VOLITION — An RPG, huh? That phrase feels familiar, somehow.
INTERFACING [Medium: Success] — Not just the phrase. These mechanics, the feel of arrow keys under your hands.. You’ve done this before. Not this exact game, but similar.
ENCYCLOPEDIA [Challenging: Success] — The game you are looking for is OFF, an RPG made in ‘08 by one Mortis Ghost about something called The Batter, an entity sent to purify the world he resides in.
CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] — That sounds just like you.
COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] — Yes, but despite the respect you hold for this noble mission, you never quite finished the game. You got stuck on one of the last bosses: The Queen.
INLAND EMPIRE [Formidable: Success] — You just could not do it. Looking at her made you sick.
PAIN THRESHOLD [Medium: Success] — So you don’t know the ending. This has apparently been subconsciously eating away at you for a while.
LOGIC [Easy: Failure] — ..Maybe the lieutenant knows something? You should ask him. Ask him if he has ever beaten OFF before. It’s the only way to calm your lore-driven heart!
YOU — “Kim, can I ask you something?”
KIM KITSURAGI — “What’s the question? I hope it’s related to the investigation.”
RHETORIC [Challenging: Success] — Watch out! You say “beat off” here to mean completing a playthrough of OFF, the RPG video game by Mortis Ghost. However, the phrase “beat off” is also euphemism for masturbation! Without context, it would appear you were talking about masturbating!
YOU — Whoa… I’d better be more careful!
RHETORIC — Yeah, you’d better. Now say “never mind” and never ask him anything like that. Ever.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] — Ever? What a party pooper. It’s cool, man. You’re cool. Kim’s cool. It’s important to get to know your partner.
YOU — “Actually, never mind.”(Don’t ask him)
PERCEPTION (SIGHT) [Medium: Success] — Out of the corner of your eye, you see a gigantic centipede on the ceiling.
"Mario Mario" is an anachronism. He and his brother were only ever referred to by mononyms in their lifetime, like most residents of the Mushroom Kingdom at the time - multi-part names were typically reserved for members of the Toadstool dynasty, and even these were more like titles or Roman cognomina than what we would call a surname today. His putative ennoblement as founder of the "House of Mario" came centuries later as the collapsing feudal order sought additional sources of legitimacy
#mushroom kingdom folklore says that he sleeps beneath a warp pipe to arise in the time of the kingdom's greatest need #he's definitely shown up a few times but it's hard to tell if he has risen from the dead or is just in the middle of some time travel shit #historians hate him.
While the historical evidence for Mario having a younger brother is quite concrete, the name of said brother is less certain. "Luigi" is generally held to originate with a separate figure from a series of chthonic myths, who originally served as a sort of psychopomp charged with capturing spirits that escaped the underworld. The strongest case for a contemporary figure named Luigi comes from the Waffle Kingdom sagas; however, this Luigi's brother is a gladiator named Gonzales.
now I know that there's no way for me to respond to this without a bunch of fans of the modern adaptations ruining my inbox for the next week, but there's no evidence of Waluigi - or indeed Luigi - in any of the contemporary versions of the Mario-Wario sagas. The name "Wario" itself is a later invention, held to be a pun on warui that likely emerged after the adoption of Japanese scripts in the Koopa States.
The conflict between Mario and his "boyhood rival" was one over political influence on his home island and Mario's long absences - in particular his trip to Sarasaland. While later Sarasan sources would heavily reference Mario's brother, he is absent from both the preceding narrative and the unrest in Mario's homeland. The historical consensus is that the Sarasaland journey was one of Mario's earliest wanderings, with his brother attempting to manage affairs in his absence and proving unfit. The invention of a separate "Wario" character and its development into an explicit coup d'etat were later poetic creations, as is distancing of the "Wario" figure from the later depictions of Mario's brother as the more cowardly and reserved "Luigi".
(As an aside: "Mario Land" is a mistranslation. The original Mushroomer and Sarasan chronicles are better translated as "the land of Mario", without connotations of ownership. The modern scholastic consensus is that it refers to Yoshi's Island, where Mario and his brother spent their youth and later established a small manor, not, as commonly depicted, a "Mario Castle". The emphasis on Mario as king of "Mario Land" was a mostly successful political maneuver by the Yoshis to retain coequal status with the Mushroom Kingdom heartlands in the face of 18th-century expansionist pan-Mushroomism.)
The later emergence of "Waluigi" is an ironic recombination of two figures from the same historical source, and may have originated as a farce parodying the Mario stories. (The name "Waluigi" is also conflated with the early Norman figure Varr Yngwi, who is generally credited with the invention of tennis.)
