quick sparrows

writer and costume maker, battle angel and tactician 

[horreurscopes]

#2019 commission for @quicksparrows >:) 

(commission info!)(ko fi)

[stkidd]

mercykills/ hallerweens 

im thirsty dont look at me 

[cheaphalloweencostume]

sometimes im really glad i was born at the time i was, because i watch a lot of videos of people doing “old world” artisan shit and in the age of me being able to see virtually anything ever on the internet and being just short of able to DO anything ever, that is still the coolest shit on earth to me, and im worried that if i was born in the 1500s or something and i made a day trip to pick up a new barrel to salt cure my meats in or whatever, i would just like, see the cooper doing his shit and just lose it

[cheaphalloweencostume]

the local smithy in 1581: *beating some red hot metal shit with a BIG ass hammer*

me, 15 years old w 3 children and smallpox:

[the-other-voice]

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory, when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (via the-other-voice)

[despaircrossing]

((submission by @famicomdemon ))

[stimcourse-archive2]

remember when queer theory was about understanding how sexuality affects socioeconomic standing and how to liberate LGBT people from their oppression and not this neo-liberalist “who can be more inclusive” ego-stroking mess

[pure]

Queer theory was about making intelligible how LGBT people come to exist in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. That institutional moment in academia (1990’s) was concerned with unraveling revolutions in how we understand the world through the vantage point of people who are ravaged by heterosexual oppression. It looked at contradictions, stigma, and what types of events undermined the tyranny that heterosexuality has on regulating the embodiment of people. It rarely was concerned with how to achieve “liberation,” but that isn’t bad tho lol it’s just a mischaracterization of it.

What makes the “Queer theory” we see today noticeably dissimilar from the 1990’s is the rise of cynicism and nihilism among people pushing queer theory in the academy for the past… 13 or so years. An edgelord phase, so to speak. The greatest work of queer theory to me is “Epistemology of the Closet” by Eve Sedgwick. One the worst is “No Future” by Lee Edelman, which highlights the nihilism streak.

The fixation on “inclusitivity” and queerness sort of being a grab bag of identities that straight people can cloak themselves in to feel oppressed and have moral authority on demand is largely a ~2010’s invention. Straight people were interested in queer theory before of course but this is where we really begin to see “Being weird makes you queer” types of things. Headlines about “if a woman pegs her man that makes you queer” hilarity. Queerness quite explicitly being reduced to “you are oppressed if you don’t identify as straight” and valorizing minoritarian identities.

I rambled but anyway yes contemporary queer theory sucks ass and balls but calling the primarily collection of queer theory works that were concerned with mapping out “liberation” is kind of an oversimplification and a mischaracterization.

[appalachiananarchist]

I hate glamorizing over-working. It’s not healthy. The fact that there are so many people going without sleep, food, personal hygiene (not to mention time for relaxation, personal time, and socialization, which are very necessary for mental health) just to stay afloat is not something to be celebrated or applauded. It’s a problem, not a goal that all good employees should aspire to, or a norm everyone should be expected to perform.

[falseknees]

Spring is the fucking greatest

[portraitsofboston]

“Everyone lies: ‘Oh, getting old is terrible.’ What the fuck are they talking about? It’s so great! Let me count the ways. It takes until you’re 40 for you to have enough money to buy anything—like a bunch of weird chairs, that thing for my cat, the stuff for the web comic. You can’t afford a comic made of tiny things when you’re in your 20s. You need to get to a point in your life when you’ve made connections in your community, and you can do fun artistic projects, and you can buy a couple of movie chairs and have them sent to your apartment. That’s what it means to be 40. You just do whatever the hell you want. It’s awesome! People say, ‘Oh, being in your 20s is the best.’ Is it? Because I found it very anxiety producing, and sad, and kind of lonely. I feel none of those things now. Life is awesome. And then they say, ‘Oh, you know, you’ll be wrinkled and ugly.’ Wrinkled? Maybe. Ugly? Are you kidding me? I’ve never looked this good. Look at my hair. I just had it done. Ask me how much that cost. I couldn’t spend that much on my hair even in my thirties. Look at this thing. It’s a shirt from a museum. I’m going to get all my clothes from museums. I couldn’t get any clothes from museums when I was in my 20s. Also, I know so much more now. I’m like a genius—just from life. I have all sorts of knowledge. I feel like we’ve all been lied to by society—that youth is where it’s at. Not really. Youth kind of sucks. It’s thrilling, but it’s also terrifying. I’m not scared of anything now. Oh, that’s the other thing. It’s the biggest thing. When I turned 30, a friend of mine wrote to me and said, ‘Tell me what you’ve learned. Give me your wisdom at 30.’ I remember reading that and thinking, ‘I have no idea.’ But I thought about it for a couple of days and I wrote back to him. ‘You now? I do have an answer for this: I feel more confident now. And I care a little bit less about what other people think.’ Now, at this age, I don’t give a fuck what people think. This is how this translates to me. I’ve never attempted to be popular by any definition, which is good, because I certainly haven’t been. But it always killed me to disappoint people. I feel that less now. You can’t hang anything over my head emotionally because I just don’t care. I don’t feel that I have to impress anyone anymore. It’s awesome!”

