"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
dirt enthusiast
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Xuebing Du
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
DEAR READER
🪼
JBB: An Artblog!
Cosmic Funnies
wallacepolsom
almost home
PR's Tumblrdome
Discoholic 🪩
Sade Olutola
No title available
Keni
No title available
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
seen from United States
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@shippingfleetadmiral
no but actually. so many people revealed who they are during the trial and they’re going to blame it on misinformation but i could be sitting in plato’s fucking cave and I still wouldn’t be doing a tik tok dance to someone’s SA testimony. like that’s not misinformation that’s just being rotten to your core
Black cats are lucky. (via leahweissmuller)
MAN [IN THICK ACCENT]: Black cat bring good luck. Not bad luck. I have black cat - See, him face - And I am not dead today: Good luck!
“See him face”
I sure fucking do see him face
Him face
Reblog him face for good luck in 2021
Reblog him face for good luck in 2021 (2)
Reblog him face for good luck in 2022
A New History of Fandom Purges
On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”
On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.
Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…
HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!
1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed
1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites
1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere
1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites
1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites
2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites
2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again
2001 - Tripod Massacre
2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN
2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks
2002 - FFN bans porn
2002 - FFN bans RPF
2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes
2004 - FFN bans script format
2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded
2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again
2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes
2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal
2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids
2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it
2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted
2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted
2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly
2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity
2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic
2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN
2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org
2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic
2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content
2014 - Quizilla shuts down
2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors
2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids
2014 - Viddler deletes vids
2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
2016 - y!Gallery deleted
2016 - Elfwood goes offline
2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic
2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama
2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad
2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs
2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban
2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning
2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed
This is only a small taste of the many times that:
Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.
Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.
Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.
Fans grudge reported each other.
Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.
It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.
Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.
This is why we need AO3.
And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.
For anyone who is new to my tumblr, here is the root of most of my views on fandom.
(No, this is not a complete list. Please stop suggesting that. It’s merely an illustrative sample of the exponentially larger problem.)
Also, let’s give it up for BERU WHITESUN LARS, that woman was ready to call her husband out for driving away Obi-Wan who could have helped them when they were in danger, who had weapons hidden in the house because she has lived on Tatooine all her life too, and who was 100% ready to fucking go, the minute shit started going down. Beru Whitesun Lars is the woman who wove kindness into every one of Luke Skywalker’s bones, who knew he had a destiny beyond them when it was his time and was willing to let him go, but also was ready to shoot a bitch in the face the minute her son was in danger. BERU WHITESUN LARS DESERVES A STANDING OVATION.
hey I'm gonna fix all discourse real quick, watch this
1) mind your own fucking business
2) take care of your own mental health first before attempting to dictate to others how to care for theirs
3) nothing about the human experience is binary, any attempts to simplify existence down into two categories of good or bad/right or wrong will fail because there will always, ALWAYS be someone or something that cannot be categorized. Doing this to human beings is oppressive.
4) what nourishes the lily drowns the cactus. your wounds heal differently than others. respect that other people know their needs better than you do, and stop trying to change peoples needs when they don't suit yours.
#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.
“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”
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.
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
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.
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.
This is why it’s important to learn how to analyze media, a skill we are apparently losing.
While Huck Finn, for example, absolutely and obviously carries a moral message, not all stories do, because not every story is supposed to teach you something, nor will every story hold your hand and gently walk you to an easy conclusion.
I am so frustrated by the “if media portrays something, it’s saying it’s ok” and “if you enjoy a piece of medoa which portrays something negative, then you’re bad” mentality. Just pls. Stop. That’s not how stories work.
“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.”
This right here.
If “you should be willing to sacrifice everything, including your soul, to protect your friends when everyone around wants your help hurting them” stops becoming a moral lesson because someone says the n-word, I think people are… a little TOO impressed with the power of hate speech.
Hate speech is a terrible thing, but it’s not witchcraft. It has the power we grant to it.
If you want to say “I know what the point was, but I couldn’t get past seeing that word typed out,” feel free, but please don’t say “typing that word out nullifies the point,” as that is not how anything works.
