lin

boop bloop

[dct239394cvvd098dffgggp]

uquiz where i talk to you and neither of us is having fun. you wont get anything out of this

[dct239394cvvd098dffgggp]

its a testament to like covid times and whatever that my tagline was 'you wont have fun' and 'youll get nothing from this' and 30k people went 'yeah whatever' and proceeded anyways. out of all the reactions i got to it and ive read as many as i could, just this is the best thing abt it

[boykeats]

what emotion do you write from

homosexuality

[strongermonster]

i love student housing. i’m in the common room waiting for a friend and there’s some dude crying on the couch w a bunch of his friends around him and i can only hear bits and pieces but someone asked him “who gets the minecraft server if you guys break up?” and he started crying harder and a 3rd person reached over to smack the guy who asked it on the back of the head

[wufflesvetinari]

from last year’s workshop: Cool Writing Hacks that ripped my heart out but made my work better anyway.

-not every line of dialog needs an action attached to it. somebody doesn’t need to shrug or scratch their arm or glance at other people every two seconds of a conversation unless the motion means something. you’re not writing stage directions and you can trim this stuff down to make your dialog snappier. (this one in particular felt like a callout of me specifically, goddammit)

-if you want the audience to remember something–especially something that will be important in a climactic moment–you have to show/tell them at least twice beforehand. preferably three times. otherwise they will not remember! they simply will not!!

-the room layout isn’t usually all that important BUT if there’s going to be a fight scene you BETTER fucking figure out a way to convey that entire layout early in the scene or no one will know what the fuck is going on

-on that note, get somebody to read your fight scenes even if you are ABSOLUTELY SURE they make sense on the page. on the first pass they probably don’t. (unless you have a gift i would kill for. some do!)

-eyes cannot talk. eyes can’t talk! it’s easy to say that someone has “rage in their eyes” or “their eyes were telling me to run” but that’s all shorthand for other body language we notice subconsciously! try digging in and describing that body language instead. you will likely get something richer that way

[wufflesvetinari]

oh i forgot all the stuff about immediacy!!

say you’re in Natasha’s POV. you can either say:

“Natasha sat on her porch with a glass of lemonade, watching the movers unload. She saw one of them stumble with what looked like a pained wince. She noticed that the other men kept their distance.”

OR:

“Natasha sat on her porch with a glass of lemonade, watching the movers unload. One of them stumbled with a pained wince. The other men kept their distance.”

we are already in Natasha’s POV, and we established in the first sentence that she was watching the movers. so we don’t need constant reminders that we’re behind Natasha’s eyes–we can just see what she sees! this puts us closer “behind her eyes,” so to speak, and lessens the distance between the reader and the scene.

[ursulaklegun-deactivated2024122]

i think a lot of people have collectively forgotten that nonbinary is an umbrella term for an incredibly vast range of experiences and embodiments…it’s not one singular thing

[plantcatbloop]

right like one non binary person can't speak for all of us. we're so different. not even an umbrella man it's the sky! and then the binaries have their own houses or something.

[targuzzler-deactivated20180224]

are you a philosopher

boy im dumb as shit

[pochowek]

“boy im dumb as shit” is just rephrased Socrates’s “I know that I know nothing“ so whats the truth

[oopsabird]

the reason you were able to read more and do more activities in a day when you were a kid than you do as an adult isn’t because you got stupider, it’s because as a child you generally had your base needs taken care of and your schedule provided to you, so you didn’t have to use as much of your mental and physical energy on planning, life maintenance (ie food and administrative tasks), and general executive function. of course you could focus on reading a novel in two days, somebody else made your lunches and you never thought about phone bills and you didn’t even have to decide for yourself when to take a bath. c’mon

[constance-mcentee-deactivated20]

Wow. I never thought of it that way.

