The Snow Tower

Where the Wheel turns upon the Last Dragonborn

[pazzesco]

Kindergarten game in China

Physical fitness, coordination, visual-spatial processing, self-confidence and teamwork in one simple/impressive exercise.

[ktyxdovahkiin]

DIE WAFFEN LEGT... AN!

[memescomedy]

[necrobob]

That’s not quite true. The reporter behind the story, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was murdered.

[whatisthisplaceidonteven]

After mass protests, the Prime Minister of Iceland was forced to resign, along with many other members of the ruling party.

After mass protests, the President of Pakistan was forced to resign, along with many other members of the ruling party.

Worldwide, hundreds of people – many rich and powerful – were arrested.

Billions in stolen assets were returned to the people.

And 82 countries changed their laws to crack down on the wealth hoarding the papers revealed.

(Source here)

To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.

Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.

Take your power back. Demand better. Keep fighting for a better world, because a better world is possible.

[girlswithbiceps]

Girl Biceps Rock!

[terrible-hime-deactivated202512]

Just my face.

[ktyxdovahkiin]

"Just her face," she says, as she flaunts her well-developed pectorals and trapezius

[girlswithbiceps]

Girl Biceps Rock!

[elderscrollsconfessions]

Confession: There is not a butch bone in my body but something about Jarl Elisif's whole vibe makes me want to do the whole knight sworn to her service with incredibly sapphic undertones thing for her.

[ktyxdovahkiin]

Hey so maybe there's ONE butch bone in your body

[queenofnots]

Likes to charge, reblogs to cast

[ktyxdovahkiin]

Sweet Mother, Sweet Mother, send your Child unto us For the sins of the unworthy must be baptized in blood and fear

[girlswithbiceps]

Girl Biceps Rock!

[ktyxdovahkiin]

FOOOOODDD

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[closet-keys]

I still can’t get over how many teenage boys and adult men thought that the protagonist of Hard Candy was the antagonist and that it was a horror movie instead of a power fantasy. It was extremely telling how many men found that movie terrifying, while women and teen girls pretty much universally found that movie empowering and the ending relieving.

[not-the-very-button]

I literally haven’t posted in ages but someone mentioned Hard Candy so HERE THE FUCK I AM. It is my favorite movie. Of all time. It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The acting, the writing, the direction, the cinematography, it’s all stunning.

I first watched it when I was a fourteen year old girl, the same age as Elliot Page’s character in the film, and I was disturbed certainly, it’s a disturbing story, but it’s also the story that most single handedly made me a feminist.

I, like a lot of girls at the time, eschewed the label of “feminist.”

“Oh I believe in rights for women but I’m not a feminist.”

Like it was a dirty word. We were taught culturally that it was a dirty word . Feminists were crossing a line. They were annoying. They were queer. They were gender nonconformist. They lived outside of the expectations for girls and women. They did not play the game of wanting to be wanted by men, of existing for male excitement. Feminists weren’t hot. And even as a young teenager I knew that to be a woman and not be hot, not be wanted by men, was to live in absence of a very specific kind of power and acceptance.

I watched Hard Candy on a whim. I had just seen Elliot Page in Juno and I was crazy gay for him (though denying this at the time) and picked up Hard Candy at a local dvd resale store because I saw he was in it.

And it changed my life.

For context, I grew up on Law and Order SVU — SVU specifically. From an inappropriately young age it was one of my favorite shows. And as much as I think SVU can get the trauma of rape and assault right, being a child aware of what a constant threat sexual violence against women and girls was fucked me up. Rape has been one of my biggest fears from the time I was ten. It still is.

And here was this movie that put the power in the hands of the teenage girl who was so at risk for abuse. The movie starts out and you think you know where it’s going. Man lures young girl he met online to coffee shop. Man makes girl feel older and mature. Man takes girl home to his apartment.

Sitting there, a high school freshman in my living room on a Saturday night, I was waiting for the turn, for the teenage girl to become the teenage victim. Then when the turn finally came it was like I could suddenly breathe again. A grown man exposed for his indecency by underestimating a teenage girl, that girl lecturing a grown man on his predatory behaviors, a teenage girl refusing to be played with or manipulated, one who takes matters into her own hands because no one else has.

So many moments in that movie were utterly formative for me.

And almost every man in my life who watched it could not understand the poignance of it. They absolutely felt Elliot Page played the villain. Sure, Jeff did some bad things, but he didn’t deserve what he got! That girl was psycho! She’s crazy! And I played along with this, talking at great lengths about how the ambiguous morality of the film was ground breaking and how it was really about vigilante justice. I wanted so badly to prove it was the art I knew it was. Why wasn’t it being heralded as a seminal psychological thriller like Memento and Se7en? It impacted me more than either of those films.

It’s not even a particularly violent film! There isn’t any gore! There are some blurry shots of a surgery, but no real blood, no graphic brutality. David Slade, who frankly should be a more acclaimed director than he is, intentionally shot close ups of the actors faces during these intense and disturbing scenes. He focused on the emotion and the performance. He didn’t want to show the violence of it, but rather the mental game and the psychological impact of that violence. And yet men cannot get through this movie without wanting to throw up.

