Ornamental Hermit

Sarah, she/her, thirty. this is an aesthetic blog, except when it's not.

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[bgm05]

People who live in big cities will say stuff like Well if youre bored why dont you take the public transportation to your local artisanal cheesemonger

[little-miss-rasputin-pageant]

in almost every other children's book where the main heroine is swept away to a land of whimsy she's shown having a lovely time; braving dangers occasionally, trying to find her way home, sure, but ultimately delighting in the magic around her. meanwhile alice spends her entire time in wonderland like

[roach-works]

look, here’s the thing: alice in wonderland’s enduring fucking charm is that it perfectly captures the vibe of being a very tired and annoyed child who is nonetheless required to play along with adult nonsense.

alice is dragged from place to place without warning, forced to play stupid games with no good prizes, grilled over her schooling and manners and recitation and dress, scolded, judged, insulted to her face, sent away, given gifts she didn’t ask for and doesn’t like, corrected incorrectly, been subject to shifting and arbitrary rules, and then when she gets snappish with all this bullshit everyone acts like a little girl’s temper is the end of the fucking world.

alice in wonderland isn’t a drug trip or a nightmare or a metaphor, that’s just what being ten years old is LIKE. that’s why kids love it so much. even if they can’t quite articulate how, they recognize themselves in it.

[trans-pickles]

I'm gonna go ahead and add - the reaction image is barely even a joke. This is the original illustration of her at the Mad Hatter's tea party.

look at how fucking angry she is

[tpwrtrmnky]

Basically my primary frustration with a lot of mainstream left-ish framings of trans issues is the treatment of trans rights as a concession they're making to be nice, rather than a principled stance grounded in a real, material understanding of the world.

It leads to this attitude of being vaguely embarrassed to support trans people, which crumbles when Right Wing Dipshit Pundit #33145 starts going on about "harsh truths" that a competent advocate could call out for being incorrect.

[tpwrtrmnky]

"You are transphobic" as an argument by itself is a lot weaker than "You are demonstrably, unambiguously wrong about this issue. You have reached an incorrect conclusion despite having all the information needed to be correct, because you'd rather be transphobic than right."

[daughter-of-sapph0]

so called feminists: "actually women are naturally inferior at everything, including quiz game shows, beauty pageants, chess, and video games. we need a society that is segregated so that anyone who would ever have to potential to win against a woman is eliminated. this is actually far better than organizing sports into weight classes or different athletic/skill level based categories that ignore sex, like what wrestling and video/board game tournaments already do. I cannot accept the reality that men and women are the same species. this is actually how we truly protect women. by calling them weak pathetic losers who could never win against even the worst opponent, and preventing them from even playing at all."

[daughter-of-sapph0]

actually conversion I had with one of these nerds:

me: "so you think men are better at literally everything, even things that do not require any physical ability whatsoever?"

terf: "yes! those should still be segregated by sex! males should not be playing against women ever. it's an unfair advantage"

me: "so my brother has an unfair advantage over me when playing fucking monopoly?"

terf: "yes. males are statistically better and managing finances, while women are irresponsible and lenient with spending money."

hey guys. I think the people who are literally unironicly saying "women are bad at money. this means they suck at board games" aren't actually feminists

[strangestcase]

No joke, that was the rethoric the Francoist regime in Spain used to justify women being legally underage regardless of age and unable to open bank accounts without their husbands or fathers permission. That law was effective until 1975.

[gatheringbones]

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

— Beyond Words, by Carl Safina

[pirateprincessjess]

When I was early on in my transition I got in a Lyft, and the driver was this big country guy. I was a little nervous so I just sat quietly in the back.

After a moment he changed the music on his phone to what sounded like a Hatsune Miku song. Curiosity got the better of me, so I finally spoke up and said “is this Hatsune Miku?”

And he said “Yep. You looked uncomfortable, and I know Transgender women like Hatsune Miku, so I thought it might help.”

I think about that interaction a lot.

[dapperpea]

[kiwimintlime]

not aromantic but I believe in their beliefs.

"there's no platonic explanation for this" try harder bucko

[kiwimintlime]

love is a beautiful wonderful multifaceted nebulous thing that shouldn't be reduced to the strict bounds of Tier One: Romance and Tier Two: Friends. get weird with it. love your friends deeply, wildly, passionately and platonically. cowards

[tabris-the-seventeenth-angel]

HEARTBREAKING: friends who i should be going to the movies and playing dnd and watching anime and cosplaying and going to the mall and having sleepovers and exploring the woods with live one hundred trillion miles away

[whyenn-reader]

im doing good! you know. besides the underlying feeling that I'm fundamentally incapable of fitting in in a society. besides that i'm chillin

[subwaybug]

More people should get into poly shipping. Both because polyamory is awesome and because it's really fun to make complicated ass diagrams

[thedreadvampy]

Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone

like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive

why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people

why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants

why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.

every day governments, councils and businesses make your life worse as a side effect of making vulnerable people's lives WAY worse. if you're ok with that you're a fucking idiot and if you're in favour of it you're a vindictive cunt cause again literally the ONLY payoff for your life getting worse is other people's lives getting worser.

[fforsythiaaa]

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

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

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

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

[qqchurch]

[lesbianboyfriend]

[ID: tweet reading “that’s a great idea for a story. But have you considered they should all be girls?” /end ID]

[animentality]

[my-dailydreams]

[butt-rice]

i wish there was a way to say "you're right, but this is really ineffective and even counterproductive messaging to anyone who doesn't already agree with you" without sounding like an asshole