This blog is centered on LGBTQIAPN+ positivity and education, as well as visibility within Japan, with an extended particular focus on Genderfluidity and Gender non-conformism (GNC) and its presence within Japanese history, culture, and media representation, among elsewhere. Though I do not make original posts often, I do reblog. This blog is 100% Inclusive of all LGBTQIAPN+ identities. This blog also doubles as a "Studyblr" for Japanese language learning resources / references.
“What I’d really like? I’d really, really like to see some gay people arguing it for me. I’d like to see gay people taking an active part in looking at the spaces they create, and asking how they can make them inclusive of bi people. How they can make the bi people who are already there feel welcome. I’d like to see gay people taking a long, hard look at their own actions and doing the work of deconstructing the ways in which they exclude bis. I’d like to see them acknowledging how their biphobia and bi erasure hurt people. I’d like to see them calling out when bisexuality is treated as a joke or pushed aside. I’d like an apology.”
— On Bi Visibility Day, what I want from gay people
NT ppl will performatively support you, sing to the heavens that they hate Autism Speaks, and reblog shit about Mentol Health luv but when when a ND person acts “harmlessly but kinda Odd” online they’re like
[id: A heavily distorted image of Shrek taking a photo with a wide-lensed camera. The caption reads: “*snap* Yep, this one’s going in my cringe compilation.” end id.]
I’m not ableist, I just bully people who don’t understand sarcasm :) and people who can’t pick up on social cues :) and people who stutter :) and people who talk too much :) and people who get nervous easily :) and people with a short temper :) and people who show any signs of neurodivergency aside from occasionally mentioning taking meds :)
This. There are many intersex children who go thru puberty early, and most of the time intervention is chosen for us, not by us. Cis intersex children deserve autonomy too.
Hello Tumblr! I am posting this on behalf of the Queer Liberation Library, who don't yet have a Tumblr, but have promised me they're working on it. Some of you may remember them from the Twitter Poll I was involved in a few months ago where Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites beat multiple award-winning, trad-pub queer authors with a hefty 69% (nice).
For those of you unaware, the Queer Liberation Library, or QLL, is an organization fighting to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community.
And today, June 12th, 2023, they launched their fundraiser to try and reach 15k so that they can start purchasing digital licensing for queer media and hopefully open their digital doors to library patrons across the US in 2023 with as many queer and trans books as possible.
You can check out their newly redesigned website here:
Queer Liberation Library (QLL) is fighting to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, informa
(If you are in an unsafe space and need to exit the webpage quickly, there is a quick exit bar at the top that redirects to a weather page. When I spoke to them about their web design they were also open to accessibility suggestions and are potentially working on a dark mode for those of us who need it.)
If you know me, you know I am unequivocally pro-library, both as a reader and a queer writer. But with the current rise of homophobia, transphobia, and the proposed ban on books taking hold in certain States, the importance of having protected access queer books cannot be over-emphasized enough.
The QLL aims to protect that access, aiming to provide FREE access to queer and trans media (ebook and audio) to patrons regardless of location within the United States.
They are funded entirely through regular donations from their supporters and their now annual Pride fundraiser, where they hope to afford the cost of not just library books but also maintaining their web presence and staff.
I cannot emphasize enough how much this project is a labor of love for everyone involved and its importance.
And just to clarify, I am not involved in any way beyond raising awareness. When QLL reached out and asked me to retweet their fundraiser tweets, I readily agreed and offered to post about it on Tumblr because I believe in their mission and the world they are trying to build.
One where queer and trans books can't be banned or taken off of shelves because of bigotry and hatred.
If you would like to donate to the cause, you can do so here:
Happy Pride! Let's build a queer library!
They've already surpassed their first 2k, and it'd be absolutely wonderful if we could help them reach their next milestone. And if you can't give, please consider signal boosting this post.
