Origami Around
★
Sweet Seals For You, Always
ellievsbear
oozey mess
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
taylor price
PR's Tumblrdome
KIROKAZE
h
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
pixel skylines
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
wallacepolsom
Claire Keane
Sade Olutola
RMH
sheepfilms
noise dept.
d e v o n
seen from Iraq
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@galenwilson
I think more non binary characters should be fat
fat and black and brown 👍🏾
kinda tired of non binary being tied to skinny androgyny that's mostly white. I say that's as a non binary transmasc/boy thing who's fat and black.
being non binary can look like anything and anyone but especially individuals who have different body types outside of thin. they can have body/facial hair too. show up for all enbies.
another thing I wanna yap Abt is how like, a lot of plus sized friendly counterparts for clothes really do feel like "cover yourself up in these ugly colors" like what if I wanted to wear a cute small bikini that barely hides anything? in cute colors or patterns? why do I gotta go with stuff that essentially hides my whole body... especially ugly looking stuff
friend pointed out how nobody wants queer stories that are personal and vulnerable especially through author's experience or people they know, they want stories that are watered down and marketed in the most unproblematic way possible. they don't want the queer authors view of the world they want whatever is easy to digest and makes queer people look good.
problem is, some of us are really bad and complex people and I feel like that deserves to be represented more, both sloppily and gracefully because in all honesty I find queer stories that are scrubbed of its personalized authenticity from the author as insulting.
the two things that come to mind here is both Steven universe by Rebecca Sugar and I sexually identify as an attack helicopter by Isabel Fall
these two stories are VERY different but share the same element of vulnerability and queerness intertwined with each other and both share similarities with downright cruel dissection from queer people who feel uncomfortable with these types of personalized stories.
In the 2024 elections, in the last year I lived with my abusive ex-roommate, they ended up voting for the AIPAC-backed local candidate instead of the Democratic Socialist-backed candidate mostly because of advertising that convinced them the latter had failed at her job. I feel like, in that moment, I saw a vision of the future stretching infinitely before me, decades of my life soon-to-be-lived, in the worst possible way.
To be clear: my abuser was one of those self-made "progressives" who regularly wielded their politics and identity as a cudgel to beat people into some kind of shape that offended their sensibilities less. The kind of person who genuinely argued that I can't "call myself a Leftist" if I would lie in a fucking job interview, who would insist that they never lied even as they 'stretched the truth' regularly throughout our friendship. Someone who insisted that they genuinely did a lot of research into things, but who I knew for a fact would literally just watch a few Tiktoks and then add whatever they had most recently seen argued into their big book of "Political opinions to hold until such a time as it inconveniences me."
It took a couple of advertisements to get them to change their mind, because they had a couple of conversations where reasonable doubt was cast on a good candidate, and now we have a do-nothing Democrat in office.
I think about that a lot.
I am, above all, a believer that I should not be involved in politics. I'm happy to vote, I'm happy to support other people who are better than me, but I should never have been at a point in my life where I am distinctly better than the multiple friends I used to have who considered themselves quite progressive. In the middle of my abuse, in 2022, I was canvassing for a bullshit piece of legislation which exchanged a whole bunch of weed stores opening up (the only reason it passed because Good For Economy) to also expunge felonies for non-violent drug offenders (the bigger reason I cared though I'm not gonna pretend like I don't like weed too), and all-too-regularly I had the thought, "If you, my abuser, really care about the criminal justice system nearly as much as you claim to, you would be helping with this." Fast-forward to today and I'm the only person of my ex-friend group who's done something approximating long-term political work beyond a couple of protests, and I do not do that much political work.
I still don't think I should do anything politically. I'm competent enough at talking to people that I trick others into assuming I'm charismatic, but I don't read theory. I aspire to be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-imperialist, but I haven't supported causes. I'm a freaky internet pervert with fringe beliefs, which in my experience are tiring to most people who hear them whether or not they agree. I have a knack for getting kicked out of social groups for reasons varying from "reasonable enough" to "you said you think (political wrongthink) is real and now I can treat you like the Secret Chud I always wanted you to be." I was not supposed to be a political person, I was supposed to play video games and jerk off until I died unknown and unloved, something that both the internet and much of my IRL friendships have made perfectly clear.
