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@lightreyofthestars
I’m back and posting semi-regularly, but on a new blog! check out @queerfables if you miss seeing me around here! at the moment i’m lowkey obsessed with hannibal, so there’s a lot of that, but there’s other stuff too. I’m following back everyone who adds me there, so come say hi!
I could use some softness in these hard times so have five gentle Good Omens headcanons:
1. Crowley taught Aziraphale poker, with the vague thought in the back of his head that maybe one day they could play strip poker. Except Aziraphale turned out to be so charmingly and stubbornly bad at poker that Crowley couldn't bring himself to suggest it, it didn't seem fair. Aziraphale's entire face is a tell and watching him try unsuccessfully to pretend he's got rubbish cards while holding a royal flush is one of the true joys in Crowley's life, so they play for cupcakes instead and Crowley does his best to lose.
2. Aziraphale and Crowley have been writing letters to each other pretty much since the invention of mail. At first this sometimes involved bemused Roman couriers wondering how the heck they'd ended up in the jungle and why the guy with dark tinted glass over his eyes looked so pleased to see them, but eventually international postage rates dropped. They never talk about their correspondence, except to occasionally pick up the thread of an ongoing theological argument, but they both still have every letter they ever received.
3. Crowley has a secret soft spot for cats. Every few months, Aziraphale insists on going to a cat cafe for lunch so Crowley can get in some quality kitty time without admitting he wants to. Crowley is so invested in pretending he has no interest in cuddles that the grumpiest cats always make a beeline for him, settle smuggly in his lap and refuse to budge. As it turns out, Crowley's poker face is worse than Aziraphale's.
4. When they're apart and Crowley misses Aziraphale, he goes to the local market and buys whatever makes him think of Aziraphale. He buys empty mason jars, cheese knives with carved wooden handles, maps of the local area. He holds onto them until he sees Aziraphale again, and then passes it off as something he was given second hand, or left by accident and never reclaimed.
When Aziraphale misses Crowley, he goes out and causes mischief in Crowley's name. Crowley asks him about it later, and he pretends he has no idea what Crowley's talking about, and ignores the way Crowley's face lights up over his bad behaviour.
5. Eventually Aziraphale gets tired of waiting for Crowley to suggest it, eats all of the cupcakes earlier in the night and proposes they bet on something else. That night when they play poker, they both win.
Will dreams of teaching Abigail to fish. He tells her that to catch one, you have to name the bait after someone who cherishes you. He names his lure after her, and he sends a killer after Hannibal. But he doesn’t truly understand Abigail, and she doesn’t cherish him back. Hannibal survives.
Will casts another line, and this time he’s the bait. He resumes therapy with Hannibal, trying to lure Hannibal into revealing his true self. But Will’s own sense of self is fragmented, and he’s losing track of what he really wants to catch.
Will dreams of binding Hannibal to a tree, and in the dream Hannibal tells him that knowing a person requires you to love them. Will kills him for saying it. He isn’t ready to know himself. He isn’t ready to know Hannibal.
When Will names himself the lure, he again chooses someone he doesn’t understand, someone who doesn’t cherish him back. His heart is divided and he can’t accept his full self. Because of that indecision, Hannibal slips away to Europe, leaving Will behind.
Will dreams of Abigail again, this time in a hospital, a kitchen, a church. She has scars on top of scars and Will understands her even less now. Maybe he understands himself better, though. She tells him the things he’s afraid to admit: that after all the bloodshed and atrocity, he’d still follow Hannibal. He wants to know him.
Will finds Hannibal in Florence. Who does he name the lure after this time? Perhaps no one. Perhaps oblivion. Perhaps there is no lure, just a naked hook and the dark affection of a knife. If oblivion loves Will back, it shows it by trying to claim him. He leaves with a bullet wound in his shoulder and a gash in his head, violence traded for violence, and still nothing on the end of his line.
Will dreams of Hannibal again, and in this dream they blur like boundaries between them mean nothing.
“I’m not going to miss you,” Will tells Hannibal, when he casts his final lure. “I’m not going to find you… I don’t want to know where you are or what you do… I don’t want to think about you anymore.”
