thank you SO MUCH for reminding me about [feature of patriarchy] and [problem caused by lack of kids' sex ed] random tumblr user in the notes! louder for those in the back!
Part of community action and moving away from capitalist structures can be being a community caretaker. It's doing what we tend to historically identify as ""women's work"" — cooking, cleaning, childcare, gardening, needle and fiber work, etc.
It's not just for women. It's literally just a different form of labor. It's important.
It's mending not only your own clothes, but the clothes of your friends, family, and community members who do not have the ability to mend themselves. It's knitting or crocheting practical items like gloves, hats, socks, and scarves and gifting them to those who need them directly or donating them to a local org who gets them out into the community. It's making blankets out of old tshirts and wash rags out of the scraps. It's offering to watch your friend's kid for an hour or two so they can get some rest. If you have a living situation where you have access to land it's growing a garden and sharing the crop. It's making a hotdish for a friend or neighbor when they're not doing well. It's going over and doing dishes for someone who is struggling.
It's not right that women have been historically forced into doing these things under Patriarchal rule. They are tasks anyone can do to improve their lives and the lives of others around them. The idea that their Patriarchal connection to womanhood makes them unimportant or not useful is rooted in misogynist bias.
giggled at something and my coworker comes out of the break room and goes "I just heard like, a haunted child laugh... so weird." and I'm like okay so it was a normal regular alive adult laugh actually
There's a paradox in a lot of plural spaces. System kids are welcome, but only if they're Literal Children who stay in child-only soft boxes where they can be ignored. If a kid wants to have an adult conversation, then they're spoken over, pushed away, or otherwise discounted more often than not- and if they're accepted, then it's often at the cost of expecting them to have absolutely no childlike qualities to "prove" that they're mature enough to stay around. We even see this pattern within systems sometimes.
What are systems without adult members supposed to do if the only place system kids can talk is in the Super Soft Safe Box? What about system kids who want to talk about theoretical physics or drugs or sex or a thousand other taboos? What about kids who function as adults? And what about system kids who are kids but don't want to live their lives in the Super Soft Safe Box like the world expects them to?
Acceptance of system kids as being wildly different from each other in mindset and ability is improving, but we still have a long way to go in treating system kids with a shred of respect and decency in wider plural spaces.
Not to mention... why is there so much intense focus on mental age as some universal concept in the first place? It feels like a lot of the plural community takes the concept of mental age as a given without considering where that idea comes from, how it affects how they treat others, and how it interacts with systemic discrimination and ableism. It can sometimes be a useful construct if approached critically, but I see so little critical thought about it.
If you want some reading on the topic, one of the articles cited is worth at least a skim- it's a fairly good surface overview of eugenics and its tie to IQ/mental age, immigration, racism, ableism, etc.
ID below the cut with the full quotes- sorry to alt texters, I fit as much as I could in there but the text limit is real.
[Image one ID begins:]
There's a subtle sort of discrimination to how a lot of plural spaces treat system kids/littles. Especially those in adult bodies, or with a particularly large gap from their body's age.
"Littles must always be supervised in online spaces or else they'll bother adults and be preyed upon." "There must be an adult in your system if you're bodily an adult- they should handle life while the kids go away to never be seen by adults again. Littles should only talk to other littles. Anything else is unsafe and sometimes pedophilic. Right?" "Littles shouldn't be in charge. They're supposed to be cared for by everyone else and kept out of sight." "You're welcome here! You just have to only ever talk in the Baby Zone that no adults ever visit to talk to you. Yeah, it's empty and no one will answer. But you want to talk, right?" "Sorry sweetie, the adults are talking and you can't be here. Even if you're capable of understanding, consenting, etc. You're not allowed to be here with us if you're not a real adult." "Littles can't take care of themselves or handle any adult responsibilities, ever!" "Is there an adult I can talk to?"
Blue, an anthro cat sitting down, looks angry at the above phrases.
