Spectra

Hi, my name is Ash. Im a gamer girl who is also just bad at games. Favourite games are spelunky, tf2, undertale, and celeste. 20yo, lesbian, poly, and furry :3

[beeeleenn]

today is the last saturday of 2012. reblog now or go @#!*% yourself because you won't get this chance ever again.

[pokeballvictimized]

okay i read the 'dump your puppygirl' article. i don't like it. I'm going to be a bit of a contrarian and say that I think it has valid points but fails to address the actual question. what it does is villainize a disabled woman, and criticize her for presenting femininity and struggling. i think there are a few questions that the article needs to actually answer to be helpful

What motivates someone like the partner to engage with the puppygirl? why might the partner willingly engage in a dynamic that hurts her, even without external pressures?

Why does the puppygirl act the way that she does? Is she evil? Is she callous? Is this described 'softness' some kind of shield over her manipulative nature, or is there perhaps a series of desires that when followed, results in this dynamic?

What can the partner and the puppygirl do, independently or together, to not re-create this dynamic? Given that most situation don't feature, to my knowledge, someone quite this bad, how can someone recognize when they're being the puppygirl or the partner?

[pokeballvictimized]

like it's not really controversial to say that by-and-large, trans women are struggling, whether that be emotionally, financially, socially, or whatever. It's also not controversial to say that someone you need to prioritize taking care of yourself over others. And there's a lot of really hard to acquire and valuable skills in recognizing that your needs aren't being met, understanding that you can't take responsibility for someone else's life, and figuring out how to end a relationship in a way that doesn't make you feel guilty forever. But the article doesn't do any of that, it just handwaves all the difficult parts in favor of ragging on this hypothetical puppygirl.

[pokeballvictimized]

If you are a trans woman interested in dating other trans women it is entirely possible and even likely, that you will at some point, find yourself in a relationship where someone is relying on you beyond your capacity to support them. What do you do then? How do you have that conversation? How do you move on? Is the only way to pretend that your partner is pure evil and pat yourself on the back for escaping? Is that the point of this article? I disagree, obviously, but I don't have answers. It just seems pointlessly cruel to talk about weaponized incompetence in respect to this girl who is disabled and struggling.

[toasthaste]

idk i just feel like people who are so confident there is zero value to LLMs are, ironically, being pretty incurious. i just saw a meme that featured a city skyline, wanted to know what city it was, reverse image search gave me nothing, so i ran it by claude and it instantly came back with toronto skyline, pointed out a very distinctive building in the image that I have no familiarity with. easy to double check, it was right, and now I have that tiny little fragment of curiosity satisfied! I wasn't ever going to put a a real concerted effort into figuring this out, it's not that important to me, but it's nice to be able to get my answer easily!

it feels basically identical to the earlier days of using google and wikipedia when people complained about how that was making everyone lazy cause they just looked things up instead of going to the library about it but actually it ruled to be able to have so many questions answered so easily. I am simply not going to the library to investigate every single fleeting curiosity that tickles my brain!

[dizzyformula]

the slugs voted saltttt get me outta hereeee

[nongunktional]

i do think the negative interpretations of "im probably nonbinary but i have a job right now" are kind of reaching. it's obviously a waste of time to theorize the op's intended meaning, so instead i think it's better to recognize how the phrase can be a useful framing device to criticize how much of a fucking hassle it is to get gendered correctly. "but i have a job" e.g. will face discrimination that could threaten livelihood; e.g. don't have the mental bandwidth to explain gender to others; e.g. don't have the time and energy for the soul-searching necessary to confirm. all three of these are labor issues. yes you could interpret it as "but being nonbinary isn't important enough to worry about", despite that being a blatantly bad-faith read. it's more useful to interpret it as "but being publicly nonbinary requires a lot of social effort that, in many cultural contexts, will create more problems that you can't afford to deal with". like cmon it's a really good jumping off point for productive conversations about queer labor rights

[storyweavingspider]

The average white is racist.

By which I actually DON’T mean that the average white would call me a nigger to my face outside the lofty confines of a reasonably anonymous account or an anon ask in my inbox. They find themselves too vulnerable and me far too scary for that in most situations. And after all, they’re a GOOD person, who has evolved past racism! In fact, I bet they’re fixing their mouths to say that I’m ACTUALLY racist towards whites, no matter how well spoken I may be (and then to slap on anon to call me a spearchucker, pedophile, and whatever else they can reach for to make themselves feel better).

No, the average white finds themselves beyond such base defoulments of their mouths such as “the n word”, such things that leave them open to the potential of losing jobs, social standing, a few teeth if they get punched out, and more (if caught in 4k, anyway). And yet,

The average white is racist.

