hey. hey. tunafesh

i'm rob. i'm captain lesbian. 28, they, white, tme, socal. ☼ about ☼

[egberts]

it's so easy to do things! it's so easy to get up and do things and get things done! i am capable and motivated and executive dysfunction can't touch me. *starting to cry a little because my affirmations aren't working* it's so easy to do things, come on get up, it's easy, let's do things *mental image of a cartoon trying to move a heavy lazy animal* come onnnnn

[egberts]

IT'S SO EASY TO DO THINGS! IT'S SO EASY TO GET THINGS DONE!!!!

[pjackk]

NOBODY HELPS ME

[slunch]

ban pjackk again

[slunch]

WAIT NO

[plounce]

*creaks my knobbly finger at you*

[catcrumb]

[archivearchangelica]

Practical things to do on Fair Day, 2006

[goodgirl-inc]

[abonethrownfromthevoid]

Losing my mind over this

[softservewidow]

Never forget these two queens putting on the most showstopping tiktok of all time

[shilohsylvanian]

rainbow of critters and flowers <3 (I realize i need more blue flowers in my yard)

[plounce]

ive said it before and ill say it again. the thing about the stereotype of lesbians being bitches is that being a lesbian does sort of turn you into a bitch bc god damn people are so fucking annoying about and to lesbians

[wisedreamdelusion]

festival of carrot make us all right mind and sight

[pitbolshevik]

my super sustainable bmw

[pitbolshevik]

[lamignonette]

[fatehbaz]

As always, they wanted Cuba. [...] Even better, thought The New York Times, a [US] war with Spain over the island would distract from the crisis at home. “Why not,” the paper asked, referring to the possible acquisition of Cuba, “give the public something else to talk and think about” besides “the everlasting Slavery question?” [...]

In 1854, the USS Cyane burned Greytown, a dusty community on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, to the ground.

The pretext for the assault was to assist a white U.S. citizen threatened with arrest by local authorities for the murder of a Black man.

The backstory was that Cornelius Vanderbilt wanted to gain monopoly control for his steamboat and stagecoach business, which was conveying travelers rushing across Nicaragua for California gold. [...] President Franklin Pierce defended the ruin: Greytown was “a pretended community,” Pierce said, [...] comprised mostly of “blacks and persons of mixed blood.” Greytown, the president said, could expect nothing other than to be treated as a “piratical resort of outlaws or a camp of savages.” Washington was also competing with Great Britain for a [Central American] canal [...]

---

A year later, in 1855, William Walker sailed out of San Francisco with a detachment of fifty-five soldiers, whom he called La Falange Americana, toward Nicaragua. A Tennessee mercenary who earlier had tried and failed to seize territory from Mexico, Walker was backed by both Southern slavers and Northern investors, including Vanderbilt [...]. Spanish Americans across the hemisphere were horrified when Walker, after a five-month war, grabbed power and proclaimed himself Nicaragua’s president. Even more so when he reestablished slavery, in a country that had abolished the institution three decades earlier.

Walker was popular in all the United States [...]. Nicaragua, a play celebrating Walker's conquests, opened at Manhattan's Purdy's National Theatre [...]. Migrants from the United States flocked to Nicaragua to settle [...]. Walker offered them hundreds of acres of land and Vanderbilt sold them discount tickets [...]. President Franklin Pierce quickly recognized Walker’s government. [...]

---

United States gunboats were sailing further in Latin American waters than ever [...]. In February 1855, Paraguayan soldiers fired on the USS Water Witch, killing its helmsman.

The U.S. Senate was already annoyed with Paraguay for drawing up a commercial treaty that had contained the phrase the United States of North America. And so, in response to the attack and to satisfy congressional demands that Latin American nations refer to the U.S. by its proper name, President James Buchanan dispatched a fleet of nineteen ships carrying twenty-five hundred men and two hundred guns to deliver a revised treaty, with the word North struck out. Such a show of force left Paraguay little option but to sign the treaty, which opened the nation’s waters and markets to the United States. [...]

---

The idea [...] of convening an assembly of “all the American States of Spanish origins from Mexico to Chile,” wrote U.S. ambassador to Colombia James Bowlin, is a “ridiculous farce.” Bowlin dismissed the “mad pranks, and silly nonsense of pretended Statesmen.” [...]

[In Paris] on June 22, 1856, at a gathering of Spanish American exiles, [Chilean philosopher Francisco] Bilbao gave a speech proposing to hold a congress [...] to create a Latin American confederacy. [...] If not, no resistance to Washington would be effective. “Look,” he said, “you can see the smoke from the campfires getting closer. Listen, the soldiers’ footsteps are ever nearer.”

Panama, then a province of Colombia, was strategically important as the potential site of a interoceanic canal or railroad. Bilbao called it “the fulcrum that the Yankee Archimedes is using to lift South America and suspend it over the abyss,” so to “devour the continent in pieces.” [...] “Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States,” he said. [...] Central Americans [from Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador] did finally unite to drive out Walker in 1860 [...].