And now I've done more active good for the world than 90% of the people who live in my stupid country because I showed up a couple times throughout the past couple years. But I do not get to feel like I Get It. I do not get to feel like I've learned enough about a topic simply because I watched a couple Tiktoks. I have had to also live with the fact that learning a frayed selection of half-truths from social media doesn't make you an expert in your field, which is something that so few others seem to fucking understand. I know what I don't know, and I'm the fool who regularly walks out to meet the pseudo-progressives only to be assured that no, don't worry, I am just a secret conservative piece of shit who's not contributing to anything positive - these random people online said so and they know MORE than me about The Real Issues.
And suddenly, it clicks: This is the Democratic Party. This is the way it functions. I didn't meet progressives, I met Democrats with a White Savior complex.
The future as I see it, which I hope beyond anything else to be wrong about, is this: The US-centric version of "The Government actually does stuff" Socialism gains popularity, because the US populace has become so acquainted with the government doing nothing and everything getting worse that anything is seen as better. The Socialists who get elected manage to wrangle a number of high-profile wins by simply using the bureaucratic process for the things it's supposed to fucking do, rather than for constantly giving tax breaks to corporations and over funding cops. Serious national conversations actually begin about issues such as Reparations, Land back, and - be still my beating heart - Global Decolonization. We begin working towards a better, brighter future.
Except then, the details get all fuzzy because the people who learned to care about this stuff learned it from the fucking internet, and things on the internet only happen when enough of a stink is made about them. We get Reparations, but they come in the form of business grants given to Black-owned businesses, most of whom aren't actually struggling in any way, while the best that can be done for those who had their generations of labor and lives stolen from them, is more kneeling. We give governance of multiple states back to the various tribes who deserve it, but we only ever give it to the already powerful, ignoring any inter-tribe dissent from those who might have reasonable concerns for the sake of some easy victories. We get a version of Decolonization which prioritizes the most amenable to the Imperial Core who are willing to give us mineral rights, essentially reshuffling the cards in the all-too-familiar ways that the US has a bloody history of doing.
Then, in another four years, when the candidate who led us to those policies (which would undoubtedly be victories but would not be true justice) should be kicked to the curb like the warmonger and criminal they've inevitably become, the now-Progressives, the Social Democrats, the people who want to believe that they would be marching side-by-side with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. only a few decades ago - they will hesitate. They will like the feeling of winning too much to give it up for actual victories. So they will become the new liberals - bringing up points of nuance to obfuscate from grander injustices, "well actually"ing with pointless details about how the US government intended for programs to go instead of dealing with the consequences of how they are.
I hope to be wrong. I would pray that I'm wrong if I believed in anything. But I don't know if solidarity is real, or if it's just one of those things that everyone pretends to care about until the point they need to do it.
I wish I took a better pic of this writing in a bar bathroom in toronto bc I think of it so often. Be So Completely Yourself That No One Is Attracted To You Or Wants To Employ You
WHY IS GEN ALPHA NOT SCHOOL?!?!?!
Youtube has shown me a couple of videos of someone reposting a Tiktok where a Teacher goes "Guys.... gen alpha CAN NOT (read/understand media/comprehend things) and I'm worried" and it makes me want to fucking scream. I say the following with full understanding that "generations" don't exist, that trying to place older and younger people in opposition is bullshit, and that trying to attribute behaviors to large groups of people is always a losing game, but more people will understand how I feel with these words so I don't care:
It feels spiritually millennial. Like we already had this conversation a long time ago but we have to re-hash it because I personally have now experienced it (or far more likely, because I personally have seen a Tiktok about it.) It feels like nobody's learning anything, they just want to talk about it until they feel like they have, and that all thought about this topic will be put down the moment we don't have to look at it anymore, until the next time it becomes a problem by looking at it.
I do not doubt for a single second that there is truth in what the teachers are describing. I'm not going to deny their reality. Speaking as somebody born in '96, who got to watch as the last sniffs of "The Good Times" closed every door in my face, who went along the same path of "gifted kid > burnout > unemployed internet freak," the anti-intellectualism these teachers are describing is not new, it is not specific to Gen Alpha, and if you retain one thing from this post let it be this:
Gen Alpha is "like that" because the internet has given the game away, and they are reacting rationally.