Will finally knows himself, and he finally knows Hannibal. “I don’t have your appetite,” he says, and he finally knows that every word of this is a lie. He’ll tell Hannibal one day, hand pressed to the glass that keeps them apart, and he’ll twist the confession like a knife because wounds are the language they love best.
In a way, this part is a test. Will can love, and by loving someone he can know them. He can have all the understanding and acceptance in the world, but he’ll never know for sure if someone loves him back until he casts the line.
“Name the bait on your hook after somebody you cherished.”
“So you can say goodbye?”
“If you the person you named it after cherished you, as the superstition goes, you’ll catch the fish.”
Will baits the hook, and just before he casts it, he names his lure one last time:
“Goodbye, Hannibal.”
And Hannibal walks right into the arms of the FBI.
I’m back and posting semi-regularly, but on a new blog! check out @queerfables if you miss seeing me around here! at the moment i’m lowkey obsessed with hannibal, so there’s a lot of that, but there’s other stuff too. I’m following back everyone who adds me there, so come say hi!
Anyway if you're still emotional about good omens and want to talk about it hit me up on discord @clavicular#6925
Listen my wife and I both wear glasses and sometimes when we kiss our glasses bump together and we laugh and say "clink"
You're welcome for this good wholesome content
friendly advice to not revolve your life around one person, one feeling, one place, one memory, one problem. the complexity of life and the diversity of the world is beautiful and you have the right to explore it. do not settle for less. you deserve better.
How I Teach Men Not To Talk Over Me: from one feminist to another, when basic respect is lagging and conversations are impossible
I’ve done this to several men, and they catch on rather quickly. You’ll be able to have a conversation right then and there, and it works long term too - they might’ve forgot their manners by the time you talk to them again, but by repeating this, they’ll eventually learn to let you talk without you having to do this at the start of every convo. Source: I have a very stubborn older brother, who eventually learned too.
1. When they interrupt you, stop talking. Don’t try to raise your voice or battle them. Be completely quiet and wait.
2. Ignore everything they’re saying. Do not actually listen - just wait until they shut up. Don’t make a point of anything they say, do not answer to anything they say, do not refer to anything they say here. Literally do not listen a single word. Let them rant as long as they want.
3. When they finally shut up and wait for your reaction, say: ”I wasn’t done talking.”
4. Start over whatever you were saying when they interrupted you. I don’t care if it was a 10-minute explanation of rocket science. Start. Over. Repeat you original thought, but do not add anything related to what they just said while talking over you. That gives them the idea that it’s okay to interrupt you, you’ll still listen and pay attention and they’ll get their point clear without having to listen to yours. (It’s especially funny when you get done and they expect you to keep going talking about whatever they talked over you. The face when it sinks in that you didn’t listen a single word is glorious.)
5. If they interrupt you again, return to step 1. If you find yourself repeating the cycle over 3 times, tell them: ”you’re not letting me speak. Either you listen and wait for your turn, or our conversation ends here.” If they try to make excuses, laugh it off or keep interrupting, end the conversation. Prove them that if they wont let you speak, they’re not worth your time.
Why does this work? First, because sometimes talking over is internalized and men don’t actually notice they’re doing it. Being vocally called out makes them realize it and pay attention to it - especially if it happens more than once. Secondly, by refusing to aknowledge anything they say when they interrupt you, they’ll soon realize they will not get their own point across if they keep doing that. Peoole and especially men have the need to be heard and paid attention to when they talk - when you make it clear that by talking over you, they will not have your attention, they’ll learn to wait until you’re done, because they know that’s when you will be paying attention and actually listening.
Go my darlings. Have some actual conversations where your point of view is just as valid as his. Demand the basic respect of being heard. You can actually have some interesting conversations with men when they’re forced to listen too, when being louder is not going to make them feel like they’re dominating the conversation or winning the argument.
This is gonna be fun.
Some of the best writing advice I ever got was if you’re stuck on a scene or a line, the problem is actually about 10 lines back and that’s saved me from writer’s block so many times.
