I always thought that DNI/BYF lists were a bit silly, because they’re not really going to stop anyone from interacting. So, here’s a list I like better.
I will block you if:
-You are racist against POC, including Romani people, Black people, Indigenous people, Asian people, and Latine people.
-You are antisemitic or islamophobic
-You are transphobic, including policing the identities of trans people.
-You are aphobic or arophobic.
-You are ableist, including using words such as freak, crazy, insane, sociopath, psycopath, psycho, or psychotic in an insulting way. Narcissist should only be used for people with NPD, and not in a derogatory way.
-You are intersexist
-You accuse people of crimes or faking an aspect of their identity without proof.
-You suicide bait. And no, there aren’t any exceptions to this.
-You are a dick to my friends
-You make posts about any of the above that you claim are jokes or ironic
-I simply dislike you and don’t want you around my blog
-I would be uncomfortable with you reblogging my posts for another assorted reason.
Weakest tiniest magnetic plug known to humankind right in the center of the suction cup just so you're sure it's a little wobbly and insecure lying on its side the whole time it's charging
Don't even get me started on this little bastard!!
Based on my knowledge of body safe design, I'm fairly sure this is because they're trying to avoid bacteria being able to grow in the crevices of the charging port. Hence the shallow or even sticking-out port.
If you're not big into martial arts, you might not have heard of sanda, originally created as CQC for Chinese soldiers. It's often decried by just about everyone as being, essentially...just MMA rather than having roots in traditional Chinese kung fu.
That's only half-accurate. I'll explain why, but I need to catch you up the nearly one hundred years before it's creation for context.
(CW for war crimes, brief mention of sexual assault, mention of Native American oppression, and political cartoons with a racist depictions of Asians - and as always, if someone knows better, please correct me)
The first thing you need to understand is the Century of Humiliation, a concept in Chinese historiography. The premise is that China was regularly fucked over from the 1840s to the 1940s when the communists took full control of the mainland. While this is a narrative pushed heavily pushed by Chinese nationalism, it's not exactly wrong - they had it pretty bad, and thought not exclusively the fault of foreigners, a lot of it was, including the two Opium Wars where England and France wrecked China's shit for the right to keep the drug trade going. The Second Opium War is where the UK first got Kowloon, which would be followed later by the rest of what would become Hong Kong.
English Commerce
I tell you to immediately buy the gift here. We want you to poison yourself completely, because we need a lot of tea in order to digest our beefsteaks.
The Taiping Rebellion, from 1850 to 1864, is estimated to have cost up to about 30 million lives, compared to the American Civil War's 700 thousand. And let me tell you, it's crazy we don't talk more about the Taiping Rebellion, not only because of the devastation but because the rebels were a very strange branch of Chinese Christian that believed their leader to be the brother of Jesus Christ. Which...well, I guess that's also technically the West's fault, although Western Christians were heavily divided on how they felt about the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and ultimately after some indecision and putting feelers out to the rebels, the West chose to back the Qing.
For the people who love the DDR because their enforcement of laws were not always necessarily the worst in the entire world for queer folk: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was spectacularly feminist for it's time, way more than East Germany was pro-queer! Maybe consider switching over to Chinese Christofascism?
(I'm sorry, I'm going to be angry about that literally forever)
China would go on to badly lose the Sino-French War and Japanese-Sino War, the two together resulting in China losing suzerainty (essentially control of foreign affairs) over Vietnam and Korea, and a lot of their influence outside their own borders.
At this point, you can start to see how China was being treated by the West...and Imperial Japan, who, as we've discussed, were great big westaboos. Everyone wanted a piece, and it was a race to get the biggest. They didn't think in terms of what China wanted, they hardly considered themselves in opposition with China, but rather each other.
Putting His Foot Down
Uncle Sam: Gentlemen, you may cut up this map as much as you like, but remember that I'm here to stay, and you can't cut me up into spheres of influence!
Needless to say, the Chinese were...not pleased with how things were going.
