silly goober :3

[beetlegarden]

we are not born to die!! what are you talking about!! do you think a book begins just to finish? do you think a song opens with a beautiful chord just for it to end? you don’t read the book to finish it, you read the book to eat up the excitement and the emotions it evokes!! to learn and to digest and to fall in love and be heartbroken!! you listen to the song to dance and dance and sing your throat raw!!! to cry and smile and swell with the harmonies!! yes, we are born with the inevitable fate of death, we are mortal after all, but that is merely the finale of the play!! the final act, the closing of the curtains - we are not born to take a bow and exit stage left!! we are born to love and be joyous and yell and move and learn and cry and feelfeelfeel!!!  we are not born to die, silly, we’re born to live!!!

[puresugarandspite]

the ancient (Homeric and tragic) Greek concept of fate was that a beginning was fated to happen, and eventually it would reach a fated end. Anything in between those points? Fair game. See: Poseidon delaying Odysseus’s journey home and throwing as many storms at him despite the fact Odysseus was fated to return. See also: Calypso holding Odysseus captive on her island and not wanting to let him leave, despite the fact he was fated to return home. See also: Thebes being ruled by Jocasta, Oedipus and Creon as equals- that wasn’t in the prophecy! Oedipus didn’t save Thebes from the sphinx because he was fated to, he was only fated to make it to Thebes at some point to marry Jocasta.

EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT YOUR BEGINNING AND YOUR ENDING IS FAIR FUCKING GAME TO DO WHATEVER

[captain-price-returns]

[noartnowritingsorry]

Oh no…

[autistic-speedbump]

[zelda-heritage-posts]

Zelda Heritage Post

[michaelmoonsbookshop]

just some of the the changes in design for the Penguin Symbol on old Penguin Paperbacks 

[dinkywinks]

he did a little dance and for this crime he was imprisoned in a bubble

[luxflora]

They liked his little dance so much they gave him a spotlight

[anasandorpygoscelis-deactivated]

family album

[delgrosso]

[sensationaltrainreading]

[luulapants]

Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.

[nestofstraightlines]

There’s a phrase that really stuck in my head around this. It was from one of the British divers who enacted the Thai caving rescue, though I couldn’t tell you which one or which interview.

As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“

And the diver said, “No, actually people always get that exactly wrong. In an unexpected and urgent situation you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.”

[throckmortons-thrussy]

[zoesupreme]

[cursedpossums]

unrestrained summer fun

[cursedpossums]

every year around late may, without fail, this post starts getting notes again . and my little wet raw chicken breast of a brain gets puzzled. because i forget that summer is , in fact. a yearly event

[brilliantpines]

do you guys remember when we used to say oh worm all the time. remember that

[brilliantpines]

is anybody out there

[acakewalkofcrocodiles]

[isuggestkillingyourself]

[tactfulsaboteur]

[psybomb]

Every time I see that last pic, I have to note that the funniest line is the one immediately after the highlight

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[fleshengine]

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

We gotta fix that.

[dancinbutterfly]

Progress.

Onwards!

[onthedriftinthetardis]

I can't access the full paper, but their conclusion is right there in the abstract:

While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.

[ravioliet]

"why can't they just be friends?" not in the homophobic sense, but in the "in your need to center romance in everything you are missing the whole point of the media in question" sense

[big8cola]

great trope

[loveridden1999]

“bi women bringing their cis-” bi women can do whatever they want shut up

[oneheadtoanother]

[rustingbridges]

somebody do a venn diagram of which marios do or do not pay bills

[kittiescatlover]

so THIS happened. 👇

Ok. Kitttys just made me smile. Smash LIKE if kittys just make you smile.

[scratch-meowt]

my hottest take

[keeper-of-the-flames]

Counter point, those machines can make me a peach sprite.

