Ah, the side blog.

Kat, 20+, They/Them | Here, I post whatever. I just don't want to delete it. Mostly advocacy 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸🇸🇩🇺🇦Check out my writing blog @kat-writes to leave any and all writing prompts and see my work!

[mesothelihomo]

[mesothelihomo]

[katisback]

God forbid a guy have a different interpretation on a fictional character. God forbid a guy express that opinion without being yelled at by multiple people.

God forbid a guy's autism gives them a break and let's them not shut down when their friends yell at them, even though they're clearly teasing.

But no, a guy's autism and anxiety and depression has been triggered and a guy took the word "stupid" way too personally and doesn't know how to bring up that the silly conversation was hurtful without sounding, indeed, stupid.

[joytri]

[jtownraindancer]

[jtownraindancer]

Had a minute at work to look it up, and I did find the title!

source

[followthebluebell]

#O Ancestors! I cry. What is your wisdom for times like these?#Start a garden and have a cuppa. says my great-grandmother who went through the depression#Lie your ass off to the government and have a cuppa. says my great-great grandfather who escaped the potato famine#Keep your humours in balance and have a cuppa. says my ancestor who survived the bubonic plague#Bring tribe together so many make strong and have cuppa. says my neanderthal ancestor#BITE THEM BITE THEM BITE THEM. Says my small arboreal ancestor. ALSO LITTLE TREAT.#Thank you for your wisdom ancestors. I say and turn on the kettle. - gallusrostromegalus

[gallusrostromegalus]

How serendipitous to discover that my tags have passed Peer Review just as I have sat down with a cuppa :)

[ruinedchildhood]

[spaghettioverdose-deactivated20]

Reblog to save a duck

[13faeinapenguinsuit]

Quack quack

[ijustgotherebro]

It’s getting to be that time of year where more people are going outside to parks and stuff so i thought it would a good idea to reblog this again

[theofficialvincenzo]

Once I was feeding some ducks from a bag of birdseed I brought with me, and this woman next to me looked so confused and asked what I was feeding them

When I said it was birdseed she just went “oh- can they actually eat that? Is that safe?”

I didnt know how to respond like, at all, so I just pointed at the duck and said “bird”

She then had a look on her face like a new groove was just forcibly carved in her brain and said softly “oh my fucking god”

[only-tiktoks]

[shane-actually]

👏🏼

[symphonicseauxl]

He destroyed him

[katisback]

i'm feeling angry and i don't know where to put it.

it's sitting in the back of my throat, at the edges of my skull. but where should i put it? i can't scream. i can't hit.

i can't start another fight.

so what do i do? what do i say and where do i say it?

here? this is as good as anywhere, i suppose.

i'm angry that someone got their way. someone had nothing to add.

now no one has anything to add. we are silent and disjointed, as if we dare not speak of plots and names, to avoid someone's ire.

someone who had the chance and gave it up. but how dare we do things that make someone feel excluded from the thing someone excluded someone's self from?

someone hurt my friends. someone made them feel that they could not be authentically joyful about their personal pleasures. because someone didn't care for those pleasures.

i feel that i can't be authentically joyful about this personal pleasure. i had a hand in creation around it, because of it. and now i must feel guilt, because i love it? because someone else does not.

that makes me angry.

i'm angry that someone gets to dictate what i talk to my friends about, because they have gone quiet. my attempts to rekindle and reconnect and allow for the joy are

meaningless.

i'm angry at my helplessness. i'm angry. i'm tired. i'm angry. i'm angry.

i wish change was easier for my mind and my heart. i wish this change hadn't come from hurt. i wish i could fix it.

i'm angry i can't fix it.

emotions are not fixable. nothing i say or do will make this better.

through trial and error i can try to speak of this beloved thing, but how will i know if it's too soon? if i am just upsetting others by trying to continue being authentically joyful about this thing? would they say?

i'm angry that i don't know.

i'm angry at myself in advance for hurting my friends because i will inevitably fuck it up.

i'm hurt. i'm angry that i'm hurt. i don't think i'm allowed to feel hurt.

i can't be there for my friends when i'm just angry and hurt. they can't be there for me when they're angry and hurt. so, what? we sit and stew in silence, far from each other, unable to touch our common joy?

i'm helpless. i'm angry at my helplessness. i'm hurt. i'm angry at my hurt. i'm tired. i'm angry at my tiredness.

i'm angry at my anger, because what good does anger do when it's no longer welcome?

i'm angry i can't find a way to say i'm not okay. i have to be okay. that's the rule. i can't be angry, helpless, hurt, or tired. i can't.

but i am. and yet i no longer feel like a person, connected to my anger, helplessnes, hurt, and tiredness. i just feel angry.

i'm feeling angry and i don't know what to do with myself.

it's sitting in the tension of my shoulders, pumping through my veins and permeating my organs. but where should i put it? i can't scream. i can't hit.

i can't start another fight.

so what do i do? what do i say, how can i say it? where do i say it?

here? this is as good as anywhere, i suppose.

