I’m Doing My Best

I go by Ender or Magpie | 28 | They/Them | My art blog is endermagpieart if you wanna check it out

[possumsarenice]

Shout everyone else taking the vow of silence today

[autistichalsin]

The test for allyship isn't how you treat an oppressed person who is your friend, family, spouse. It's how you treat an oppressed person you absolutely can't stand who is vile and loathsome in every way.

Do you gender trans people correctly even when they're being absolutely terrible people? Do you refuse to use the r-slur against someone who suicide baited you but is neurodivergent? Do you refuse to snark at a mentally ill person who is being genuinely unpleasant, "go take your meds!"

Do you allow members of marginalized groups to be terrible people without judging their entire demographic for it? One of the most invisible yet vital forms of privilege is the right to be terrible people as an individual rather than as a group. Do you acknowledge that there are bad people in every group, that it doesn't make their group less worth fighting for? Or do you shake your head if you happen to get mistreated by some who belong to a group and insist the entire group is awful and not worth your allyship?

Oppressed people can see how you treat those of us you like, but do you still treat the worst of us with the basic dignity you treat the worst of other groups with?

[thelawfulchaotic]

If empathy is a muscle, this is how you get SWOLE. This is how you grow BEEFY. I’ve got stacks of empathy muscles. I’ve got an 8pack of empathy and love for humanity’s flaws.

Once upon a time I felt I was a useless pit of a person who did not deserve to live. To fight this voice, I found the “””worst””” people I could and defended them in court regardless of what charge, what they could pay, who they were. I wanted to prove to myself that everyone is worth defending, because if everyone is worth it, so am I.

Pleased to inform you that everyone is worth defending. Human rights are worth defending. Humans are worth helping, even though a lot of them fail and fall even with help. And it’s worth it standing up for oppressed people always always always.

[sprinkledsalt]

My mom ran placement testing at her university’s English department for many years, and she’s talked about how she and the grad students who helped read the student essays would often see these incoming freshmen do what they called “keyword searches”, meaning they’d zero in on a keyword in the essay prompt, write a long rant about that word or phrase, and completely miss the point of the overall prompt. Basically, they weren’t reading the entire prompt and actual arguments being made, and instead would have knee-jerk reactions to a couple of words within the larger text, leading to baffling and hilariously off-base responses.

That’s what tumblr users do all the time, and they’d be placed in the lowest level of freshman English due to their poor reading comprehension lol. When you have someone just wildly missing the point in your notifications and ranting about a small piece of a post, and not engaging with what the post actually says at all, they’re doing a keyword search. Recognize it for the poor reading comprehension it is and realize you don’t have to take it seriously.

[foulfirerebel]

Preserving @sprinkledsalt's prev tags, they are golden:

#too many people can't actually read and we need to call that out more#like no your take is not valid because you're fundamentally misunderstanding the text#or not even engaging in the text at all

#you can't READ# 'oh but some people weren't taught--' that is not my fault #and random people on tumblr aren't English teachers for functionally illiterate bloggers

[shofarsogood]

A small offering of images that fit this theme:

[nikoisme]

scrapped painting,, thought i might as well post it

[nikoisme]

i want to put my thoughts behind this: this was supposed to be a piece for pride month, titled "you were loved". the sky is the color of the aroace flag (just upside down)!

basically, i wanted to show an aroace person — an old aroace person, to be precise. being aroace myself, i am always told that i will forever be lonely and miserable if i don't get a partner. so showing grace, who is aroace to me, as old and happy and fulfilled and oh so loved by his best friend, was really important to me <3

[thatgirlonstage]

Please don’t let fandom ruin something you love. Walk away and unfollow the fans and enjoy the thing by yourself, or find a limited circle of people who ignore the discourse, or get your irl friends into the thing and collectively ignore the Internet community, or blacklist from here to the moon if you need to and only ever scroll through your rarepair ship’s tag on AO3. But don’t let fandom distort a show or a movie or a book or a comic you used to love so badly that you can’t enjoy the original anymore. Please. It isn’t worth it.

[astriiformes]

Other people have touched on this more eloquently, but I love that Ryland Grace is at his core a teacher. A middle school science teacher. Sure, his background as a former academic is also critical to the story, mostly because something about him needed to catch Stratt's eye and thus result in him getting dragged into the project, but more importantly than that, he hated being in academia. The book makes it fairly explicit that he wrote his controversial paper and insulted a leading scientist in his field because he was burnt out and hated the environment and got self-destructive as a result, which is a far less rosy view of academic science than I would have expected (and, frankly, completely believable).

And then he left and became a middle school science teacher. And that turned out to be his real calling. He was bright and creative and a little bit brilliant and a genuinely good scientist, and he gave that world up to teach kids and he loved it. Even after everything, after the Petrova Taskforce and Project Hail Mary and Tau Ceti and ultimately ending up on Erid, his calling is to teach kids.