I feel like I need an elaborate explanation
Often times, I find myself stuck on what a character should say next or what should happen in a scene to connect A to B or so on. When this happens, I fall into the trap of writing and rewriting the same few lines over and over, and becoming more and more dissatisfied every time until I give up.
But problem is almost never actually whatever line I’m trying to write at the moment; the issue is the stuff leading up to the line. Maybe there are structural issues with the set up, maybe I wrote a bit of dialogue that was out of character leading to a discussion that doesn’t make sense, maybe I’m missing a vital piece of exposition or expositing too much. It could be a lot of things, but the important part of the advice is to look back and be willing to consider changes to something earlier in the work (even if you’re really attached to like a piece of dialogue or a particular sentence or something) instead of trying to find a way to force out a scene that’s not working.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining!
This is really helpful!
Woah! I never thought about that! Thanks!
I made a thing! I was thinking about this for a few days - because I realized that when I was young, I was also frustrated about being given the same advice over and over - without really knowing what it meant!!
Here’s 5 techniques which I have done before which have helped me grow as an artist, which are good for 5-minute warmups or just straight up challenges for your sketchbook!
Obviously, these are not the ONLY techniques - they’re just the ones I find most fun! And maybe they’re not the most ‘correct’ ones out there, but it’s better than another comic about practicing more, right?
Good luck to everyone on their drawings!
also I learned about this project called “queering the map.” the idea is that in the past gay neighborhoods and gay spaces were very clearly defined bc it just wasn’t safe to be yourself anywhere else. as lgbt+ people become more visible and accepted many feel that we are losing our connection to those spaces
so every dot on this map is basically someone’s queer experience: coming out, meeting their future wife, seeing another gay man in public for the first time, anything you can think of that truly left a mark on them
it started in Montreal and is primarily English-language with most pins dropped in the US, Canada, and Europe, but there are people all over the world who’ve shared their experiences. it’s great to look at places near you but it’s also great to see that even people in places you thought were the middle of nowhere are happy with themselves and finding community and living their lives
It’s here and it’s SO SWEET?? Just clicking around it’s very personal stories, in first person and a lot of them addressed to a specific “you”, and sooo many in extremely poetic language. It feels like an art installation and it’s so beautiful. ;W; Thanks for sharing!!!
… there’s also a lot of really silly ones (like gay sharks in the middle of the ocean)
I looked at Jerusalem and immediately found two favorites for entirely different reasons.
Things I found from the queer community of japan:
It’s no secret to the Japanese that Shinjuku nichome is the gay district of Tokyo but about half the pins left there are for the same club in that area named gold finger. Definitely a place to check out if you’re looking to get involved in the Japanese queer community for whatever reason, it seems.
I have a sneaking suspicion this submission is a haiku when written in Japanese…
This guy got the scenic view I guess
Is this how people feel while reading deep romantic poetry because wow I’m moved.
Honestly the best feeling is learning we’re not as alone as we’ve been led to believe
These are all super poetic oml I appreciate every single one of them
There are none in my town. Guess I’ll be the first
I went to my old, STAUNCHLY conservative town and saw “There are a lot more of us here than most would think, past and present” and I nearly cried
i dropped a pin on my old high school!
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
wow okay i’m crying now
“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.
I dunno. That’s just really stuck with me.
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
This is human nature. Don’t give up on it.
If you love a child and you’re worried that something about them is going to make them a target for bullying or other cruelty in the future, the best possible thing you can do is give them as much validation and support as you possibly can, and do your best to counteract the cultural messaging they’re going to receive about the ‘wrongness’ of being different. Show that child unwavering respect as a human being, and demand that others in that child’s life also treat them with respect.
The worst possible thing you can do for a child who is fat, gender nonconforming, disabled, LGBT+, or otherwise different from most of the other children they will grow up knowing, is to tell them they have to hide or get rid of their differences so people won’t be mean to them.
You need to refuse to become a child’s first bully. The world can be an awful, cruel place to kids who aren’t like their peers – but you can counteract some of that cruelty instead of being the first to show it. Accept kids for who they are and teach them that they deserve respect and care as they are, that they don’t have to earn love or kindness by suppressing parts of themselves to fit someone else’s idea of who they should be.
