something in the water

This is a place for words. Some of them will make sense. 18+ only pls; some of this shit isn't for kids.

[ex-libris-craux]

skrunkly old man appreciation post

i'm gonna miss you, buddy. go yell at clouds for me 💚

[aromanticduck]

Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you

[juststarsandthemoon]

Free service with no ads: Okay so these guys are stealing my data

[a-method-in-it]

Free service with no ads that stays afloat with regular donation drives: The backbone of society

[unhelpfultarot]

Eight of Cups and The Star

You'd like to get away from all the tired familiar horrors, and splash in a lovely unspoiled lake under a clear evening sky.

[angels-in-asylums]

Some people in asylums in the 50s were crazy. Some of them were psychotic, screaming at things nobody else could see. Some of them were aggressive, kicking and punching and biting without provocation. Some of them were a danger to themselves. Hell, some of them were a danger to others. And they were people. They were human beings. And all human beings deserve human rights, something those people, by law, didn't have.

Some people in mental hospitals now are crazy. Some of us are psychotic. Some of us are aggressive. Some of us are a danger to ourselves. Some of us are a danger to others. And we are still humans, who deserve human rights, which we legally do not have.

Some of us, a few of the crazy people you talk about, are exactly what you say we are. Psychotic, aggressive, a danger to ourselves and others. That doesnt change the fact that we are human. That doesnt change the fact that every individual human that exists, has ever existed, and will ever exist deserves human rights. That doesnt change the fact that we don't have those human rights in every situation. "Few of us are aggressive," while true as a statement, fails to acknowledge and insist that those of us who are still deserve to be treated with the same dignity and respect as any other person.

[bebewrites]

genAI companies are now buying up rare and antique books so they can scan them and use them to train their AI. then they're destroying the books afterward.

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almos

AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.

they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.

they're taking water, power, natural resources for their data centers. they steal. they're book burning, essentially. i'm just so angry, i'm at a loss right now.

[tethered-heartstrings]

"stress" by yoan capote - made of bronze and concrete

[tethered-heartstrings]

[uququ]

after a couple hours chopping dried sea urchins into tiny pieces with a razor blade you start referring to the razor blade as yourself in your thoughts. a little while afterwards you'll inevitably think something along the lines of "i'm getting a bit dull, i'm going to have to throw myself out & get myself a new self" at which point your internal monologue has pretty much returned to baseline

[life-of-jauxro]

[anachronic-cobra]

This happens with mobility aids too. I bump into shit with my forearm crutches and say "ow" before I realize those are not, in fact, More Legs. Then when I get up and try to walk without them for a second there's a moment of feeling like a dog walking upright

[hapalopus]

If you find this interesting, look into extended mind/body theory :)

Author: Rachel Bourbaki Category: Philosophy of Mind and Language Word Count: 1000 Can your mind be outside of your body? Typically we think

[thatfandomhoe73]

I think there’s a teaboot(?) post about this with a huge security cam system

[teaboot]

Yeah I get twitchy when I don't have my eyes

[64mpg]

it is actually so important to me to be alone at my house

[kat-of-letters]

i know that “don’t harass people for being weird, they might be autistic!” is a fairly popular take on here. but as a Certified Autist, i’d like to add that harassing allistic and/or neurotypical people for being weird is also bad, and should not be done

and before you come in with “yeah, you never know who is and isn’t autistic, and you shouldn’t force people to out themselves!” i want to say two things: one, i agree. and two, even if you could magically avoid ever harassing a single autistic person, it still wouldn’t be okay to go after NTs for being weird. they’re people, janice. they’re allowed to be really invested in naruto

[blujayonthewing]

#stop playing the game of ‘who is it okay for me to hurt?’ #the answer is no one #the answer is ALWAYS going to be no one #none people is the correct number of people to hurt [X]

[viralfrog]

[partywithponies]

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

[partywithponies]

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

[partywithponies]

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

[dizzyghoast]

i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.