Heres a tip: Do not make limited edition pride stuff in the tumblr shop! I know June is coming up, But if your gonna add pride stuff actually give it a lot of thought, Come up with the designs, Maybe make some subtle pride for people to buy who don't want their parents to know? That'd be cool! But don't make it a limited time thing, A lot of people see it as people using a money grabber to take our cash then we wait for another 11 months
I think it'd be cool to have pride merch, But only if its well thought out. You should ask the community and make polls about it, See what we all think! It should be like that for every merch piece honestly, Then we can help you mold it into something the community will genuinely like and buy
Please Please Please help me with this. I've been wanting to make Pride stuff for a while but this is one area I don't have any experience with and I really want to do it right.
Can you help me out? What can we make that is meaningful and respectful? I don't want this to be a cash grab, something we all feel icky about. I want this to be something that brings us all closer together and make merch that means something.
Also would it make sense to donate a portion of the sales to a charity. If so, which one. I would love to do some good with sales of this merch but I didn't want it to see like a marketing tactic.
Please share this with your friends. I usually promote posts like this to get more visibility but I don't want the hate that I usually get to transfer over to any of you or this initiative.
Edit: I'd love to collaborate with tumblr artists/store owners on this. We could sell Pride stuff they've already made or make new stuff. Send people my way if you think they'd be interested.
hi! just wanted to ask, maybe it flew under the radar, but why does clicking on the person whom it was reblogged from's username on desktop now take them to the user's blog instead of their reblog of the post? with the 'talking in tags' and 'prev tags' culture tumblr has, i feel like this could be a roadblock for those types of interactions. especially for blogs that post/reblog a lot a day. (just to clarify, i'm not referring to on-dash, but rather when wanting to view the previous tags through an entire reblog chain by clicking the previous person's username). thanks!
hmm, there was a change recently where clicking the whole header takes you to that post in the blog view popup, but i think clicking on the "parent" blog name (the one the person reblogged from) should still take you to their post. if it's not, then that's probably a bug. please file a Support ticket about this, if that's what you mean.
You're saying changing this small pink highlighted area to make it impossible to go to a specific post was intentional?
This breaks the entire concept of "prev tags" because it's now impossible to see what the previous tags are. Tumblr really hated the prev tags chains so much that they decided to nerf them like this?
It also makes it impossible to reblog a post starting from before a reblog addition was added—so now if you see an interesting post but it has a super long or annoying reblog section (and the reblog in question is inaccessible), you're out of luck. Those posts exist, but the UI for accessing them has been completely removed.
yes, i'm sure, just double-checked this morning. this is one change in a series of updates to the reblog consumption experience to help make it more intuitive and easy to understand for new users.
and you can still access those reblogs, you just have to go through the notes view for now.
WDYM "through the notes view"? if a post has 10k notes, and my mutual reblogs it with "prev tags", are you expecting me to scroll through hundreds of pages of reblogs to find the one they might have reblogged it from? that doesn't make any sense to me.
also, not only are reblog tags not included in notes view if they're more than a year or two old... if prev user has reblogged the post more than once, there is no unambiguous chain of attribution available in dash view anymore. none. zero. no matter how much of a workout you give your scroll wheel. and by turning off themes by default for new blogs, you've ensured that dash view is often all there is.
put it back.
if whoever unilaterally decided to trash a longstanding feature with lots of site culture dependent on it thinks putting the link in the usernames is "unintuitive" or whatever, then put it on a little permalink icon or something. i don't care. but removing it altogether causes major problems that have zero satisfactory workarounds.
(also, why isn't this new whole-header click area a real hyperlink? why is it some janky faux-link that doesn't even have "open in new tab" functionality baked in? yeah, yeah, the permalink is in a menu somewhere, but if the goal is convenience...)
...actually now that i think about it. did you have religion class in school?
also was it mandatory??
.
yes, it was mandatory
yes, it wasn't mandatory
no??
Voting ended onMay 22, 2023
extra points reblog and tell me where youre from in the tags because for us religion* is a non-mandatory class where in high school you don't get grades but extra points that might help you in other classes**
*and with that i mean Christianity Class because wow i love being in the same region where the pope is /s
** which is the only reason i kept attending
This is terrible news. I’m infuriated.