The traditional narrative is that the Qing's modernization efforts were, at best, a very mixed-success. There's been more questioning of that, though, since "modernization" is inherently kinna a Eurocentric term with arbitrary values. Just before the Japanese-Sino War, everyone was pretty certain "modernization" had gone great and they were going to crush Japan like ants. The Qing did face issues with corruption and firing shells that had their high-explosives siphoned to be sold off, but considering Russia has had to deal with essentially the same problem in Ukraine finding their reserve tanks to be hollow tin cans, I'd say that's fairly modern.
Social instability would continue to rapidly worsen after losing the First Sino-Japanese War, during which Japanese acts of brutality were enough, as I mentioned in my previous historical post, to elicit at least temporary scandal for the Japan among the Western Powers Imperial Japan hoped so desperately to impress. Tensions were especially high with Christian missions, culminating in an incident in which two German missionaries were killed in an attempt to kill a third accused of rape. That led to Germany invading and taking away yet another piece of China's sovereign territory. Not helping things was that, because of special protections for the practice of Christianity forced on China by treaties from those prior conflicts, many bandits were "converting" or claiming to have done so in order to escape the law. And all of this is in the midst of serious natural disasters ruining lives and leaving people with nothing.
So that brings us to 1899, the main point of this post, and something you may have only heard of before in a throwaway line on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm talking about the Boxer Rebellion.
It was then that an escalating series of murders against Christians (missionaries and converts) and attacks on telegraph wires and railroads blossomed into something like but not quite a revolution, the most notable event being the Siege of Peking (Beijing), where over two thousand Christians and foreign civilians took refuge until the formation of the Eight-Nation Army, an alliance of Italy, Russia, the United States, the UK, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Japan, Germany, and France, invaded to rescue them.
You might assume that "Boxer" came from someone's name, or a major location, or something like that, right? The name actually conceals the reason I find the Boxer Rebellion so interesting, and why we're talking about it today. See, back then, kung fu was referred to as "Chinese boxing" in the West.
The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists were just one extralegal organization that flourished in late 1800s thanks to the Qing slowly losing their grip on governing even within some parts of their own territory. They weren't just anti-foreigners, they started out pissed at the Qing for the ongoing troubles, and fighting government control is where they got their start. Yet, they famously used the battle cry "support the Qing, destroy foreigners" - hey, wasn't this supposed to be a rebellion by an extralegal organization?
Ha - well - while she initially condemned them, Empress Dowager Cixi would later throw in with the Fists, at least partly because the prince stanned them so hard he met with her wearing one of their uniforms. This, it seemed, was a legitimate path to expelling all foreigners.
So, right now you're probably thinking back to where this post started. The natural conclusion at this point is that the Fists surely lost, but their martial arts were impressive, right? And then that became sanda?
Well.
No.
The movie Boxer Rebellion (1975) depicts martial artists jumping into crowds of armed soldiers and devastating them with the awesome power of kung fu. You might expect this to exaggeration typical of action movies, and it is, kinna. It's also only half of what the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists thought they were capable of.
The Fists believed their kung fu made them invulnerable to blades and bullets, including cannonballs. They thought they could fly. They thought ghost warriors would descend from the sky to help drive out foreign armies. Though they had some firearms, they were mostly armed with blades if anything at all. The Empress ordered the Qing military to assist them, but generals wisely chose to do the bare minimum or outright ignore the command entirely.
Even stranger was the legends that grew around the Red Lanterns. You can think of the Lanterns as a kinna women's auxiliary to the Fists, who spurned women lest they "pollute" their masculine magic kung fu and cause it to fail. The Lanterns were divided by age between Black Lanterns (older women), Blue Lanterns (middle-aged women), and most famously, the Red Lanterns, who were eleven to seventeen.
Like the Fists, Red Lanterns possessed magical powers. They could fly, but also, unlike the Fists, walk on water and stop guns, among other things. When Catholic women were accused of making that masculine kung fu magic fail by exposing themselves, the Fists resolved to wait for the Red Lanterns to arrive, since their magic would be immune to corrupting femininity.
I want to take a moment to say I know how all this sounds, and I've tried to keep my language serious at least in this section because I don't mean to paint the Fists as "stupid" for the things they believed. It's important to keep in mind the Fists were largely peasants driven by nationalistic fervor and desperation from how bad things had gotten thanks to foreigners, natural disasters, and the Qing's own corruption and internal failures. It's depressingly reminiscent of ghost shirts, which just ten years prior had failed to stop bullets during Wounded Knee. The population was despondent and angry, with little still left to lose. That led them to kill innocent people prior to dying themselves to an enemy they never had a chance against. People like Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, and others outright took the Fists' side at least in terms of "who started it".