I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case

[tamabula-rasa]

​

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY*

here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to multiple porn bots catfishing using the same stolen pictures of the same trans woman on the same page

remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags. note that despite neither the image nor video in the posts in this screenshot being marked as mature content, this screenshot of them is going to mark this post as mature content as soon as I post it

here's some of the lovely messages of positivity you can expect to get if you're a transfem on this platform! I cropped the real-life gore images out of the first one, the person in the second one has made multiple posts like this + pedojacketed me and still has that same account and does that same shit, and the the person in the third took weeks for tumblr to do anything about, because:

here's tumblr staff stating that making explicit death threats towards transfems is not a violation of the ToS or user guidelines!

and here they are stating it again! and while we're on the subject of who the user guidelines apply to:

here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a year-old post with 15,000 notes being flagged as sexually explicit (over 100 times in case you thought it was maybe a fluke) despite the image in the post not actually showing anything, SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a heated rivalry gifset showing two fully nude dudes fucking center frame getting flagged as sexually explicit, which it is according to tumblr's definition, but despite that it has tens of thousands of notes and in fact is so popular and shared that if you look over to the third image you can see that same gif as one of the trending tag thumbnails! and on that note:

here's an episode of an anime available on youtube with a TV-14 age rating that I posted a screenshot of that got flagged as sexually explicit, had the appeal denied twice, got fully nuked off the site, and then got my entire blog marked as mature for posting!

and here's that same already-marked-as-mature blog curiously being marked as mature a second time out of the blue 15 minutes before they dropped the age verification update that would hide mature content!

and here's my first blog of 13 years getting a SPECIAL type of mature flag that marks all of my posts as mature content individually and separately from the actual mature content label!

you don't get to appeal these terminations btw! they automatically and instantly deny your appeal and send you the rejection before you even get the email telling you they got the appeal and will carefully review it

not that appealing will do anything anyways! here's tumblr staff terminating me for explicit content when I appealed the explicit flag on a post that they accepted the appeal on after terminating me for it,

and here's tumblr staff denying my appeal on that termination, lying about why i was terminated, terminating my already-and-still-terminated blog a second time to change the termination reason to one i can't appeal, which they then upgraded from an account deactivation into a postmortem full account nuke! isn't that wild?

here's them doing it to me a second time

and here's tumblr staff terminating me FIVE TIMES in multiple weeks it took them to do anything about a burner blog and a post pedojacketing me and encouraging people to harass me forever over completely fabricated claims that everyone spreading it around admitted were false on the post itself by the way! note also how only the burner blog got deleted - but the main account? just a post removal. after weeks of it being reported and spread around. the fastest of my terminations during this period was three hours after making the account by the way!

which isn't an isolated occurrence, either! they'll pass over multiple open, avowed nazis posting swastikas and slur-filled nazi race science shit about how they think black people are biologically inferior subhumans for months on end to nuke some random transfem off the site in as little as 10 minutes after account creation, then take MULTIPLE MONTHS to respond to your report of someone sending you harassment messages to tell you that the content you reported has already been removed (because it's an ask in the inbox of an account they already terminated along with four others in the time it took them to respond)!

And to really send a clear message about where they stand, they've REALLY ramped up the termination of transfems since the start of pride! And everybody will act like you deserve it and are a subhuman unworthy of life if you don't openly support the multiple ongoing harassment campaigns against transfems, all enabled and quietly endorsed by tumblr staff and moderation!

*except transfems

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

if you had a reblog of this from my original reblog queued or in the drafts this will have broken it btw you will need to queue/draft it from literally anywhere else except that original reblog

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

can you believe they actually tried to hit this with the explicit content flag

it's not just staff either it's the userbase being enabled and encouraged by this shit

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

they denied my appeal

[tamamoland-of-the-black-sky]

get outplayed you stupid fucking assholes

[tamamoland-of-the-deep-abyss]

[ex-libris-craux]

in case anybody is confused about tumblr's stance

[thememedaddy]

[teabree-shark]

I'm sorry but it was too good to disable RBs for so I'll take this hit personally

[pup-purgatory]

[ohcorny]

Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively "we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer" I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.

You can read the interview here, you can buy my graphic novel featuring a gay vampire here, and you can call your congressmen about rejecting HR 2616, HR 8705, HR 7661 using 5calls.org (they don't have these specific bills listed as things to call about, but luckily you can talk about whatever you want on the phone)

[stjohnstarling]

The reason most indie novels are written like the author is terrified of doing something wrong is because the overwhelming majority of indie novelists get their start by networking in the violent panopticon of the social media indie publishing community, which favours the people who are able to win at the social policing game.

[3s-are-green]

Okay so this comment got me googling because I hadn't heard of Isabel Fall

And if you also hadn't heard of her go read this because uhh... Holy Shit

[headspace-hotel]

I had heard of the whole messed up situation with this story, but I hadn't ever read the synopsis of the story before, and WOW

This story sounds like it could have been a brilliant exploration of gender and warfare and violence but instead it was attacked by people who didn't know how to confront a story that made them uncomfortable, and the author faced horrible consequences.

