Lalaithion

If you find someone with the username "Lalaithion", or some variation thereof, it's probably also me. She/they

[mousidy]

"mtf" and "amab" voted worst acronyms of all time

[mousidy]

we don't need "leftist" ways of calling trans women male actually

[mousidy]

you can say trans woman. you can just say trans woman

[mousidy]

people will criticize tme/tma calling it "the new gender binary" and then go around calling people amab and afab as if they just ran a find and replace in their vocabulary for "male" and "female"

[mousidy]

"sex is what's in your chromosomes" is not a neutral statement. that's one of the main reductive oversimplifications that the right have been pushing about sex for years. sex is a combination of physical characteristics, many of which can be changed or removed in the process of medical transition. I cannot wrap my head around why other trans people are so happy to uphold regressive binaristic thinking like this

[roseoilz]

translucent fabric sculptures by korean artist do ho suh

[riverfortune]

I just finished listening to a book the other day. It's called Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold. It is listed as the first in her Vorkosigan series but the recommended reading order is to start at book 2, so I initially skipped it. The rest of the series is basically a bunch of action/space opera books following a particular family in their adventures in a sci-fi future involving a planet that does feudalism in space and a boy who is born with a fragile body into a warrior-based society. They're really fun and I recommend them.

But.

Falling Free is about a man whose company sends him to a space station to teach a bunch of people with extra arms where their legs should be how to do space welding. When I first read the summary, I thought it was really weird and figured I wouldn't get around to reading it. I'm so glad I read it after all.

It's not just about a bunch of four-armed freaks learning space welding. It's about recognizing the exploitation of those around you. It's about the dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy. It's about the danger of outsourcing your morality to what's legal. It's about how offloading responsibility onto the next guy results in disaster. It's about learning what kind of labor is needed to make a society. It's about how sometimes you can weaponize bureaucracy against itself for good. It's about how others can weaponize it for evil. It's about understanding the value of women's labor. It's about the value of free will. It's about the importance of taking responsibility for the consequences of your own actions. It's about the dangers of eugenics and it's about the dangers of coorporations and it's about the dangers of personal ambition. It's about standing up for what's right even if it goes against what you always thought was right. It was published in 1988 and it's about four-armed people welding in space.

[murderhealion]

you should read the vorkosigan saga because ☝️ HOLY FUCKING SHIT? DID SHE JUST - WITH A BELT?? IS THAT AN AQUARIUM??? EXCUSE YOU!!! WHAT!!!!!!

[elexuscal]

also on the topic of Cozy Fantasy: I feel like the Circle of Magic books by Tamora Pierce are criminally neglected in this conversation. Like that series has so Many of the popular hallmarks: found fantasy! A magic system based on crafting! Psychic soul bonds! The two main mentor figures are literal cottage core lesbians.

But, crucially, the books manage all of this while having stakes. There are the relationship, personal level ones-- will these orphaned kids become friends? Will they learn to overcome the traumas of their respective backstories? Will they learn to master their magic?

And then there are Larger, life-threatening stakes... but crucially, not 'save-the-world' level. Pierce made the excellent choice for the first quartet (when the kids are like ~10-12 ish) to generally have the threats be natural. An earthquake, a forest fire, a pandemic; there's a pirate raid, but even then the framing feels more like a force of nature. As the kids age, the threats do become more human, but remain generally localized. A crime syndicate, a serial killer. The focus of the story remains what can we do to improve things, here, now, where we are?

They really are such delightful reads and I think they could offer a lot of insight into how stakes don't need to be End of the World to still be tense and impactful.

[fallensofar]

I devoured these as a tween, in fact all of Tamora Pierce's books. Read them through the school library, and now I only own the Song of a Lioness quartet. This is making me wonder once again is I could just squeeze a few more books onto my shelf...

[2022dirt]

Faces in coffee.

[transmortifried]

idk why people are still trying to do "hear me out"s on tumblr

you could talk about wanting to fuck the space needle on here and people would still call you a poser for insisting on fucking "conventionally attractive architecture" as if that's a coherent, easily-recognizable category

[charlesoberonn]

I want to fuck Antoni Gaudi's unbuilt Hotel Attraction skyscraper design

[anatomizer]

"hear me out" and it's a picture of the most fuckable building you've ever seen. c'mon now.