[pusheenthenerdcat]

guys did you know the tech in that nefangled machine revolutionized preemie healthcare

[maimonideznuts]

[pusheenthenerdcat]

yeah the guy who invented them made incredibly precise infusion pumps (as opposed to gravity fed ivs) which not only meant they could give medications to teeny tiny babies safely, it's also used for insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines. the key element is that it's a peristaltic pump so the liquid stays in sterile tubing for safety

(unholy drink cloaca uses it to dispense precise amounts of flavored sugar syrup)

[hedgebotherer]

Then how the haters loved him,

As they shouted out with glee,

"Unholy Drink Cloaca

You'll go down in history!"

[naamahdarling]

You DON'T get this on any other site in quite this format.

[magnetothemagnificent]

franz kafka’s writings are often analyzed in a trans lens the person who wrote that was almost definitely a trans person who related. people who call kafka a trans woman are almost entirely trans women. there is also a huge subset of literature shitposter girls who use kafka and the metamorphosis specifically to talk about their experiences with womanhood. so while i agree that the trope you are talking about is antisemitic i don’t think that applies here. he’s not being called a woman in a disparaging way.

It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.

Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!

Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.

It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.

Kafka's Metamorphosis and writings about his depression are from the viewpoint of a disabled Jewish man who was watching as antisemitism was slowly escalating around him and Jews were becoming insects in the minds of society. And "he's not being called a woman in a disparaging way" is the dumbest excuse ever- antisemitism is antisemitism. I've seen trans people infantilize Jewish men, calling them "different breed of man" or "scrunkly" and then insist they meant it positively. Intent doesn't matter. Calling a Jewish man, who never ever indicated having any gender identity otherwise, a woman, or implying he's somehow not a full man, is antisemitic.

[obi-waankenobi]

I hope I'm not derailing here (please tell me if I am and I'll delete this), but I'd like to especially call attention to this line (which I love, btw):

I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.

At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky™ person? She must actually be autistic!"

Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!

It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.

People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.

OP, I'm sorry I only spoke on being transgender and autistic. Those are the only two points that I could speak on from experience. Talking about real people like they're fictional pisses me off, and I sort of... got off on a thing.

[terulakimban]

I'm not OP, but one thing that's frightening about this from a Jewish perspective (especially in the context of discussing someone who was alive in the interwar period) is the recurring idea that Jews only matter as lenses for other people's stories. That we can be empathized with, but only if our narratives can be twisted to someone else's.

Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.

It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).

Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged

Well. I'm a cis woman. GNC, perhaps, but cis. And I get misgendered (and degendered) a lot because of how people read Jewish features. And... when friends insist that any discomfort I have with feminine stuff is because I'm an egg... I get that they're trying to be helpful for a journey of self-discovery. But I've done that introspection. I check in with myself periodically just in case. And "oh, you're really nonbinary/a trans man because you're [insert list of stereotypically Jewish features//personality traits commonly ascribed to Jews [whether or not I have them]" -it hurts. Because not only are they minimizing my actual identity and my self-knowledge, and deciding that they're the experts on my life, rather than me, they're doing it in a way that's constantly used to hurt me.

[theres-a-hole-in-my-wall]

another thing! Jewish men are (pretty often) seen as feminine/unmasculine and like they could never be 'true men'. In a lot of media they're the awkward nerds, the virgins, the weirdos. Point is this is not just misgendering anybody (which would be awful enough), this is misgendering a group that's known to be seen as less masculine than a white man for example

*this is a bit of derailing but it reminds me of how black men face the opposite issue of being seen as hyper masculine & in turn hyper violent. None of us can win in this racist ass society my g-d

[littledoggy-girlcollar]

“he’s not being called a woman in a disparaging way.”

No, but everything in his writing that gets commented on is something that speaks to feeling out of place in society, or something that conveys emotional or social vulnerability.

So for someone to say “because of these things I think she was a trans woman teehee!” they are implicitly 1) denying that any other aspect of identity might cause these feelings, and 2) asserting that if someone feels these things, they must be a woman.

Ignoring his Judaism AND implying that men can’t feel alienated or vulnerable and if they do they must actually have been a woman. Doesn’t seem very respectful or deconstructing of gendered norms to me.

People need to either start recognizing that you can empathize and identify with jews on our own terms or you can stop fucking talking about us.