[gamechangershow]

Now everywhere Erika goes, a roast of Sam Reich follows... 🔥

Watch the full episode on Dropout

[theperksofneurodivergency]

“Emotional abuse works like this: You are screamed at, and then, not knowing any better, you stand up for yourself. You think this is a way of being strong. You think this is a defense tactic.But this only provokes more screaming. Going silent provokes more screaming too, but usually it keeps the threats to the minimum. It keeps it just at screaming and not: a shove down the stairs, or order to pack your stuff and get out. So you learn how to go silent. How to play dead. How to cry without making a noise. How to swallow noise. How to wipe your cheeks, get out of the car, and go about your day. You learn. And when the screaming has stopped, when the two of you are in the car or out to dinner and they’re all smiles, all asking for favors, all questions, you are still hurt and annoyed and want to ask them, how? How can you speak to me like that? How can you pretend you did not say those things? How can you have forgotten? But you’ve learned. So you listen to, “Can I borrow your key”s and “how was your day”s and you play dead. You swallow the noise. And sometimes it doesn’t matter who is speaking to you, it doesn’t matter if they’re a friend, it doesn’t matter if their criticism is constructive, it doesn’t matter. You’ve learned. Any sort of speaking, any raising of the voice, any insult and you play dead.”

— Good Girl, Lora Mathis (via lora-mathis)

[queen-mihai]

It's Juneteenth yall. And I'm not letting this day go unmarked.

Black people fight for everybody. We stand in solidarity with women, lgbt people, poor people all over the world of every skin color and background. Every religion and nationality.

Today, stand with us. Be with us. Tell a black person you love them. Hug a black person (with consent). Ask that hot black girl out today. Make a black person smile. Black lives matter to everybody and you matter to us.

Stand with us on Juneteenth like we stand with you all year round, and I hope a happy Pride month continues for all of us

💝

[queen-mihai]

Obligatory self reblog because Tumblr doesn't ever let anybody see my stuff unless I literally post it repeatedly

[queen-mihai]

I'd love if you'd reblog this and keep it moving, with love

[katoninefandoms]

Happy Pride!

[beanixwright-deactivated2022030]

hot flaming take i’m abt to slap you with: it’s not acceptable to punish children for their grades, no matter the circumstances.

[beanixwright-deactivated2022030]

lost a follower for this one!

[transarsonist]

Any situation in which the grades are "bad enough to punish" is a situation in which your child is already struggling, and needs, more than anything, your support and affection.

If you punish them you will teach them nothing but how to loathe

[love-notes-to-survivors]

And that their worth is dependent on what they can accomplish.

[postapocalypticcottagecore]

Oh, teaching them that their worth is dependent on what they can accomplish is fully intentional a lot of the time...

[thechanelmuse]

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.

[mysteryteacup]

For those of us who aren't from the states, what - apart from apparently a shitty law - is that?

[kethsposy]

A law passed by Bush that cut funding to public schools whose students didn't improve every year on a set of standardized tests- meaning not that each student was supposed to improve during their time in school, but that this year's first graders had to do better on the tests than last year's first graders, and next year's had to do better still. Obviously this was really difficult over the short term and completely impossible over the long term.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

The program also incentivized schools to cut their losses on struggling students, expelling or encouraging them to drop out to bring the test averages up instead of being able to spend the effort to actually help them.

[anyroads]

No Child Left Behind was an absolute disaster for education, poorly hidden behind an insidious name. The real goal of it was not just to defund education (in order to reallocate those funds to appease Republican lobbyists), but to stop teaching critical thinking. Not only did struggling students get left behind, but by prioritizing students who did well on standardized tests, the focus shifted entirely to teaching students memorization without understanding context, and how to guess their best on a test in order to pass. The focus became passing tests, not actual learning. In the process, students were taught that they don't need to understand the material, they just need to know how to follow directions and give the answers deemed correct by the school boards. They were deprived of agency in their own educations.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

No Child Left Behind was devastating. We knew it then and we see it now.

[razzleberryjam]

Its even worse now that they stopped teaching phonics while prioritizing "sight words"

Theyre literally teaching kids to recognize words they want them to know while preventing them from ever learning how to read, which means you can't learn new words, you can't sound it out and ask someone what it means - the kids can't fucking read. Gen alpha can't fucking read. They can only read "approved sight words"

[dgcatanisiri]

The best description I've ever seen of No Child Left Behind is that it is "a masterpiece of Orwellian language that says that no child shall advance faster than the slowest."

[autistichalsin]

Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Fiction is not reality.

You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.

No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.

No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.

You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.

Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.

The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.

Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.

Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.

You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.

[friolily]

this should be common fucking sense tbh

[hemipenal-system]

thank your local trans girl for being alive right now

[hemipenal-system]

good job soldier. now turn around and thank your local trans boy for being alive right now

[hemipenal-system]

tumblr search still broken but also nonbinary people! go thank them too!