Even if you actually succeed in forcing a child to be ‘more normal’, the lessons they take away from seeing themselves as unworthy without changing major aspects of their appearance, personality, etc., will stay with them forever. It’s traumatic to be told who you are as a person is a bad thing.
Whether you succeed or not, the attempt will teach them that it’s acceptable for others to demand they change major aspects of who they are; that bullying is an acceptable way to show love; that they deserve any cruelty people show them for being different; and that if others around them are ‘weird’, they’re entitled to bully those others into compliance just as they themselves were bullied – by you.
Children with eating disorders are in a worse position than happy fat kids with adults in their life who love and support them exactly as they are. Children who are bullied until they stop self-expressing in ways that defy gender roles are in a worse position than happy gender nonconforming kids who have adults in their life who stand up for them and love and support them exactly as they are.
Autistic kids who grow up in an environment where their differences aren’t treated as burdens are better off than autistic kids who are traumatized by abusive therapies where they’re trained to deny any uniquely autistic needs, pain, or body language and taught implicitly that who they are is lesser.
Don’t try to change a child to make the world safer for them. By teaching them that who they are is the problem, rather than the bullying itself, you are being part of that danger. Instead, do everything you can to honour and respect the children you love for who they are.
Encourage them to think well of themselves and to not believe any messaging they’re receiving from the world that tells them they’ll never be good enough until they conform. Seek out and create positive representation of people like them – and people who are different in a multitude of other ways – who are good, interesting, worthwhile people. Compliment them on the unique ways they express themselves. Teach them not to be afraid of not being exactly like everyone else.
A kid can grow up different and still be okay. But they need the support and love of the people around them to make it in a sometimes hostile world. And they need the adults in their life to work to keep that hostile world at bay as much as possible, and not be part of the hostility.
Knife Theory
Original post from u/jimbaby on r/DnD
When writing a character’s backstory, it’s important to include a certain number of “knives”. Knives are essentially anything that the DM can use to raise the stakes of a situation for your character. Anything that can make a conflict personal, like a threatened loved one or the appearance of a sudden enemy. They’re called “knives” because the players lovingly forge them and present them to the DM so that the DM can use them to stab the player over and over again.
The more knives a player has, the easier it is for the DM to involve them in the story. So it’s important to have them! When breaking down a backstory, it kind of goes like this:
Every named person your character cares about, living or dead (i.e. sibling, spouse, childhood friend) +1 knife [EDIT: a large family can be bundled into one big knife]
Every phobia or trauma your character experiences/has experienced +1 knife
Every mystery in your character’s life (i.e. unknown parents, unexplained powers) +1 knife
Every enemy your character has +1 knife
Every ongoing obligation or loyalty your character has +1 knife
Additionally, every obligation your character has failed +1 knife
Every serious crime your character has committed (i.e. murder, arson) +1 knife
Every crime your character is falsely accused of +1 knife
Alternatively if your character is a serial killer or the leader of a thieves guild, those crimes can be bundled under a +1 BIG knife
Any discrimination experienced (i.e. fantasy racism) +1 knife
Every favored item/heirloom +1 knife
Every secret your character is keeping +1 knife
You kind of get the point. Any part of your backstory that could be used against you is considered a knife. A skilled DM will use these knives to get at your character and get you invested in the story. A really good DM can break your knives into smaller, sharper knives with which to stab you. They can bundle different characters’ knives together into one GIANT knife. Because we’re all secretly masochists when it comes to D&D, the more knives you hand out often means the more rewarding the story will be.
On the other hand, you don’t want to be a sad edgelord with too many knives. A buttload of knives just means that everyone in your party will inadvertently get stabbed by your knives, and eventually that gets annoying. Anything over 15 knives seems excessive. The DM will no doubt get more as time goes on, but you don’t want to start out with too many. You also don’t want to be the plain, boring character with only two knives. It means the DM has to work harder to give you a personal stake in the story you’re telling together. Also, knives are cool!! Get more knives!!!
