I PUBLISH ALL ASKS.
Please block "harassment tag" to avoid the terrible shit people sometimes send me.
Send all NerdyKeppie questions to help @ nerdykeppie.com
He/They.
Jewish middle-aged non-binary butch lesbian.
Find my writing in Scion 2e, Changeling: The Lost, Vampire: The Requiem, & others.
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Due to the unfortunate level of scam requests I have received, I no longer reblog donation or fundraiser requests from blogs I do not recognize. Don't follow me just to submit a signal boost request. I notice, & I will just delete your ask and block you.
No, that doesn't mean I think you, personally, are a scammer. I just don't have the hours in my day to sift through the number of asks I get and verify them, so if I don't recognize someone from prior interaction, I just won't do it. Yes, I agree. It does suck that shitty people have made this necessary.
I post all other asks as they were submitted, with the exception of fundraisers from blogs I don't recognize. I answer at my whim and not upon demand. I will never honor requests to answer asks privately or anonymously. Anon is never turned on. These are hard self-care boundaries. Please block the tag "harassment tag" if you don't want to see to some of the horrible shit I get sent sometimes.
I will only reblog/repost/boost a given fundraiser once every 7 days. Period. Sending me more asks will not change that. If you only interact with me to ask for signal boosts, I'll just block you with no response. That is the only exception to my "post all asks" policy. I am a person, not a public resource. Don't make me feel used. It's exhausting.
If you like what I do, please consider hiring me, buying something from my company, NerdyKeppie, buying me a coffee, becoming a Patron or tossing some money in my PayPal tip jar. I am a disabled, queer, Jewish, non-binary butch, and those sources plus freelance writing are my entire income.
Here is the cast of many of the frequently-mentioned entities in my posts.
I will not debate my identity with anyone. I am a transmasculine non-binary butch lesbian, a cripple, a dyke, and lots of other things, too. You don't get a vote in that, and if any of those words are words you object to someone using in reference to himself, block me. I won't censor my identity for your comfort; it took a lot of hard work over decades to become proud of who I am.
ACAB includes gender/sexuality cops. You aren't the mayor of Dyketown or the burgermeister of Transberg, so fuck off.
Mom is a job title to me. I'm okay with being called Mama Spider, but no other feminine terms.
No, I am not an anti or an anti-anti. Leave me alone.
No, I won't DM you.
No, I won't answer your question about Israel.
No, I won't talk to you about I/P.
Nothing above the above two things means anything other than that I don't talk about those things online. Declaring that you know my "true secret allegiance" is the oldest of antisemitic tropes. Fuck off.
Don't project your shit onto me. I do not consent to being your straw man.
If you want to write your own AU vaspider fanfic where I'm evil/secretly not actually Jewish/harassing your best friend or stuffed rabbit or whatever, I can't stop you, but please keep it to yourself. It's just... embarrassing to witness.
I will not perform Good Jew or Good Queer on demand, whatever that means to you in this instant. Fuck off.
Yes, I've been out for a very long time. No, I'm not interested in being lectured by people half my age over shit that happened when you weren't alive yet.
"Man bad/woman good" is regressive TERF/right-wing shit. It doesn't matter how you dress it up. Knock it off.
I'm almost 50. Yes, I'm still online. Yes, I'm still doing the things that I like to do. Don't be weird about it.
Curate your own experiences. If you don't like seeing what I write, then add 'vaspider' to your "filtered content" list, and don't bother me about it. Tumblr is a 17+ environment, and I am not responsible for you seeing things you don't like. My daughter and stepkid are both old enough to drink. I raised my kids. I'm not raising you or any other kids.
Anyone who tries to turn you on your fellow workers or trans people or queer people or fellow Jews is doing the work of fascists for them. Act accordingly.
My icon has lore, apparently.
I never answer asks privately and anon is never turned on.
The thing is you can have a grassy lawn or even a golf course without it being an ecological disaster, you just have to a: be cool about having the occasional non-grass plant in the mix and b: be willing to live in a climate that supports grass without irrigation.
I always thought that golf as a sport should be adapted to the local native landscape. I think this will encourage regional pride when local golfers completely trounce visitors at Swamp Golf, Desert Golf, Forest Golf, etc. Rich tourists will be pressured to travel extensively to experience all forms of golf, instead of staying in their backyard country club golf courses. Internet discourse will probably somehow get worse but I think this is a small price to pay.