As someone who has dipped in and out of the science communication/science education world myself, it's so important to me that Grace loves teaching, and especially that he loves teaching kids. People really devalue science communication work, and there's often this unspoken assumption that the people doing it just aren't "smart enough" to become real scientists, so they do scicomm instead. And everything about Grace flies in the face of that -- he's perfectly capable of doing the science, but it's not what he loves the most! What he loves and values and finds important is teaching, and I adore that. It's so refreshing to see, and such a genuine love letter to educators, and to everyone who chooses to prioritize communication and education regardless of how specialized they may or may not be in their field.

His happy ending is to be a teacher. And that's so important.

[lakemojave]

People are unfazed if you hate women but if you dislike dogs they assume you're a bad person

[lakemojave]

Tumblr users will read a post complaining about normalized misogyny and hyperfocus on your claim that it's ok to dislike dogs

[chromaticrainarts]

I think this ship (spaceship) is really funny

[bsaka7]

excerpts from erin in the morning's article on the ioc's ban on transgender women and sex testing policy

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[grimark]

ryland grace joins a star wars erotic roleplay discord on a whim because some random misfiring neuron buried in his subconscious is like "well maybe i could [censored] an alien" and he mostly just lurks there at first, and discovers to his disappointment that most of the people there are just roleplaying the human characters??? nobody wants to roleplay one of the fucking. i don't know, the fucking bug people from attack of the clones with him. and then when someone does agree to roleplay with him, they get their feelings hurt by his extremely reasonable constructive criticism about their speculative xenobiology worldbuilding. the mods keep telling him to chill out, this is supposed to be for fun, but how is grace supposed to have fun when people keep getting their made up alien bug facts wrong. anyway then they have to ban him from star wars erotic roleplay discord because he keeps picking fights with people about like the alien krebs cycle or some shit. do you all see my vision.

[grimark]

i think these things are happening concurrently. it was a very troubled period in his life 😔

[jewfrogs]

the change from AD to CE feels really emblematic of how surface-level and meaningless the supposed secularization of the western world is

[jewfrogs]

Common Era is definitely preferable over Anno Domini, if only because christ is no lord of mine, but it’s only less christianocentric in that it doesn’t overtly make reference to christ in its title. the benchmark is still the same. you’re still measuring when the common era began using the (supposed) birth of christ, separating history into “the period before jesus” and “the period after jesus”. this conception of history is no less defined by christianity than it was before, except that now it’s easier to ignore because you’ve draped it in a “secular”, “modern” veneer and done nothing to actually unpack the ways in which western society intrinsically centers christianity.

[iamemeraldfox]

Okay now I need a point in history that could be a benchmark to start counting the years from, and would be a common point for most of the world

What year would it be today?

[sarah-ankh]

UTC

Coordinated Universal Time.

The system by which every computer in existence now keeps count of the passing seconds.

And I mean that literally. To a computer system "now" is a number that represents the total number ov seconds that have passed since midnight on the 1st of January, 1960.

1960/01/01 00:00:01 is literally the beginning of time as far as a computer is concerned.

This would be the year 66UTC

[telewrenevision]

I like this idea but if we changed it now then next year would be the year 67 which would make a lot of people angry

[ralfmaximus]

Bring back stardates

[animentality]

[infectiouspiss]

seeing the mature content warning on a post just means i get to play the game of is this actually mature or is this just a woman

[scienceisdope]

Follow @scienceisdope for more science.

[ralfmaximus]

All those people are now gay. Happy pride month!

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

Starting a collection

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

[definitely-not-lordenglish]

[home-and-having-tea]

[captainsnoop-deactivated2020041]

i hate it when game devs put “fixed several issues” in patch notes 

no. tell me what you fixed. i wanna know what the glitch was.

you know those patch notes that are like “fixed an issue where if the player sat in a bush for too long, they’d become the size of a skyscraper” 

i wanna read those. tell me those. 

[necroesque666]

[sindri42]

[sindri42]

[ahdok]

Adjusted value of Bees. Now that was a special one… because every item in the game had a minimum value, and a beehive was a container for bees, which each had a minimum value… which meant the moment one of your dwarves picked up a beehive, your entire fortress’ net worth skyrocketed… a value used in determining how powerful the foes that visit and try to murder you are.

[prokopetz]

Reblogging for the explanation of what “adjusted value of bees” actually means, because I know several folks following this blog have been wondering.

[probabilitydirigible]

Okay but you’ve all forgotten the best Dwarf Fortress bug of all “Flying creatures give birth in midair, leading to tragedy” 

[probabilitydirigible]

Actually I lied it’s the one where after a major update werewolves and vampires started climbing the nearest tree and refusing to come down. It turned out that he’d given evil creatures the ability to sense each other, but forgotten to set a maximum range on it, so werewolves were aware Hell was underground and trying to flee by climbing 

[thepageofhopes]

This has to be my favorite patch note ever