hello! my name is Hawke, i’m the head of a small system. this blog is my small corner of the internet where i can share pretty much anything that catches my fancy. these topics include fandom, social justice, and anything i find entertaining or funny.
-> rentry here <-
update 2!
mcyt stuff goes on the main blog, no more sideblog. woe, cubitos be upon ye
Tagging
this blog does not and likely will never have a consistent tagging system due to lack of spoons, however i am happy to tag most things on request
exceptions to this are peoples personal good faith identities as well as things that i am fixated on
i can’t promise that i’ll be perfect with tagging, especially surrounding unreality and NSFW content, but i try
The worst sin you can commit around so-called "woke" white liberals is pointing out that, actually, NOT every homophobic republican is gay!, actually, many of them are just evil cishets doing their thing, and the closeted ones affect people more through evil than through their gayness so why are y'all so fixated on it? Hooooboy y'all those liberals will FLIP THEIR SHIT because how DARE you fuck with their hilarious narrative turning every evil anti-queer politician into a good ol' fashioned fag like they deserve, it's actually SUPER liberal and cool and effective to blame all queerphobia on queer people, why are you RUINING our GOOD TIIIIME
"BUT DOESN'T GRINDR KEEP CRASHING WHEN--" no. Jesus it happened ONE time at ONE republican gathering. Yes there's a SLIGHT increase in traffic on the site for their gatherings - the same as EVERY SINGLE BIG GATHERING OF HUMANS. If you've been telling people "Grindr crashes at EVERY GOP convention" you've been spreading misinformation to blame queer people for the violence they face in the US and it's gross
mandatory viewing on this subject (particularly the second one which provides some well-needed critical thinking and fact-checking on the whole "republicans always crash Grindr" claim; there's a shit ton of blatant misinformation going on there we need to make people more aware of. like, a major part of this myth stems from a straight up satire twitter account's post that was taken at face value.)
from the second video:
But building on that essay [first video], and what we’ve discussed today as a prime example of a narrative born from the “homophobes are secretly just gay” trope, I want to examine why it’s so resistant to correction, and why people that are otherwise usually media literate and concerned with truth over comforting myths might grab onto this with both hands and refuse to let go.
And I'm including myself in this. The first time I heard the Grindr crash thing, I laughed. I'm not coming to you from moral superiority. I'm coming from a position of "I also fell for this and then felt annoyed about it and made it everyone else's problem in the form of a video essay because I think the truth is actually a more effective political weapon than a lie."
So why does this work? I think there are four main reasons, ranging from "understandable" to "I'm not sure that's healthy babe."
The first reason: yo, it feels good. Queer people are constantly on the receiving end… Of right-wing politics in a material, tangible way. These aren't abstract disagreements. These are people who've campaigned on the premise that your love is invalid, your identity is a disorder, your existence is a threat to children. And when the power imbalance is that stark, there is something extremeeeelllly satisfying about the idea that the oppressor who thinks they are so much better than you is nothing but a fraud. They can’t even meet their own bar for “deserves rights.”
It's the political equivalent of "the bully has a crush on you." We're told that story from childhood. So when someone offers an adult, political version, "they're homophobic because they're secretly homosexual", we’re already primed and lubed, and it slides right in to how we understand the world. And suddenly, the power dynamic feels more manageable, they’re just pathetic self-hating gays, I’m not scared of that. It feels good, and it feels true. And that’s the exact kind of story that goes viral, regardless of whether it’s based on evidence.
The "Republicans crash Grindr when they gather" claim has every quality of what misinformation researchers call “sticky”, as in, it’s sticky. It’s sticks to your brain. And it does so, even after you learn the truth. Researchers call this The Continued Influence Effect (CIE). It’s a cognitive phenomenon where misinformation continues to influence a person's reasoning and beliefs even after it has been clearly and credibly retracted. The paper posits that people continue to use misinformation because, on some level, they still feel it is relevant or useful, even if they know it's false. This paper frames this not just as a problem of forgetting the correction or new information, but as a problem where the feeling of familiarity and narrative coherence from the original misinformation overrides the factual knowledge of its retraction. We believe, because it feels true.
And you’ll see this under any post that’s been debunked. People who fell for it will say “well, it might as well be true” or “This case might be false, but this really happens, so it might as well be true, and in a way it is true.” [laughter] Like yeah but in another way that isn’t nonsense, it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter, once it’s in your head, it’s often hard to get rid of. Especially when it’s gone so viral that you’ve seen people talking about it from all directions, each time your new worldview being compounded and cemented. And this… it went viral. And I get why.
One: it’s funny, and funny storied spread faster than boring ones.
Two: It’s ironic.
Three: We have a clear villain being a hypocrite. People love an exposed hypocrite because...