I do not say this as some kind of "SCHOOL SHOULD TEACH YOU SHIT THAT REALLY MATTERS" screed, fuck that whole argument. The idea of school isn't just that it teaches you stuff, it teaches you how to learn, and inspires in you a want to learn more. That hasn't been reality for at least 60-70 years, from what I know, and as someone who grew up watching Hank Green, PBS Kids, Bill Nye, all the shit that is incredibly worthwhile, that has never been my reality either. None of that actually prepares you for living in the US. If you think it does, I genuinely think that will be a big hurdle for you to clear before you ever understand the state of the US as much as you most likely want to.
FD Signifier, in a video discussing the asinine "why are black men not going to college??" discourse (watch his video, don't take my stupid ass's words as gospel, especially on topics of race) put it this way:
"[Black men who forego college] are simply just looking at college, at student loan debt, at wage slavery, and at a hostile work and educational environment, as a bad decision. They'd rather take the long shot at alternative venues of success (which, by the way, are highly marketed to them in our media) and saying hey, if I don't make it as a rapper, if I don't make it as a trapper, if I don't make it as a basketball player, then, y'know - maybe I'll make it at AutoZone."
I am not going to simply say, "This is a universal experience actually!" without acknowledging that FD is correct in his analysis and that his takes on black men and masculinity are always insightful, and that's why I want you to watch his video, with his words. The conjecture I would add is that this is a thought pattern which I believe is also increasingly prevalent the younger you are, the longer that we have lived in the post-modern capitalist shithole that is the current state of the world, and that young folks I have met tend to have a higher chance of having this mindset because the internet simply displays a hundred thousand things to you at once and doesn't tell you how to form an opinion on it or look up the things that led to it.
In my experience, as someone who's been both lucky enough to engage with real progressives and unlucky enough to engage with people who certainly think themselves progressives, when somebody is worrying about how The Kids Aren't Learning Anything, they are placing a value on learning that it does not functionally have. That is not a moral judgement. That is not a statement that learning isn't worthwhile. I wish above everything that learning and discovering science and culture and history and and nature and language and everything on this beautiful planet of ours was a worthwhile endeavor, but the reality is that my degree hasn't mattered since I was out of college for two years, and ever since then the only thing that's mattered is "can you lift a 50 pound box above your head and/or stand on your feet for 8 hours."
I can't, so I'm "useless." It doesn't matter if that's not actually true, if that's how I am constantly treated and made to feel by many of those around me, and it doesn't bring me any comfort knowing that people have it significantly worse than me for shit outside their control, nor does it bring me comfort to know that there are so many people who had things more in their control and "failed" anyway.
My office jobs were filled with primarily black women doing the actual work, and a gradient of mostly women filling in the in-between steps, becoming more and more oversaturated with white men and white women the further up the chain you went. My service and physical jobs were ones where primarily black men would do the difficult labor at the lowest levels, with a similar gradient the further up the chain you went - more and more white women and men in the positions with less and less physical responsibilities. This isn't even counting the undocumented migrants who are made to toil for pennies, or the literal slave labor we have in our prison system, and it certainly isn't counting the interconnected web of supply chains of suffering which keep the Imperial Core secure and well-fed. This is all written under the incorrect assumption that the bar for unjust suffering begins at "being poor or working class in the US," which it does not, but it is one of the only lenses I can actually argue from with some authority.
Gen Alpha does not need to learn how to retain information; if you're not going to a particularly "nice" college, you barely need to learn how to retain information to get by, at which point you can bleed out everything that isn't related to the specific place and specific tasks that your individual job requires of you. Gen Alpha has had the internet for their entire lives, so unless they live in a stable and positive environment (which, I don't think most adults do, let alone most young people and children) they can just see the reality that we live in, see the harsh edges which are going to or have already hurt them, and shrug and continue to scroll their phones because, fuck it, nothing matters anyway. Every single ad I get the few times I go on Twitch is a fucking gambling ad. More and more AI-generated art is being shown on billboards. Your labor was already worth a miniscule amount, and as long as I've been watching daytime TV and seeing News exposés on how random people IN YOUR CITY are struggling, I understood that it wasn't even worth that much because you need to have people dying alone with no security in order to have people desperate enough to do the shit jobs.