[quasarkisses]

habits to pick up if you’ve enjoyed your tumblr chaos revival experience:

reblog more stuff!!

appreciate imperfect things

focus on enjoying yourself

prioritize compassion

complete your anger

make yourself laugh

create things that fail

tell people if you like what they made

distance yourself from things that hurt you

what made this site what it was 2010-15 was sharing. it was enjoying something and sharing your joy with others who appreciated it, and added to it! acknowledge the flaws of the past as we move forward, but the fresh energy on this site tonight is something you don’t have to lose

[quasarkisses]

@nighttyger it means to let yourself experience anger, but not to live in it. there are many, many things that deserve being angry about in the world, but it’s just as important to take time for the things that make you happy

experience anger, process it, and set it aside when you’ve emptied your emotional reservoir. anger has a purpose: let it serve you, then rest.

[dankmemeuniversity]

[actualbird]

legitimate fucking lifehack: discord server literally just for yourself to keep track of stuff over devices. links. reminders and checklists. all neatly divided into categories. search function and dates. why didnt i do this earlier oh my god.

[stillwaterseas]

yup. i made a server just for myself, i have a channel for reminders and calendaring, a channel for to-dos, a channel for snippets of fiction and writing ideas that come to me when i’m out and about, and a channel of just “links” for when i need to get a zoom link or whatever from my phone to my computer fast and easy.

[plantcatbloop]

adhd is a bitch but maybe if i get myself to do this ill actually thrive

[gertruderobinsonscat]

I hope that “between the crematorium and the dildo store” becomes a famous saying for whenever a person has lost in the most pathetic and undignified way possible. Sort of like how we still use the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” two thousand years after the event. 

[andythelemon]

Simple things, every day.

[c0rpseductor]

hi there tumblr.com! it’s me, lestat c0rpseductor!

i really do not like making posts like this but i’m in a kind of shitty financial situation. i’m really low on funds and have been trying to keep up with bills and other occasional expenses where i can with commissions and so on, but PTSD has been kicking my ass in a major way, especially with the holidays coming up. ideally i would be employed right now, but between my brain and the pandemic things have obviously not been ideal.

if you would like to toss me a couple US dollars because you’d like to help, or because you love me so much and think i’m sweet, you can do so via my ko-fi. please don’t feel obligated! i’m in a sorta tough spot, but i’ll live either way. thank you for reading also. have this gif.

[oceaniccunt-deactivated20190622]

[makilikesflowers]

An angel

[mielparaoshun]

Wtf bats swim

[zooophagous]

Omfg

[paddysnuffles]

Here’s another little-known bat fact:

Orphaned baby bats are often swaddled tightly like teeny burritos to mimic being cuddled by mom and help ease separation anxiety.

They also seem to find pacifiers soothing.

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted on this before, but there’s always someone who hasn’t heard about this before. Plus, I’ll happily take any excuse I can to post cute baby animal pics (especially when they’re wrapped like tiny furry burritos) :)

[star-anise]

Until 50 years ago the word for a bisexual woman was “lesbian”

I’m not denying that female homosexuality is a natural part of human nature and has always sexisted. There absolutely are and always have been women who are exclusively attracted to only women. The distinction that is relatively recent is the distinction between people who are different levels of attracted to women.

Which is to say, if a woman had sex with other women, the word for her was “lesbian”, regardless of her relationship to men. Until the 1970s.

So for example, in lesbian bars of the 1930s-50s, where butch/femme culture emerged (check out Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis), femmes usually tended to be married to men who financially supported them. While married to their husbands, they went to lesbian bars and had affairs with other women. Bisexual women were part of the lesbian community. When the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian advocacy group in the USA, formed in 1955, a great deal of their work was helping women leave their husbands. Some of them were completely gay and locked in loveless heterosexual marriages with men they were incapable of desiring–some of them were bisexuals who were capable of love and attachment to men, but were actively pursuing relationships with women. To tell which were which would involve delving deeply into their personal thoughts and feelings, which we can only do for a few of them through this much distance and time, because they at the time didn’t think the difference between gay and bisexual women was terribly important.

