Storyteller By Trade

Artist, Professional Dungeon Master, occasional writer, huge geek, and entirely useless lesbian vampire. Sup!

[victusinveritas]

[marx-and-cola]

[samcormac]

what’s the rush?

[rainwasheseverythingaway]

The time will pass anyway

[scrupulosity-comics]

sometimes instead of a horrid little monk, divine visions of lesbians dance in my head dispensing wisdom

[scrupulosity-comics]

[a-book-dragon]

You don't have a male or female brain – the more brains scientists study, the weaker the evidence for sex differences

Rather than distinctly male or female, the human brain is much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs – basically the same no matter the sex of the body it's in.

rb to make a biological essentialist mad <3

[liminalweirdo]

“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”

[mckitterick]

the notes on this are toxic - to help clear up any misunderstanding, here’s the actual science paper:

Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three dec

in short: brains are brains

[txttletale]

or to be a little less pithy, groundedness means a sense of internal consistency, the idea that events and traits of a story or world are grounded in a coherent set of logics.

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

there is of course nothing wrong with wanting realism in a story, but 99% of the people who say they do really want groundedness. like the vast majority of dumb arguments about asoiaf/got are its fans saying "its realistic" when they mean "its grounded" and people ridiculing them because it is in fact not very realistic (and not just because of the overt fantasy elements)

[prokopetz]

In my experience, another big part of the problem with talking about "realism" in fictional milieux is the product of a specific Type of Guy employing the term as a sort of semantic bait and switch, sometimes without consciously realising that this is what they're doing.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

It's basically treating those silly "How [Media] Really Should Have Ended" YouTube videos as a legitimate critical lens, and in circles where this song and dance is common, it leads to a lot of people reflexively shutting down the moment they hear the word "realism" because they assume (often quite reasonably!) that oh great, it's That Guy again.

[shoyou-kun]

she sneak

[animentality]

[postilionstruckbylightning]

People really need to take a wider view of this paranoia about age gaps and realise this is how we lose the ability to build communities. You need to be able to realise that people can have things in common with you even if they grew up in a different time/place/culture. You also need to realise you can build communities with people who don’t have obvious things in common with you, that people can have the same goals and needs as you even if in most ways they’re very unlike you. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to work together to have any chance to stand ip against the few who have so, so much more power, money and influence than any of us do individually. We need to form communities that reach across age (and class and race and sexuality and so on…).

[firawren]

This is one of those topics I feel very strongly about and agree completely with the points in this post.

I struggle to make fandom friends on Tumblr, and sometimes I worry that it is because people in their 20s think they can't be friends with someone in their 40s. That I'm uncool, weird, cringe, intimidating, or just too different from them.

But things don't change as much with age as most think. Older people still are silly, awkward, overwhelmed, enthusiastic, confused, playful, irresponsible, obsessive, dumb, cool, horny, and all these other things young people think we stop feeling or being as we get older. We're just humans. I am really great friends with someone on here more than 20 years younger than me because we have so much in common! You can't tell that we're different ages when we chat.

And also—you can be friends with people who you do NOT have much in common with! Because fundamentally, you always have humanity in common.

Years ago, there was this lady in my community who was maybe 30 years older than me and who I knew was far more conservative than me. I dismissed her as someone I didn't want to spend any time with because she was obviously too different than me. But, I was forced to spend some time with her (long story), and guess what? I became really good friends with her! Because I found out I was wrong about all those things that made her different than me? NO! I was right about that—she was just as annoyingly conservative as I had suspected. BUT that wasn't the whole of her person. She was so much richer than that. There were lots of things I didn't know about her. A few of those things were commonalities, but overall, we still didn't have much in common—but that didn't matter. We could still be kind to each other, help each other, respect each other, even enjoy each other's company if we stuck to topics where we didn't clash too badly. I feel really bad for judging her, and I'm so glad I gave her a chance.

So yes, please make friends with people who are not your same age. You probably have more in common than you think, and even if you don't, that doesn't matter. We're all humans and we need each other. Our communities need us to get along.

[delphinidin4]

I'm 40. My bestie is in her early 60s. We met in 2014 on tumblr thru fandom. make inter-generational friends!!! <3

[naamahdarling]

The constant framing of an older person interacting with a younger person as something with clearly predatory intent is a huge part of the problem. Learn to spot actual grooming behavior and patterns, don't substitute a difference in age for your actual judgment. This pedojacketing shit has to stop. We were not meant to stick to only socializing with people within two years of our own age. That is not how you have a functioning society.

Also, we built these sites and all the source material for your fandoms. Stop acting like it's weird for us to be in our own damn houses. Learn to talk to people older than you. Go learn to quilt.

[forestgreenandgray]

Hey do you know what rumination is?

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

What to Do When You're Triggered

[little-grey-dowitcher]

So many people never learned to live with harmless discomfort at any point in their lives and holy fuck does it show

[little-grey-dowitcher]

“But I wanna know!” You’re gonna have to learn to be ok with not knowing some things, especially when those things involve personal details about strangers that they’re not comfortable sharing.

“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.

“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.

“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.

“But I want it!” And I want a million dollars. You can’t always get what you want.

[little-grey-dowitcher]

A lot of people were also never told “no” as children and the consequences of that manifest in similar ways. Learn to be ok with being told “no.” You’re not gonna die if you don’t get your way in every single situation ever.