I always try to incorporate at least 7 knives into my character’s backstory, and so far the return has been a stab-ity good time. Going back into previous characters, I’ve noticed that fewer knives present in my backstory has correlated with fewer direct consequences for my character in game. Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, it’s just something that my friends and I have come up with to help with character creation. We like to challenge each other to make surprising and creative knives. If you think of any that should be included, let me know.
EDIT: I feel I should mention it’s important to vary up the type of knives you have. All 7 of your knives shouldn’t be family members, nor should they be crimes that you’ve done in the past. That’s a one-way ticket to repetitive gameplay. Part of the fun is making new and interesting knives that could lead to fun surprises in game.
I love this! I’ll be introducing this concept to the 2 (count em, TWO) groups of new players I’m DMing for now.
For everyone’s information:
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
I’ve been thinking lately of how to articulate this–
to preface, I was literally voted “most likely to get into a fight over neutrality™ ” when I was graduating from library school, I’m like very very against the way neutrality/all sides/compromise is leveraged as a political tool by reactionary and exploitative actors. a lot of what I talk about professionally could be considered under the broader umbrella of “anti-neutrality”
but the thing is, I’m anti-neutrality because of what neutrality symbolizes in the current political context and the horrific views that are implied when neutrality is invoked. Neutrality in librarianship usually means not engaging with any racial justice issues, hiding LGBT content, not holding anything critical of capitalism or white supremacy in the collection, defending hate groups using library spaces, etc. The whole “neutrality” thing gets a big FUCK YOU from me and other radical librarians. And I know that this “debate” spans far, far beyond the world of librarianship. Similar conversations are constantly happening in relation to electoral politics, in relation to protest rights, in relation to conversations on abuse culture. And the template of “neutrality” representing the oppressor and suppressing the marginalized is constant in all of those iterations
WITH THAT SAID, I see some folks on here that apply this framework to situations which are not oppressor/oppressed or abuser/abused and I feel the need to address that. “Neutrality” as a concept is honestly a very neutral tool– it can obviously be leveraged for violence, and it isn’t in and of itself virtuous or enlightened, but it isn’t universally evil either.
If you have two friends and discover one is abusing the other, and you remain “neutral” you are siding with the abuser and you’re being shitty.
If you have two friends who had a healthy relationship where neither was abusive and they had a falling out and you remain neutral on their conflict and remain friends with them both, that is totally fine and healthy and not a bad thing to do.
If you remain neutral in a political conflict between fascists and anti-fascists, then you’re not a safe person to be around!
If you remain neutral in a political conflict between a group of anarchists and a group of Marxists because you want to understand both sides to promote leftist unity and solidarity, that is totally fine and politically sound and not a bad thing to do.
If you try to address “both sides” talking about TERFs and trans women, that’s equating oppressed people with their oppressors and is really fucked up and you’re not safe to be around!
If you try to address both biphobia and lesbophobia when discussing lateral aggression in wlw communities to address trauma and build healthier shared spaces, that’s totally fine and reasonable and not a bad thing to do.
Neutrality is entirely dependent between what “sides” in a conflict you’re identifying. I think any time someone is preaching neutrality, they need to be very specific about what points they are neutral between and why, because most really shitty views will hide behind being vague as fuck.
But someone wanting to listen to and learn from and address multiple sides, someone trying to build unity in a non-abusive context is not a universal evil. Context matters.
I fucking hate how low-key conservative lesbians/TERFs will say « TERF is a slur » but will not mind calling themselves « dykes » at all. I am obviously not saying they shouldn’t! I’m glad they like this word, but they shouldn’t call people’s fucking identity itself a slur while using one for themselves, you know? I really just think it is rampant transphobia/bi-phobia, as trans/nb and bi people are the ones who will use queer for themselves the most, From what I saw.
Yep.
I don’t have a link rn but an ex-TERF said: ‘not all exclusionists are radfems, but all radfems are exclusionists’. And they’re absolutely right.
Queer is an inclusive term - that is, it’s not clearly defined as an identity - so people of many non-straight/non-cis identities can call themselves ‘queer’ if they choose to without having to get into specifics as to what makes them non-straight/non-cis.
This is bad for a lot of people. Such as:
- gatekeepers (aka exclusionists, which includes radfems) because how are you supposed to know who to exclude unless you can see the minute identity paperwork?