Do you know how many horrific and lengthy rape scenes I’ve watched? How many dead women with mutilated bodies I’ve seen larger than life on movie screens? Horror and mystery are my favorite genres. I have to look up the content warnings for every fucking horror film I wanna watch to prepare myself for potential triggers. And cis white men, self proclaimed film aficionados, can’t handle the SUGGESTION of serious violence being done to another cis white man on screen. Then it becomes too out there. Too gratuitous. Too fringe to be anything but a controversial indie flick relegated to the bargain bin at second hand dvd shops.

The refusal to acknowledge the brilliance of Hard Candy as both a work of art and a cinematic statement infuriates me. I sigh everytime someone asks me what my favorite movie is, waiting for the uncomfortable look I’ll get. Hard Candy is a disturbing movie because of its subject matter and it’s frank discussion of pedophilia and sexual abuse. But the character of Hayley Stark, a 14 year old girl who takes back symbolic agency for women and young girls as a whole, who gets revenge on a sexually violent predator, is 100% a sympathetic character. She is a part of me. I feel her rage and I feel her unspoken motivations. I get it. I get her. And I’ve long since grown tired of trying to make it a movie “film buff” dudebros will respect.

It’s not for them. It is not about them. And they can’t stand it.

If Liam Neeson indiscriminately tortures and murders people to save his daughter from being sold into sexual slavery, he’s a badass. A hero.

So why is Hayley Stark a monster?

“I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed,” she says toward the end of the film.

And she absolutely fucking is.

[vengeful-horde-of-angry-ghosts]

Tags @msbadatnamingthings

[ktyxdovahkiin]

... How could people fucking think that Hard Candy's Hayley Stark is a villainess?? Where the fuck are these troglodytes? We need to get Goblin Slayer in to exterminate the fuck out of them in their nests, where's Goblin Slayer at, someone get his number from the Guild.

[girlswithbiceps]

Girl Biceps Rock!

[ktyxdovahkiin]

I love halter tops

[fall-on-demand]

On the subject of “What Are Men, Really?” and “why do I relate and connect so strongly with gay/bi men, but straight men feel like a strange alien species to me?”

I’ve partly clarified what the difference is between my strong affinity for masculinity and whatever it is straight men are doing.

Straight men’s attachment to masculinity is reactionary. They lean in to masculine norms out of fear of being perceived as unmanly, as gay, as effeminate or feminine, as inadequate. They fear demotion, loss of status, loss of privilege, a fall from grace. They’re not embracing masculinity so much as they’re backing into it, out of fear of what lies outside it, as one might back into a safe compound while brandishing a gun at an approaching zombie horde.

Whereas my attachment to masculinity stems from 2 sources:

1) “I’ve had femininity crammed down my throat my whole life without my consent and now I’m freeeeee” AKA sort of reactionary, but in an empowering, liberating sense. Throwing off the chains and rebelling against society’s rules.

2) Sincerely relishing and enjoying masculinity, enjoying things like suits, waistcoasts, neckties, leather jackets, sweater vests, pocket watches, cologne, visible sculpted musculature, showing off one’s physical strength, sitting or standing with one’s legs spread, direct blunt communication, confidence, assertiveness, taking the lead during sex, a million little things society has arbitrarily coded “men stuff,” are things I take enthusiastic delight in, like Ariel gushing about her collection of human paraphernalia. I’m like a weeaboo, but for masculinity.

(And yes, there is a heavy element of eroticism for me in a lot of what I listed above.) (Insert autoandrophilia joke here)

In Daniel Lavery’s book, he noted that Gomez Addams has FTM energy because Gomez seems to relish being a man so much, whereas Herman Munster is simply phoning it in, and therefore lacks that vibe. And it’s true! A lot of cis straight men really are just phoning it in. In fact, if they put as much energy and enthusiasm into performing masculinity as I do, they’d probably be perceived as gay! Or at least as a dandy. (Gomez is something of a dandy.) The straight male role seems to demand phoning-it-in. They have to sleep-walk through it.

And the thing is: Women aren’t like this! Some women phone it in, but I can think of plenty of women who sincerely enjoy certain types of femininity, and aren’t doing it because society told them to, or to please men. Femme lesbians are an obvious example, but also straight women who are into goth or lolita fashion, or who volunteer to be surrogates because they enjoy being pregnant and participating in motherhood, or who buy sexy underwear purely because it makes them feel good. Or look at the way women who are hardcore into makeup culture react when some man, unsolicited, says “You know, men think you’re prettier when you don’t wear makeup.” Said man usually gets thrown to the wolves for his impertinence. They’re not doing it for you, bro!

But it’s hard to think of any men in my life who really relish masculinity in that same way except for, well, the gay and trans ones. I feel like the few straight men who do that in our culture get labelled “dandies” or “metrosexuals” and are seen as proximal to gayness.