[queeranarchism]

#my wife is on the SOR for being gay #no joke #she hit on a girl in a straight bar once #in 1997 #and while the girl was into it #the off duty cop sitting nearby was not #and so he arrested her for ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ #which in our state was still a felony #in 1997 (and would remain so until Lawrence v Texas in 2003) #and since ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ was a felony and a sex crime #she got put on The List #she is still on there to this day #because it costs MONEY to ask a judge to take you off #and she has tried four times#since 2003 #to get taken off the SOR #but every time the judge has said something like ‘no you pled guilty to the crime i can’t possibly take you off the sex offender registry’ #with no acknowledgement of what the actual crime was #(the crime of being a butch lesbian hitting on a cute girl who was into it) #(in 1997)

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

Younger queer people need to realize that the SOR being used against queer people simply for being queer isn’t some ancient history thing. It still impacts queer people today. And it can quite easily be used that way again.

[ashelyskies-deactivated20241121]

Listen!

When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.

Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.

Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).

Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.

Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)

“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.

The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.

It has been used against us time after time and it will continue to be used for that.

[cluegrrl]

And this is where the push of purity discourse in fandom shows its fetid, fascist underbelly.

[gwydionmisha]

This is why they are making being trans in public a felony in some states.

[harperhug]

When you decide that people who commit a certain crime or category of crime should legally lose their humanity, you create incentive for more people to be charged with that crime.

[liberalsarecool]

Billionaires lie. All the time.

[gwydionmisha]

Judge stops Kansas law restricting transgender youth health care

A judge appointed by Gov. Laura Kelly said Kansas likely violated parental rights by restricting gender-affirming care for trans minors.

[vaspider]

Kansas Judge Eviscerates Anti-Trans "Experts" Jamie Reed, Chloe Cole, James Cantor; Blocks Care Ban

The judge found 349 individual facts supported the continued provision of gender-affirming care.

Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach brought forward a litany of anti-trans witnesses familiar from litigation defending these bans. Among them was James Cantor, a Toronto psychologist who has built a career testifying for states defending care bans despite no clinical experience treating transgender minors—and who was once quietly dropped from a Florida Board of Medicine hearing after it emerged he had served on the advisory council of the Prostasia Foundation, a group that has worked to destigmatize pedophilia. Folsom wrote that Cantor "has not conducted any original scientific research on the efficacy or safety of gender dysphoria treatments," and noted he is not licensed to treat anyone under 16 and has never diagnosed a minor with gender dysphoria. [...] "The Court gives Dr. Cantor's testimony little weight," Folsom concluded. The judge turned next to Farr Curlin, a Duke University doctor and theologian who was an author of the Trump administration's HHS report on pediatric gender dysphoria ... By his own admission, Folsom noted, Curlin's views are "radically counter to current medical orthodoxy." The judge found his opinions "appear motivated by his personal views as opposed to a methodology applicable in the field of medical ethics," and gave his testimony "little-to-no weight." ...

And then there was Jamie Reed, the self-styled "whistleblower" who built a national profile on lurid, largely unsubstantiated accusations against a St. Louis gender clinic and who has gone on Fox News to describe being transgender as a delusion. Reed also did not testify and could not be cross-examined. Folsom gave her affidavit "little weight,” and had scathing remarks towards her lack of expertise: “The Court gives thus Jamie Reed’s affidavit little weight, given that she is not a medical provider or mental-health professional. In addition, her affidavit primarily addresses her experiences with a clinic operating outside of Kansas—thus, it does not rebut or refute the credible, uncontroverted testimony about clinical practice within the state of Kansas,” read the order.

This decision is 117 pages long, and if you want to actually feel good about something a judge has had to say recently about trans rights, this is legitimately a good read. (I understand that some people do not read legal decisions for fun. You should still try reading this one. It's really good.)

Given how thoroughly and completely he eviscerates the supposed qualifications and relevance of the same tired grievance actors that the right totes from case to case like a basket of moldy oranges, I hope that this decision will not only act as an example for future judges, but save them a bunch of work, because they don't have to then go do all of the writing themselves on how much these people suck, they can just cite this decision.

[owlsounds]

Footage of Judge Carl Folsom III tearing anti-trans scumbag grifters bloody new assholes...

[scottishcommune]

[ibedressin]

Happy Black Fae Day!

I did this as part of a collaboration post with many other wonderful black creatives over on IG. My theme was Warrior Fairy.

Creative Direction and editing by me

Shot by @sachinteng 🥰

[higgsbison]

happy glorious 25th of may

[creekfiend]

it's interesting to me to see like. within queer communities the thing where if you said "things are really fucking stressful and awful for us right now and it's giving us a lot of really terrible feelings that don't have an outlet" ppl are like "yes, true" and then if you're like "it's far easier and safer to vent that frustration and fear on accessible members of your own community than it is to try to vent it on the people who are actually in power" they would be like "yes, true" and if you said "it feels better to justify venting that frustration and fear and anger if you can frame it in head as very important and righteous, rather than admitting that it's a coping mechanism being utilized by a fallible human being undergoing very difficult circumstances" they'd say "yes that's also true"

but if you're like "this is relevant to your own current behavior" with the implication that the intracommunity thing they're currently big mad about is actually not as important and righteous as they're casting it in their head, it's like "no no. not MY behavior. mine is rational and I am correct. the issue I am fighting with other queer people about like rats in a sack IS actually the most important issue to be addressing right now"

and like

this is stuff I have to constantly watch out for in my own behavior! it is absolutely absolutely a thing, and absolutely something we ALL deal with and are capable of engaging in. it's ramped up in intensity the last year or two and I don't think that is a coincidence. I wish we were more capable of this level of analysis of this stuff without getting defensive.

and like, again, it isn't like it's evil. I don't think it's GOOD to do, but as I said, it's the completely understandable behavior of a human being under considerable stress. we need to cut ourselves a break in order to be able to be honest about what we are doing sometimes.