---

All text above by: Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Books, 2025). Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.

[tritoch]

one of the places I think the writing for FFXIV has generally missed an opportunity is to explore in more depth how krile feels about the events of stormblood and shadowbringers vis-a-vis zenos and the resonant experimentation.

like, stormblood is in part a story about the gendered impacts of imperialism, which is why two of its leads include a woman sold into marriage at a young age and later forced into sex work and a woman whose unflinching loyalty to empire explicitly does not shield her from misogyny. the scene where zenos grabs yotsuyu by the hair is just straightforwardly a scene of gendered violence to the greatest extent the animations and the mores of the writers allow. depending on your wol's gender stormblood is either the story of how zenos exploits and abuses three women (two of them textually colonial subjects) on his way to do the thing that really matters, fight a man or The Woman He Has Decided Is Exceptional. and the third of the women violently exploited in this way is krile!

like the violence zenos does to yotsuyu and fordola is desexualized to the extent images of gender-based violence can be desexualized under current conditions (and I think it could easily be argued that square-enix's decision to be like And It Wasn't Sexual in the stormblood side stories is kind of a cowardly ass-covering move), which imo is why it matters that the violence done to krile is explicitly to violate her bodily autonomy! human experimentation, particularly performed in the service of empire, is very obviously meant to be a vile and horrifying thing to contemplate! zenos in the text deploys the metaphor of animal butchery: "[S]ilence that mewling little piglet. I would not hear another sound pass her lips...until I strip the fat from her." we are very explicitly invoking ideas of dehumanization, of women as objects of consumption, etc. and this pretty shocking culmination of this theme in the stormblood main quest...doesn't really get paid off and 100% just turns into a genre power up for the endgame, and stormblood's themes about gendered violence don't get any payoff in the text until fordola and yotsuyu's patch stories.

even just in writing this I can actually sort of immediately see why they couldn't explore it. it's gonna be pretty important that krile not be read by the audience as a victim in relation to zenos if endwalker's finale hinges on her having the ultimate say-so on the mothercrystal-shinryu situation. If it's at all about krile as a victim of his violence, it can read really horrendously to have her deciding "yeah I believe in zenos enough for this" as a factor of the finale. and it's conceptually cool for her to have the decisionmaking power here at all, zenos involvement or no. I like the idea that she specifically gets to make a dramatic gamble here at the end. but the idea that it only works because they pretty explicitly overlook what he does to her is....pretty bad! and it's not like it removes these implications from the text! they don't get undone by ignoring them! there are perhaps drawbacks to trying to have a character pull double duty as the Existentialism Understander and the Avatar Of Imperial Violence And You Better Believe That Includes Gender And Race-based Violence

just a bummer to me that they seem generally disinterested in fleshing out krile's understanding of the hydaelyn and zodiark saga, which is pretty disappointing given she's literally getting possessed by hydaelyn and making that choice with the mothercrystal. would love to be proven wrong and for the next expansion to get much more interested in her!

[stjohnstarling]

I think the battle is long since lost on what the “-coded” suffix means, but I (old movie guy specifically invested in queer coding) seem to be unable to let go of how annoying I find the fuzzy popular use of the term. This is probably a flaw in my character.

[stjohnstarling]

Coding is intentional, it’s a way of communicating indirectly with the audience through a shared language of signs. That’s why it’s called coding, because it’s communicating in code. It isn’t when a thing reminds you of another thing.

[sevdahalma]

most fantasy books or fics i’ve read that contained a desert biome fell back on real world prejudice and misconceptions in place of authentic worldbuilding for a place and people, and it is so telling that the trope seems to repeat itself

things like

the desert as a lifeless wasteland where ‘life is crushed underneath the shifting sands and blazing sun’ blah blah blah. deserts are full of life and they are beautiful and people have lived and prospered in them for eons. please read a book

the desert as an ugly or barren terrain where everything is harsh and threatening

the desert as something scary

the inhabitants as backwards religious zealots

the men as overly violent and oppressive

the inhabitants in need of outside instruction/intervention, i.e. “civilizing the savage”

the “harem” and women as exotic, sensual, mysterious

writing tribalism with no knowledge of how tribes actually function

djinn (or for the westerners, genies)

Islam Lite (the aesthetics or spiritual practices appropriated and stripped of meaning)

sprinkling random arabic words for ✨flavor✨instead of expanding your worldbuilding to include language as well

clothing as oppressive or mysterious, instead of serving its actual purpose (protecting you from the elements, which should be obvious but i guess it isn’t. covering your skin keeps you cooler and safer in most deserts)

people who live in deserts as ignorant, superstitious, uneducated

this isn’t worldbuilding, it’s just ignorance and bigotry