[roach-works]

here’s my take on the situation:

men with traditional views on gender have largely painted themselves into a corner. they only find affirmation of their gender in expressions of male supremacy, and there are fewer and fewer of those all the time, because men aren’t actually inherently better at anything than women are, because it turns out gender doesn’t work like that. men as a class have to actively suppress women as a class to maintain superiority over them, and even then, as we’ve seen, women can still push back effectively, and gender variant people throw wrenches into the works too.

joyous, voluntary expressions of masculinity are gay *because* they’re not reactionary, because they’re not violent, because they don’t respect the established hierarchy of strong men over weak men and all men over women. finding men beautiful, being a beautiful man that loves other men, is not traditionally how it’s supposed to work. taking the outward forms and gestures of domination and repurposing it into something reciprocal is scary to people who have only ever seen the binary of hurting and being hurt. playing with gender has to be taught to people who only know it as a fight.

i’m a trans man. i’m also a committed feminist. i’ve had to come to masculinity after a lot of thought. i’ve had to learn to like men and to forgive them. i’ve had to figure out how to be a man apart from the forms and functions of men trying to be better than women. i’ve had to try to explain this to my dad. adherence to male supremacy isn’t the only way to express your masculinity. it’s just the only way a lot of men are ever taught.

i do like being a man, though. it feels good. i’m not zipping around with the ecstatic abandon of gomez addams, but i’ve got time to learn.

[ktyxdovahkiin]

perceptive

[ktyxdovahkiin]

probably the most muscular superheroine in Taiwan!

[hootenanie]

post my angel of discourse. post for me!!!

[playwrongs]

(In a piercing soprano) Horror movies are unethical because the characters are forced to be scared!

[lavendersalve]

(In a warm, resounding contralto) we should ban sex scenes because the characters were children at some point in their lives!

[naamahdarling]

(In a velvety tenor) All children's entertainment is inherently unethical because it's created by adults for the express purposes of manipulating the minds and emotions of young people before they can think for themseeeeeeeelves!

[joasakura]

Y’all not just knocking on the devil’s door, u out here caroling on his lawn

[ktyxdovahkiin]

(in a resounding bass) Every WRI-terrrrr! Is inherently Proble-MAAAA-tiiiiiiiccc

[4gifs]

[socially-awkward-supervillian]

Fun fact: Cheetahs only attack prey that runs

[youwinagainmoffat-blog]

jesus that is good to know.

[chandra75-deactivated20180905]

Yup, that’s the point you just stay still and let it do whatever the fuck it wants that doesn’t involved you getting eaten. 

[magehenry-moved-blog]

REALLY FUN FACT for big cats cheetahs are fucking docile as shit

my grandfather ran a cheetah sanctuary in south africa and he’d just lie with them and sleep among them and they’d rub against him and chirp at him they’re big fucking babies

[pkmnbreederbrianna]

Another Fun Fact: Cheetahs are incredibly nervous animals. One of the (many) reason’s they’re going extinct is that cheetahs are so sensitive and nervous, some of them are literally too nervous to breed. Others will breed, but stress themselves out so much, they’ll lose their cubs. So zoos with breeding programs had to figure out how to make cheetahs comfortable enough to first of all, get laid and secondly - not spazz themselves into miscarrying. So what’d they do? They gave the cheetah’s their very own Service Dogs! The dogs make them feel safe, protected and secure!

[emo-islandniles]

AJHHHHFDDGHH SO PRECIOUS

[renirabbit]

this post just got so much better

[enjoying-nudiustertian-deactiva]

THIS IS OFFICIALLY MY FAVOURITE POST

[wylltingtrees]

[sashayed]

this is emmett and cullen they are best friends

[clover11-10]

This is the greatest thing I’ve seen all day.

Dogs are truly angels.

[oshiawaseni]

so THATS why these cheetah ft dogo pics exist

[erin-luci-and-me]

the anxiety cat

[peppermint-madness]

Also! Cheetahs are not in fact classified as big cats, they are simply very large lesser cats, due to the fact that they purr, meow, chirp, and cannot roar. Also many cheetahs have learned to recognize wildlife photographers are friends and not foes, so they will just come up to people and be friendly occasionally as pictured at the top of the chain. Some will even leave their Cubs with photographers to look after while they hunt. So. Yeah. Cheetahs are great

[elfwreck]

[bunjywunjy]

this works because cheetahs are actually fairly social animals, and they look to members of their group for context on how worried they should be about any given Situation. but since cheetahs are also nervous social animals, they can work each other into an anxiety spiral pretty easily over things like “being in an enclosed habitat” and “there’s a guy over there”.

so by introducing a dog as a member of the group, the cheetahs will now look to the dog for context clues on how worried they should be! and the dog Is Not Worried At All, Thanks, so the cheetahs think everything must be chill even if they were personally unsure about it, and they stop being so freaked out about literally everything.

[parkchanwoohoo]

Weeping at this. Frighteningly similar to how I sound

[ktyxdovahkiin]

ahh hahahahaha

[thebibliosphere]

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.

[ktyxdovahkiin]

This is why I have never used ANY grammar software, at all, ever. Of any kind. Death to grammar software.

[jermaine-main]

[kleefkruid]

hate how this 1) manages to make fun of Belgium without bothering to mention us 2) every single person in the notes knows this 3) it's true

[triple-fisting]

[ktyxdovahkiin]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA