Nonbinary (tme). Fae / faer / faers, he / him / his (that order for preference)
Blog notes:
There's no main topic here i post whatever
If a big part of your blog is incest kink / pedophilia kink / proship shit I will block you
^ Generally if you are team "fiction doesn't affect reality" you're not gonna agree with what i've got to say
I also block terfs / radfems, transmedicalists, and ppl who act like misandry is an axis of oppression / equivalent to misogyny
Tagging:
"[thing]" and "[thing] mention" for whatever topics I know to tag
"Thing" vs "topic: thing" are to differentiate actual instances of bigotry vs talking about that angle of oppression (example: "antiblackness" vs "topic: antiblackness")
"ask to tag" means I'm pretty sure that the content could upset someone but I don't know how to warn about it. If you want something specific tagged please let me know.
I have different tags for different original post types but "dormouse rambles" is for all original posts
The rise of overly dark Magical Girl shows, which contain suffering for no other purpose than to display said suffering, largely stems from a complete misunderstanding of what Madoka was, and what made it great.
Madoka spends two and a half episodes setting up a happy, cheerful, Magical Girl show, and then spends eight and a half episodes rejecting that premise, showing that hope only leads to despair, that a wish will lead to a curse, that things cannot fundamentally improve, and that trying to make things better will only bring suffering upon yourself and others. This is what derivative "tragical girl" shows were about; the suffering of young women for its own sake, as if that was the point of Madoka, as if the suffering was the entire point.
The last episode, however, has Madoka herself rejecting the show's entire premise. She's told hope leads to despair, and exclaims "If someone says it's wrong to have hope, I will tell them they're wrong every single time.". She's told that the very foundation of the universe leads to suffering being inherent, constant, and that the only thing one can do is to endure said suffering as long as one can bear, before falling to despair and inflicting the suffering one has experienced unto others; she's told that any wish will become a curse, yet ends the show saying "All those Magical Girls who held onto their hopes and fought against witches, I don't want to see them cryâI want them to stay smiling until the end. If any rule or law stands in my way, I will destroy it. I will rewrite it. That is my wish, that is my prayer.""
Walpurgisnacht had been set up as the most terrible witch to ever exist up until that point, and the viewer had been led to believe they'd fight to the death against it, and inevitably loseâas a Magical Girl seemingly always does in the Madoka universe. Madoka does not fight her, Madoka shows compassion, simply stating "It's okay. It's okay now, you don't have to hate anyone anymore, you don't have to curse anyone anymore. I'll go back, before you took that form, and shoulder that burden for you". There was no fight, and Madoka simply took on her despair, as she took on everyone else's, allowing them to once again have hope.
That's why the ending of that silly meduka meguca copypasta does make me cry every time; we pray, never to forget, that being Meguca was suffering. It's not anymore, there are struggles, but there always are in life; the Magical Girls who held wishes in their hearts prevailed against the very concept of the show, with the ending showing that you can make the world a better place through love, compassion, and the power of a wish. The twist in Madoka Magica isn't episode 3, where the first explicit death is shownâit's in episode 12, in which it shows itself to have been a completely normal Magical Girl show all along.
like, I myself have also never lived on the rez so I can really only speak to the experiences Iâve had shared with me by friends and familyâand frankly, there are some things my loved ones just straight up wonât even talk about because it was just that fucking bad. but with the way some folks on this site (in particular, as Iâve mentioned before, white Europeans who seem to have convinced themselves that just because theyâre not American means theyâre absolved of all the evils of white supremacy and imperialism) talk about Native people living in the imperial core it feels really clear to me that a lot of these people have never even, like, attempted to so much as imagine just how fucking bad the conditions on most reservations are. theyâre certainly not doing any research into it. just, like, speaking loudly and confidently about how privileged we are to live in the US without a shred of consideration for the fact that these places were intentionally constructed to have the worst living conditions possible. and like thatâs not to say that you canât have any semblance of a good life there, Iâve also heard so many stories of joy and love and community on the rez and I donât want to take away from that. but those things are hard fought for through the fucking incredible power and resilience of what it is to be a native person surviving genocide, they happen IN SPITE of all the odds stacked against us. I promise that you as a white person in fucking France or whatever are not worse off than generations of people forced into reservations, with extremely limited access to food and clean water and healthcare. for real.
and of course the justification is always âoh well thatâs such a small percentage of the US population thoughâ as if thatâs not literally the same logic used by the government to allow these people to continue to suffer, and as though population percentage is supposed to make me just stop caring about my relatives. like that just doesnât make you look better. and if youâre from a colonizing European country it was your fucking ancestors that created the conditions that led to people suffering today. shut the fuck up!