In light of recent events, I have begun submitting bug reports when I see mature content labels applied inappropriately to posts, especially if an appeal has been rejected.
yeah i drive the truck that isekais all those lonely 20yo NEETs and bored salarymen. it’s a really hard job. they keep sending me to workplace counselling after each hit. “it’s normal to feel guilt at ending someone’s life,” they say. how do i tell them that’s not what makes me feel guilty? “but it’s okay. he’ll live a better life in another world.” yeah, with 100 girls who could have lived normal lives but got drafted into being in these boring dudes’ harems. how many women’s lives have i ruined. and they don’t even know. they don’t even know
Sounds like you need "His Soul is Marching On to Another World; or, the John Brown Isekai" by CabbagePreacher, an actual fic on AO3 about famed abolitionist martyr John Brown getting isekaied to such a world and going on a rampage abolishing harems.
Did anyone ever like attempt to document and compile the variations of Barney the dinosaur murder ballads across the elementary school system in the early 2000s. Like legit it has always fascinated me as a phenomena and I would love to know if there were like traceable regional variations or what.
Looking at the tags so far I’m kind of fascinated by how much the ‘I Love You’ parodies vary in their phrasing/murder weapons but the ‘Joy to the World’ ones are nearly identical
here is my collection of barney murder songs as they appeared in the notes and comments of this post at about 4 pm pacific 7/25, somewhat arbitrarily color coded to show similar memes. it appears that "baseball bat and 2x4" is the mode configuration but there is so much variation that that exact phrasing only makes up a small part of the set. if i knew more about statistical modeling i would turn this into some kind of data tree that shows which phrases are most likely to follow other phrases.
Fucking thank you. I literally cannot stand up for more than a few minutes at a time bc of nerve damage from having a tumor removed from inside my spine. The number of shows I've gone to and bought seated tickets and not been able to see...
... yeah.
Not quite as annoying as the bouncer at a comedy show who told me "We don't do that for sold-out shows*" about the ADA request for a booth that I'd been told by email months prior was totally fine and going to happen, but very close.
*I only barely kept myself from saying, "Oh, I didn't realize the Americans With Disabilities Act didn't count for sold out shows," and just went to find the house manager instead. That club fucked up so many times after assuring me I could sit in a booth instead of a wobbly chair that we just stopped going, though.
A recent Supreme Court decision threatens a core democratic principle.
The Supreme Court dealt a massive blow to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States with its April decision, Louisiana v. Callais, significantly weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision of the landmark legislation prohibited voting practices that were racially discriminatory. In 1982, a bipartisan coalition in Congress strengthened the law further by stipulating that plaintiffs only needed to demonstrate a discriminatory racial impact, rather than prove racist intent.
With Callais, the Supreme Court overturned Congress’s earlier judgement and now requires proof of racist intent rather than discriminatory effect, which raises the bar dramatically for the federal government to act. Within weeks, several Southern states quickly moved to redraw district maps, with legislatures in states such as Tennessee targeting Black-majority districts that long elected Black and Democratic legislators. Democrats warn that, as a result, one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group of Black lawmakers founded in 1971 in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, could lose their seats.
The decision threatens a core democratic principle, “one-man, one-vote,” that a very different Supreme Court entrenched through a series of landmark rulings between 1962 and 1964. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed in 1953, those decisions rose from a rejection of the entrenched, often corrupt Southern electoral systems in which districts for state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives disproportionately favored sparsely populated white rural areas over more diverse (socially and politically) urban constituencies. The latter typically included larger Black populations and were more supportive of civil rights.
Partisan gerrymandering is almost as old as the United States itself.
For most of U.S. history, political parties have crafted districts designed to benefit their own interests. The term itself is named after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1812 authorized a bizarre state senate district that looked like a salamander. Since the early 19th century, through the redistricting process that follows each new Census, voters have been packed into districts that would elect candidates from the party in power. Sometimes state officials in bipartisan states reached deals so that each side could enjoy the benefits of safe seats.
But partisan gerrymandering took on a distinct racial character in the South, where Democrats dominated. Liberal Democrats viewed redistricting reform as essential to advancing civil rights. Although their primary focus was the South, northern states such as New York and Illinois also maintained districts at the state and federal level that favored rural areas, bolstering conservative power.