What are adult-bodied systems with no "brain adults" supposed to do? Drawing of a family of stick figures, all of whom are either child-short or hunching to be shorter.
What about systems whose caretakers are their children? Systems where there is no older person to supervise? Systems finding ways to live an adult life when no one inside aligns with it? What are you supposed to do when a 5-year-old does your taxes and drives you home?
"Just grow up." Do I get a choice, or are you ripping that away from me too?
[End image one ID.]
[Begin image two ID.]
Why is "mental age" the bar people are using to decide whether someone is worthy of autonomy and respect, anyway? Where does the concept of mental age come from in the first place, and why does it exist?
From Wilson, R. A. (2024). Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c9a5f080:
"Eugenic traits:
Prominent among the eugenic traits found in sterilization laws were those concerning cognitive ability and mental health. These traits, ordered in terms of their frequency in U.S. state and Canadian provincial sterilization laws, included feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, criminality, imbecility, idiocy, sexual perversion (or depravity), mental unfitness (or deficiency), and moral depravity (or degeneracy). As this listing suggests, these laws especially targeted those perceived to have some kind of cognitive limitation or psychiatric condition on the grounds that they were unfit and would propagate these eugenic traits to their children; approximately 70% of all eugenic traits mentioned in sexual sterilization laws in the United States and Canada concerned cognitive ability or mental health. Given this, there was a clear role for psychologists in programs of eugenic sterilization, given their expertise in psychological testing (Rose, 1985). Such testing and subsequent sterilization were conducted through emerging forms of institutionalization, such as “training schools for the feeble-minded,” especially as eugenics gained state-level backing (Miller et al., 2015).
One of the roles of psychologists was to develop ways to measure those who were cognitively or psychiatrically subnormal. Emerging intelligence tests were adapted to quantify and classify those deemed “feeble-minded”or “mentally deficient” (Thomson, 1998; Trent, 1994). Binet’s famous test of intelligence, for example, incorporated the more specific existing folk categories of “imbecile” and “idiot,” adapting these to designate developmentally delayed children with mental ages, respectively, of 3–7 and 2 years. Following the translation of Binet’s test from French into English by Henry Goddard in 1908, “moron” was coined in 1910 to pick out those in the general population with a putatively fixed mental age of 8–12 years. This resulted in a three-tiered schema of intellectual subnormality—moron, imbecile, idiot—that came to be widely used in the eugenics movement.
In the hands of the psychologist Lewis Terman, what became the Stanford-Binet test initially was deployed in selecting army recruits near the end of World War I (1914–1918) before being used on the general population. The three-tiered scheme was accordingly fed into the newly minted idea of an intelligence quotient (IQ) that remains with us 100 years on, with the fixed mental ages of moron, imbecile, and idiot mapped onto standard deviations from a normalized IQ of 100. From the 1920s, these tests were widely used to identify children who were candidates for eugenic sterilization, whether they were already housed in segregated institutions or within the regular school system or general community."
From Asilverm, & Asilverm. (n.d.). What’s My Age Again: Why Mental Age Theory Hurts People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.disabilitywisdom.com/2018/12/21/whats-my-age-again-why-mental-age-theory-hurts-people-with-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities/:
The concept of “mental age” was first introduced by Alfred Binet, co-creator of the first IQ tests, in the early twentieth century. Generally, “mental age” has been measured by comparing an individual’s score on a standardized IQ test with the average performance of their same-age peers. For people with IDD, “mental age” may also be estimated by comparing the person’s demonstrated physical, speech, adaptive or cognitive skills against the average for various age groups.
Not surprisingly, “mental age” came about alongside the eugenics movement in the United States. Mental ages were used to classify various groups of “feebleminded” individuals by severity: Adults with a mental age of 9-12 years were classified as “morons”; those with a mental age of 6-8 years were classified as “imbeciles”; and those with a mental age of 2-5 were classified as “idiots.” Individuals from any of these groups were thought unfit to reproduce."
A drawing of Blue looks annoyed and concerned. It's labelled, "TFW it's eugenics again. :("
Oh yeah. Why is it always eugenics?
