No one's innocent in crime town

Ruth (aka Red), 33, she/her, Scotland. Everything fine to reblog unless otherwise stated. I don't reliably tag triggers or spoilers because I forget, so if that's an issue for you, be careful/avoid. Bi, cis, VERY white, sorta disabled, polyamorous, illustrator (art @ongoingart), Quaker, lifelong dork. My first word was 'Zaphod'. According to my dear friend Kofi, "a notable wit and raconteur." Probably NOT an octopus, several cats and a large snake in a human suit, but it's best not to check.

[creekfiend]

I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while and I am sorry if it comes off oddly. How do you navigate an intelligence gap in a relationships? I have dated men of equivalent or greater intellect and found them inadequate in other ways, but when I have dated men less intelligent than me I become frustrated with them and their insecurities bleed into the relationship. You and Ship (or the personas you perform publicly) seem content. How do you avoid getting frustrated? [cont.]

"[part 2] I mean no insult to Ship of course. They seem very attentive and I used to really enjoy their detective skits. From the contents of your blogs they come across as so much less intellectually curious that it surprises me that you are compatible. Do you get adequate intellectual stimulation from other relationships/is that not a need for you in a partner/are my standards unrealistic?"

i have no idea how to respond to this. we have all been in absolutely helpless hysterics about it for the last thirty minutes. this is by far the most deranged ask I have received about my personal life on this website in my fifteen year career on here, and that is saying quite a lot

i can't decide which part of this message is my favorite, but if I HAD to say, probably the part where you appear to be entirely in earnest about this? in almost any other case I would assume a message like this was an elaborate way of insulting me or my partner or both, but I really genuinely don't think that's the case for you, which is actually MORE confusing. its just so compelling. there's so many layers here. i want to hire someone to cross stitch this for me so I can hang it in our living room. i can hear ship intermittently breaking out in peals of hysterical laughter in the kitchen

[thedreadvampy]

20 minute run today which is the longest run we've ever done by 150% (previous longest was 8 minutes)

this couch to 5k business might actually be quite effective. by my estimate we did slightly under 2 miles (3.1 km) of solid running so a) that's really not bad and b) we are 60% of the way to a full 5k and it is actively getting easier not harder

[thedreadvampy]

tattoo it on my soul

[thedreadvampy]

incredibly relevant thing to remember. especially when I'm getting frustrated with newer activists bringing up things I've seen deadended repeatedly. you learn by trying and seeing how you fail and reabsorbing that failure as learning.

[thedreadvampy]

this book is a great book to read if you just want to fucking scream

[thedreadvampy]

[thedreadvampy]

incredibly relevant thing to remember. especially when I'm getting frustrated with newer activists bringing up things I've seen deadended repeatedly. you learn by trying and seeing how you fail and reabsorbing that failure as learning.

[thedreadvampy]

this book is a great book to read if you just want to fucking scream

[thedreadvampy]

incredibly relevant thing to remember. especially when I'm getting frustrated with newer activists bringing up things I've seen deadended repeatedly. you learn by trying and seeing how you fail and reabsorbing that failure as learning.

[kinkydorah]

troy and abed with the vaaaaaampires 🎵

[thedreadvampy]

Wait I've just seen the photo that the right are performatively outraged about seeing on Zac Polanski's Instagram

that's a really funny t-shirt I might need to make that t-shirt.

(goes without saying, no it's not an actual threat, unlike retweeting, say, direct calls to attack asylum hotels or MPs)

[40ouncesandamule]

Activist charged with felony after giving border agent "duress code" that wiped his phone

The government says destroying his own data during an airport interrogation was illegal.

A few things of note:

This is why people to your left have been chiding you about the "pedo" panic: now, the government can accuse you of being a "pedo" to justify committing crimes against you.

This is why people to your left have been chiding you about the "terrorist" moniker: for the last half century, the government can accuse you of being a "terrorist" to justify committing crimes against you.

[thedreadvampy]

Vatican City is so statistically funny man. Population density of 2,200/km² but it's only got a population of 882. Migration rate of 1000 per 1000. Gender balance of 95:5. 2.5 Popes/km². But we all have to pretend that's a real country to appease the Catholics I guess

[apolladay]

What’s the furthest distance you’ve driven in one day?

* less than 100 miles (<161 KM)

* 100- 200 miles (161-322 KM)

* 200-300 miles (322-483 KM)

* 300-400 miles (483-644 KM)

* 400-500 miles (644-805 KM)

* 500-600 miles (805-966 KM)

*600-700 miles (966-1127 KM)

* over 700 miles (>1127 KM)

* it’s complicated

* see results

What’s the furthest distance you’ve driven in one day?

less than 100 miles (<161 KM)

100- 200 miles (161-322 KM)

200-300 miles (322-483 KM)

300-400 miles (483-644 KM)

400-500 miles (644-805 KM)

500-600 miles (805-966 KM)