I live in a Midwestern city and I do not believe for a second that there will be real solidarity from the coasts when we inevitably require help in whatever hypothetical post-"socialist" utopia that people online want to believe in, because most of my life Red States were a punching bag by snot-nosed adult brats in fancy clothes. I understood how alone we were more than any of the people who could name more literature than me. That literature may have given me more, better words to describe it, but none of it would have given me enough words to convince people of reality, because I also learned a long time ago that learning and doing are two separate things, and learning only really matters so much as it can inspire you to do, and a lot of you don't want to do anything. If I, today, went back in time 10 years, I would not be able to stop us from getting to today, because I know none of you would have listened.
I have nothing but empathy for teachers, the US's schooling system is a fucking hellscape, but I also lived next to a now-retired teacher who never had anything good to say about her (mostly underprivileged) class, who could not conceive of children as anything other than a massive nuisance who can't just act right for some gosh darn reason. That is all I think of when I see a video talking about "kids these days aren't learning" -- somebody who, far sooner than they would like to believe, is going to have given up on the kids, given up on their job, and thrown up their hands. And hell, some of the time, I can't really blame them, but what chafes my ass is that it never seems to come from a place of concern for the children, just bewilderment at "why" and "how."
You should already know "why" by now. I saw all of this happening as a child. You should be able to recognize it as an adult.
also while its Juneteenth, today's also my oc Hitch's birthday!!! black gnc trans boy mouse!!!!
doodle of my fursona hehe
never gonna water down my blackness, my ass will take space and be loud asf
btw,,,niggas can be bunnies too
(sigh, here's the reblog pass for non blacks who are scared to engage with black art lololololol)
I chipped my tooth
I chipped my tooth on an oven-baked sandwich in quarantine.
My roommate (my abuser) would harangue me at the time about my dysfunction: (as well as everything else) "Just brush your teeth!"
And it weighed on my mind.
Because it meant they were right (because they ALWAYS had to be right) and in a sense, I knew they were, but I also knew they didn't actually care about my teeth: they cared about being right.
Soon, the tooth fell out, leaving only a small shard of it connected to me, and at the dentist I was told something interesting:
It was a baby tooth.
It had somehow, inexplicably, hung onto my mouth for far too long, far past the point it had grown rotten and brittle, far past the point it had been helpful to me, far past the point I ever needed it, and it certainly never needed me.
And in that, I could not help but find a lesson I needed to learn.
"Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm being helpful" is a vastly underrated thought process that I strongly encourage others to get comfortable with
"Bisexual women and their boyfriends" is such a crabs-in-a-bucket discourse. "Noooo you're not really oppressed because you have the option to be straight!!! That whole grossly exploitative period of the 2000's where bi women were Hot Taboo Babes and/or Sluts and where all Lesbians were treated as secretly bisexual are NOT related or based in similar patriarchal values or anything like that!!!! The history of queer oppression began when I realized I was queer and nothing irrelevant to me is important in The Community!!!!! The closet only exists when I'm in it!!!!!!!!!"
(walks up to the transbian polycule at the bar) so which one of you is the twilight sparkle and which one of you is the pinkie pie and which one of you is the applejack and which one of you is the rainbow dash and which one of you is the rarity and which one of you is the fluttershy and which one of you is the great and powerful trixie and which one of you is the octavia and which one of you is the vinyl scratch and which one of you is the
terrible idea: a game that implements Trespasser's "look down at your breasts to see your health" mechanic, but your character is transfem and you increase your health bar by taking prog, increasing your breastsize and health at the same time
Trespasser was trying to not have a HUD, so the way you checked your health in-game was to look down at your character's breasts:
And the state of that tattoo on the left was your character's health.
Trespasser is a wild game.
It's a super-ambitious action-adventure with a physics & AI system years ahead of what was coming out at the time. It's super influential, sold about 5 copies, was completely impossible to play at launch, and it was created by the guy who designed the Xbox and the writer of Deus Ex & Dishonored. It's been cited as inspiration for Half Life 2, Halo, Far Cry, Doom 3, Octodad, and Surgeon Simulator. It was widely considered The Worst Game Of 1998 when it came out.
It's also a Jurassic Park tie-in that doesn't bother mentioning that in the name!
It's just one of those games that apparently every late-90s game developer either played or helped make! The impact of Trespasser is just massive, all for a game no one played and reportedly isn't that much fun anyway.
