Just Another Lost Alien, Pretending To Be A Human

[coyoteroadkill]

ive said this before but it was on my old blog so I'm saying it again

dehumanizing abusers is not effective at doing anything other than make people think they're ontologically incapable of violence

[ajunicetryagain]

it's also creating a class of people who you can abuse while telling yourself that you're Good and Moral and Not an Abuser.

[kyraneko]

if you dehumanize the caught abusers then the uncaught abusers will use their humanity as proof of innocence

if you dehumanize the hypothetical abusers you create incentives for false accusations as a means of dehumanization whenever dehumanization is desired for other reasons

[moon-meerkat]

never related to authors being like "childhood is such a blessed innocent time", catch me with that jane eyre shit like "such dread as children only can feel" and "I then sat with my doll on my knee til the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room"

[fangtastic-bastard]

"Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing."

I find this passage from the Mary Oliver essay "Staying Alive" very poignant and true.

[dizzyghoast]

every so often i remember how awesome the modern interconnected multicultural world is. i grew up getting to hear fairy tales from all over the world. africa, asia, europe, america. everywhere in between. i can have bagels for breakfast, curry for lunch, and ramen for dinner without even leaving the city limits. music and art and philosophy and technology that originated thousands of miles and years apart from eachother have come together and interwoven into something greater than the sum of its parts. its hard not fall into despair when thinking about the horrors but god. god the wonders.

[dizzyghoast]

you can have friends on the other side of the planet! neither of you even has to travel!!!!! you can just talk to them whenever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[jewish-joy]

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

[jewish-joy]

#i love prayer plants but they're fussy so I don't keep them#can we have a picture op they're so pretty

Behold, Dorothea

(Naming my plant "Gift of God," and then giving her to a seminarian with just the explanation that it's a prayer plant? Okay, that's my bad.)

[jewish-joy]

I should also add- I ran into my rabbi and explained the situation. I then asked, earnestly, if there was a remedy. A mikveh of sorts, or a beit din, or something.

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"

So Dorothea's a free agent according to rabbinic opinion. I guess I'll permit her to be Roman Catholic.

[thoodleoo]

reading about the participation of children in rituals as a form of play in ancient greece and came across an incredibly charming story from julius pollux's onomasticon where a flood prevented the adults from reaching a sanctuary to sacrifice a ram to heracles, and the children solved the problem by....sticking a bunch of sticks in an apple to give it "legs" and "horns" and offering it as a sacrifice instead. it's such a charming thought and i can perfectly picture kids these days also pretending at sacrificing an apple "goat" at recess

[thoodleoo]

catch me on the playground playing sacrifices

[guccifloralsuits]

If THE modern translator of the OG Odyssey text wrote this about my film adaptation I’d kill myself

Emily Wilson you’re goated

[barelyfunctionalcephalopod]

[image transcript: Nolan's Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior's glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters have convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible. /End image transcript]

I strongly recommend checking out the full article linked by OP, this isn't even as brutal as Wilson gets.

[salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds]

[whetstonefires]

i have seen this post on my dash 7 times now and every time i think more loudly, 'this is what Batman villain The Penguin's dialogue sounds like when they let him be fun to watch.'

[appri-dot]

Shapeshifter who gets horribly grotesque and mutilated when flustered

[appri-dot]

Its actually so important to me

[tumblebagel]

Yeah okay this is going on main

[redstonedust]

unfortunately i dont think its queerbaiting if the creator is just so terminally heterosexual that they never remotely considered the same gender relationship their show is centered around could be read as romantic. it is deeply painful however.

[melanqueerly]

Maybe accidental queer baiting? The way someone may not mean to say something rude, but it may come off rude, so it's rude. Frustrating either way.

[phinarei]

Not being a dick, just a friendly clarification.

By definition you can't accidentally queerbait. Queerbaiting is specifically using a same sex pair from the show to market the show to queer audiences with no intention of ever following through on a romantic relationship.