Four: it feels like justice. It’s someone we see as a threat getting caught in the act, exposed for their lies! They finally get their just desserts! And on top of that, it’s easy to believe because...
Five: it’s just plausible enough even for a skeptic.
Just because you did something wrong in the past doesn’t mean you can’t advocate against it now. It doesn’t make you a hypocrite. You just grew. Don’t let people use your past to invalidate your current mindset.
By now many of you have probably seen the news reports of a scientific study in Nature supposedly showing that people actually become neurologically ‘adult’ at the age of 32 years old — not 25, as fans of the frontal lobe myleination theory of adulthood would have it, or 18, as the purely legalistic definition of adulthood would, or even 13 or 15, as many cultural rites of passage have variously held it to be.
No, now that some entirely exploratory research has discovered that the average, non-developmentally-disabled brain tends to enter a new phase of functioning and connectivity around the early 30s, we have a new random spot on the ground for pop scientists and those seeking to limit the rights of marginalized young people to draw a target around, and act like they were aiming for it the entire time.
In sum, researchers Alexa Mousley, Richard Bethlehem, Fang-Cheng Yeh, and Duncan Astle reviewed a large pool of nearly 4,000 MRI brain scan results, filtered exclusively for neurotypical participants, and found that, consistent with prior research on the subject, the density of neural connections tends to peak around age 30 for most people, as does topological efficiency (in essence, how long a distance neural information needs to travel across the brain, with shorter distances being more efficient).
Less reported on have been the study’s numerous other findings on neural changes that tend to occur with age, in particular the findings that neural modularity (how clearly neural nodes can be grouped into sub-sections) and efficiency between nearby nodes (also called local efficiency) peaks at around age 90.
Why having a brain that is hyper-connected and generally efficient is the marker of adulthood, but having a brain with highly specialized organization and really efficient individual connections is not is, of course, completely arbitrary. The only reason the news media isn’t treating brain modularity and local efficiency as hallmarks of maturity is because it would make too obviously a specious headline to claim that adulthood begins at 90.
Once you have allowed that certain people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions because of how their brains are structured, you open the door to limit any freedoms you dislike. All you have to do is pluck one random developmental trend from the sea of published neuroscientific data, and claim that anyone whose brain deviates from this milestone is a neurological ‘child’ who needs protection from their own autonomy.
But as any honest neuroscientist will tell you, the brain never finishes developing. Adulthood is a socially constructed category, not a biologically observable reality, and we all exist at some point along a continuum of development that is highly personal to us. Our endocrinology, ability to grow muscle, hormone production, metabolism, circadian rhythm, neural organization, neural efficiency, the presence of brain tumors or cysts — all of these things are changing within us at all times, and remain beautifully inconsistent over the course of our life span. We are not static. And we are all growing more disabled on a long enough timeline.
There is no single moment at which we can be said to be at our most adult — not without creating a definition of adulthood that is at once completely fleeting and ableist. Is it more adult to think quickly, or to make fewer errors than others? And if so, at what point do we start cutting off large swathes of people from the possibility of ever being a true adult, not just our elders and younger comrades, but every single person with a cognitive disability, brain fog, temporary injury, low blood sugar, or who just happens to live on the low end of the bell curve?
What’s the use in packaging a diverse collection of rights, social responsibilities, and modes of interacting under the single banner of ‘adulthood,’ anyway? Is an adult a person who can operate a vehicle? Take on a loan? Join the military? Understand every possible outcome of having sex or getting a medical procedure? Someone who has done an estimable deed for their community?
I can think of a lot of adults who have never done any of that. And I know a great many people who have taken on immense social responsibility when they were in a state of cognitive disability, or while they were children: they raised younger siblings, got drunken parents washed up and headed to work, drove a car full of their family members through a mud slide in the mountains, reported a predator sliding into their inbox, and registered dozens of adults to vote when they weren’t allowed to vote themselves.
I wrote all about the shoddy brain science on "adulthood" and why it's damaging to youth, elders, disabled people, and anyone who believes in liberation. You can read the full thing for free on my Substack.
