stitchy cryptid

should be writing

[knightofleo]

😾

[jackdawsfavorite]

bonus

[indieninja92]

sssssssso long, ssssuckerssss!

[dimetrodone]

The Great Gatsby

[bigsquinky]

[paleo-bug]

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Katherine Murphy makes two highlight-reel catches in one inning during her first game in the New York Heights' starting lineup.

[fandaniel]

having a multi year long character obsession becomes like a abstract thought experiment at some point

[adamsmasher]

WE WERE ON JEOPARDY!!!!!!!!!!

[rouge-the-bat]

thank you for coming to my this #mythis

[thebibliosphere]

It never fails to amuse me when I get “hello influencer” emails wanting me to push questionable products to my followers.

Like worstie, I can barely promote my own published book without wanting to curl up and die.

The fuck makes you think I’ll shill your discount wish shit?

[thebibliosphere]

Also, it's Tumblr. If I try to tell anyone about your knock-off Wish-quality sex toy there’s going to be a horde of Autistic lesbians doing a power point presentation in the notes about safe sex toy material and correct battery storage.

Which I am 100% down for, but it will not get you any sales.

[cookieoppressor]

I was trying to figure out if you were someone important on a other platform, because there's no way in hell anyone actually thinks you can be classified as "Influencer" if you have a big Tumblr blog.

And then also think advertising to this mob would be a good idea

[thebibliosphere]

There are actually lots of people who sell stuff successfully on here, usually drop ship stuff.

They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it's marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).

And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.

I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.

They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it's on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.

It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.

They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.

This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.

It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.

Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.

So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.

But there are also drop-ship sellers on here who get enough of a kick-back from affiliate links to make selling cutesy kitsch stuff worth their time on here. They’re just making sure you don’t know you’re being marketed to.

[thebibliosphere]

Throwback to when I openly talked about this and got blocked by several huge “meme” blogs that were actually drop shippers who didn’t like me lifting up the rock and exposing how they hide their ads in plain sight lol

[thebibliosphere]

Hey, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, but if you didn’t realize these types of posts/blogs were ads… that’s okay! They are designed to trick you!

These type of undeclared sellers are relying on you believing that Tumblr is different from other social media platforms where the advertising is usually more blatant. They are also relying on your trust in your community not to put undisclosed ads onto your dash.

After all, everyone knows Tumblr is a sinkhole where profit goes to die and everyone hates ads. Why would anyone waste time doing that here… unless they can adapt what they’re doing to make you think you’re not being marketed to, because Tumblr as a user base would never allow that kind of thing. Right?

Turns out, not so much.

Some people might say, “well that’s just obvious! You’d have to be really silly not to realize it!”

And maybe it was obvious to them.

I know it was obvious to me. But I also know I have enough online experience to play “spot the affiliate link” and enough knowledge as a indie author about how those links are supposed to be disclosed by law, to know when someone is being dishonest and trying to make a post seem organic and not like an ad.

But not everyone has the same knowledge or life experiences to put the context clues together, and that’s why I wrote the above post because many, many, many people on here are unaware they are reblogging ads—usually while talking about how much they hate ads!

You’re not dumb or silly or worthless or any of the unkind things some people are calling themselves in the notes. You just needed more information. Happily I was able to provide it and now you know what to look for. Go forth and scroll with newfound knowledge 🫡

[mclennonyaoi]

working with kids and one of them says “you know you eat 8 spiders a night on average right?” and another goes “no no no those statistics are actually skewed by people who like eat spiders recreationally for fun and stuff” and my head snapped up like a fucking sleeper agent

[red-berin]

Kyle Gordon's back

[foxhardt]

you dont have to be a parent to understand the horror of walking into a room to discover that the baby crawled out of his crib and onto that pottery wheel you forgot to turn off, and while the baby is spinning around and around, the dog is sitting there all calm, like a person, gently using his paws to fashion the babys soft cartilage head into something a little more modern.  it might be the classic tale of bad parenting, but lets see where the dog is going with this

[wizardshark]

This post is from 2013. It has less than 100 notes. Together we can revive this work of art that tragically ahead of its time. We’re ready for it now

[genderkoolaid]

"The Tom-Boy Who Was Changed Into A Real Boy," a children's poem written between 1859 and 1862 and published by McLoughlin Brothers Publishing in New York.

The poem is part of the "Aunt Oddamadood series," which appeared to primarily create entertaining yet moralistic poems for children, in which a naughty child (other examples include "Little Miss Consequence," "The Conceited Boy," "The Mischievous Fingers") is presented and shown the error of their ways, to teach children what will happen if they do not behave. With that context, the purpose of this poem appears to warning children raised as girls that, should they act like a tomboy, they will eventually be quietly sent off to sea. It is made clear both at the beginning and the end of the poem that the child's tomboyish nature is a "fault" and something the audience must be "cautioned" about.

