Tumbling Like Alice

Hey this is Seraph5 (she/her)! This blog will mostly consist of fanart and long silences when I get trapped out in the real world. There will be a lot of whatever ship is setting my world on fire and whatever ships always have. Live long and prosper!

[seraph5]

Hey Gang,

I’ve been getting a few requests to purchase this in some capacity so I put it up on my redbubble:

Stede’s daydream.

If you want it on a pillow or tshirt or something let me know and if redbubble has it I’ll add it.

Cheers!

[samcormac]

what’s the rush?

[rainwasheseverythingaway]

The time will pass anyway

[keltbh]

first time staying the night

[keltbh]

dunk's flat

[keltbh]

beach episode!

[theconcealedweapon]

[nealashitposts]

So I've got this friend whose nervous because she's trans and dating this guy who she hasn't told yet because they've only been on a two dates. For this story let's call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don't worry.

So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful.

She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal.

He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet...

"Oh you have a dick?"

"... yeah."

He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says

"Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"

And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride.

My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self "Oh they don't think I can't please my girl, but I'll show them!"

[nealashitposts]

I do feel the need to add that later he excitedly tell the group that as a straight guy, he never thought that skill would be useful outside hotdog eating contests.

[hyperrbolic-orange]

"Man its too bad that im straight since I've got like no gag reflex and all."

"Honey, I must tell you, i am in fact trans and I have not had bottom surgery."

"My god... everything's coming up Jason."

[dancinbutterfly]

Pure of heart dumb of ass hetero of sexual

[tlirsgender]

Btw if people keep telling you to stretch but never told you how to actually do it right you're supposed to go slower than you think & just hold it until you feel the muscle relax. Like how anal works

[tlirsgender]

Also the muscle that goes up to your temples and gives you headaches is the same as the one that clenches your jaw & it goes down the sides of your neck so stretching your neck helps with headaches and jaw tension. You can also massage it with a vibrator

[tlirsgender]

Stretching as far as possible immediately is not the goal you just bend until it feels tight. It's not supposed to Hurt You Worse. It won't hurt if you're doing it right. Much like another activity

[tlirsgender]

Many are saying "we're on the celibacy website these people don't know how anal works either" I know. That's my secret second lesson

[slyrivers]

I love this so much, I’m gonna start saying “nuts” we need to bring it back

[libralthinking]

I love b&w proper ladies breaking character with “sonofabitch”

[yooterus-deactivated20220126]

“OHH you’re following me, oUUhhh I didn’t know that!”

[j-liz]

“And tried to uh…. ….NUTS!”

[victusinveritas]

[godlessondheimite]

[fluffmugger]

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

[pennie-dreadful]

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

[mikkeneko]

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

[three--rings]

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

[lyricwritesprose]

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

[maklodes]

I somehow don’t remember ever reading Huckleberry Finn in school as a kid, so I read it more recently (although still a couple years ago) after already having seen a lot of the racism discourse around it.

The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate – if not directly state – that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasn’t born with the innumerable advantages Huck’s white skin blessed him with.

Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his son’s life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isn’t better off with the aforementioned dad.

So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face – although in many ways different from each other – have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner that’s closer to parity than “Huck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.”

(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)

Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality – and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like “we’ve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons aren’t that great this time of year, so we won’t steal those, and we’ll count the fact that we don’t steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.”

A cynical part of me wonders whether that’s the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn – the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past society’s arbitrariness and injustices isn’t the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm… which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsider’s perspective and form bonds of necessity – and, ultimately, empathy – with members of other widely despised segments of society.

Update: Crossed out “aunt,” because I misremembered and Miss Watson is not Huck Finn’s aunt.

[natalieironside]

Shout out to trans women who aren’t computer scientists or musicians or avant-garde artists or whatever.

Shout-out to tgirls who work at Taco Bell. Thank u queen, society would collapse without you

[snkrfnd]

Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the “gay Taco Bell”, but since I was coming from the “gay Howard Johnson’s” I wasn’t shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they’d worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the “gay Taco Bell” on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven’t changed much in 20 years. I’m still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city’s version of the “gay Taco Bell” is key to survival.

[natalieironside]

Thank u for sharing this with us

[afeelgoodblog]

Fantastic idea

[durnesque-esque]

Article about it here. 

[nougatto-archived]

what’s important to note and missing from the “headline” tweet is that they simultaneously constructed additional good public transit to the public transit already in the city (bus rapid transit, train stations). Just removing highway alone isn’t going to make traffic better, the bigger part of the story is that they improved public transportation. And the current mayor wants to do more - cyclist lanes and reinstate a tram system

[squimp]

candlelight vigil for luca @garaks-padded-bra he got deactivated for no damn reason

WE MISS YOU KING

[palpablestupor]

GARAKS-PADDED-BRA???????

[sandersstudies]

Sick list of symptoms bro. Now try humanizing your behavior instead of pathologizing it.

[sandersstudies]

Pathologizing: Hey sorry I yelled at you. I have this ADHD symptom called RSD that makes me really sensitive.

Humanizing: Hey, I’m sorry that I blew up like that earlier. In the moment I felt really attacked and overwhelmed and I reacted badly, but I know you didn’t mean to offend me with what you said, so that behavior is on me.

[seraph5]

[sandersstudies]

Sick list of symptoms bro. Now try humanizing your behavior instead of pathologizing it.

[sandersstudies]

Pathologizing: Hey sorry I yelled at you. I have this ADHD symptom called RSD that makes me really sensitive.

Humanizing: Hey, I’m sorry that I blew up like that earlier. In the moment I felt really attacked and overwhelmed and I reacted badly, but I know you didn’t mean to offend me with what you said, so that behavior is on me.

[seraph5]

hi i just saw your art for the malevolent coffeeshop AU fic again and lost my mind all over again like you are genuinely so skilled and amazing, i just have NO words. i really hope that you are participating in this year’s Malevolent Big Bang because i really want to see more of your work. i’m just so in awe of your style and also you come off as incredibly kind and sweet!! which makes me even more of a fan <3

Oh my gosh thank you so much for all these lovely compliments anon!!! I had such a lovely time making the art and working with the authors. I think I won't be in the Malev Big Bang this year but only because I'm working on a different Malevolent zine with a bunch of artists in the community so you'll defineitly end up seeing more from me, and I've always got Malev ideas booping around in my head. As long as you're following me here or over on insta anytime I make a new Malev art you'll see it ✨️

[smokinghorse]

just had a really good mango it was so good that i had to illustrate how it made me feel afterwards.

[stratfender]

op’s tags are so fucking important to me

[enjoylentgreen]