To be clear: I'm not saying anyone is ableist or practicing eugenics for having a sense of their own internal age. I am pointing out how systemic ableism affects how system kids are treated, how the concept of mental age stems from ableism in the first place, and how terribly many cultures treat children and deemed-children to begin with: how children and disabled people are often regarded as objects, burdens, or annoyances who don't know enough to have a say about their own needs. Is this really how we want to assume all system kids should be treated? How anyone should be treated?
How much of how system kids are treated ties back to some form of ableism, in the end? I wonder about this a lot and I feel like I never see people talk about it.
Times That Copyright Expansion Has Historically Fucked Over Artists On An Institutional Level:
Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists
Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.
The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID
The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.
The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate
The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.
New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.
Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:
“Why don’t you use ai” idk man beyond the obvious environmental and “this machine causes psychosis and encourages people to kill themselves” thing I think asking the equivalent of a solid D student who is also a pathological liar if they can answer my question/do the work for me seems pretty fucking stupid
No, amnesia isn’t blacking out and coming to like you’ve passed out.
Amnesia is the lack of memory. It’s completely omitted from your mind. It’s akin to trying to remember before you were born. It’s simply impossible! You had no awareness before you’re born, and that lack of awareness is the same for amnesia.
Those who have not experienced it can only piece together what it is like through the accounts of those who have it, which leads to this popular idea of it being a hard transition from point a to point b. The truth is, it’s much more complex. It more looks like your mind blocking off the bad parts of a moment and keeping the parts it’s okay with to fill in the gap of time. That’s why things seem to happen so fast for those of us with it! Because we are experiencing that time— just way faster because we forget half of the moment we experienced.
The way it’s portrayed in such a single, specific way bothers me… （´-`）.｡oO
no piece of teen media has ever accurately depicted the quiet psychological warfare of bullying. bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that damage lasts in any social setting for the rest of your life
you can’t even “tell a trusted adult” because you cannot begin to articulate the thousands of small transgressions you’ve experienced building to the horror of knowing your peers would like you dead. they don’t have to say it or hurt you physically. they have other ways of letting you know they’d prefer if you were worm food
As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.
There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.
We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.
I'm instituting a new policy of "if I can't easily read your crusty scanned PDF then I'm sending it back to you, telling you to get your shit together and save your .docx as .pdf, and causing snakes to manifest inside your house"
this but also if you are in accounting and you have an Excel file please do not save it as a PDF or take a screenshot of it and then paste it into another Excel file
Good afternoon to everyone in the notes having a horrible time! Y'all are fighting demons I never knew existed!! I think every person that makes you do stupid time wasting shit like this because they refuse to learn basic computer literacy should be fired!!
Tumblr’s fucking insanely poor programming on the mobile app ads is doing absolute power numbers on my desire to use my phone less in spaces where I need to wait for something.
Tumblr has joined the war against advertising on the side against advertising.
The solution is simple as meatballs on a frozen lake.
Tumblr is a Saas — software as a service, this term is important to link what is going on. Twelve seconds of research will show you how cheap it is to add a user to a Saas. It isn’t $0.00 but it’s a fraction of a cent. The big cost is the initial load.
It’s $7 a month to pay for Tumblr Premium.
That’s fucking insane.
It should be $1-2.
You will obviously need a significantly higher volume to make the same amount of cash. I have an idea. Stop introducing shit people don’t want.
I am here on this site because of the perverts and artists and people with interestingly unhinged takes on media and/or life events.
There is no feature I crave on Tumblr beyond maintenance and a “reply via email” because I hate having inboxes outside of my email.
This is a business. I get it. I do not want this site to go under. I want the crew that runs it to be compensated well.
And.
There is no content Tumblr as a business is producing that I give a shit about. I am here still because it is the most convenient meeting ground to be weird and to enjoy weird and discover weird.
Premium experiences are so goddamn overrated and over bloated.
You have lost the plot and gotten way too big for your britches.