By the 1950s, prominent northern Democratic politicians were calling for systematic change. The United States had been transformed by urbanization and industrialization, they argued, yet state legislatures kept district boundaries untouched. “The popular character of the House has been destroyed,” argued Minnesota Rep. Eugene McCarthy in 1952, “by the failure of the state legislatures to provide for Congressional districts of approximately the same population and by the practice of electing Congressmen at large.”
In 1958, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote a New York Times column titled “Shame of the Cities” in which he said: “Of all the discriminations against the urban areas, the most fundamental and the most blatant is political: the apportionment of representation in our Legislatures and (to a lesser extent) in Congress has been either deliberately rigged or shamefully ignored so as to deny the cities and their voters that full and proportionate voice in government to which they are entitled. … At one time, in a then largely rural nation, legislative strength was heavily weighted in favor of rural areas. Though times have changed, many Legislatures have not.” A liberal coalition that included the AFL-CIO, the Americans for Democratic Action, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union championed reform.
But the conservative coalition of Southern Democratic committee chairmen and Midwestern Republicans who had controlled the chambers since the 1938 midterm elections blocked any legislative progress. In the U.S. House, some of the most notorious conservative Southern barons of the committee system counted on being reelected from districts with sparse numbers of voters, most of whom had little appetite for the civil rights movement that was shaking the region.
The responsibility for action ultimately fell to the federal courts. Chief Justice Warren had come to believe that equitable apportionment could have saved the nation “acute racial troubles” by assuring that every person’s vote carried equal weight. Although Black southerners had generally been disenfranchised under the Jim Crow system imposed after Reconstruction, those who had been able to register to vote were often at a disadvantage because of where they lived. Moreover, if the struggle for voting rights legislation was successful, the composition of districts would work against the political progress that would otherwise be made.
Within the Supreme Court, there had been strong opposition to intervening in anything connected to elections. The federal courts were wary of what Justice Felix Frankfurter famously called the “political thicket.” Because the Constitution left elections to the states, earlier justices had concluded that the court had no authority to step in. They also doubted whether the judiciary could define a clear, workable standard for the states to follow. If he and his colleagues attempted to resolve these thorny issues, warned Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Americans might even begin scrutinizing the “political backgrounds or ideologies” of the Supreme Court justices themselves.
But the pressure from the civil rights movement continued to mount. A coalition in Tennessee argued that the state had failed to reapportion seats for the lower chamber of the state legislature, the General Assembly, since 1901. Not only did the state constitution require reapportionment every 10 years, but demographic changes had also rendered the old district lines inequitable. Their lawyers argued that the districts violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment which deemed that states had to treat people the same way. Laws that discriminated on the basis of race were thus unconstitutional.
In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Carr that the courts could make decisions about these issues and legitimated the claims of the plaintiffs about the violation of the equal protection clause. Tennessee’s apportionment scheme violated the 14th Amendment because it diluted the vote of urban residents. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority (which included Warren as well as Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Tom C. Clark, and Potter Stewart), held that such disparities constituted a denial of equal protection. The court remanded the case, sending it back to the lower court for a final decision. Even so, the ruling became a landmark because it established that the court could intervene in apportionment disputes when citizens were denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Within months, over 30 suits were filed. “The rush through the door unlocked by Baker v. Carr,” observed one expert, “has been staggering.”
Baker v. Carr energized supporters of civil rights to demand more. Soon after the decision, the court’s chief opponent of federal intervention, Felix Frankfurter, retired following a stroke. Then-President Kennedy appointed Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to the court, a justice far more sympathetic to Baker v. Carr. The impact was immediate. A Georgia businessman, James O. Sanders, sued the state to overturn its county unit system, which systematically undermined Black political representation. A federal court agreed, declaring that the system could not be justified in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. Jimmy Carter, then a peanut farmer and former Navy engineer running for a seat in the state legislature, later recalled the decision and its aftermath as a turning point in Southern politics: “This was the major news item to be read and discussed at our peanut warehouse, at church, at Lions Club meetings, and in the small county newspapers.”