Cambridge, MA

[prettynerdieworks]

[qhelet-blog]

How can I learn to be beautiful and good like you? I'm so ugly I can't take it

my teacher says “all self improvement is doomed, because all self improvement begins in self loathing.” Here is what she means: if you try to get into a yoga pose for the first time and you are intent on doing it perfectly, the body itself will prevent you. you may try to straighten your leg, only to find that this brings your pelvis out of a square position. or you may find that you try to strain forward to reach your toes, only to bring the belly away from the thighs and shorten the spine– making you further from your goal the more you reach for it.the body makes these adjustments to prevent you from injury. your muscles could not take the strain of doing something perfectly the first time. if you were to push through these adjustments and insist on forcing the leg straight, forcing the pelvis square, forcing your hands to your toes, you would likely get hurt. but the body is wise and good. and if we listen to it we will not get hurt.the mind is the same as the body and so it is also wise and good. if you are not practiced enough to hold your discomfort, the mind will find ways to protect you from pain: the mind will deflect blame onto others, the mind will project, the mind will justify you in your behavior. the mind does all these things not because it is bad, but because it is wise; because the mind, like the body, knows it cannot take the strain of doing something perfectly the first time it is asked to.you cannot improve yourself on a set timeline. you cannot say: i will be a better person in six months to a year. you have to trust your body-mind to be your teacher, and trust that it knows the correct pace at which you can heal. when you allow yourself to be as you are, and to take care of the body-mind you have, to nourish your needs as they are (instead of as what you want them to be),  to allow yourself to exist without applying force, you will organically get better. the instinctive things you do to protect yourself from malnourishment and and from shame and from fear and from vulnerability and from wounds and from the past will fall away on their own. because you won’t need protection anymore.

[darlinggod]

god keep ur fucking kink meme shit out of ao3 tag y'all make this fandom even more insufferable than it already is and thats saying something!!! The kind of shit y'all post require a fucking trigger warning it doesnt belong in a safe space

[misshoneywheeler]

Hello! I see there’s been some confusion! Allow me to clear something up: AO3 is not a safe space.

Let me repeat that. Archive Of Our Own is not a safe space, not in the way you mean it.

From the AO3 Terms of Service:

Why does the Archive have a goal of maximum inclusiveness?

There are a number of wonderful specialized archives. Our aim with this Archive is to provide a place to preserve as many fanworks as possible. At the same time, the Archive software can be used by anyone to create their own archives, including archives limited to particular topics, fandoms, or ratings.

What kind of content do you allow?

We will not remove content from the Archive because it contains explicit material, as long as it doesn’t violate any other part of the content policy (e.g., the harassment policy).

One basic consequence is that users are responsible for reading and heeding the warnings provided by the creator. Risk-averse users should keep in mind that not all content will carry full warnings. If you want to know more, you may also wish to consult the bookmarks that people other than the creator have used to categorize the fanwork.

Some creators do not want to put specific ratings or warnings on their works. Our policy aims to enable creators to choose appropriate labels or to opt not to use ratings and warnings, with the understanding that some users will avoid unrated or unwarned content.

The ratings/warnings policy is really minimal. Why is this?

We believe that appropriate ratings and warnings are often in the eye of the beholder. Users who feel that a fanwork lacks an appropriate rating/warning are encouraged to try to resolve the issue with the creator. Users may also add tags of their own to on-site bookmarks of a fanwork, which other users can consult for more information. When those tags are present, you can click on the “Bookmarks” link at the top of the work to see them.

The stated desires/goals when AO3 was conceived and initially developed can be found here, on a livejournal post from @astolat (founder of VidCon, Yuletide, and AO3, and all around fannish legend). In short, the goal was “allowing ANYTHING – het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult.” 