Wait I can't believe I haven't talked about my holiday bits on here before. So I work in grocery and I always work holidays and big events that mean we get a ton of tourists in our town and a ton of customers non stop all day. When you work retail on holidays you end up having the same conversations over and over again, so this year I made it a point to choose a bit or a lie for each holiday to keep up for my entire shift that serves solely to mess with customers without them realizing what I'm doing, and ensure I have fun and make myself laugh. Here are the 2026 holiday bits so far:
Memorial day: I pretended I didn't know what it was, and I wanted to see how many customers would correct me if I kept referring to it as "America's birthday". Some people wanted to kill me with hammers for this I wont lie
Easter: I pretended to be catholic and would tell people at the register while making small talk that I gave up lying for lent and couldn't lie again until the new year because it's something I've been meaning to work on (not how lent works) (not catholic) (actively lying about lying)
Valentine's day: I invented a fake boyfriend at the beginning of my shift and wanted to see how developed of a character I could create by the time my shift ended with the rule that I could only add to his lore by telling customers things about him out loud (I have a boyfriend named Jake who surfs and is a photography major at UC Santa Barbara who I was going to celebrate Valentine's day with the following weekend because he's on a camping trip in Big Sur with his surf buddies and I also managed to sneak in that hes lived in 2 houses that burned down and that's where his passion for photography comes from, he wants to preserve his memories)
New years: I decided to tell every customer a different new years resolution but I could only make them up on the spot and couldn't say the same thing twice
Superbowl Sunday: every time someone asked me what team I was rooting for, I would confidently and excitedly say any team I could think of except for the two in the actual Superbowl and whenever someone told me that they weren't in the Superbowl I would look super crushed and disappointed
i made a post like this before but I can't find it now. so. I'll just redo it.
What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?
It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.
My first news thing I remember is the OJ Simpson trial. I vaguely remember watching the news with my grandparents before that, but that's the first story I remember, in part because my second grade teacher had us go play so she could watch the verdict 😂
from "Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics" by the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions
For those who haven't heard of Shivy Bhat: he was 19 years old and already being abused by his family while living in California, when after asking his mother if he could cut his hair, she demanded he give her access to his phone and was outdated as trans. Under the pretense that they were taking a trip back to India to see his grandmother, Shivy's family kidnapped him, planning on forcing him to live in India in order to "fix" him by teaching him to be a "cultured Indian girl," and planning on forcing him into an arranged marriage. They had taken away all his identifying documents and his phone. He managed to escape with the help of a local queer feminist group, which then resulted in a legal battle as Shivy's family tried to accuse the group of kidnapping and sex trafficking to get access to him again.
This is not the first case of a trans man in Uttar Pradesh experiencing his family use the legal system to kidnap him after he escapes to a trans shelter. A trans man, 'Aditya', came to a shelter "starved and scared," telling shelter staff his family had confined him for days and he feared for his life. Three days later, in the middle of the night, police forcibly took Aditya from the shelter, without a warrant and without following the procedure of the shelter. In a different incident, a trans man, 'Deep', fled to the Asra shelter because his father, a police officer, was violently abusive, writing in a letter that "I know if I go [back home], I will not be able to come back. They will either kill me or marry me off" and that "I believe [my family] will lock me in the house and there is a threat to my life." Five policemen came to Asra and physically attacked shelter workers, arresting two trans men who worked there and taking them to the police station where they were assaulted further. Similarly, in this article trans man named Vivek Azad talks about his family beating him, having men sent to rape him, not allowing him to cut his hair, and having all his school certificates burned by his brother which prevents him from getting employed. A 17-year-old trans man named Manoj was beaten, tied by his hands and feet, and locked in a room in his family's house after coming out, and forcibly married to a man twice his age, although he was eventually able to escape with his girlfriend and get a divorce from the man he was forced to marry.
#these are heartbreaking#but also tie precisely back into what i keep saying about how violence against those reared into expected girl/womanhood is invisibilized#ie less political legislation is made specifically targeting these groups not because they are let off scot free#but because the unwritten social contract of a high-control patriarchical society says from the outset 'these are the people you are#EXPECTED to rein in. EXPECTED to discipline. shame upon the patriarch of the house if he cannot 'correct' a deviant member of the lesser#gender class.' and so because it is such a social shame this violence is carried out in the home and not publicly.#obviously this is not to say these groups don't also face public violence but that saying these groups aren't publically/legislatively#targeted is a) untrue b) conveniently obfuscates societally-sanctioned private violence as just a fact of this side of gendered rearing#the statistics on IPV alone corroborate this but are somehow dismissed as 'lesser violence'. default violence.#i keep meaning to write up a post about honor killings as gendered control mechanisms but i am so tired of this blog at this point#on a lighter note im mallu (not tamil but a closely related language) and learning the tamil word thirunambi from reading this did make me#go :) for a moment. yay queer terminology in L1s#anyway it is not an exaggeration to say in some cultures and parts of the world one is born into the property class of the familial unit.#and not even wanted property at that; the perceived girl child is a money pit and a burden to be foisted off on a man as soon as possible.
telecom service providers in india are getting orders from government to shutdown our internet. they might also mass delete the posts and videos online. i know this is not the content you followed me for but please raise voice for the people in india if you can. if you find any posts about the brutality that the police inflicted upon protesters, people seeking legal or medical attention, people needing donation for sanitary pads, food, water, masks, etc. on twitter or instagram, please share it. it's my humble request. this is our last day. they're applying emergency alerts and new rules from tomorrow but today we are standing here in rain raising our voices and we will continue to do so.
