being trans is awesome ill be like "hey someone was transphobic to me on reddit" and someone else will be like "then get off reddit" and im like "well theyre also transphobic to me on tumblr" and they're like "well thats because youre on tumblr" and ill say "well people are transphobic on instagram and twitter" and people are like "yeah twitter and instagram are cesspits" and its like. i think you guys are missing the point that trans people should not be forced out of any space due to violent rhetoric and threats about who we are and yet its happening all the time. and yall seem to think thats just how it is and it shouldnt be
one of the reblogged tags has inspired me. yes, this is also about places that aren't accepting to trans people, im thinking of the south specifically. i left the south and moved out west, and we love it here, but we miss the south all the time. i lived my whole life in tennessee and i miss it all the time. i think about it all the time. and people will be like "but evan tennessee is a bad place to be trans" and it is. it is a bad place to be trans. but its my HOME. i grew up there, i lived my whole life until last year there, i have so many memories there. and im happy out here and its def more my speed out here but i would love the option to go back if i ever wanted to. and loads of trans people never leave tennessee or the south in general because its their home. trans people shouldnt be constantly forced and encouraged to move hundreds and thousands of miles away from the places they grew up and love because its unsafe to be trans there, it should simply be safe to be trans there
This is literally the most heart warming story I have read on Twitter so far.
I think this is exactly what friends should do, and I feel everyone deserves people like this.
A barn rasing: a collective action of a community, in which a barn for one of the members is built or rebuilt collectively by members of the community.
because you cannot, you CANNOT, build a barn on your own, and without it, you will not be able to survive.
What a fuckin’ gem of a sentence. “What we did today was a barn rasin”
Shi'i Muslim women visiting the Shrine of Our Lady in Lebanon
Catholics around the world honor the Virgin Mary during the month of May, in a practice dating back to the 13th Century. But they are not the only faith that greatly admires the Virgin Mary – enter Islam. Built in 1908, the Shrine of Our Lady draws thousands of Muslim visitors to the religious site, located in Harissa, Lebanon.
“All of [the Muslim visitors] have a lot of respect for Lady Mary,” says Father Younen Obeid. “This respect stems directly from the Quran, the holy book of Islam, which references Mary 37 times — even more occasions than the Bible. The 19th chapter of the Quran is in fact named after Lady Mary and tells the story of her life and how she came to give birth to Jesus, though Islam does not hold the belief of Jesus’s divinity.”
Randa Youssef, a Muslim woman from Beirut, says that she likes to come to the shrine to ask for forgiveness. “I hope she listens to us so that she may give our prayers to God.“
I think the reason I still enjoy tumblr is that even though this all still pisses me off, I know that anything that makes me mad on here is 100% earnest. It's not ragebait or engagement farming, y'all are actually just that stupid sometimes
(This is a short meta thing I wrote up in discord, and while I'm positive I'm not the first person to compare MB's views on ART & Miki, I was quite happy with how this came out, so I'm sharing it here too)
I love Miki as a foil to ART. It casts a lot of light on why MB & ART work so well: MB suspects that Miki has been programmed (ie forced by humans) to always answer yes or to behave in a child-like manner. It can't trust Miki's agreeableness or offers of friendship if it's something the humans have made it do.
Then it turns out Miki is Just Like That on its own and… MB still can't trust its offers of friendship, bc "there was a 93% chance Miki wanted to be everyone's friend" (said I think in NE?), meaning Miki didn't actually want to be Murderbot's friend, it didn't know MB at all and was just friendly to everyone. (The Preservation humans fall in this category a little too, especially at first: they're Good People, so they would help Anyone. They're not choosing MB specifically)
Contrast all that with ART, who argues with MB, who can be mean and sarcastic and insulting (so not programmed to always say yes or always be cute & nice), and maybe most importantly who doesn't make friends easily. ART is abrasive and snarky and overly protective and absolutely does NOT want to be friends with everyone. So if it's choosing MB, MB can trust that as being sincere. If ART didn't want to be around MB, it would make that abundantly clear, just like MB can do. So every time ART and MB argue or insult each other but then still stick together, it's them saying "I choose you, of my own free will. The humans aren't making us choose this, my programming isn't making me choose this, and I don't want just anyone, I choose you specifically."
1) do this even if you're under 40. seriously. I definitely should have been doing something like this for years and I only turned 40 a month and a half ago
2) if you're like me just now trying this going "oh god i've only done 15 and i think my hands are cramping" start lower than 30 and increase by 5 once whatever number you're doing no longer makes your hand cramp up. I can manage about 15 per exercise at the moment.
6. Spread conspiracy theories that the Democrats have deliberately sabotaged the pool and arrest whoever pulls out the floating paint chunks as vandals.
text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]
And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", but it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.
They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?
I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.
AI companies are heavily invested in making themselves relevant. They want people to believe they can't do the things they have done unaided before and make them become reliant on the AI models, so the AI models' existence is artificially justified.
All it means when people say “you’re speaking from a place of privilege” is that you’re likely to underestimate how bad the problem is by default because you are never personally exposed to that problem. It’s not a moral judgement of how difficult your life is.
let’s be real the pressure to use AI as an adult is exactly what they said the pressure the do drugs as a teenager would be like but the people that told us that caved immediately for the AI and definitely did not just say no
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
