A Twitch Upon the Thread @twitchuponthethread-blog - Tumblr Blog

Vittorio Reggianini (Italian,1858-1938) “La soirée” detail.

I made these to put up around my school for my school’s GSA. They are quotes from some little known bisexuals about their bisexuality.

Lets stop bisexual erasure and remember, bisexuality is real!

el--oh--vee--ee

Bisexual erasure is a huge thing, even in the LG community. Let’s raise the awareness!

Book Update

The Nearest Exit May be Behind You -S Bear Bergman

Probably would have blown my mind ten years ago, but I got nothing from this I didn't already know and couldn't find on tumblr. Sure, I'm sure it was groundbreaking in its time, but this is no Julia Serano. When I started Whipping Girl, I thought I pretty much knew all there was to know about trans. Boy was I wrong. Post-Whipping-Girl, I felt like Neo from the Matrix, with the whole world deconstructed in front of me. Since then, I've tried to read as much original activism as possible; but this book didn't have that effect. Possibly because I simply know more than I did when I read WG.

Pretty much the best thing about this book is that some unknown kid took it off my desk thinking it was a library book, because it had a comic-book cover, and I really hope they read it...

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme - Ivan E Coyote/Zena Sharman

This book was pretty awesome.

The first time I read a butch-femme book, I was astounded. I'd always assumed that butch women were just that, women who liked to be masculine. Turns out the reality is far more complex, and plenty o'butches have, and always have had, feels closer to what I would identify as trans or genderqueer. There's a lot of debate about trans men in lesbian spaces, but the more I read about butch, the more I feel they were kinda always there in one way or another.

This book jumps into that with both feet, and has an epic 40 essays about butches, femmes and butch-femme relationships. There are a lot of modern interpretations of butch, but I was pleased to see lots of essays by older lesbians about their lives as a butch or a femme (or as a person who hated that scene). It is mostly essays, but there are two stories, one poem, one femme manifesto.

This will come as a surprise to no-one, but this book had an emphasis on its butches. There was one more masculine-of-centre author than there was femme; but there were 24 essays about butch identity to only 19 about femme (I worked this out in 15 mins, by counting, so this isn't totally scientific; the essays which discussed both, I counted twice.) I'd also be interested to note how many essays were butches on butch, femmes on femme, femme on butch or butch on femme, and see what came up.

Finally, even though the book felt more butch-heavy than my stats may suggest, I felt like the investigation of butch was far more complex and nuanced than of femme. The butch essays were fairly evenly split, between old-school butch women, and those who identified as more trans, queer, masculine-of-centre, genderfluid than woman. Most of the femme essays were about femme women, and they rarely explored those with more complex femme genders. The exceptions to that rule were really cool, so there should have been more.

For what it's worth, the femme essays are excellent - I just feel like the book overall leans more on the radical potential of butchness than of femme. I will write more of my thoughts on specific essays later, but as a general review I strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys overthinking gender and sexuality.

#s bear bergman #butch #femme #queer books #genderqueer #books

Media update 1

Captain America 1 is a great movie. I read an article comparing the new Marvel movies to the DC ones, which noted how DC had pitched for seriousness (Nolan Batman), whereas Marvel had flying cars, and I agree with that. Captain America is AWESOME. Running around world war two with a tech dandy and a British special agent? Huzzah! What fun. And I like the romance. How many mainstream films can I say that of?

I also think gangly have-a-go Steve is adorable.

#film #film 2014 #captain america

Socially awkward problems:

1. Go onto computer to resolve problem of feeling lonely.

2. Too socially awkward to respond to any of the 8 messages you have to deal with.

failedsuicideclub-deactivated14

Hero.

charcutertheorie-deactivated201

This isn’t even the whole story. They told him he couldn’t go because they had no way of getting him there. So he walked outside when they weren’t looking and took a fucking bus. The next time he was seen was on Sword Beach, ith all his medals pinned to his chest.

brb, crying

your-raifu-is-shit

The fucking Wehrmacht couldn’t stop him from hitting that beach the first time, what the fuck did the care home staff think they could do?

the-pink-mist-deactivated201406

^^^^

twitchuponthethread-blog

There is a movie in here somewhere...

diedamederschatten

Catullus 5 in the streets, Catullus 16 in the sheets

pidgeling

twitchuponthethread-blog

To summarize, there hasn’t been a lot of research into the etymological origins of ghost noises."

oh wow oh wow oh wow

themyrmor

Hey Europe. The 1930s called. They want their advancing fascism back.

batmansymbol

by the way did I ever tell y’all about the time I got a blank message from nobody, sent on new year’s eve in 1969, when the internet didn’t exist?

because that happened

genderlesskarkat-deactivated201

What the fuck

sleek-black-wings

Time travel.

yokodere-deactivated20170518

Or maybe its from 2069, when we’ve developed the technology to send data to the past. You sent yourself a blank message as a test but as the email address you used to send it doesnt exist yet, it came up as no sender

selfishghoul

I… what?

ironchefskeleton

OKAY KIDS, LET’S LEARN ABOUT THE UNIX EPOCH

So back in the early days of computers, when we were trying to build clocks to keep all our computers in sync, we tried a bunch of different ways to synchronize them in ways that both normal people could use and programmers could utilize.