And that, in fact, is precisely what AO3 hosts. You see, AO3 is a safe space for fanfiction. It’s a safe space for people to explore all kinds of fannish content without fear of banning, deletion, or legal reprisal. It was founded, designed, and developed to be a safe space for fandom and fannish works.

There also seems to be some confusion about the nature of safe spaces vs. trigger warnings. A fannish work that merits a trigger warning isn’t something that doesn’t belong in a safe space. The trigger warning is what MAKES something a safe space despite the presence of fannish works that merit warnings.

Something else to consider: there are many other things that include het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, and highly adult material, in addition to incest, pedophilia, infanticide, necrophilia, rape, bestiality, sadism and violence, adultery, and all manner of other things. 

So holding individual women (because that’s what fandom primarily is, women exploring their sexuality in a safe forum filled with other women doing the same) accountable for their fictional exploration of things that a) exist in real life in genuinely damaging forms, b) have significant impact on women themselves, thus leading in some part to the urge to explore those things safely, and c) have existing in movies, television, popular culture, the Bible, and in all of literature since literature began? Well, that’s just an extension of the same culture that polices women’s sexuality in the first place and drives them to find safe ways to explore it.

[alienor-woods]

Ding ding ding we have a winner 🙌🏼

[fuckyeahfightlock]

[vulgarweed]

AO3 was pretty much meant to be a safe space …  FOR WRITERS.

FOR WRITERS TO POST PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING AS LONG AS IT IS ADEQUATELY WARNED FOR AND MEETS THEIR CLEARLY POSTED CRITERIA.

IT LITERALLY EXISTS TO PROTECT FANWORKS FROM BEING CENSORED, THREATENED BY LAWYERS, OR TAKEN DOWN OR ALTERED AGAINST THE WRITER’S WILL. THIS APPLIES TO ALL WORKS THAT MEET ITS TOS. ALL OF THEM. YES, INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY THAT REALLY ICKY ONE.

THAT IS LITERALLY ITS PURPOSE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. IT WILL NOT CHANGE ITS PURPOSE AND SUDDENLY DECIDE SOME KINDS OF CENSORSHIP ARE OKAY NOW BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE YELL.

If this makes anyone personally uncomfortable, there’s a very easy way to avoid that. Just don’t use AO3. Problem solved.

[harriet-spy]

I guess I should be glad that we have built a world where young fans can be so deeply ignorant of fannish history that they think that the mechanism of repression they’re invoking wasn’t originally built and used to silence them, and so easily could be again.  Their assumption is that they are entitled to have fandom feel comfortable and safe for them; it literally does not occur to them that within their own short lifespans you had to have separate and sometimes secret lists and archives for slash because “nobody wants to see that” and “it’s gross/against God’s will” and “what if the children see it!!!”  (I remember a man knitter having to quit the freaking knitlist because he took such shit just for referring to his partner as “DH/DB” (dear husband/boyfriend) the way the women knitters did theirs.)  And even within the slash community…the very first Smallville slash mailing list tried to ban strong language and graphic content.  A rebel splinter had to break off and found ClarkLex to publish all kinds of stories.  That was only in 2001!  

I know it’s a good thing that we’re now in a world where indignant young people have no idea how vulnerable they historically have been and still are in this particular context.  The time before: that was worse, for many people.  But it’s still very tiring to see.

Please, indignant young people, do start up your own archives where the Problematic Content is banned.  You’ll be setting each other on fire within the year over just where the line is to be drawn.  And advancing your actual cause not at all. 

[becumsh]

Jesus, when will this post cease to be relevant.

Take a sip from a mug with your beverage of choice and I’ll tell you a story about your fucking safe space. In Russia, slash forum was deleted by government in 2012 (or something, I don’t remember) and most gorgeous fan works are lost forever. And some scrambles of works that were saved on people’s computers are now passing back and forth between people like it’s some forbidden shit. Want to know why? Because law here basically bans everything that in Russian government’s opinion may harm children’s young minds while they are surfing the Internet. And you know what Russian government thinks is a perverted thing that children have to abstain from at all costs? Good chap, it’s fucking anything to do with LGBT. This is how Russian government makes the Internet a fucking safe space. Oh, you think this is not safe space? Well, neither do I, but no one cares about my opinion.