The average white will avert their eyes and walk faster as cops harass us, the average white gets uncomfortable when we don’t know our place, the average white would’ve voted for Obama a third time, the average white ignores resumes with “ethnic” names, the average white gets the same jobs with a high school degree as a Black person does with a master’s, the average white just thinks that Black woman was being a bit aggressive, the average white person just thought that group of Black kids were thugs scoping out their neighborhood, the average white votes against ending slavery in California, the average white is very concerned about the Black jogger caught on camera looking around an open construction site, the average white actually votes overwhelmingly Republican, the average white says they aren’t racist because they haven’t called anyone a nigger since they were 12, the average white just thinks that Black trans woman dressed to go out might’ve been a prostitute soliciting in their neighborhood, the average white trans person just thinks that Black trans woman might be a danger to her siblings, the average white doesn’t know why only one Black person attended this 30 person meeting in a 50% Black city, the average white is attending a very very sad vigil for us while making sure to intimidate the Black girl they hate who showed up, the average white is very offended that you brought up Emmett Till because they’re an antiracist from Mississippi, the average white isnt sure about the details but reblogged the third harassment campaign this week like their grandmama took picnics at lynchings, the average white thinks the police serve a needed function in society beyond “slave catcher”, the average white thinks they’re one of the GOOD ones who might’ve done a bad thing here and there, the average white thinks they don’t benefit from the structures of white supremacy that have subsumed the world and are choking the life out of everyone else,

The average white is REAL fucking racist and too terrified of what that means for them to do jack shit about it. Too scared of the ostracization, the potential loss of even a fraction of privilege, the fear of experiencing even a modicum of what the rest of us go through if they betray white solidarity, white supremacy.

The “teachable moment” is to get off your ass and start doing shit. If you can’t be the new John Brown, fucking copwatch, read abolitionist/womanist/transfeminist literature and figure out how to apply it to STOP JOINING FUCKING DIGITAL LYNCH MOBS YOU FREAKS, do you have any idea how much WE could do if we didn’t have to deal with you LITERALLY CONSTANTLY doxxing us, harassing us, trying to SWAT us, driving us to literal insanity? Fuck, sending a racialized disabled and/or trans person other than me $10-$20 to eat a real meal or get meds is more praxis than like 90% of what y’all do.

And no most of y’all ain’t any lower on the list than white benefit, don’t play now.

Whatever it is, whatever is within your realistic abilities, fucking get doing it or at bare minimum get your averagely racist ass out of our way so we can. Do you even have more than one or two racialized people irl OR online that would call YOU their friend? Work on being maybe decent enough to achieve that as a baseline goal, fuck.

[spectral-ash]

honestly the first spider to think of catching flies and whatnot probably felt smart as fuck i bet the other spiders were pissssssed they didnt think of it

[catboybiologist]

It's really not the biggest issue right now but fucking hell I hate how much "hey guys look at this trans woman *art of a whole-ass man*" has been "wokified"

[catboybiologist]

I love clocky trans women as much as the next gal but even the clockiest trans women don't look like men in dresses day to day. Even if they're not on HRT, to be frank, but doubly so if they are. And if you think that a "clocky trans woman not adhering to traditional cis beauty standards" looks suspiciously exactly like a Buffalo Bill esque caricature but it's good this time you swear, you're just kind of telling on yourself that you don't know very many trans women in real life and are getting your entire perception of trans women from media. Oftentimes transmisogynist media.

[catboybiologist]

This is the extremely petty version of it, but the actual terrifying part of it is that it seems like advocating for "breaking the toxic standards of medicalization" has often eclipsed securing a right to healthcare in a lot of advocacy and political discussion online.

In person it's MUCH different, although I will say that people still have NASTY attitudes about surgeries.

There's a prevailing attitude that the worst sin the trans community has committed is some kind of appearance standard, and some people seem to think that breaking this is the point of trans advocacy. All the while abandoning a lot else.

Meanwhile cis society is SCREAMING in your ear that you look exactly like your AGAB, and should always broadcast your AGAB through intentional fashion and medical choices.

[catboybiologist]

And the depiction of trans women by drawing literal men is an extension of this.

The "toxic standard of passing" doesn't fucking exist. Society hates "passing" trans women as much, if not more, than ones they can clock. Part of transphobia is convincing you that transition doesn't work. It's convincing you that the few features you call "clocky" make you look like a man when they actually make you look like a kinda-tall woman with some sharp features that have a unique elegance, that to a trained eye *might* make someone suspect that you're trans.

There are more media depictions of trans women that are cis men wearing shitty fitting women's clothes than there are media depictions of trans women that look like women living their lives.

If you want to break a standard, depicting a passing trans woman who is confident, open, and unashamed about being trans is more subversive than your tepid, timid, submissive literally-just-a-man depiction of a trans woman ever will be.