Or, very rarely, we’d know they were bisexual because it actually entered the historical record. As Genny Beemyn recounts in A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, Part 3, the Mattachine Society’s 1965 protest against homophobic discrimination in federal employment included lesbian Lilli Vincenz walking in the picket line next to self-identified bisexual woman Judith “JD” Kuch.

The split between lesbians and bisexual women as distinct groups dates back to the 1970s, with groups like The Furies Collective, who advocated that women withdraw from male society completely–that women end all working, personal, or casual relationships with men, and with any woman who would not do so also. The Furies are often cited as a landmark in the formation of lesbian feminism and lesbian separatism, but their first newspaper proclaimed, “Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.“

That’s where the major division between bisexual and lesbian women came from. It wasn’t a deep interrogation of the nature of lesbian women’s desires; it was appropriation of the word “lesbian” to mean a political choice instead of a sexual orientation. It comes from the sense that the choice to work with, be friends with, or sleep with men is a choice to be complicit in women’s oppression. From this comes the idea that bisexual women are less trustworthy, less capable of truly loving other women, and less deserving of a place in lesbian society.

This attitude about bisexual women shows in personal stories of the 1970s. For example, lesbian feminist Robin Tyler recalls an argument at the 1973  West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, where some members wanted to remove invited musician Beth Elliot from the stage because she was a trans woman: “When Robin Morgan came out against Beth, I said to her, look, you’re bisexual and you’re up here determining who should belong to this movement and who shouldn’t?“

Then in 1979, the lesbian sex manual Sapphistry by Pat Califia was being prepared for publication when its author came out as bisexual in an article for The Advocate. Its publisher immediately threatened to cancel publication of the book–a book about how women could have sex with women–because “we do not publish books by bisexual women!” (She later relented, and the book was published in 1980.)

History makes it very clear that it took active work to push bisexual women out of the lesbian community, and it hasn’t entirely stuck over the years–after all, most towns or cities don’t have a large enough LGBTQ+ population to have both a lesbian separatist potluck and a queer-friendly WLW sapphic potluck. A woman looking to date other women goes to lesbian events because that’s all there are in most places. We didn’t fight for “gay and sapphic marriage”, despite the number of bisexual women who wanted to marry other women; politically, bi women in relationships with women have always been grouped under “lesbian”, and there has been almost no push, especially not from lesbians, to popularize “sapphic” as the default descriptor for women attracted to women but with unknown sexual histories and/or personal desires.

[nothorses]

Exclusionist tactics

So we’re seeing a resurgence of exclusionary rhetoric- and most of this is on Twitter, but I think it’s time to unpack what happened during the “ace discourse” as well- because this stuff will happen again.

These are just the examples I can remember off the top of my head- but they’re good things to watch out for.

Echo chambers: Over the course of the first year especially, exclusionists would form tight-knit groups and private chats (especially over Discord). They would invite people into these groups and suck them in pretty intensely, creating environments where only one way of thinking was allowed. People who disagreed would often be mocked and harassed back into conformity. Avoiding Criticism: Any comparison of exclusionist rhetoric to some more “legitimate” form of bigotry was usually met with the claim “why are so many of us [targeted group] then?” Oftentimes they would point to exclusionists claiming to be trans women or people of color, later found out to be fabricated by cis and white people. Exclusionists also tended to put “TERFs do not interact” and similar statements in blog descriptions or on TERFy posts in order to avoid comparisons to TERF rhetoric.

Targeting Allyship: Communities would be pit against each other in order to discourage allyship with the ace community. The most successful example is the way lesbians were encouraged to see aces as “a lesbophobic community”, the effects of which linger today. They also attempted to pit the bi community against us, and the autistic community. Targeting Language: Exclusionists often targeted the language the A-spec community used; “allo” came under fire for being “homophobic” and “lumping people in with their oppressors”, “a-spec” was said to have originated as a term for the autism spectrum (a blatant lie), and even pointing out similarities to TERFs came under fire- again for “lumping people in with their oppressors”.