600-700 miles (966-1127 KM)

over 700 miles (>1127 KM)

it's complicated

see results

Remaining time: 3 days 19 hours

[mangled-by-disuse]

lot of people in the notes throwing out numbers that suggest they think 55-60mph is a reasonable long-term average, and i am having another Moment about how much faster, e.g., Canadian and American roads are than British ones

bc when I think about it I think the best times I've ever made on long (hour-plus) drives have been maaaaaaybe a bit above 45mph? without breaks, on the motorway, avoiding rush hour.

like, my longest drive has been about 450 miles and (subtracting breaks) it took about 9 hours, so i guess a 50mph average. right now Google is telling me that drive takes 8h 1min, but that's probably because it's 9pm and if you drove it now you would get the absolute minimum traffic. so best-case scenario you might get a 55mph average - but not during the day! not on a drive longer than 500 miles!

my point being: holy shit sometimes i forget how much difference road layout makes. fym people are out here saying 12 hours is probably 800-850 miles? the fuck it is. 12 hours is like 600 miles on a good day. how fast are you people going?

there are people out here claiming to have driven over 1500 miles! in 24 hours! that's a 62mph average with no breaks! were you driving on a fucking conveyor belt WHERE WERE THE OTHER CARS IN THIS EQUATION?!?!?

[thedreadvampy]

posts that remind you we live in the world's 48th most densely populated country (higher if you don't count the 10 small-island overseas colonies above the UK on the list) (and if you don't count Vatican City. which you shouldn't. because it's only got a population density of 2,205/km² because it's not even half a km²)

[thedreadvampy]

I consider myself politically aligned with transfeminism although I am not myself transfem. having said which. Tumblr is still Tumblr and there are a lot of half-assed takes said full-chested on here and the one that I think is perhaps the most common among big transfeminist blogs is

where I would roughly frame the central role of transmisogyny as "transmisogyny represents the point where the horror of gender deviance and the disgust of femininity and womanhood meet, and so trans women represent the apex target of cisheteropatriarchy"

some of these women appear (in what may be a genuinely held belief or may be poorly phrasing a tumblr post) to frame the picture more as "homophobia and misogyny experienced by women and non-transfem queer people is a byproduct of the hatred of transfemininity."

and I don't think. That's true. Or I think it's a confusion of cause and effect.

Trans women represent the nightmare scenario for cisheteropatriarchy - It's the fact that there's a woman! It's the choice to become a woman, which both implies a woman is a person with agency and that being a woman is a worthy thing! It's a deliberate separation from cisheteropatriarchal gender roles! It's a refusal of the implied subject-object binary of cisheteropatriarchy! It's fucking Gay Shit!!! - which is why transfems will always be catching more fire than a person otherwise similarly positioned who is either a) not trans or b) not aligned with womanhood. this is. pretty indisputable.

however what I do dispute is the frequent implication that this means that misogyny against cis (...) women (...) or violent homophobia against gay men, and in particular violent aggression towards gender nonconformity in general, is either a) collateral damage or b) mistargeted or partial transmisogyny based on proximity to an abstracted transfemininity.

transmisogyny is the point where the sexgender class systems of cisheteropatriarchy intersect. that doesn't make it the only focus of cisheteropatriarchal suppression, just the most extreme expression of it.

but like. gender nonconformity is an experience discrete from and parallel to transness (you can tell for a start because the world is full of transfems who are butch dykes and transmascs who are high fem queens with glitter beards). Misogyny too is not a side effect of transmisogyny, it's a contributor. and sometimes the tone of these discourses waaaaay overcorrects towards All Homophobia And All Misogyny Is A Shadow Of Transmisogyny.

a thing can be two things. a vector of oppression is rarely a strict binary, especially in the case of something as culturally fundamental, entrenched and complex as sexgender.

Understanding and combatting transmisogyny must be at the centre of any effective feminism. But that's because it's a confluence of the different forces at play, not because it's the simple, singular underlying force. It's where misogyny, homophobia, social policing of gender, patriarchal masculinity, the horror of the changeable body and the rejection of otherness coalesce into one singular direction.

anyway all this to say. I saw a post where a big transfeminist blog said something along the lines of 'there's no queer-coding in films it's just transfem-coding because villainising effeminacy in men is an expression of transmisogyny" and this. Is the tendency that sits poorly with me because like no? Transmisogyny is an expression of villainising gender deviance, which is a force which is also and often initially focused on homosexuality. It's one of the main contributors to transmisogyny, because external gender deviance (eg effeminacy or butchness) represents fundamental gender deviance (rejection of cisheterosexuality as a gendered power relation) and that is what cisheteropatriarchy exists to suppress. But not all gender deviance is transfeminine in character and not all punishment of it is transmisogynistic. Confluent not underlying. Gay men are being punished for being gay men, not for proximity to transfemininity. Cis women are punished for failure to perform adequate ciswomanhood, not for proximity to trans women.