The banning obviously isn’t because American Girl released A Smart Girl’s Guide to Body Image last year. Otherwise they’d ban all American Girl books, not just everything but Felicity and Molly. No, they’re specifically banning anything that shows a less than perfect image of American history. Because THEY KNOW that teaching American history means teaching its history of racial oppression, slavery, child labor, antisemitism, segregation, and misogyny. They know that, because they know EXACTLY what to ban. But they don’t want YOU to know that. They don’t want YOU to understand that learning about the mistakes and atrocities of the past means you learn how not to repeat them.
@desertdollranch I mentioned this in another post but their motivations are incredibly transparent if you just look at Kaya and Josefina. They have absolutely no discussion on systemic racism, and Kaya doesn’t even meet a white person. They both have none of the eeeevil “critical race theory” discussion that these people are saying they’re banning. So why ban them? It’s OBVIOUS as hell it’s because they’re stories about people of color.
Felicity’s story has people of color but only as her family’s slaves. Molly’s books have no people of color whatsoever and she’s just a good ol’ american patriot the entire time. Meanwhile, for all the other girls who aren’t of color (because god forbid we let a woman of color LIVE)? Caroline’s father hired a talented black man for his shipyard and pays him fairly. Kirsten feels bad for indigenous people. Samantha stands up for workers’ rights, womens’ suffrage, and adopts irish immigrants into her family at a time when they were considered a minority. Rebecca’s books discuss being Jewish in a culturally-Christian country. Kit is sympathetic to the homeless. Maryellen likes vaccines and, like Samantha, stands up for a girl who wouldn’t have been considered white at the time. Julie’s a feminist environmentalist with divorced parents and her best friends are a Chinese girl and a deaf girl. Courtney deals with the AIDS crisis with a specific message lambasting disinformation which we can’t have.
It’s just… so transparent what they’re actually banned for, and I think that it’s showing best with AG right now, because they really don’t have any good excuses. We just know what their awful motives are.
This blog is the only source that I’ve seen and it doesn’t link to anything to back it up or cite a specific school district or anything. Still waiting to see a more detailed source.
I can’t find any verification for it either. Found this instead:
A list of 25 books supposedly banned in schools and libraries in Florida is fake. There is no state banned book list, DeSantis' spokesperson
Florida does not have a statewide system for banning books; individual school districts have their own lists for that.
Cannot find a damn thing about American Girl books being banned. Many of the topics addressed in them are being removed from Florida schools, but I can’t find any of the books on a list, or any posts from students or librarians about “We used to have this book and it’s been removed,” or news articles about “X school district has banned the following list” etc.
This article includes an actual list of recently banned books in Florida schools, by district:
Nathaniel Sandler of Bookleggers Library and Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books speak out about the surge in book bans across the state.
I just did a location search for various American Girl titles in WorldCat, and I can assure everyone on this thread that these books are still widely available to check out in public libraries across the state of Florida.
I even clicked through to the individual catalogue records at various public library systems in different areas of the state to confirm! Here are some examples of the results I found for Meet Addy: An American Girl:
As you can see, these entries span four different county library systems, and each one has multiple copies of the book.
Moreover, the Broward County Library system has an option in their catalogue that allows you to view a list of “Florida Challenged and Banned Books” with direct “find in my library” links that allow you to view which branches have available copies. There are no American Girl books on this list.
I would also like to add that there is an American Girl store in Orlando, which I imagine must be fairly large, given that Orlando is practically the capital of Brand Experiences™ and while I know DeSantis has already taken on Disney, it would have probably made big headlines if he’d recently taken on a subsidiary of the Mattel Company, too.
Like, I understand the anger surrounding what’s happening in Florida, because it’s legitimately disturbing and scary, but please vet your sources before spreading misinformation.
Moreover, in terms of Miami specifically (since it was noted above), the MDPLS (Miami-Dade Public Library System)'s page is easily viewable here.
Searching for "American Girl" here brings up many results stating "on shelf at one or more locations", and as of lately they'll even note which locations in the results.
Through MDPLS you can Get a Library card here:
"eCards are free for residents and property owners in the Miami‑Dade Library taxing district, which includes most of Miami‑Dade County except for Bal Harbour Village, Hialeah, Homestead, Miami Shores, North Miami, North Miami Beach and the Town of Surfside.