Don’t like whatever triggers you? Triggers are tagged there for a fucking reason. They are there to spare your feelings of reading something that may trigger you or you find either offensive or traumatising. I’d rather read a tag that says “rape fantasy” rather than be prosecuted for hosting a slash forum or a help line for LGBT kids.

Don’t like Problematic Content? Don’t fucking read it or fuck off to your safe space which in your case is a stone cave with no wifi located on a secluded island in Friesland. Have a good day.

[fandomisnotyoursafespace]

This smackdown is glorious.

[despaircrossing]

[wintea-art]

Source

[eye-of-orion]

I had the lightning rod realization why The Discourse about fiction feels so alien to me

It’s because 99% of the arguments boil down to denying an individual’s agency

Fiction is one of the safest ways to exercise your right to choose - especially fanfic, which comes with an entire culture of tagging and content warning etiquette

If you go seeking fanfic on AO3, you can try new things with a fairly good understanding of what you’re getting yourself into

And if you get in over your head - you can close the window and walk away with no regrets

No real people were hurt in the production of words on a page - you aren’t sitting there thinking “gosh, I hope those people in this YouTube video survived that fall”

Fiction gives you the right to try on all kinds of ideas

Which is why I get so indignant when I see stuff like “XYZ content could be bad for some people, therefore it shouldn’t exist”

Or “what if minors clicked on porn for ABC fandom uwu”

The truth is, you have agency

My god, but you have agency

If you are old enough to be poking around these sites without parental supervision, you are old enough to start reading the warning labels on what you consume

And if that isn’t true for you? Then ask someone in your real life for help

(I have some pals who do ask me to screen fics for things that might trigger them)

But seriously, with fiction, you can choose what to access, and learn (in private) what you can handle

Don’t let anyone take your power

[arashi-of-ota]

antis straight up don’t believe that people have agency. or at least, not agency enough to cancel out the other things that they believe have power over us.

they’re rooted in the same politics that gave us terfs/swerfs, aka radical feminism, which believes among other things that women can’t make free choices under patriarchy - like the choice to do sex work or engage in kink or any number of other things. the reasons women give for doing these things aren’t real reasons, the only reason they do them is because patriarchy has manipulated and brainwashed them into thinking these are acceptable things to do. it’s a “feminism” founded on the idea that most women (except the radfems themselves, of course) are not real agents.

hence the transphobia - because being a woman isn’t about how you feel, only about whether you were assigned in childhood to a particular sex-based second class

hence the biphobia - because bi is a “lesser” kind of gay, because it taints the true equality of gay relationships with imbalanced man/woman ones, which are always inherently coercive towards the woman because the man has all the power

hence the hate of kink, of stories with cruel or abusive themes, because if you like that sort of thing you can’t be trusted to know your own mind. at best you’re participating in your own oppression, mindlessly acting out the desires of a bunch of old white men circlejerking it to your humiliation. at worst, you’re a traitor who’s enabling and encouraging our pedophilic anti-woman overlords, the creators of all cruelty, without which we’d live in a lesbian separatist paradise with no war or suffering.

it can never be just because you find something valuable in reading about weird shit - the only people who could do that without gagging are oppresor menz or brainwashed women. (nb people don’t really fit in here, so they’re ignored.) try on ideas? but some of those ideas are Dangerous, Corrupting, Objectively Sick, and it’s our job to keep you away from them. there are some thoughts that are too awful to ever be admitted into your head, even for a moment, because they’ll change you.

i mean, this sounds like a stretch, but the more i read the more i see it all fit together. it might not be what people consciously believe, but it’s what created this radical exclusionary politics.

[eye-of-orion]

This is also why despite generally no longer caring about Fandom Discourse, there are times when I’m going to speak up

And I am deeply creeped out by this current thread in fandom that says “readers have no agency” for exactly the above reason

I’m not saying we can never be critical about unconscious bias, or issues within fandom like racist themes, sexist themes, etc

I’m saying that it’s deeply creepy to say “we must protect people from their own choices because they’re all equally impressionable babs uwu”, especially when it comes to niche fiction written by marginalized people

[wordsnquotes]

I enjoy controlled loneliness. I like wandering around the city alone. I’m not afraid of coming back to an empty flat and lying down in an empty bed. I’m afraid of having no one to miss, of having no one to love.

Kuba Wojewódzki (via wordsnquotes)

[abd-illustrates]

tfw ur trying to write plot but ur brain only provides you with out-of-sequence snippets built on vague ideas and an endless number of potential outcomes that develop and branch out unnaturally over an unspecified timespan