Targeting Community History: Asexual history (which is by nature also aromatic history) came under intense scrutiny; any prominent figures or spaces were now considered “too problematic” (like David Jay and AVEN), and longstanding history was actively erased; while folks claimed that asexual history had begun with the inception of AVEN in the early 2000′s, ignoring documented history as far back as the 70′s at least.

Erasing Community Definitions: A popular tactic was to claim that a word “had no real definition” and thus couldn’t be legitimate. Exclusionists often compiled seemingly conflicting definitions of core words like “asexuality”, always given by unofficial sources and either allos, or baby aces. Official definitions and sources were erased entirely. “A Danger to the Community”: A core tenant of all exclusionist movements is that the group they’re excluding is “a danger to the community”. They’re “stealing resources” which usually cannot be described or quantified, nor are they actually limited- they’re “invading”, they “think it’s just a club”, they’ll “make us harder to accept”, etc.

Character Assassination: Anyone who spoke up about asexuality had their every action put under unreasonably scrutiny, and accusations were often slapped on with minimal prompting. Most often used were “lesbophobe” and “pedophile”; ever disagree with a lesbian? Now you’re a lesbophobe. Ever interact with someone under the age of 18? Now you’re a pedophile.

“Think of the Children!”: The ace communtiy was said to be “sexualizing children”, citing the fact that some young people identified as ace, and the belief that nobody should be thinking about sex or sexual orientation until legal adulthood. This often lead to people claiming aces were “pedophiles” just because of their identity.

Belittling Trauma: Aces were often asked to lay out the oppression they’d faced and trauma they’d experienced for exclusionists to pick over and “validate”- pretty much always, the end result was that exclusionists tried to convince the person in question that their trauma wasn’t real, or was “misdirected” and thus didn’t actually hurt them. Harassment Campaigns: Exclusionists would often find one person to target as a community, with the end goal being that they leave the site, shut down their blog, or far worse. A wave of harassment would come over one person at a time, in asks and mentions and all over everything they’d posted recently. We’d see dogpiling, basic insults and bullying, mocking, targeted bigotry (like ableism) etc.- and well as…

Suicide Baiting: Exclusionists would often “jokingly” suicide bait people they disagreed with, aces in particular, and I remember one ace blogger citing this harassment as a reason they eventually did take their own life.

Sexual Harassment: Aces were often targeted with sexual harassment as if it might “fix” their orientations, or just as a malicious way to hurt them. Sexual jokes, sexual insults, etc. were thrown at aces, many of them children or teens.

Grooming of Minors: Within their own communities, exclusionists often took advantage of their status, their weaponization of the term “pedophile” against others to make themselves appear safe, and the normalization of sexual jokes and comments within their communities to single out and groom minors. Minors were often roped into sexual spaces or conversations with predatory adults.

What eventually started to shut “the discourse” down and dissolve this movement was diligent de-platforming. People were encouraged to blog exclusionists on site, blocklists were circulated, we were discouraged from reblogging any post with an exclusionist on it, etc.- Instead we would make our own posts in response to their points, and screenshot theirs if needed.

Over time, this genuinely did work- and while we’re still recovering from “the discourse” to this day, we are at least in the process of recovering now.

[oh-kayisee]

Definition; Consternation: feelings of anxiety or dismay, typically at something unexpected

---

Consternation is a hard emotion to describe. It's less all-consuming than frustration, but still a struggle to control. It's more polite than anxiety, because it has a recognizable cause, but then again, it's a hole of disappointment welling up in your chest that you can't shake. It's when things go wrong, and you have to bite your lip to keep from pursing them.

[plantcatbloop]

Thank you. Your words are quite poetic and sound.