- anyone who is transphobic/homophobic/biphobic/queerphobic/etc: ‘Queer’ is a unifying political identity if widely accepted. It cuts down on group infighting and helps non-straight/non-cis ppl present a united front to their detractors.
- anyone looking to fuck with other people. Trolls, Russian psyops, etc: if your job/wish is to create havoc and generate partisanship in a group, splitting them up and making them fight each other is a great place to start. (Though it seems Russian psyops mostly concentrated on exasperating anti-Black racism with fair success.)
I’m hesitant to call it a coordinated conspiracy because radfems honestly believe ‘queer’ is a lesbophobic/homophobic word (‘just call yourself gay/lesbian, why are you scared of those words?’) and like all cultish groups, they market themselves by keeping the rhetoric at dog whistle pitch when talking to outsiders. But b/c Radfem Lite content was popular content in 2013, a lot of radfems got big followings on tumblr. the ‘queer is a slur’ rhetoric seems to have escaped into the young queer/LGBT+ tumblr consciousness as a consequence.
With ‘queer’ a contested identity on tumblr, it has increasingly broken into its smaller subcategories. As a result, exclusionists have had a fairly easy time picking on non-LG identities one at a time, with support from more traditional homo/queer/transphobes and signal-boosting trolls/psyops. trans people, nb people, bi people, pan people, and ace people have all been raked over the coals repeatedly, and will probably continue to be attacked whenever there’s a convenient opening.
Basically: ‘Queer is a slur’ is rhetoric that benefits harmful attitudes almost 100% the time.
(Also TERF is just a descriptor, not a slur. It got its bad reputation from TERFs being … wait for it … transphobic.)
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Goodnight
Radfems use a lot of dog whistles to catch the unwary. Here’s an incomplete list, to help you identify radfem lite in the wild:
Aphobia, particularly of the “aces are cishets” and “aces are trying to shut down sex discussions in our spaces” varieties, along with acting like “allosexuals” is a slur (it’s not, any more than cis or neurotypical are slurs)
This is really rich considering how anti-sex most radfems are, but logical consistency of argument always loses to “truthiness”, or so Colbert tells us.
Deliberately and repeatedly refusing to understand what the terms ace and aro mean is also a dog whistle. (See “Questioning why people need new labels” below)
Truscum rhetoric, which is used to encourage transmen to turn on other transmen or nonbinary individuals who flaunt gender nonconformity
“I don’t want to share my community with my oppressor!”
This is so classic radfem I can’t even tell you. It’s just recycled from their desire to remove “men” from “women’s spaces”, but extended to any person they see as not performing woman-ness correctly. You will see this recycled over and over, with a new “oppressor” named each time.
Remember that intersectionality says that almost all of us have some privilege over everyone we ineract with, and vice versa. This is why radfems hate intersectionality; they like to believe that all privilege is solely gender-based.
“Queer is a slur” and other queerphobia, including severe pushback against any effort to work out a general term for the queer community that isn’t “gay” or an ever-shrinking basket of letters
“Drop the I” rhetoric aimed at convincing young intersex people that their bodies are medical problems that need medical solutions, rather than that our society medicalizes bodies that fall outside very rigid gender norms and we need to stop doing that
Protip for anyone confused: radfems don’t understand biology, to an extent should be embarrassing in any adult. Radfems define intersex people as cis women who require surgery and/or other medical intervention in order to have “female” bodies. They are unwilling to understand that human bodies come in a wide variety of forms and that our definitions of binary gendered genitalia and sex characteristics are arbitrary.
Seriously, if I see any of y’all reblogging that stuff we’re going to need to have a serious talk about the western (particularly US) medical community’s outright sexual and medical abuse of intersex children. No blame on the people who grew up with that - it’s a nightmare to get out of. But in no way do we need to be reinforcing the attitude that intersex bodies are “broken” and that intersex people don’t need the queer community’s support and acceptance and resources to fight that label. They do.
Yes, this includes reblogging posts written by intersex youth who’ve drunk the kool-aid. Don’t spread that poison.