Charge fairly, provide the core service intended, and get out of the way for the mechanism that makes your product worth it — in this case, the evolving nonsense essays, comments, hilariously specific and targeted hate mail that feels at least half loving, and comics.
This place is wires and a collection of bad decisions in a group project for a teacher that is themselves about to get fired. It’s special because of the people. Not the fucking software.
Look into my beautiful eyes, tumblr staff.
Ban the nazis.
Stop banning trans people for being trans.
Keep the lights on and the floors swept.
Understand that every feature to compete with another network misses the point that this is place is a dive bar.
You bought a dive bar. You can’t make it into a gastropub. Your attempts to bring in headlining entertainment is going to fall on deaf ears, we are here to see the local folks live their theater kid nightmare orgasm comedy fest.
This brought to you by counting how many ads I had to scroll past on my phone while stuck in traffic where the ad purposefully slowed down the scrolling mechanism.
You are not going to annoy me into supporting this business.
Any money I have / will in the future spend here is because it serves the purpose of putting my weirdos in my life and me in theirs. My tolerance to the bullshit terrible programming extends only as far as the path takes to replace this with newsletters and mailed zines.
Because I love data (being a big ol' nerd), let's do some math.
CURRENT PRICE FOR TUMBLR PREMIUM: $7.00
ESTIMATED NET RETURN (($7 x 0.971) - $0.30): about $6.50
This accounts for basic credit card processing fees of 2.9% + $0.30. Something at Tumblr's size should be able to negotiate better, but we are being malicious in our calculations, and saying "you get the basic rate" to prove a point.
SUGGESTED PRICE FOR TUMBLR PREMIUM: $2.00
ESTIMATED NET RETURN (($2 x 0.971) - $0.30): about $1.64
So
I ungenerously estimate the current Tumblr premium gets them $6.50/revenue versus my suggested $1.64/revenue.
Seems bad?!
Let's do a bit more math.
How many users at $2/base ($1.64 profit) would it take to cover the income of 1 user at $7/base ($6.50 income)?
6.50 / 1.64... 3.96341463415
I will
uh
go ahead and
round up
to 4 users
So.
1 user = $6.50 (6.50 x 1) profit.
4 users = $6.56 ($1.64 x 4) profit.
we'll just let the ol' tumblr keep them there six cents and call it even an even swap
Now.
To be fair.
To make this work.
You have to attract 3 more users (1 versus 4) to pay.
This feels like a lot!
Until it doesn't!
Because personally.
I would pay $2.00/month to keep this site running. Feels like a rounding error in my books.
I flinch at $7.00/month. Feels weird to pay this much for a site that so regularly has "hm, this disasterous new feature is pissing me off."
:)
But
as always
what do i know.
To satisfy my various spoken and unspoken life/art studio ambitions
I offer this as a free consultancy lesson to anyone making a patreon or paid newsletter or whatever thing --
where you have a digital product that does not require shipping, handling, etc.
You can make it expensive and aim to have a small audience.
You can make it cheap and aim to have a large audience.
I personally am really fond of cheap digital services because it feels like support when I realize I have not had time to keep up. When I do have time to keep up -- "Oh this is a great value"
And when I do not, I see the bill -- "Ah, I am glad THING exists. Happy to throw them a few coins."
In respect to my soul, please use this lesson exclusively for such things as
art
music
thinly-veiled self-insert fan fiction
non-tax evasion accounting practices
joyous pornography or other erotic silliness
history (all years available)
claymation
cartooning
books (novels or things longer or shorter)
poetry (erotic or non)
coffee
fiction
non-fiction
non-non fiction
non-fiction fiction
and, of course, real reviews of faux products that should exist, but do not, due to limitations of time, space, money, reality, magic, technology, theology, methodology, organic chemistry, biology (marine, terra), cosmology, topology and/or cartography
I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff
baratheonpilled
discoholicmusic
prguitarman
germansingergirl
dededos
stormborns
romaincrisis