The next case shifted the focus from state legislatures to the federal government, centering on districts for the U.S. House of Representatives. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), the court ruled that Georgia’s congressional districts were unconstitutional. Plaintiffs from the 5th District argued that their district had nearly the population of the state’s smallest, the 9th, yet both elected only one representative. This diluted the votes of 5th District residents. In a 6-3 decision, the Warren Court held that congressional districts must be drawn to be roughly equal in population so that each person’s vote carried the same weight. According to the majority, led by Justice Black, “It would defeat the principle solemnly embodied in the Great Compromise—equal representation in the House for equal numbers of people—for us to hold that, within the States, legislatures may draw the lines of congressional districts in such a way as to give some voters a greater voice in choosing a Congressman than others.”
Baker v. Carr legitimized judicial intervention in apportionment. Wesberry v. Sanders extended the “one-man, one vote” principle to districts for the U.S. House. In another 1964 case, Reynolds v. Sims, the court ruled that both chambers of state legislatures had to be determined according to population.
The revolution in judicial thinking meshed with the landmark legislation passed by the Democratic Congress in 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, that committed the federal government to ensuring that states did not violate the 15th Amendment, the Reconstruction amendment that protected the right of all (male) citizens to vote. As Black registration rapidly increased in the South after 1965, reapportioned districts that were drawn in response to the Supreme Court decisions ensured that the new votes would be treated the same way as white votes in rural communities.
Democrats also blocked efforts by congressional conservatives such as Virginia Democrat William Tuck, who attempted to pass legislation stripping the courts of their ability to intervene in apportionment cases. Although the measure won support in the House, it failed in the Senate. Liberals likewise blocked a proposed constitutional amendment from Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that would have reversed the court decision’s rulings on state government. The American Jewish Congress opposed Dirksen’s proposal, arguing that the effort to reverse the Court’s decisions was an attack on “democratic principle.” Ultimately, Dirksen was defeated.
In 1969, in Allen v. State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court ruled that vote dilution fell within the scope of the Voting Rights Act. Under this interpretation, the Department of Justice gained authority under Section 5 to deal with inequitable districting in addition to the denial of the vote. Federal “preclearance” would be necessary for any changes to voting, even matters that appeared technical or procedural. Over the following decades, rural-dominated districts were dismantled, and the number of metropolitan and urban districts steadily increased.
By the end of the decade, the transformation of legislative representation was complete. It didn’t come as a surprise that Warren would later call Baker v. Carr the “most vital” decision of his tenure.
The legacy of the Warren Court is now hanging by a thread. The immense progress that had been made in the 1960s tackling the problem of systemic racism within the electoral system has lost massive ground. A series of Supreme Court decisions, as well as legislation and court decisions in red states, have expanded voting restrictions and are now leading to a dangerous acceleration of the redistricting wars where long-standing concerns about racial justice are losing their hold.
In addition to the obvious political ramifications of the new congressional maps, the erosion of representative values that these developments portend have already sent the country backwards in the struggle to make U.S. democracy whole.
Once I said "My gender is whatever's funniest at the time" and my coworker stops dead in his tracks, turns slowly and says "So are your pronouns honk/honk?" killing me instantly
I was talking to a friend I knew before I transitioned about my new relationship (my first one ever!) and I said "Yeah, I think I only indentified as aro/ace most of my life because I didn't have lesbian as an option" and he looked me dead in the eye and said "Oh? Why not? ...Ohhh"
Then he said "You know, I completely forgot you weren't always this way. Femininity really suits you" and let me tell you I started tearing up
Of course, not ten minutes later I mentioned that I had to relearn how to sing and he said "oh no, what happened?" so he might just be a little slow
Update on that friend: a bunch of people sent me "he's a little confused, but he's got the spirit" gifs in response to that story. I can tell you now with certainty that she definitely has the spirit, and she's not confused anymore
The other thing about meeting my wife on this website is I've seen multiple friends today reblog a post about how some mutuals you eventually transition to using their given name and some you never do, and the thing is. The woman I am legally married to is in the latter category.
For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times.
Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.
#not to woke out on this fun post #but i do find it profoundly weird that it's normalized to react to a person harmlessly expressing sexual desire #for a character KNOWN to be widely considered attractive #with "you deserve violence and jail time for being horny haha. we should beat you with sticks" #like the underlying implications of the whole horny jail and related memes just feels too ominious for me to enjoy #like im glad she finds it funny. but why the fuck is it seen as normal to send a meme like that to a stranger? #"we said no horny" ON THE INTERNET??? ABOUT THE GIANT BIG TIDDY VAMPIRE LADY?????