I really donât want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkisâ âkeep Tolkien whiteâ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isnât seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkienâs âI hate apartheidâ valedictorian address being used as a âcounterâ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except itâs only ever the âI hate apartheidâ line thatâs shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isnât exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going âomg we relateâ and expressing what is a very, very mild âsegregation is not greatâ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around âwhat do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?â in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose oneâs own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist itâs anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck⌠and then getting really Pikachu-meme âbut theyâre misreading itâ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with âI donât see colourâ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely donât have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. Iâm not surprised by Serkisâ comment. I donât really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy âI felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther setâ âI somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possibleâ Serkisâ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesnât exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response âfuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, letâs see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptationâ. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. Theyâre interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we donât have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, itâs always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had âa few racist elementsâ but ânothing like the racism of todayâ. Of course itâs nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isnât writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very âget thee gone from my gateâ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkienâs own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkienâs âproblematic elementsâ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway âBlack men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron⌠itâs the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidentalâ, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible⌠casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge âscandalâ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politicsâ˘ď¸, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didnât want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesnât need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkienâs few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And itâs just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they donât realy say about most other âcanonicalâ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic âloveâ? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in NĂşmenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and weâll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkienâs world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We donât need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting âkeep the Shire whiteâ Serkis soundbites and âhooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!â news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
The other post is much too big and I still need help with credit card bills and food money. I was able to support my family earlier this year but I'm in between checks, and won't see any money until I finish writing my second book. If you'd like to support your favorite horror author's favorite horror author (not to mention keep a disabled Black lesbian's family afloat), please consider sending me some Good Luck, Don't Starve money!
âSo... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:
It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.
You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.
Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.
Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%
During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.
When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.
You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.
You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.
If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.
Please feel free to share this.
And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.
Literally my dad warned me about this yesterday morning(and it seems to mostly effect "processed lettuce".), I had to change my lunch for volunteer program because of it.
I could use this list for reference, thanks @ocean-again
Can anyone help a black transfem with tech and stability for my teaching job? I only owe 250 in rent and need help with procuring a good computer. If I had to set a goal myself it would 750 for other bills and tech by August, when my class starts.
Please please consider helping me out financially to get my best foot forward as a small time educator. Thank you.
Current Goal: 0/750
Link to a post with all my pay apps and gfm info below:
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
Until my internship is over (which has my trust and momentum but still has had many hurdles and has no weekend work) I am still fundamentally unemployed or self employed with little book sales. Please help me keep building out my career so I can stay housed.
Hey I'm gonna tag people under the cut for a bit more momentum. I still have to pocket 250 for rent by the end of the month. And I really need a computer. Apologies for the consistent tagging
Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of yearsâfar longer than settlers have been in Canadaâand made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotÄn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racismâlike Kashechewanâbecause it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
I work with kids and sometimes we have to do safety lessons with them about like, not telling strangers on the internet your home address or something. And sometimes the kids wont understand why, so you have to impart upon them that, well, some adults want to hurt children. And thats kind of difficult to do, because you have to beat around the bush, both because you dont want to scare them (while still making them understand how serious it is) and because you might lose your job if you explain it too straight forward.
Luckily, for some reason, the villain of one of the most popular franchises with children for the last 10 years happens to be a serial child murderer. So when a kid asks why they shouldnt trust strangers, instead of hand wringing and humhawing my answer out, I can just say "we dont always know when a strange adult has good intentions with children, or when they are William Afton."
Find an alcohol free, non acidic mouthwash to avoid weakening enamel
Fresh breath/cosmetic mouthwash = after meals
Ingredients like chlorhexidine in mouthwashes can cause staining â there are effective non staining alternatives
Mechanical brushes are more effective than manual brushes, but only if used correctly â they are supposed to do 99% of the work for you
To use mechanical brushes correctly, turn them on and gently move them along the teeth in each quadrant. Each quadrant should take 30 seconds: 10 seconds on the back of the tooth, 10 seconds on the front, 10 seconds on the chewing surface (2 minutes total when youâre done with all 4 quadrants)
Or just follow the directions on the specific brand youâre using
Brush should be angled at a 45 degree angle / touching the gumline
String floss is non negotiable, so learn how to do it right â C shape that hugs each side of the tooth, up and down 2-3 times (donât see saw it â watch a video for demonstration)
String floss is more effective than toothpick floss. Toothpick floss can cause gum trauma
Itâs ok if your gums bleed when you first start flossing â they will stop when you get consistent with it
Tip: disclosing tablets stain plaque and show you what spots youâre missing/need to focus on
Use interdental/proxy brushes for gaps in between teeth or if you have braces
Donât open your mouth wide to get to the molars / back teeth â just open mouth slightly, less resistance from lips & you can reach the back teeth easier that way
Water floss is helpful & I think itâs a valuable part of oral care!