Biphobia of all the usual flavors but particularly of the “bi people are only oppressed due to their homosexual inclinations” and “bi is a transphobic term”, because nothing says radfem like encouraging two groups they hate to turn on each other
Calling bi women traitors to their gender is old school hardcore, but I’ve seen it popping up again lately.
Kink-shaming, particularly by telling victims that they contribute to their own oppression by having kinks or talking about them (false!)
Porn-shaming, by saying that porn permanently damages people and makes them either a) not able to enjoy sex irl (false!), or b) inclined to hurt other people sexually irl (also false!), and sometimes both of these at the same time, which doesn’t even make sense (see “truthiness” point above)
Throwing sex workers to the wolves because how dare they have a job swerfs don’t approve of, blah blah purity blah sexual policing blah oppressing themselves blah blah I can’t even with this bs
Poly-exclusionary language
Any attempt to turn pan folks against bi folks or vice versa (see “Truscum rhetoric” and “Biphobia” above)
In general, trying to pit one part of the queer community against another part. They’ve been using this tactic for at least 15 years. They keep using it because it works.
Constantly equating the entire queer community with homosexuality and defining the community based on homosexuality, which is so ahistorical I can’t even
Policing the term lesbian as being for homosexuals only
Seriously, I never saw anyone try that outside radfem enclave-type contexts until I got on tumblr, what even is this bullcrap.
Quick history lesson for the kids: in my own lifetime and for decades before I was even born, “lesbian” has always been a self-chosen label and has always included a lot of people we today would call nonbinary and explicitly included lots of openly trans and bi and ace and aro women. Lesbian is a community and/or a behavior and/or a preference, not some medical term with scientifically sharp borders.
Yes, you can absolutely use wlw or sapphic if you don’t want to use lesbian. I know that radfems have poisoned the term for some of us, and some folks just don’t want to deal with the attacks. Use whatever words you’re comfortable with.
“Drop the [insert letter here]” - basically, exclusionists
“Invasion” rhetoric, that some identity is suddenly “invading” the queer community and doesn’t belong, and is going to suck out all the resources and/or make us all conform to being like them
If you think this sounds like Fox News talking about immigrants, you’re right. It’s the exact same line used in a new context. RADFEMS ARE HARDLINE CONSERVATIVES. They are NOT progressive AT ALL. They use progressive words to press a far-right conservative agenda but with white cis homosexual women in charge instead of white cis straight men.
“You will not replace us” is a shared rallying cry between radfems and white supremecists.
Questioning why people need new labels at all, denying that specific labels should exist, denying people the right to label themselves, making fun of labels people have chosen for themselves, refusing to understand or simply accept the labels people have for themselves
“LESBOPHOBIA!!1!” - There is real lesbophobia out there, just like there is real pedophilia out there. Radfems like to redefine “lesbophobia” from its actual meaning to include such gems as:
being nonbinary, trans, or gnc in general;
existing as an intersex person who does not believe they are “biologically female” (a category that doesn’t exist anyway);
existing as a bi woman in the lesbian community;
existing as an ace or aro woman at all;
identifying as queer;
asking for some attention to be paid to intersectionality involving race, religion, disability, class, etc. within the queer community;
calling attention to transphobia, biphobia, or aphobia within the queer community;
arguing with radfems;
using the words terf or swerf;
basically holding radfems accountable for their behavior in any way.
Made up straw men nobody ever actually supported or argued for, such as “monosexual privilege” (what even?)
Any kind of purity test or moral pollution rhetoric
This is their basic ideology, which is organized around cis women’s purity that will somehow come pouring out of our vaginas to heal the world of all its messy complications, as soon as enough of us are pure enough. Purity rhetoric makes the word “problematic” into the world’s greatest sin and also conveniently tears down any real person who’s actually trying to make the world a little better. Because if the world got better, what would radfems have to rail against anymore? Especially if the world got better because of people who didn’t follow their incredibly restrictive rules.
Not everyone who reblogs posts like the above is a radfem. Tumblr has a unique structure that disassociates posts from their contexts, making it very easy for radfem lite rhetoric to go viral outside of radfem circles. Radfems love to take advantage of this fact (and of us).