There is officially licensed Destiel merch signed off on by Kripke. Teen Wolf had a commercial with the actors for Derek and Stiles draped over each other talking about being "on a ship." Both shows actively used scenes between them as marketing while actively mocking fans for wanting them together. Sherlock has multiple characters refer to Johnlock as a couple, including characters we're supposed to believe are never wrong about human behavior and pushed those scenes in marketing. Then they acted insulted when fans saw them as a couple.

That's queerbaiting.

Done on accident it would just be queer subtext. Done because they had no other choice due to censorship is queer coding.

The specific meaning of the word is really starting to get lost and it's a pretty important one to keep accurate. It describes a very specific phenomenon that was done repeatedly and maliciously for decades and is meant to examine that specifically.

Doing it on accident sucks, but it isn't a tactic of capitalism intentionally intended to suppress queer representation while making money from queer fans.

[joyandotherstories]

Reblogging to keep the accurate definition and examples of queerbaiting circulating in the world

[catsbeaversandducks]

Via @korvys​ (Twitter)

[cornistasiathecoblinking]

I’m glad humans evolved to Boop the Snoot for Good Luck.

[headspace-hotel]

glowing as though holy

[wingedvoid-otherblog]

Balto in new york has it too<33333

[json-derulo]

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

[json-derulo]

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

[json-derulo]

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

[json-derulo]

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[gokusclit]

I hate how a woman having body hair is immediately seen as this like political statement or that she’s gnc or whatever like girl wtf it’s just the natural state of her being

[byjove]

There is such a double standard in the way male family annihilators under duress and women who kill their children in the midst of extreme mental illness are treated by the press. A man loses his job or gets served divorce papers and immediately kills all of his children and himself in front of his wife instead of seeking help and he is the poster boy for the mental health crisis and there are serious discussions about how men feel their only worth comes from providing an income. A woman suffers from extreme postpartum mental illness and actively seeks treatment for days, weeks or months and is genuinely failed by the mental health system and her support system and finally kills her children and tries to kill herself because her brain keeps telling her to do it and she is painted as the most cold, calculating, evil and despicable monster the world has ever seen. There are mothers saying they also suffered from postpartum anxiety/depression/psychosis and they NEVER thought about killing their kids so obviously she just hated her children because the thought of mental illness being so severe it can make a mother a danger to her own children is scarier than framing it as an isolated act of intentional evil.

The media and society at large is always handholding patriarchal violence and disproportionately condemning and punishing women who act in ways that are considered counter to the romanticized ideal of a mother or wife. The media is always discussing men’s mental health when the problem is often that men refuse to seek it because they resent the idea of a loss of control or social stigma while women are begging and pleading with their support systems and psychiatrists for help and receiving none. There is a serious mental health crisis in this country, we repeat that over and over again and then fail people when they show signs of serious mental illness or beg for help.

We already know the justice system and particularly the justice system in the state of Massachusetts hates women and some of the pieces of information weaponized against Lindsay Clancy make me think there is every possibility her trial will go the way of the first Andrea Yates trial.

*TERFs, do not hijack this post. Fuck you.

[pussyhoundspock]

joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

[nonevahed]

prev tags:

literally ok so not a funny story but kind of funny? when I was nine I encountered rape in a book and I was like hey mom what’s this mean and she explained it and I was like oh. gross. and then like two weeks later a girl on the bus abruptly disclosed her csa and we were all like ????? what ???? but I was like wait hang on there’s a word for that ☝️🤓 and explained what it meant and that it was illegal and that you could talk to a teacher or my mom if it had happened to you and everyone was like ohhhhh I see I see and very somberly comforted the girl (she was safe she was removed from her home and living with my neighbor at the time so it wasn’t Urgent)

[zarohk]

And this is a perfect illustration of why it is important for kids to read or variety of things, and why abusers don’t want them to.

[bebx]

And may your pets always stay healthy ♡

[byjove]

ACTUALLY, MAD RESPECT HE WAS A MACHINE.

[myteetharewhitewithsin]