Buy a water floss with a dial
To use a water floss correctly, aim at gumline (45 degree angle), close mouth, and guide water floss along the gumline (1-2 seconds between each pocket)
Helpful tip â if first time, feel along the gumline first to see what itâs like. If youâre focused on what youâre doing and you have your mouth open, that will cause a mess. You want your mouth closed and for the excess water from your mouth to be dripping into the sink
Repeat for backside
Tongue scraper is worth it â lots of bacteria/gunk gathers on tongue
If you have gag reflex/small jaw, just do progressive overload â starting at the front and making your way to the back slowly
Weird tip but smiling can actually help lower your gag reflex
GENERALLY (not always): antiseptic before brushing, fluoride mouthwash after (if you donât like the feeling of fluoride on your teeth after brushing)
But thereâs a higher concentration of fluoride on toothpaste vs mouthwash, so if youâre okay with spitting and not rinsing thatâs usually effective too
Since you canât eat/drink for 30 mins after fluoride mouthwash, ideal time is to do it at bedtime (so it can look like fluoride mouthwash in the PM, antiseptic mouthwash in the AM)
DONâT mix the mouthwashes
Drinking a lot of water helps bc the water we drink is fluoridated and protects against cavities
Xylitol-containing gum helps with dry mouth and gives fresh breath (which is why Iâm partial to it)
Optional, but if u wanna be extra fancy/preventative w it: xylitol lozenges overnight also help stimulate saliva & protect against harmful bacteria. Just a passive thing u can do :)
I get in theory why people complain about het ships or whatever, I get wanting to watch queer media I really do, but I guess where yâall lose me is like. I saw some asshole on a post about Sinners complaining it was âhetslopââthis person was specifically doing so while also claiming Remmick was a queer character and thus they were justified in caring more about him than the Black protagonists. which is a whole other disgusting can of worms that has been well addressed by others at this point. but even in the absence of that part of the argument, like, no, i actually donât think that a hunger for queer stories is an especially good excuse to deride and dismiss a piece of landmark Black filmmaking, especially as a non-Black person. I have a post thatâs been going around encouraging folks to engage with more Native stories and characters, and I had someone come onto that post saying in the tags that theyâd need these stories to be queer in order to care. and I just think that, you know, sucks! like obviously as a queer Native I also want to see more of those stories too. but idk how else to put it other than to say that Black people and people of color shouldnât have to be like you in order for you to care about our narratives and experiences. and I think some of yâall are using this disdain for heterosexuality as a cover for your unexamined racial biases. itâs not okay to be racist to people just because those people happen to be straight, and you continue to be white before you are queer.
on an even more basic level than that, also, I simply just think some of yâall NEED to learn how to interact with media and storytelling without ships and fandom in mind. like if not being able to write fic about two men kissing is genuinely going to be a dealbreaker for you I think thatâs actually something you need to work on within yourself because at that point I think youâre no longer really interacting with art and themes and narrative so much as just kind of playing with toys. which is, like, fine I guess. have fun. but it wouldnât kill you to disengage from that from time to time. especially if would allow you to actually appreciate rich and deeply moving cultural stories from communities of color that you desperately need to learn how to see as human
Iâll always be here, behind you
Iâll provide full normal speed video process on my patreon:www.patreon.com/wlop
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There's an attitude I've been seeing more and more of where having any kind of artistic opinion that isn't praise is seen as some kind of faux pas designed to yuck people's yum or whatever, and while I understand the kneejerk response behind it I do have to wonder like. How sustainable do you think it is to foster an environment where even the most casual criticism is met with hoards of defensive with Whoa Mama Mia Cunt Let People Enjoy Things style comments
OK so yes feedback is necessary specifically in art but I have seen people just be full on mean or unnecessarily harsh. There's creative criticism and then there's just being a dick for the sake of it.
Okay. And I'm saying people are allowed to, when they want to, on their blogs, be a dick about things for the sake of it if they feel like doing it. I'm wildly skeptical of the idea that constructive critique is the only kind of feedback one is "allowed" to make in their own siloed corner of the internet, or that insistence on this will somehow create a healthier space for expressing opinions.
Once again. I can understand the kneejerk impulse here, I do. It sucks to imagine, say, a creator scrolling online coming across some needlessly vitriolic post about something they worked on. But anyone is allowed to go "That's dickish" and move on, or people can engage with "I think this is oversimplified blah blah" if they want to but at the end of the day it isn't some kind of crime against the hobby or a fandom or even a singular person if someone just shoots off "This sucked I wasted my night" in their own accounts.