Santa has once again returned to the North Pole, to be interred on his peppermint throne and judge the children of the world, kept alive by the sacrifice of 1,000 naughty kids every single day
There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of cookies and presents, and the laughter of a jolly old elf
Context for anyone who is wondering: Lamine Yamal's parents won an UNICEF raffle for a charity photoshoot in which Barça players posed with kids, and 5 month old Lamine happened to get 20yo Messi. Which is like. Literally insane
i’m going to be really honest with you guys i think the tendency to read the absolute worst possible intentions into every action you don’t agree with is getting too automatic and it’s eating you from the inside out
I’m a busy man. Got two caution signs to remind me to slow down sometimes. Got a vibrating megaphone. Clocks. Radiation. Four goats. Got half a tank of simple columnar epithelial tissue. 60% through my day. Half a tank of gas. And it’s only 10:50.
Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!
Here's what I need you to do:
If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.
Yes, that's really it.
I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.
If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.
I am not talking about that unless I have results to share. That would bias the results.
I did write them down and I did share them with a trusted contact who can prove that I wrote them down the same day I made this post. (While I did so before I made this post, I am not sure they will be able to provide proof of that, because I did so on the same day.)
OP are you interested in...?
Do you have to click through to see the post? Does the clickthrough contain the words "mature content"? Then yes.
OP are you interested if the post is about...?
I am interested in the mature content labels, not the content of the post. Is there a clickthrough that contains the words "mature content"? Then yes.
Yes, please. I felt really silly when I noticed I forgot to include that in the original post.
Is it okay if I send you my own posts?
Yes, those are perfect for what I'm looking for. I actually need to do some processing on a post to make it useful for testing my hypothesis, and this makes it easy.
Are you looking for "potentially mature content" also, or just "mature content"?
I want both, please. Anything that throws up a blocking screen that you have to click through. The distinctions between them are one of the things I am hoping to study.
Does it matter when the post was made originally?
Technically no. There's no way to respond to this without introducing some bias in the results, and I don't want that. However, I do collect some data on a post as part of making it useful to me, and that data is easier to collect if the post is recent.
What if I request content label review on a post after I send it to you?
I need to see the mature content label to be able to use the post. Because the mature content label hides the content of the post, it is very hard to use a post that no longer has a mature content label. You could send me a screenshot, but people could use that to lie to me.
Basically, it's more work for you to make it usable to me.
OP are you a transphobe? It would ruin the experiment for me if you're a transphobe.
I promise I'm not a transphobe and not doing this for transphobic reasons. You should still double-check that I'm not a transphobe for yourself, though. I am not sure that this study will have the useful effects you're hoping for; I am studying something specific, and it may not be what you hope.
America instills violence in men from a young age.
It’s irrefutable that men’s present anger is lacking in sufficient specificity and articulation. As a feminist movement, this should not be alien to us. There was a time, more than half a century ago, when women’s anger and frustration were equally inarticulate. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in search of illuminating what she deemed to be “the problem that has no name,” the problem that “lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women … a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning.” Her words from the ’60s still ring true today:
"It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough."
Might we now, 60 years later, say the same thing of men?
Without a movement to teach them or an analysis to guide them, their present anger lacks the sort of precision that could help us feel comfortable with it. It’s anger that stems from abstract knowledge, a gut feeling that injustice is being done: words on the tip of the tongue, but never quite spoken. Men don’t know exactly what the injustice is, but they perceive it nonetheless. Something is off. A stench without cause. An odor emanating from somewhere.
Here’s the thing: paucity of specificity and inadequate articulation do not render men’s current frustration illegitimate; if anything, they bolster the case for further investigation and lay bare the urgency of this historical moment. It’s time we entertain the idea that men might be picking up on something real. There has been hypocrisy, and it is worth being angry about.
Men look at the feminist movement and—subconsciously, I think—ask themselves: What is feminism doing to protect me? I need protection, too, you know.
In general, we dismiss this feeling. Protect you? After what you’ve spent centuries doing to us? Protect yourself, asshole.
Though I understand where it comes from, I’m afraid this sort of terse reaction stops us from asking the important questions. Namely: If we say we abhor the violence of men and want it to cease, what are we doing to stop boys from being recruited into it?