[thepersonalmossblog]

“hear me out” and it’s the fucking dildopolis

[smokeydabear420422]

[homunculus-argument]

Hey btw, here's a piece of life advice:

If you know what you'd have to do to solve a problem, but you just don't want to do it, your main problem isn't the problem itself. Your problem is figuring out how to get yourself to do the solution.

If your problem is not eating enough vegetables, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make vegetables stop being yucky". If your problem is not getting enough exercise, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make exercise stop sucking ass". You're not supposed to just be doing things that are awful and suck all the time forever, you're supposed to figure out how to make it stop being so awful all the time.

I used to hate wearing sunscreen because it's sticky and slimy and disgusting and it feels bad and it smells bad, so I neglected to wear it even if I needed to. Then I found one that isn't like that, and doesn't smell and feel gross. Problem solved.

There is no correct way to live that's just supposed to suck and feel bad all the time. You're allowed to figure out how to make it not suck so bad.

[just-evo-now]

so my boyfriend and i occupy very different hotness tiers. i'm, idk, edible but bland. he's catnip for fags. freaks are constantly coming up to us in public to shoot their shot at him. They do this even when we're hanging out together, which is extremely funny because they never know how to interact with me. Like obviously we're not dating, no one could tolerate such a problematic hotness gap right? So who the fuck is this clown?

Like, one time we were climbing and this girl comes over to hit on him. They chat a bit, he gets up to climb a route. Girl turns to me - and mind you we are not shy about PDA - and asks "Hey so what are your friend's pronouns". Mhm. That's us girl. Just gals being pals. That's my buddy up there when he gets back we're going to sit real close and maybe kiss a little. like friends do.

[just-evo-now]

other times people will give me A Look like im intruding on them. like bro can't you see im trying to flirt with this guy? dont be a weirdo give us some space.

[just-evo-now]

this situation is not helped by the fact that I hate interacting with strangers - and my bf knows this - so I will never voluntarily engage in the conversation and he will never drag me into it by e.g. introducing me. so most of these scenarios end up being me staring off into space pretending the flirter doesn't exist, my bf talking to the stranger while also pretending i don't exist so i'm not forced to speak, and the poor flirter desperately trying to get in his pants while also wondering what the fuck is going on who is that why are they just standing there

[just-evo-now]

these poor bastards usually try to end by giving him their phone number. disaster. his phone is a graveyard of hopeful queers thinking they got a good grade in flirting. what they should do is ask him to fuck in the nearest back alley right now, but for some reason they never think of that. sometimes i think about telling them but then i would have to stop pretending they don't exist so

[thestuffedalligator]

“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.

“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”

She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”

After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”

[winter-wise]

Miles is so oblivious about Aral's bisexuality that I honestly think he could see Jole come out of Aral and Cordelia's bedroom buckling his belt and Miles' only thought would be "I guess Jole had some kind of wardrobe malfunction. Nice of my parents to let him change clothes in their room."

[chimaerakitten]

So I’m considering writing SGA fic,

[dragonslayer26806]

Also, can you let me know when you write it so I can read it?

[chimaerakitten]

If I ever get anything off the ground for real I’ll definitely post an announcement 😅

[song-of-the-spheres]

Aral Vorkosigan, talking to himself in the mirror at some point during Shards of Honor, probably: "all right you've gotten to first base (fighting alien monsters together) and second base (telling her about your disastrous first marriage). next is third base (proposing to her) and then fourth base (asking her to mercy kill you if necessary). then maybe you can think about kissing her."

Aral Vorkosigan at the end of Shards of Honor, probably: "holy shit it worked?! oh thank God."

[molly-ren]

hey what's up with the "!" in fandoms? i.e. "fat!" just curious thaxxx <3

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

[molly-ren]

woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

[stevita]

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

[molly-ren]

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

[michaelblume]

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

[hosekisama]

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

[nentuaby]

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

[raincityruckus]

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

[sassafrassarah]

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

[taraljc]

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

[realmarysue]

I am very glad this has been going around so folks learn the Lore, but also let’s encourage it because then we get to say “bang paths” more often.

[afloweroutofstone]

My favorite category of government program to run across is "program you've never heard of doing extremely important work to solve a major problem which you have also never heard of." On that note, the US drops millions of pounds of sterile bugs over Panama each week in order to prevent a parasite infestation from moving into North America. Everyone say thank you to the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle Borer Worm (COPEG)

[afloweroutofstone]

This program had its funding cut during the DOGE cuts last year and now the parasitic worm they were trying to slow the spread of has officially arrived in the United States.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

your cat was an honor to see in the window