It's so important to be able to deal with stories that give you uncomfortable feelings in other ways than just attacking it. Being shown new perspectives sometimes has feelings of discomfort because it's an unfamiliar way of seeing the world.

[mickpin]

You can read it Here

[pangur-and-grim]

I’m sorry, but that is the opposite reaction you should be having. this is a story about how mob-behaviour and ostracization destroyed a trans woman’s career and sent her back into closet. the takeaway cannot be “well, we just need to mob and ostracize the correct people, then.”

[ariaste]

During the Isabel Fall incident, I was active on Twitter and in the professional circles of scifi/fantasy writers. I watched it happen in real time as it grew from a few people going "As a trans person, I don't know what to think about this" alllllllllllll the way along the shitty, SHITTY fucking game of social media telephone to non-trans allies saying "trans people are uncomfortable with this story!!! so it's bad!!!" to "there's no way that the author could be trans, because SURELY no trans person would write a story like this" to "actually the author is CLEARLY a transphobic troll and the story should be taken down and the publisher should apologize." I truly cannot fucking remember whether I took part in the witch-hunt -- I do remember I was at my day job during the worst of it, so I hadn't read the story and therefore didn't have A Hot Take of my own and was confused about how quickly everything exploded out of nowhere... But I might well have retweeted things other people said -- people I trusted to have thoughtful commentary on queer topics, people who I knew believed passionately in social justice and had good intentions. I don't remember if I did. But I know that I might have. I know that in other situations, I have absolutely signal boosted commentary from people when I trusted them to know more about the topic than I did.

I am not saying all this to excuse my friends and colleagues by saying "Oh, they had good intentions, they didn't mean it." I'm telling you that because I want everyone reading this to feel deeply somber about the idea of what YOU could do when you truly, genuinely think you're acting with good intentions. I want you to see what could happen when YOU run your mouth unthinkingly on social media and lean into collective hysteria instead of practicing prudence and thinking for yourself. They had good intentions, and they ruined someone's life anyway.

No one person ended Isabel Fall's career. No one came at her with a knife to personally, individually stab her in the back. But hundreds and thousands of people threw just one little pebble and thought NOTHING of it, because it was just one little pebble, right? Except it contributed to ten thousand other pebbles. It was part of the five tons of pebbles all crashing down on Isabel's head at once.

Out of the authors I personally know who were involved with the debacle, all of them felt absolutely crushed with shame and regret when they learned the truth afterwards. I have spoken in person to people who, during the debacle, were calling for Fall's story to be taken down because it was "transphobic", and who later realized that they were the ones doing violence for absolutely no fucking reason at all except collective hysteria and getting caught up in the mob, and who even to this day are embarrassed and regretful of what they did and who wish deeply that they could take it back and sincerely apologize to her. They can't. It's too fucking late. And that's a tragedy all of its own. The people I've talked to know that. They mourn that.

The community that killed Isabel Fall's career was not a community of "bad people" or evil monsters or secretly-awful bigots. It was a community of people who cared deeply and had good intentions who nevertheless ended up doing a really really REALLY BAD THING. Being a good person doesn't prevent you from hurting others. Having good intentions doesn't prevent you from hurting others. "uwu listening and learning from my trans siblings <333" doesn't prevent you from hurting others. And no matter how famous and talented an author is, they are still a human being who is just as capable of making a horrible fucking mistake and hurting someone as you are.

Don't put people on a pedestal -- either as some kind of writing god or as a witch to burn at the stake. They are people. And Isabel Fall is a person. Be so fucking careful of what you say and who you say it to or where on the internet you say it, and if there's a loud bit of confusing drama happening and you aren't absolutely fucking sure that objective, real-life LITERAL MATERIAL HARM has been done to someone, consider shutting the fuck up and staying out of it instead of amplifying it. Consider watching from the sidelines and waiting a week or so for the dust to die down before you have a take, if you really feel like you must have a take. Consider using intellectual judgment instead of acting reflexively from your gut-reaction feelings. Consider discussing it with a friend in private instead of publicly airing your grievances.

And treat others the way you'd want to be treated. How would you feel, if you were in Fall's position? How would you want people to deal with your work if it upset them or if they disagreed with it? Would you want to be publicly stoned to career-death, or would you want people to discuss it calmly and with restraint, and for the ones who didn't like it to go, "I think it's not for me, actually," and for the ones who didn't understand it to say, "I think I need to sit with this for a while."? How would you want people to act, if it was you? Great, now act that way yourself.

Extending mercy and grace and basic fucking courtesy is HARD, and it doesn't always feel good -- frequently it feels frustrating and unsatisfying and bitter. Deal with it. Deal with it.