A few years ago, I was following a radfem I had met through other channels, where she had kinda mostly behaved like a reasonable person (at first). Most of the tactics above were in her tumblr-side basket of tricks. I’d been warned about her by other people. Totally should have listened.
Her rhetoric started mild but got worse and worse. I watched her target multiple teenagers and groom them to parrot radfem lite rhetoric and think of their oppression solely along gender binary and “pure” homosexuality lines. If I tried to intervene at any point to address actual queer history, she shut me out with illogical but unanswerable comebacks (the one I remember most vividly was “if you believe in monosexual privilege unfollow me now”, which is a weird af answer to “biphobia is not the same as homophobia, for a variety of reasons, and homophobia is not the font of all queerphobia, and some homosexuals (her, in this case) are biphobic”). Her behavior was disturbing as hell and I nearly stopped logging into tumblr at all because of how much I couldn’t stand watching what was happening. I finally unfollowed, which I should have done from the start. To those kids she was grooming: I’m sorry I didn’t fight harder for you.
The sad truth is, giving up and conceding the field to radfems is exactly what they want. Terfs want all of us to be too burnt out to fight back. They’re like those handful of assholes lying down at the front of London Pride, secure in their belief that we won’t actually remove them no matter what they say or do because it’s too much trouble to deal with the fallout. If that attitude doesn’t reek of privilege, I don’t know what does.
I see a lot of people say they’re tired for The Discourse™. I get that - hate is exhausting to deal with. But do we call dealing with nazis/the alt-right/white supremecists “discourse”? Of course not. It’s survival, because they consider us sub-human and want to strip our rights and protections as people. How about pushing back against MRAs/Incels/PUAs? That’s literally survival for women and nonbinary folks, and basic human decency for men.
The same applies here: it’s not “Ace Discourse”, it’s terfs targeting aces & aros and literally trying to get them ejected from the community so that they won’t have community resources or access anymore. Radfems literally objected to the Trevor Project having scripts for aces; they demanded everyone stop donating to the Trevor Project to punish the non-profit. Literally, they objected to suicide prevention for aces and were willing to cut off prevention for other people to force their point. That’s life or death.
Similarly, it’s not “Queer Discourse”. Radfems don’t object to the word queer because it’s been used as a slur, or they wouldn’t identify so heavily with dyke and gay, both of which also have long histories as slurs. No, radfems object to any inclusive, overarching term for the community. As long as there are letters, they can play drop the letter games and pretend people don’t belong, simply by ignoring one letter at a time until we’re down to “LG”. They can’t do that with a big word like queer. Similarly, they’ve objected to a lot of other terms - MOGAI, GRSM, and other acronyms have been proposed and roundly mocked or rejected as “lesbophobic”. It’s not the word they object to; it’s the big tent approach. (Seriously, google “MOGAI hates lesbians” and boggle with me at the sheer hubris.)
Arguing with a radfem is not Discourse, because Discourse assumes everyone is arguing in something vaguely like good faith. Discourse is something we do with colleagues we may not agree with but who we see as fellow humans and our equals in terms of rights. Any time you’re debating with someone who doesn’t even try to see you as fully human or their equal, it’s not Discourse or Debate anymore - it’s survival.
tl;dr: Radfems are hyper-conservative extremists who have infected tumblr (and other sites - light a candle for AfterEllen y’all) with a flood of bald-faced lies and hate in an effort to fracture the community into the parts they consider acceptable and the leftovers (most of us). They want us to be too scared to speak up, afraid of being attacked by them and the young people they’re grooming in their image. Their goal is to create closed communities of mostly white, all cis, middle class, “respectable” homosexual women, who will then change the world so that they replace white cisstraight men at the top of the pecking order; fuck the rest of us because we’re not pure enough to deserve “their” resources, even if we contributed most of those resources ourselves. We may be suffered to exist as long as we defend their utopian ideal. The moment we protest, we will be exiled.
So basically, that’s why I’m queer. The people in our community matter more to me than any concept of purity or perfection ever will. If the people in our community matter to you, learn how to spot these attempts to snipe us off one sub-group at a time; learn to stand united and support all of us.