We have not embodied gender equality sufficiently. As a feminist movement, we have worked tirelessly to protect women and girls from the violence that is all too prevalent in their lives but have said next to nothing about the violence facing men and boys. We have fought tooth and nail against institutions that predominantly brutalize women but have done little to combat the institutions—institutions like military bases, prisons, and police training facilities—that so often brutalize men, too. I think that’s in part because men operate (and benefit from) these institutions, but that’s no reason to ignore them. Just because a man is in charge, that doesn’t mean the institution is safe for other men. Men and boys need protection from the violence of powerful men every bit as much as women and girls do. Powerful men—men who are used to enacting violence with impunity—are a threat to us all.
What’s worse, we seem to have decried men’s anger wholesale. We have labeled angry men as bad men and, in so doing, have lost vital nuance. Because they cannot articulate it to us in sufficient language—because they have yet to locate the precise source of the stench—we have denied any possibility that the anger men feel might be righteous.
Here’s the thing: men should be angry, and their anger is righteous, albeit misplaced. If the culture that raised you sees you as little more than a future agent of military, police, or corporate violence, it would be strange for you not to be angry. Men have been ignored. They have been brutalized. They have been told that it is their job to do the policing and soldiering and brutalizing on behalf of us all. They have endured grave gender-based violence, and rather than help them locate it, we’ve mostly told them they’re making the whole thing up. [...]
What if we encouraged men to trust their noses instead of instructing them to relinquish their frustration? What if, instead of spending energy denying that something is amiss, we dedicate our energy to affirming that something is off and join men as they search for the source of the stench? What if we say to men, “We agree. Something isn’t right. Your body and psyche are being exploited to nefarious ends. You were groomed unfairly,” and then rage and scream and investigate alongside them?
This is where I am flummoxed and exhausted by contemporary popular feminism, if only because it is so obvious. We will volunteer for hours outside an abortion clinic, helping to protect women who are entering from being harassed. We do so because it is both vital and necessary. We do so because we believe in a world where people have agency over their own bodies. But we do next to nothing about military recruitment centers or police academies, institutions whose primary job is to instill violence in men—to take their bodies and their minds and exploit them for the violent ends of the ruling class.
Can we stop scratching our heads and pretending we do not know how America became a nation of such violence? Can we stop acting surprised when, after raising our boys as child soldiers, their violence turns back against us? Can we own up to the truth: that we cannot ask boys to conceptualize ruthlessly killing faraway brown people, then reasonably expect them to turn it off when they come home? That we cannot raise boys to fantasize about guns and war throughout their childhood, then act surprised when they shoot up a school? That we cannot raise our boys to be fine with abusing Afghani prisoners, then expect them not to abuse us, too?
As a feminist movement, it’s high time we pick a lane. It’s time we take a stand with veterans and against the military. It’s time we declare that we’re no longer OK living in a violent world. We must decide that the dignity and bodily autonomy of men and boys matter to us enough to fight for them. We must rage against the myriad institutions that insist on making murderers out of our little boys. As a feminist movement, we must categorically decry war, in all its forms.
This article is by Jacob Tobia (they/them), a genderqueer person, and is an excerpt from their book Before They Were Men.
I feel very similarly to Jacob. While people will bring up "feminism helps men too!" as a comeback when relevant, on a large scare (especially with regards to pop feminism, which is a loose and largely useless combination of cultural radical feminism and liberal capitalist feminism), feminism has failed to actually, materially prove this. We have a massive messaging issue, and the failures of feminism for men, all trans people, and women are all interconnected, as are the failures of feminism to be critical of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. It's not that people haven't been talking about these issues - we have for decades - but that hasn't solved anything.
We need to make men's issues feminist issues in the minds of every person who knows about feminism. Feminists need to be the loudest and most passionate on framing war as gendered-based violence for those classed as men, on the lack of awareness for perceived-male victims of sexual violence, particularly forced-to-penetrate rape, on how the patriarchal weaponizes stereotypes of men as having an innate inclination towards physical and sexual violence to dehumanize men of color and all trans and gender non-conforming people.
One goal we should have for feminism, is that the average teenage boy has, on some level, an awareness that feminism is fighting for him. Many teenage girls already have that awareness - even if the are anti-feminist, they still have a sense feminism purports to be fighting on their behalf, for issues that concern them. Whereas many teenage boys - even if they are pro-feminist - do not necessarily view feminism as for them, they see it as for women, and they wish to support women. Meanwhile, this harms all trans and gender non-conforming people, whose place in feminism has always been tenuous and reliant on convincing cis women that we are "just like them" and ignoring the ways that feminism has always been built on profoundly cissexist beliefs and principles. All of this must change for collective liberation to be possible, on a gendered level and a total civilizational level.
