DystopianBookworm

books. Mostly books. Mostly fiction books. Also, I reblog anything that I like

[enigma-the-mysterious]

"Why didn't you say anything when Congress was in power?"

Bro, I was 14 when Congress was voted out of power, 11 when Anna Hazare sat on a hunger strike. I was watching Ninja Hattori at that age, the fuck did you expect me to do?

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

[mackdaddyofthecravate]

Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol 

[sazandorable]

a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:

NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.

Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.

YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.

DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.

SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.

As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.

(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)

[shatterpath]

bring the healthy fun back to fandom!

[loveridden1999]

New Delhi - 20-07-2026

[nchntd]

In the club

[vacuously-true]

I think I’m literally never gonna be sick of this masterpiece. I think watching it on a loop for eight hours could fix me. Dancing’s what clears my soul. Dancing’s what makes me whole.

[dimmadoome]

I just love that this very video is an accumulation of thousands of years worth of art made by people who have never met each other. The concept of this video was so completely unfathomable to every single artist who made the sculptures and yet they’ve all put something toward the creation of it.

[i-restuff]

ITS BACK ON MY TIMELINE

[skyinide]

[afronerdism]

This might be the funniest reply I’ve ever seen in my life

[thepioden]

[fozmeadows]

I AM WHEEZING

[skyinide]

PLEASE STOP REBLOGGING THIS OMFG

[frustratedasatruar]

Reblogging to spread the word to stop rebogging this post. If you all do the same, maybe we can raise enough awareness to solve OP’s problem!

[mysharona1987]

[gumuhit]

you’re going to love again, find a job again, create art again, do what you love again, feel powerful again. you’re going to be back on track. i don’t know when, but you are going to feel like yourself again, eventually. this isn’t the end. hang in there.

[thesummoningdark]

The last week has been so ridiculous even the satirists can’t take it any more

[the-stray-liger]

the fucking timestamp

[thesummoningdark]

Happy tenth birthday to this post which will apparently haunt my notifications for all eternity.

It’s about Brexit, by the way. The timestamp is a week post-referendum. Newsthump is UK-based and I myself am scottish. And yes, things have 100% got worse since then, but personally I regard the referendum as the point at which we entered the Clownshoes Timeline.

[dnyane]

How to tell your nephew you are gonna be fuckin his widowed mom?

Step 1: Beat him senseless. Proving that you could kill him at any time, and hence you are not interested in killing him, because you love him, like a son.

Step 2: Order him, the King, to give you the most powerful position in the kingdom, so you can enforce the "ways" that you yourself came across through delusions and some very suspicious book.

Step 3: Post script the fact that you are gonna be fuckin his mom now onwards, and ask him to get used to it, on your way out.

[byjove]

A large part of the reason families were bigger in the past was because marital rape was not considered rape and birth control/abortion methods were ineffective, dangerous and/or illegal. We can dance around this and act like our great great great grandmothers just loveddddd being mamas so much that they decided out of their own free will to have 11 children. We can pretend that they DECIDED to have big families because it was a financially advantageous decision so they could have more labor around the farm. But a lot of children in the past were fundamentally unwanted and not conceived out of love, children were not a choice women got to make. We need to admit that and stop pretending historical women were inherently more maternal because they were impregnated at the age of 15 and kept having babies until they were 40. That did not make them loving mothers, it did not make them ‘the divine feminine’ and it sure did not make them happy.

[headspace-hotel]

It is important to think about this truth, because it is so painful that the initial reaction is to deny it or simply not think about it...

[kneelb4kesha]

Brandon Sanderson is interesting because in the majority of his body of work (especially his main cosmere universe) he kind of sits down across from you and says,

"Listen, even if an omniscient God or a godlike being is real, most religions are built on only a bit of truth and mostly upon myths designed to keep order among the populace. This order creates, designs, and enforces rigid roles for racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. It excuses and handwaves, if not outright encourages, colonialism and oppression."

and you're like "Mr. Sanderson, aren't you a card carrying member of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints?"

and he's like "don't worry about that"

[tinylobelia-deactivated20200702]

[wisteriafield]

i’ll kick anyone’s ass. i’ll kick your ass. i’ll kick your dog’s ass. i’ll kick my own ass

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[grimeclown]

 “hi welcome to mcdonalds what can i get for you?”

“yeah can i get a deluxe quarter pounder with cheese?”

“absolutely, do you want the meal or just the sandwich?’

“uuuuuh hold on”

*fishes something out of my pocket*

“mikey what do i do?”

“get the fries. youll need the energy in the coming days”

*stuffs it back in my pocket*

“uhh yes please  the meal would be great”

[texcritterspizzajamboree]

serious question: can anyone else see this post? am I hallucinating?

[meme-loving-stuck]

this is like Schrodinger’s fucking meme because half the time the pic is deleted and the other half it’s visible

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[marzipanandminutiae]

my father, who is not a misogynist by any means and therefore surprised me by revealing this, DESPISES Saffron from Firefly (conwoman who seduces her predominately male targets)

in a series with multiple instances of men beating, humiliating, and occasionally killing female sex workers, including at least one main character and several sympathetic side characters. and two other main female characters being threatened with rape at various points

but the worst character, to him, is a woman who preys on men’s attraction to her

[thefrontofnuthing]

I’m really liking Stormlight archive so far but the juxtaposition is killing me

Shallan: I need to impress Jasnah to save my family!!! I’m going to draw pictures and show her my tenacity!

Kaladin: death bridge.

[mideias]

It's often the most male-catered to and even misogynistic media that feature some of the deepest and borderline homoerotic relationships between men. But that is to be expected. People think that patriarchy enabling homoaffectionate relationships between men is a bug, but it's actually a feature. True love can only come from a place of respect, and men often don't respect nor esteem women. They don't see women as capable of intellect, or strength, or imagination or even humanity. Those attributes are reserved to men. Which is why men's true love is often reserved for other men while women are just props to them. That's why it's easier for a lot of male writers to create stories about supposedly heterosexual male characters having the most world-shattering (accidentally romantic) bonds with other men, but not with women that they're canonically attracted to. It's because they can't fathom their male protagonist being so deeply affected by a woman's character, since women are to be lusted for and kept as props for their little domestic fantasies but never truly respected or admired as individuals. The ancient greeks were more honest about this stuff because they understood that patriarchy and male/male affection went hand in hand.