We just tried saying “The current time is THIS date” and just storing that date as some text, but while that was easy for humans, it was a bunch of different numbers that worked together in funny ways and computers don’t play nice with a bunch of random, arbitrary rules.

Not much worked, until we realized that we needed a BASELINE to compare against, and a way to represent the current time that covers everybody. So we came up with Unix time, because Unix was the style at the time. Essentially, Unix time represents any given time by saying “How many seconds ago was 12:00 AM on January 1, 1970 in Iceland somewhere?”. Recent enough to keep the numbers relatively small, far enough that nothing computer-y would fall before it, and consistent enough that there’d be no discrepancy based on where you are.

So what happens when you see the date “December 31, 1969” on a buggy message like this is that the computer received a bunch of zeroes by mistake and went “Oh, this must be a message!” Then when it tried to interpret it, it got to the date, found a zero, and said “Zero seconds since the Unix Epoch? I’ll round down - this was sent at the last second of New Year’s Eve, 1969! They’ll be so happy to finally get their blank message.”

And then the computer traipsed off on its merry way, because computers are fucking idiots.

omgitsnewton-deactivated2023080

there’s a fuckton more kind of epochs, but mobile OS are mostly made around Unix-based OS, hence the Unix epoch.

Wolf Hall

One cool thing I did this weekend was go and see Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies, which is the middle class equivalent of a movie-double-bill.

Wolf Hall is a book about the rise of Anne Boleyn, and the play takes 2.5 hours. The theatre leaves you a nice gap to go for dinner and to get gently sozzled, before you return for the next 10 years of history in which Anne falls and Jane Seymore rises. 7.5 hours of politics and silly hats in all.

It was glorious ^_^ A witty script and incredibly fast pace stopped it getting dull. Ghosts, scheming, and men in tights. Thomas Cromwell is my new dead crush - he spoke 13 languages and was a very cunning chap.

#culture #london is awesome

1/06

Good day.

I went roller blading down Horse Guard's parade

Got creeped on by a racist

read a lot of my book (Rainbow Six - Tom Clancy. Terrorists have just taken over Disneyland)

Got a book for a friend

Got a new knitting book for me

Wrote about feminism

Perfection

#shopping #crafting #london

iriseslineherpath

It’s pretty annoying how the biggest thing holding femslash back is a lack of female characters. We obviously need more cool women who have great scenes with other cool women.

Like, we don’t read slash fics about guys because we think they’re hot, we read them because those characters are so adorable and have so much chemistry.

The worst part is that this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if more movies/shows passed the Bechdel Test.

twitchuponthethread-blog

This is so true, so true, so true. If a show has one fully developed female character, it's a miracle. Two such characters, both prominent in the series, with a complex relationship interrogated by the show? Yeah, no wonder there is so little femslash -_-

I'm starting to think that the lack of female friendships is the biggest challenge, even more than a lack of good female characters. Take Firefly. Firefly has so many great female characters, but none of them interrelate. The main relationships on the show are: Mal and Jayne, Mal and Inara, Mal and Zoe; Simon and Kaylee, Simon and River; Zoe and Wash. And so on. Inara and Kaylee have scenes together, but we have to infer a lot about their relationship from those little frothy bits.

And I find this is a problem in a lot of shows period.

#feminism #media overanalysis #overthinking things #firefly

binghsien

pronouns

pronouns that indicate moral status

pronouns that indicate group membership

pronouns that indicate social hierarchy

pronouns that indicate relative age

pronouns that indicate ethnicity

pronouns that indicate time acquainted

pronouns that indicate active / passive

pronouns that indicate health or sickness

pronouns that indicate copyright status

LANGUAGE IS COOL LET’S GET WEIRD.

twitchuponthethread-blog

Oh man this would be so awesome :D There is no good linguistic reason why pronouns must indicate gender. I wonder if there are any existing languages where they don't? Social hierarchy and age seem like two very plausible ones - and in fact in French, there is tu/vous which conveys respect as well as pronounage.

#language

visitpositivelysmittencom

Think about anyone who has come out as bisexual in the media. Megan Fox, Billie Joe Armstrong, Margaret Cho, Anna Paquin, Megan Mullally, David Bowie, Angelina Jolie. Their sexuality is usually glossed over — often times, the media decides the person is either gay or straight, depending the relationship they are currently in or the relationship they get into in the future. If a man comes out as bisexual and in the future gets into a relationship with another man, people generally define him as homosexual (such as Alan Cumming). It’s important to note both homosexual and heterosexual people are monosexual and only attracted to one gender. In saying someone is straight or gay based on who they are currently with totally negates an individual’s identity. Several people throughout have been classified as monosexual, despite identifying as bi. Marlon Brando himself was bisexual and he’s well-known as a “manly” man, it’s no surprise that people would want to erase his sexuality to fit their perception of him. Anne Frank was also bisexual; she wrote about having a love for girls and wanting a girl to date in her diaries. Angelina Jolie is one of the most well-known bisexuals and she still gets marked under a monosexual title because of her long term relationship with Brad Pitt. Yet, in doing this, people are neglecting her identity.

Bisexual Erasure: What It Is and How to Avoid It

(via positivelysmitten)