Residents of Hialeah, Homestead, North Miami and North Miami Beach are still eligible to receive a free Miami‑Dade Public Library eCard (and vice‑versa) due to a borrowing agreement between Miami‑Dade County and these municipal libraries. Residents who live in Bal Harbour Village, Miami Shores, the Town of Surfside or outside of Miami‑Dade County may obtain a non‑resident library card for an annual fee of $65.00."
"eCards are available to residents of all ages; however, patrons that are 16 years old and younger need to confirm parental authorization prior to applying."
Via the Interlibrary Loan page:
"With a valid library card patrons can request books, articles and audiovisual materials from a vast network of libraries at no cost to them. We always try to find other libraries that lend their items for free; however, this is not always possible and loan charges may apply. Patrons will be notified through their online account if any charges apply. We will not proceed with the request until the patron notifies us that they accept responsibility for any charges.
Patrons with reciprocal library cards and non‑verified addresses are ineligible for the service.
In order to comply with the American Library Association's National Interlibrary Loan Code, items published within the past 12 months, reference works owned by the Library System, and whole issues of magazines or newspapers cannot be requested."
They also have a "Libraries @ Your Door Home Delivery Service"!:
"Can’t make it to the library? Use our Libraries @ Your Door Home Delivery Service to have books and other library materials mailed directly to your home for free. Simply log in to your library account online or call your local branch to request items.
Once you're ready to return your items, simply drop them off at any library location, use the book drops or pay return postage to mail them back."
y'all there is an absolutely bonkers deal going on at itch.io right now
You can get over 500 rpgs for only *five dollars* right now. That's right, over $2000 worth of games for only five fucking dollars. It's insane. It's unreal. It's totally worth more than any dollar amount you're going to throw at it. And it's all going towards charities that work with trans folx on the ground: specifically Zebra Youth and Transinclusive Group.
If you donate more than $10 you get a special bonus - the creators of Action Fiction will send you a PDF copy of the 5E supplement "Monsters of Murka: Chromatic Gamut."
Go check it out now!!! Offer lasts until April 6!
So, this one is actually a lot more important than reporting and blocking spam bots. That post has 20,000 notes rn, so it would mean a lot to me if you could give the same treatment to this as you gave to that (@neil-gaiman if you're listening).
If the petition gets 100,000 signatures they have to consider it for debate in parliament.
It's a crime that Gender Recognition Reform was blocked in England, but Scottish MPs voted it into law and that the UK Parliament overturned that is in direct contravention of democracy as a whole.
It's a pretty serious big deal. Please sign, or, if you're not a UK citizen, please boost.
Y’all IK we won the senate and it’s definitely important to celebrate, but if you’re in Georgia please, please, please vote in the runoff on December 6.
If we can get 51 instead of an exact tie it will give us a little wiggle room. For the past two years, a lot of the improvements Biden has attempted to make haven’t made it passed the Senate because one or two Democrats voted no and that was all it took; if we can get Georgia too, one Democrat can vote no and the legislation will still pass. The more seats we have the better chance we have for serious, meaningful change.
“People have always told me: ‘You’ll understand once you start dating. You’ll feel it when you like someone. You’ll learn when you grow up’. But the feeling of romance I was supposed to understand one day - the meaning of kissing or sex - I couldn’t get that at all. I thought I was lacking some thing as a human. That’s why the words aromantic asexual… they saved me.” | KOISENU FUTARI
hey, if you’ve ever wanted to learn how to make a gif but doing it traditionally in photoshop is too hard, you should look at this.
gifcam is an app designed to make making gifs easy. all you have to do to record a gif is size the window and hit record. it has a built in editor and it saves with low filesizes and many options.
the best thing about the whole deal is that its completely free. yeah. thats right. you wont pay for anything and you’ll never have to
you can download gifcam here, and if you want, you could reblog to spread the word about this awesome software
That is the offical website. Don’t download gifcam anywhere else because copycats have been bundling up the program with backdoor Trojans. This happened a few years back on tumblr so please be careful.