[catboybiologist]

"I'm just trying to fight the rhetoric forcing trans women to be more feminine" look someone on a waiting list for HRT in the eye and say that shit again. Say that there is mass social pressure to distribute and get people to use HRT again, while looking a dysphoric trans woman in the eyes.

You are regurgitating social contagion rhetoric. Fucking stop it.

[catboybiologist]

And btw, if you're a trans woman who's gonna jump to my notes saying something like "oh but I literally do look like a man"

You're a victim of this. You've internalized this. You've been beat down by this, and I have so much compassion for you.

[catboybiologist]

Like yes it's nice to have representation of women who don't adhere to that standard of womanhood. But you need to realize that it's not "subversive" to depict us that way. There's nothing wrong with it in a vacuum, but you have to be a LITTLE cognizant of the cultural environment that those decisions exist in.

Again. What I want to see more of is trans women who "pass", but their transness isn't a dirty little secret. They have a choice of whether to let people know, and they actively choose to be open and broadcast their transness.

Absolute tired of every trans woman being depicted as a literal man or as a woman with a deep dark secret. Fuck you

[catboybiologist]

Would you still draw a thirst trap of her if she were post op

[storyweavingspider]

THEY FUCKING GOT SALEM WHAT THE HELL. HES GONE MY FRIEND WTF

[storyweavingspider]

Tumblr staff was getting tired of endless tgirl and decided the largest unabashedly Black and transfeminist transmasc would be a perfect nostalgia snack. “See! We ban diversely, we ban the Blacks in addition to white trannies :)”

[storyweavingspider]

To be clear, Salem has also had a concerted harassment campaign against them which is likely the cause of this. It’s not something new or particularly unsurprising, it’s a documented white supremacist site doing white supremacy in its moderation and allowing white supremacists, transphobes, and transmisogynists (a mostly overlapping triple venn diagram) to utilize their site to harm the most marginalized among us over and over.

How long are you motherfuckers gonna keep letting this happen? As long as they are able to keep doing this arbitrarily to marginalized folks, especially historically Black people, transfemmes, sex workers, etc. At the whims of harassment campaigns, none of us will be safe. We will keep watching our friends disappear, we will keep watching medical, survival, etc. fundraisers die off, we will keep seeing this site become more fucking fascist as more marginalized folks get scattered to further and smaller corners of the internet again. If you can say or do something, put to fucking action your thoughts don’t just sit there anymore, fucking speak up about whats been happening!

[butchfriend]

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

[cognitiveinequality]

[sturionic]

For anyone unfamiliar with Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the entire thesis is that traditional educational models promote oppression by removing students' agency in their own learning. Freire argues that currently education functions as a "banking model" - teachers are the holders of knowledge, and students are empty vessels, waiting to have that knowledge put into their heads like a piggy bank. This reinforces a passive attitude towards information, not seeking and understanding it on your own terms, but waiting for a "banker" to deposit it into your head.

Instead, Freire proposes that teachers and students act as co-creators of knowledge, where students become active participants in their own learning through questions and dialogue. Teachers are also open to changing their understanding of topics in the process of critical dialogue - the goal is not "student learns Fact A and memorizes it as presented," but instead the goal is the knowledge itself, discovered collaboratively by teacher and student, who are acting with empathy and respect towards each other. This also starts the process of the oppressed being able and empowered to question structures of power, take agency, and actively participate in the transformation of society.

So, the irony of writing an AI essay on critical pedagogy is actually insane; because it's essentially the extrapolated endpoint of Freire's arguments that our current educational system creates passive receptacles who not only can't think critically in an educational context, but also become the perfect citizens for a world that doesn't want us questioning structures of power, to view those in power as we viewed our teachers - deliverers of indisputable facts that must be memorized and regurgitated because they command it, and not co-creators of true understanding.

[crtter]

As a Brazilian person, my opinion re: the whole Toby Fox thing is that I understand him wanting to preserve the double entendres and hidden meanings of his game’s text and only being able to do it to the extent he wants to when it comes to Japanese due to the fact he speaks it to a degree but like. Let’s not kid ourselves here, dude. I KNOW why you learned Japanese: it’s because you wanted to play video games in Japanese and watch untranslated anime. That’s why you can make sure your translation is coming across the way you want in Japanese: you understand their memes and pop culture references. The obvious solution to getting your game translated to the degree of precision you want is to find a nerd who learned English because they wanted to play video games in English and watch untranslated cartoons and, as a result, understands American memes and pop culture references. Completely unrelated to the topic at hand, but I’m currently out of a job and-

[crtter]

My resume: No degree in anything related to translation, has never lived in an English-speaking country, decided they’d understand English from then on at 13 because they wanted to watch the Fairly OddParents without subtitles and listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic songs. Fuck with me.

