CURRENTLY READING: Project Hail Mary & The Left Hand of Darkness
“So wait up, I’m not sleeping alone again tonight. There’s so much to dream about, there must be more to my life…”
OVERVIEW
Names include: Binh, kin names if we’re close enough
Pronouns
Vietnamese/white american, Viet is my first language
you dont get to know my mental/physical conditions from this.
4teen, 18+ blogs DNI
Mutuals can ask for discord (no hard feelings if i say no!! im bad at talking to new people)
Other than that no DNI because they don’t work
Blanket warning for religious themes, gore/viscera, and a lot of political stuff on this blog.
Boundaries: Don’t discuss menstruation with me Okay. also if im a total stranger to you please dont address me with a name
TAG ORGANIZATION
Zero rambles: Talking tag (OLD)
.txt: Talking tag (NEW)
Zero Responds to your woes: Answering asks (OLD)
.answered: Answering asks (NEW)
The Street Lamps Flicker/TSLF: Audio drama I’m working on!
Not everything is organized…
INTERESTS
Movies/TV: House MD, del Toro’s Frankenstein, I Saw the TV Glow, D(e)ad, Dropout TV
Theatre: Melliot (particularly Adamandi, but I like it all.), The Dunwich Dolls, Falsettos, Team Starkid (particularly hatchetfield), John Proctor is the Villain, Maybe Happy Ending
Books: Frankenstein, The Crucible, Babel (R.F Kuang)
Music: MCR, FOB, Bikini Kill, Jack Off Jill, Dazey & the Scouts, Jhariah, Bonus Disc, The Sonder Bombs, Stomach Book, Skinny Girl Diet, Bratmobil, Defiance, Ohio, my local scene in general tbh, I play bass!
General topics: Religion (particularly Catholicism, but also Buddhism a bit.), (socio)linguistics, biology, writing (particularly musical theatre), foraging
it's really really funny to me that eva stratt's list of crimes canonically includes piracy. do movie only fans know they tried to take her to court for pirating everything ever published and she ron swanson'd her way out of it. i need you all to know this.
"making them afraid will make them more racist" that's wild to me, because we live in a whole culture of social consequences for antiracism anyway. It is literally safer to be a racist than it is to speak up against it, socially.
Idk about you, but "I'm afraid no one will want to be my friend if I'm a white supremacist" seems like a pretty logical thought process to have, and I wish THAT were the normal and not "I'm afraid my friends will hate me if I tell them they made racist jokes".
okay but what about a FEMALE podcast protagonist who whimpers throughout the whole thing and is always on the brink of death and thinks she's a monster for the things she's done and saves so many people and hurts so many people and fucks up and tries again and has so so so many scars. could you be normal about her or would the misogyny prevail
i'll never stop holding the opinion that systemic subjugation of women and children under patriarchy is not a result of degenerate sexuality or "urges" out of control btw. there's a reason ted bundy (yes, the serial killer) jumped at the opportunity to tell the religious right in an interview that he was corrupted by pornographic magazines. in fact i've seen the right increasingly cling to this perspective precisely because they feel it absolves them
You can make a movie with where the only white character is a man named Ray Cism whose one line of his 16 seconds of screen time is “I seriously hate women and minorities.” and you’ll find fifty bajillion reader x Ray Cism fanfics and renaissance style drawings of him with a halo of golden light
“It’s easier for trans women to pass/be stealth!!”
“It’s easier for trans men to pass/be stealth!!”
Actually it’s easier for people with very specific bodies (white, thin, average height) with large incomes and supportive families to transition medically in a way which is more likely to conform to strict ideas of ‘man’ and ‘woman’
I swear every time I see someone try to make the argument for one of us having it better they exclusively either cite celebrities (again, see white, rich, thin) or assume that the people they know irl are representative of every trans person.
It also begs the point that YOU DO NOT KNOW IF SOMEONE IS STEALTH UNLESS THEY TELL YOU. No one actually knows how many trans people successfully live as stealth.
Most of the passing trans people I know personally are women, but most of the trans people I know to be stealth are men. I also know far more trans women than I do trans men. Not to ignore the fact that these arguments completely erase non binary people who are pressured to just pick a binary gender to ‘pass’ as because it is functionally impossible to be a ‘stealth’ non binary person.
It is completely possible to have important conversations about the specific oppressions that different kinds of trans people face without framing one group as being completely objectively better off. Stop trying to pit us against each other. It isn’t easy for *anyone* to be trans in this world.
Rocking back and forth. Stratt is not cruel. Grace is not innocent. Rocky is not naive. Every member of the crew was selected for their skill. Please. Allow these multi-faceted characters their facets. Allow Stratt her coldness and utalitarianism while acknowledging that she only did what she had to and she never took any joy in it, that she was a fundamentally kind person who was driven to awful extremes by her love for the world and humanity. Allow Grace his kindness and trauma without ignoring the selfishness and fear that fueled his choice. Allow Rocky his blind spots and learning curve without disregarding his intelligence and adaptability. Allow Yao, Ilyukhina, Dubois, and Shapiro their unique personalities and quirks without neglecting that they were the astronauts chosen to savr the entire world, that they were captains and engineers and scientists so prolific they were entrusted by Eva Stratt with the fate of humanity. Please. I beg.
Rocking back and forth. Stratt is not cruel. Grace is not innocent. Rocky is not naive. Every member of the crew was selected for their skill. Please. Allow these multi-faceted characters their facets. Allow Stratt her coldness and utalitarianism while acknowledging that she only did what she had to and she never took any joy in it, that she was a fundamentally kind person who was driven to awful extremes by her love for the world and humanity. Allow Grace his kindness and trauma without ignoring the selfishness and fear that fueled his choice. Allow Rocky his blind spots and learning curve without disregarding his intelligence and adaptability. Allow Yao, Ilyukhina, Dubois, and Shapiro their unique personalities and quirks without neglecting that they were the astronauts chosen to savr the entire world, that they were captains and engineers and scientists so prolific they were entrusted by Eva Stratt with the fate of humanity. Please. I beg.
i've been using computers since 2009 i know how computers work you people need to stop assuming people know nothing about computers. yes i know you can change icons. i just made this post because i wanted to make a silly post about my puter. so many of you people would be the least fun person at parties because of how you go "omgf youre so stupid wait until you learn about (thing)" like politely. shut the fuck up and start being nicer to strangers on the internet
have some fucking joy and whimsy and instead say "its so awesome people are learning about this"
I work with kids and sometimes we have to do safety lessons with them about like, not telling strangers on the internet your home address or something. And sometimes the kids wont understand why, so you have to impart upon them that, well, some adults want to hurt children. And thats kind of difficult to do, because you have to beat around the bush, both because you dont want to scare them (while still making them understand how serious it is) and because you might lose your job if you explain it too straight forward.
Luckily, for some reason, the villain of one of the most popular franchises with children for the last 10 years happens to be a serial child murderer. So when a kid asks why they shouldnt trust strangers, instead of hand wringing and humhawing my answer out, I can just say "we dont always know when a strange adult has good intentions with children, or when they are William Afton."
It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.
He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.
Like, look at this stuff????
It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!
Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.
And then there's this one:
The Fantasy
For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.
The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.
But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.
Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.
This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.
"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.
"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.
"We often fantasized about Dick's joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles." - Al Bean, about The Fantasy.
I love it. Something about it feels so incredibly human. The emotion on display, even without a face to show it. This is magnificent. Truly magnificent. I feel it in my soul.
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