[katoninefandoms]

hey can my friends stop showing me new media with the most pathetic sopping wet cat white men in them? I never have been and never will be able to be normal about pathetic sopping wet cat white men. please it's ruining my life and my photo gallery storage. this has been a lifelong problem ever since I watched return of the jedi far too young and tortured luke and han rewired my brain. it's not my fault but I'm trying to live a life here.

[howstrangethemusicsoundstome]

People are trying to bring back 1880s-era anti-ASL sentiment. Worst timeline.

[tuttle-did-it]

You'd be surprised how often I'm told there is no interpreter at an event, there are no captions at an event, and they act like I'm asking for something absurd.

This isn't a performative dance routine interpreting what is going on.

But hey, deafies, we're woke now because we require interpreters.

[tuttle-did-it]

This is all absolutely true. Also, to add, many deaf people receive a much worse education because the schools are unwilling/unable to invest in proper education for deaf people. So there are deaf people out there who struggle to read English because the structure of English is completely different than the structure of Sign Languages.

Also, Sign Language is NOT international. Signing in London is different that Ireland, or Paris, Toronto, Mexico, New Zealand, India-- some of the signing may be similar or even related but they are all different languages. So if you see several interpreters at an event or a news broadcast or en EU summit, and they are doing different signs, this is why.

And for the idiots who still don't comprehend that for many people English is a second language, even signers who were born in an English speaking country-- and still argue 'you get captions what's the problem' - Have you ever watched the auto-craptions on the news or a live event, or even a film on Amazon that they couldn't bother to get a human to properly provide subs? Yeah. A good percentage of the time, it's just word salad that means absolutely nothing. You're likely to just get a pile of words that may or may not have to do with anything going on in what you are trying to watch.

Some time, put on the news with no captions or sound. Put on a film or show you have never seen before, and try to lipread what is being said. Try to figure out what the plot or context is from just the actor's faces. Just try to engage when the only queues you have are facial expressions and movement on the screen-- if you can even see them talk at all, a lot of films and shows are shot over a shoulder with the back of someone's head.

Wear ear-plugs when you are out having a coffee with a friend and try to figure out what your friend is even saying. No music, no nothing-- just earplugs and trying to figure it out.

Do all of this for a week and then tell me that craptions are enough. Then tell me we don't need interpreters. After two days, you're going to be angry and frustrated because you don't know what the fuck is going on.

Interpreters do more than just tell you the exact words. They INTERPRET English language and put it into sign. They aren't just randomly throwing around their hands and looking silly. And they do it on the fly, live, as something is going. A good majority of the times, Interpreters have no idea what is going to be said. In those moments they are hearing something in English (or French, Spanish, what have you), figuring out what the best way to sign these words back to a sign-user base, and they have to do it all in seconds. It's a LOT of work.

So if you are at an event or you see two or even more signers who keep switching off after half an hour or an hour, know that the money is NOT being wasted having multiple interpreters there. They are not being lazy. They are doing a whole helluva lot, and their brains and hands and faces occasionally need a break.

So if you are hiring interpreters for an event, don't be surprised if they say you'll need to pay more to have several interpreters there. The interpreters are incredibly skilled, and they work bloody hard. If they tell you they need more than one, don't have a fit at them and try to talk them into just having one interpreter, thinking you can pay less. Understand that they work their arses off, and it's a very intense job that requires a lot of brain power and body power. So please, PLEASE be kind to interpreters.

And for chrissake, STOP DOING THIS. STOP DOING THIS. STOP FUCKING DOING THIS.

[once-a-polecat]

Seconding all of this, but also to get more specific on the first point:

ASL (American Sign Language) is not only different from BSL (British Sign Language), they're not even in the same language family. Similarly, LSM (Mexican Sign Language) is different from LSE (Spanish Sign Language), and there are other regional sign languages in Spanish speaking South America.

My (hearing) kid is studying ASL and when there was a Deaf contestant on British Bake Off he said that he really didn't recognize the BSL signing. But we traveled to Peru last summer and saw some people signing at a restaurant, and he said he recognized a few signs of LSP, even as he could tell it was a different language.

When you start to understand how much signed languages are full and complete languages with specific grammar and structure, you realize why captioning is not an equivalent to interpretation.

[leebrontide]

"Why would deaf people need interpretation in a language that's their first language? Can't they just read a fast moving faux-phonetic transcript of a speech made in their second language."

Clown-ass behavior.

[pnkrathian]

help a queer autistic couple live together

hi, I’m pnk, and soon, I’ll be moving into an apartment with my fiance. unfortunately, I recently got into a car accident and now im unexpectedly stuck with a lot less money. I have a new job lined up for the end of March, but I still won’t be getting paid for a while.

We really want to live where we will be because it’s a progressive area and we want to stay away from our home state because it’s Very Very conservative and we’re both worried about losing our rights.

We really need money to help us out with our rent for the first month or so of living there, so we’d HIGHLY appreciate any donations, it would save us a TON of suffering.

p@aypal: @pnkrathian

k0-fi: https://ko-fi.com/pnkrathian

ca$happ: $pnkrathian

Venm0: https://venmo.com/u/pnkrathian

Thanks a bunch, and please share if you can’t donate!