More often than not, history is sad.
So the Boxers lost, badly. Empress Dowager Cixi was given a pass for siding with them because she was more useful on the throne than off it, but the Qing would fall about a decade later in the middle of trying once again to further "modernize". China fell a free-for-all between warlords, ultimately coming down to the Kuomintang's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. The two would (barely) work together to resist Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which quickly became part of World War II. Soon after they fell back into conflict, with the Kuomintang forced to retreat to Taiwan and still claims independence that the PRC still denies.
In Taiwain is the Republic of China Military Academy, which was known as the Whampoa Military Academy when it developed sanda in the mid-20s. It is, basically, MMA. Traditional martial artists certainly played a part in it's early history, but they were doing what Bruce Lee would fiercely advocate for decades later - "absorb what is useful, discard what is not". Foreign combat sports, like Muay Thai and (actual, Western) boxing were worked in as well. Like in MMA, a background in traditional martial arts can be helpful going in, but you're going to have to learn a lot more and probably unlearn several things as well. The biggest influence was actually the lei tai, raised platforms where Chinese brawlers engaged brutal and often fatal matches, sometimes with weapons even. Like, people had organs come out on the lei tai, it was nuts.
The reason MMA and sanda look so similar is that that's just what comprehensive and effective fighting looks like. It's the same reason England doesn't use gyroget ammo for their guns while Germany equips their soldiers with fully automatic crossbows. In video games, which I love with all my heart, fighting styles as diverse as sumo and capoeira are presented as more or less equally balanced, with different advantages and disadvantages. That's not how it works. We solved the optimal way to hold your arms and it's not like this.
You may have heard of Xu Xiaodong, a Chinese man trained in sanda who has a history of fighting and handedly winning against supposed masters of kung fu. The PRC hates him for that because, like with pseudoscientific traditional Chinese medicine, kung fu is a useful promoter of nationalism, and it's better at that if it keeps it's mystique as impenetrable as possible.
I would probably like a lot of modern Chinese martial arts movies if not knowing that they were bankrolled to be propaganda for the PRC, like the first Ip Man, which exists to further the myth of wing chun and remind everyone that Japan sucks for what happened during WWII. I don't think they're making many movies about the Boxer Rebellion.
The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.
Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.
Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't be directly observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.
Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.
The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.
When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!
I gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all; if there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.
It’s very kind of you to remember this! I didn’t! That now reads as an extremely 2012 piece of writing; you’ll forgive me because it was fashionable at the time (and demonstrates the tone of a decade.) And I was 24. Thank you so much for remembering this and bringing it up; I truly appreciate it.
On the original subject, this reminds me of something a pregnant friend told me.
See, with pregnancy in the US medical field, they make a big fuss about the due date. They'll put an exact date for when the baby will be born. And if the baby is born significantly before the due date, that's a Problem, true. But if the Due Date comes and the baby isn't born... they induce labor or have a C-section.
So there's actually not a lot of information as to what happens when the baby takes longer. And all the data says that Baby takes nine months ON. THE. DOT. Because that's what we make happen.
And maybe that's fine. Maybe it isn't. But it's kind of silly when you consider we don't know with that kind of precision when anything else in medicine will happen, so why would pregnancy be like that?
I wonder if this has changed recently? My mother told me that the only reason they worried about my due date was that she had gestational diabetes with me, so they were trying to balance her health and mine. They let her go overdue with my older sibling. It sounds a little odd that they don't have data on it though, if it is a new development within the past ~30 years.
My first rec would be "be more specific". Rural vs urban poverty are very different, as is poverty between countries (What programs are available? And how easy are they to access?), and the experience of it changes drastically based on your other identity factors. A black man with undiagnosed depression living with three roommates is gonna have a very different experience than a vietnamese woman with a kid and a husband who's still struggling to make ends meet.
Then, look for people's stories that are similar to the ones you want to write about. Talk to people who live in poverty. Figure out what you want to write about, about it.