None of this btw is to deny for a second that transmisogyny is the most potent expression of sexgender enforcement. but. like. I think the idea that it's the sole focus at times leads people into really unhelpful patterns of theory where everything is flattened through the lens of How This Represents Proximity To Transfemininity. at worst it leads (SOME!!!!) transfeminists to a place where they appear to think that misogyny qua misogyny or homophobia qua homophobia isn't like. A thing. which I don't love.

[thedreadvampy]

music is scary but it's ESPECIALLY SCARY!!!! if the talent you're meant to be bringing to the table is largely about Projecting Confidence And Swagger but you're very sure you're bad at music.

[thememedaddy]

[thedreadvampy]

I'm so business

[thedreadvampy]

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE workwise. I am feeling SO GOOD about this project I've been working on for 2+ years that nobody else understands or cares about which iiiiiiis

I have test built some backend architecture on our website to create standardised wording for all our services so that it can be used modularly to make different framings for different pages and audiences.

So like there's a backend form making up the page for each service, and if you change one thing using the established variables for that service, it not only changes on the page but it also updates everywhere that service is described, including in fundraising and recruitment and funder-facing parts of the website.

(filling in a new form will automatically populate a front end page and add mentions of it to everywhere relevant, so eg if I add a new counselling service in Edinburgh partnered with the City Council it will automatically add info about the service into the page about Edinburgh, the page about Counselling, and the page about collaborations and funders; if I mark all our Peer Connecting services as closed, it will remove the information about Peer Connecting being a thing we do, etc)

It's made up of 4 hierarchical modules, from the big Approaches (the broad theories of change we use, like counselling, peer support, or psychoeducation) down through Practice Methods (because we offer deliver the same thing differently in different areas and to different audiences, this means we can decide centrally what we Always Mean when we say 'this service is a Peer Support Group') and into the granular practical details ('Services' - where do we deliver this methodology and to whom, and 'Instances', which is an optional bottom-level module that's just like. When is the next recovery dropin? What are the dates for the next round of this course?)

AND THAT!!!! LETS US RATIONALISE OUR ENTIRE MESSAGING STRUCTURE! every Approach and Practice will have its own clear set of shaping questions to help sell it! Every Practice has to match up with the Approaches we can speak confidently to! We don't end up with totally different messaging for the stress management classes we run in Edinburgh and the identical stress management classes we run in Dalkeith!

INTERNALLY it means that we'll have like. A really clear messaging bank so if we need to make a poster or a pitch or a funding application there's really specific pick up and paste wording available to build off.

and it also means we can start tagging other types of content (like case studies or reports or volunteer opportunities) so that they are all interconnected.

I am also hoping that down the line (if I get it off the ground):

We can build in some auxiliary messaging modules which cover stuff people are asking about or looking for (eg information about how and why we work with specific underserved communities; information about individual teams; etc)

I can set up some kind of integration between SharePoint and Wordpress, so that people can add/edit info directly through our existing work systems without them having to duplicate work or me having to manually input it to the website (I'm not gonna worry about it yet though because just having the standardised format will already cut work on site updates in half)

In my dreams, I can ALSO build a similar tagging system On SharePoint so when me or fundraising or HR need to work on something it's all super searchable. I don't think SharePoint is up to that though.

anyway even in its simplified form this has been a HUGE development project so far, I've learnt how to use a bunch of new wordpress tools and plugins I haven't used before, I've put together indicative lists for everything, I've built MS Word versions of the staff-side forms for review, I've got sitemaps to show how it's gonna create multiple parallel user journeys, a list of custom page blocks, draft copy to plug the variables into, some visual dummies to show how the blocks should look on Wordpress, and the whole post type architecture more or less built.

our web devs have the stylesheets locked down so I can't build the dynamic blocks (and also my html is Not That Good Yet). all I need to do before I can brief that in is build a full dummy journey and. agree and finalise the forms. then I hand off the build to the devs and the population to senior management and leave it with them until both are ready for me to populate the website.

SO ANYWAY. I'm presenting this BEAST of a project next week to the senior leadership stakeholders for approval and to start finalising the information. So I've been trying to coalesce all my spreadsheets and variable lists and sitemaps and backend work etc into something that makes sense without me explaining things like JSON and page taxonomies and custom blocks.

and like. In doing that I'm really realising a) how much work I've done and b) how good the work I've done is. Like because this has been a passion project I've been tinkering with and learning new tools and ideas on a steep curve, my focus has been on the remaining loose ends or duplications or recursions. It's literally been scattered over 5 different platforms, none of which are aligned because I'm sketching things out as I go. and now I'm stepping back and looking at all of it at once and bringing it together and going hey. Fuck. This might be a really robust data system I built here without knowing how to do any of it when I started.

Like even if it permanently stalls out at SLT, I have really fucking Done Something here. This is my fucking systems development magnum opus. It's SO CLEAN and I think!!! It's very workable!!!! If I can get this running it will give me at least 2-3 years of Great At My Job confidence boost MINIMUM and it will be in every interview I ever do.

[thedreadvampy]

[highflying businesswoman romcom protagonist voice]

Good news, honey, the big presentation went great!

[thedreadvampy]

everything is so sounds all the time