[crtter]

On a more serious note. This has probably been addressed much more eloquently by other people by now but something I feel that has been lost in the confusion is that Latin American UTDR fans didn’t bring up the lack of localization of Undertale into any languages other than Japanese out of nowhere. People started talking about it because it was revealed that the Undertale orchestra concert world tour would skip South America entirely. The fact that we also have nearly no access to official UTDR goods due to the fact Toby will only work with Fangamer and they charge a small fortune to ship to South America from their US location despite having having European and Japanese branches also contributed quite a bit to the general discontentment around the subject.

None of these things, mind you, are unique to Toby Fox’s intellectual properties. It’s just one instance of a very common pattern when it comes to the way media is distributed, and that’s why it’s so frustrating! I don’t think it’s on purpose at all or born of any sort of malice, but I DO think that the fact their work is appreciated in places other than North America, Europe and Japan sometimes will never cross the minds of creators born in “first world” countries. There’s a reason why “come to Brazil” became a meme, after all. It’s a comment you’d see a lot in music videos on YouTube and social media accounts of singers and bands because it’s not uncommon for them to just… never perform here throughout their whole careers.

So it’s not just about the localization thing (as much as I think Toby is definitely overestimating the amount of micromanaging he has to do to make sure his “vision” comes across as he wants it to in other languages). It’s about the message that, even if not intended, Latin American fans of basically anything receive over and over again: you’re not getting any nice things because we kind of, like, forgot you exist? Try being born in a more important country next time.

[annabelle--cane]

what I mean: "sexual intercourse" is as much a social construct as "romantic courtship," and you discover this very quickly as a queer person if you try to talk to able bodied straight cis people who literally think the only thing that counts as Actual Sex is penis-in-vagina penetration, like they call oral "foreplay" it's so dire. various people have a lot of vested interest in cleanly defining "sex" vs "not sex" for a whole slew of reasons (ex. censorship dodging and enforcing, conferring the social clout of virginity and prowess, finding and closing loopholes about premarital sex, deciding what relationships "count" as serious partnerships, ligating what is general assault vs sexual assault vs Something That's Definitely Probably Fine And Not Sexual At All, Actually, etc.), and it's really not something you can just fall back on as obvious common sense that people are dumb for questioning.

what I say: sex isn't real and you can't have it

[bovineblogger]

[theoneofwhomisblue]

Wunk sells children for a carrot

[beyond-a-name]

let's get neglected by Mama :(

[elbiotipo]

perdón but I gotta dunk on Tobías Zorro just one more time

his statement on why he doesn't want to just let a translator do their job:

his 271 page book about how localizing the intricate wordplay and nuance of Undertale to the arcane and esoteric Japanese tongue was so fundamentally different it can never be done anywhere else lest its sacred meaning be lost:

[elbiotipo]

None of this detracts from the quality of Undertale itself and its translation which I'm sure it's excellent. I'm just saying he was willing to put on all this effort for Japanese and Japanese only and it wasn't a question of KEEPING THE TRUE MEANING OF SANS' PUNS. He just wanted to get the Japanese translation done. Just that one.

[zitongzi]

Many fucking people dont realize how often this is the case. How often times westerners will put out all the stops to make sure the japanese parts is perfect and good but then just do fuck all for the rest. How is toby fox willing to put all this extra effect into the japanese translation, but then putting zero effect into any other translations, any different than Sucker Punch flying to japan to make sure the japanese bits of Ghosts of Tsushima was accruate but then just making shit up for the mongolians and not even being arsed to go to a native american museum within their own fucking city for their native character in infamous?

[adriagan]

it fucking sucks being a disabled person who can't work and having to see these fuckass posts where someone's like "ahaha jobless people have no life and that's why everyone shitty online has No Job" and everyone and their mother reblogs it joyfully onto my dash for me to see. yes unemployed and unemployable people are truly without exception dogshit people with no hobbies and no redeeming qualities. you're so right. anyway if you'll excuse me i have to start my shift at the I'll Never Be Employed Because Of Permanent Disability And I Love Knowing How You Really See Me store

[adriagan]

if ur able to work can u reblog this i am seriously SO sick of it.

[adriagan]

btw this isn't solely a disability rights issue or an issue about people who are entirely unable to work. you should also be thinking about the people who are regarded as unhireable. transfems are hugely discriminated against in this way, people of color are passed over for less qualified white people, anyone who has any difficulty playing the interview game is less hireable... frankly anyone who made the mistake of pursuing the things they love and now has a degree for a niche field. if you still joke about Jobless People it's because you've fundamentally connected the worth of people to their labor, and specific labor, work that you see as valuable. and while i'm at it stop making fun of people who still live with their parents. asshole.

[sailatina3]

When your friend starts posting like a chud....