Just a reminder my blog is trans inclusive. It’s bi inclusive. It is pan inclusive. It is intersex inclusive. It is ace/asexual inclusive. It is aro/aromantic inclusive. It is queer inclusive.
I don’t support terfs or exclusionists.
If you came here looking for an ally in your bigotry you came to the wrong blog. Go away. You are not welcome here.
Blue by Jowie Lim
telling teenagers it doesn’t get better is so cruel and irresponsible. you’re suppose to be the adult stop trying to get doomer cred and act like a sympathetic human being
Broke: it doesn’t get better
Woke: it’s gets better if you put in the work to MAKE it better
ok but your brain finishes re-wiring itself and completes the adolescent maturation process at around age 27-30 so it literally does just get better
reaching thirty is like making it to a save point. it really does get better.
This is all the more important right now with the pandemic potentially wasting a big portion of many kids’ childhood and teenage years. They musn’t think this is it for them. Hell no.
And things aren’t set for you after 30. I was suffering miserably at 30. I’m 43 new, and have a new life and am the happiest I have ever ever been. It gets better. Yes, even for ADULTS, it can get better.
It gets so much better.
Despite the general ups and downs of life (and there have been some DOWNS), my life is better in almost every way than it was in my 20s.
Stick around. It gets better.
Note that this is the other side of, “These are the best years of your life,” so don’t say that to teenagers either. Even if it never occurred to you that you were saying, “It gets worse,” it’s a pretty safe bet that it occurred to the already-suffering teenagers you’ve been saying this shit to.
The only thing that was “best” in my life in my teens was my left knee, and that’s because I busted it when I was 19 and couldn’t afford a doctor to fix it. The right one still works just fine.
Something happened at about 24/25 and all of the teenage/young adult anxiety, and worry, and mood shifts that had been a natural part of adolescence/teenage just - went away. I had concerns in my life of course, but suddenly I was better able to handle them. Not quite sure why, but I’ve spoken to quite a few people who noticed that sometime between 24-27 a whole lot that had come with teenagerhood just sort of disappeared.
It does get better. You get better at dealing with things. You’ve got experience to fall back on. It really does get better.
When you’re a teenager you have very little control over your problems and very little of the experience that would help you fix them. In your 20s you start to figure these things out. In your 30s you start to overcome them. I’m not gonna say you have it all figured out by your 40s, but I can tell you truthfully that more than once I’ve had someone tell me their 40s were the happiest they’ve ever been and someone else in the room immediately chime in with, “You think that’s good, wait till you hit your 50s. You’re totally out of fucks to give and it’s awesome.”
Reblog if you Remember
omg that was…actually back in the day
has it really been 15 years?
Yeah, I was there for that one. Those were wild, confusing days
I miss LiveJournal… I do not miss Strikethrough
On the issue of the ‘q slur’...
So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:
The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.
Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.
Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion.
Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity.
In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.
“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”
Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.
Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.
Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.
“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”
Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”
Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”
Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?
“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”
“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”
“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”
Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.
No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.”
Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.
But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:
Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism.
This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.
I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?
Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”
And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!
But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group!
If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.
If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.
Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.
This entire post really resonated with me. Especially the part where you say:
“When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group!”
If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity.
If you say or tag “q slur” you are showing you are an ignorant, self-righteous child who has no fucking idea of our queer history and is completely uninterested in learning
If you say or tag “q slur,” you are an ignorant child and I don’t care if your feelings are hurt.
Imagine being buried alive and then seeing this little guy with a backpack suddenly arrive
It gets better. The little backpack has a two-way radio.
So you’re trapped under rubble, and then a rat shows up. Flicks a switch on its little tumtum. And starts talking to you.
Article here | Organization here
#I love the hashtag women in STEM bc at first I thought they meant the rat 🙈 (via @sprotteswelt)
until you said that it never occurred to me that the woman in STEM was the scientist and not the rat. i was just like “hell yeah, this rat is a powerful woman pioneering lifesaving technologies as a rescue ranger”
I wish all closeted LGBTQ+ people a very happy pride month.