Like. A lot of people are trending towards thinking I'm talking about the importance of constructive criticism and like, sure, I think that is probably a more interesting avenue of analyzing something's flaws, but once again if you're not like, addressing an artist or interested in doing a deep dive that doesn't mean you're Not Allowed to be flippant or quick to judge. It's kind of startling how many times I've seen someone be like, "I can't stand this album" on their blogs, untagged, had that shit shared, only for it to come across someone's feed and for them to respond with "Why? What's wrong with it? People are allowed to like it, why are you being so negative, why are you tearing people down for no reason, this isn't even real critique," as though the intention in the first place ever was or ought to have been substantive critique in the first place.
It's difficult to articulate my feelings on this, but I do increasingly feel that the insistence upon there being a correct form of disliking something that precludes the possibility of making anyone feel insecure or hurt because they like it is significantly more stultifying than an atmosphere where people can shoot off "Fuck this" and be blocked or ignored for it
Having been through art school with a BA as a result let me just stop you there.
OK sometimes you don't like a certain art style. That's fine. Doesn't mean the art is bad, it's just not to your tastes.
That doesn't give you the right nor even a reason to be a dick on the Internet because you don't like something. If you want to be a dick, do it to someone who has time and energy to give it back. Because at that point you deserve shit in return.
If someone is outright asking for constructive criticism, that still doesn't give you the chance to be a dick. It means they want help learning something they're putting time and effort into.
By all means, be a dick, just do it to people who have earned it.
I feel like you're misunderstanding the entire thrust of this conversation.
Why do I need a "right" or "reason" to post anything online? Why is it that my enjoyment of something is intrinsically justifiable, but my lack of enjoyment requires justification? And based on whose standards? If I can thoughtlessly tweet out a "This album rocks," without expecting people who hate it to demand a longform review from me to explain my enjoyment, I'm not sure I understand why I can't say "This album sucks" without having to go into the trenches about its positive qualities and negative ones. Why do I need to formulate every opinion I have in the form of an art school critique addressing nobody at all?
Why can praise be thoughtless but criticism must, at all costs, be formulated in art school constructive form in case the creator happens to see it and get their feelings hurt or a fan finds it harmful? Particularly when someone could very well have their feelings hurt by thoughtless praise of something as well! I'm not even trying to claim a more substantive form of criticism isn't more interesting or more valuable for one's interpretive abilities. I just think this notion that there is a moral obligation in all online spaces-- no matter how siloed-- to tiptoe around the potential hurt feelings of a hypothetical audience that may or may not even be courted, is at best stultifying for any real plurality of opinion and at worst enabling people whose insecurities about their own hobbies lead them to confidently dictate what people say in whatever passes for privacy in an online space nowadays.
I dunno, I've read works of brutal polemic that I've found immensely creatively engaging, thoughtful, and substantial in its knowledge of a particular form or medium. I've read works of praise I've found miserably trite. Why is the former not allowed to exist because of its dickishness? Why is the latter beyond critique itself?
A lot of people seem to be laboring under the idea that this is describing a situation where someone is literally walking up to someone and going "Your shit sucks" and walking off, but I clearly indicated in that first reblog that that's not even what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about how to talk to people who solicit criticism. I'm not even talking about how to talk to creators at all. I'm talking about this ongoing, deeply insecure assumption held by a number of people in a number of spaces where any kind of negative opinion, regardless of who said it, whether no one was tagged, whether they intended this for a massive audience or for two mutuals, is treated as a personal attack on one's identity rather than a (perhaps douchey!) articulation of one's own tastes. I personally would deeply prefer an environment where people can feel comfortable just saying whatever shit they feel like on their blogs/accounts and just getting blocked if someone's feelings are hurt over it than this constant assumption that there's a morally acceptable formatting one must adhere to for fear of reducing some hypothetical reader to tears, IN CASE they were to, by whatever means, encounter that opinion in the wild
You can be a dick, and you can expect people to listen to your opinions. You can't do both.
Constructive criticism is the art of walking that line. Good critics aren't good because of their good taste. Good critics are good because they can appropriately contextualize and dose dickish opinions so artists can build the art they want to build.
I think you, too, are misunderstanding the primary thrust of this conversation.
Why do you think someone being a dick is "expecting" someone to listen to your opinions? Why do you think that person is "expecting" any sort of audience at all? I am critiquing the inherent assumption that people who are "rude," however this is defined (and I believe it is ill-defined specifically because so much of this is conflated with whose feelings are hurt rather than the actual substance of whatever hypothetical comment is centered here), and have repeatedly emphasized in multiple places that there is a difference between approaching someone and insulting their tastes and creations versus airing an opinion in the (admittedly, increasingly decreasing) privacy of an online space.
I don't disagree with your definitions of constructive criticism or what makes a good critic, I disagree fundamentally with the notion that online users are morally obligated to be critics at all, that the standards of what constitutes criticism needs be imposed to the average user who has any kind of negativity to opine, and the double-standard of not applying such lofty standards to praise.