I learned about this poem from this small collection of transgender antebellum (pre-Civil War) USAmerican children's literature, collected by historian Jen Manion. Another relevant example from that collection is "Lucy Nelson; or, the Boy-Girl," the story of a child assigned female who dislikes femininity and prefers playing with her brothers and acting like a boy. Lucy and their brothers get in trouble, but Lucy is singled out for punishment. They are forced to wear boys clothes for a month; this doesn't initially seem that bad, but it becomes clear that the real punishment is subjecting Lucy to gendered humiliation. Lucy's brother laugh at them, declare that if they dress as a boy then they will "be treated as one," leading to them being physically and verbally cruel to them. At a dinner party, the stress of the gendered humiliation they are facing for their transmasculinity reaches a breaking point. A guest's fixation and confusion on their gender leads them to shout, in tears, "I am not a boy!" to end the inquisition.

Lucy's story ends not with them simply realizing they are a girl; it is explicitly detailed that it is very difficult for them to resist their "boyish" nature and they were "in danger of lapsing," but that eventually they became an "obedient little girl," having been successfully humiliated back into appropriate (and, notably, white) daughterhood. These examples show clearly how the narrative around the "acceptance" of tomboys hides the very real disdain and cruelty directed at transmasculinized youth that has existed in Western culture for centuries. Rather than their masculinity being praised, or the masculinization of a young girl being seen as positive, these tomboys are depicted as out-of-control, insufficiently white, and further masculinization is depicted as a punishment done to tomboys, something meant to be humiliating and scary, thus coercing them back to the role of daughterwifemother.

[genderkoolaid]

Also wanna add that this is a good example of malgendering in history, and why that term is so important when talking about anti-transmasculinity.

For both Lucy and the tomboy-turned-sailor, further masculinization is a punishment. The story of Lucy literally uses the phrase "if she dresses like a boy, we'll treat her like a boy" as a justification for verbal and physical harassment and humiliation.

& while the poem is lighthearted and meant to be fun, it is very clear that becoming a sailor is not something the tomboy is doing for fun or of his own volition. The poem explicitly describes the transition as happening "quite quietly" and "without noise," and being orchestrated by an unclear "them" which we can assume is likely the tomboy's family. Being a sailor was a job which involved hard manual labor, dangerous circumstances, and associated with lower-class (thus sexually dangerous) men. Again, this poem is from a series of moralistic poems which very clearly lay out for children what happens when you act "bad." The message here is: if you, little girl, try to act like a boy, you will become coarse and unloveable and be sent away to sea to live amongst dirty, dangerous cis men.

This is why malgendering is such an important term and concept, for all trans people, but here particularly with anti-transmasculinity. And I also hope that y'all keep these examples in your back pocket to use the next time you hear someone run their mouth about how the patriarchy just isn't that concerned about policing masculinity in people perceived as girls, because ummmm patriarchy LIKE boy stuff duh!!!!!!!!

[archaeocoyote]

This is really interesting to me because its so seldom that something lines up so well with my particular experience of having grown up intersex and as a transmasculine person. An experience that has led me to believe that the reason the policing of transmasculinity in kids is seen as "invisible" or even non-existent is because it often functions not on a level of open hostility, but on a subtle level of coy, "concerned for your future" social isolation, ostracism, and humiliation that feels orchestrated like a dance throughout your childhood and impossible to explain to anyone not on the transmasc or butch spectrum. I started getting "helpful" comments, snide remarks, and even doctors office visits about "fixing" how masculine my body and presentation were literally even before I realized I was trans or started to consciously play with my gender presentation.

Little girls and kids who were AFAB are only "allowed" to be tomboys insofar as their eventual assimilation into gender conforming feminine womanhood can be assured. If that assimilation is at all in question, the gloves come off really quick and they start considering forcing you onto supplemental estrogen.

[genderkoolaid]

#it makes me feel a lot of things to see this written out#especially the second case - that was… a lot of my childhood#‘if you act like a boy we’ll treat you like a boy’ and crucially ‘let other children treat you like a boy’ as a withdrawal of protection#or - more accurately- a throwing the wolves#the boys knew I wasn’t ‘a real boy’ - it was just a license to do violence without repurcussions

^ this is exactly it.

this is what makes anti-transmasculinity so fucking infuriating to talk about. because people say shit like "well little girls are rewarded for acting masculine!" with no sense of irony.

but really so much anti-transmasculinity swirls around this notion that being made a boy is a punishment for people intended to be girls. on two levels:

because being a girl, and succeeding in the role of daughterwifemother, is your personhood. that is why the above poem is titled "the tomboy who was turned into a real boy," while depicting the tomboy dressed as a sailor with his head in his hands as if he is crying. it is not a whimsical adventure, it is meant to be read as obviously negative as a poem about a child who steals or is rude and gets punished for it.

the ever-present specter of cis male violence (physical and sexual) is not any less present for transmasculine people, and those who wield anti-transmasculinity (especially against children) know this. its implicit in the poem, its explicit in the story of Lucy, its the background radiation of every 19th century story of a FTM crossdresser which obsesses over whether or not they kept their virginity while living around cis men.

i never ever ever ever ever want to hear anyone claim that "masculine girls" are less hated than "feminine boys"* again. everyone get radicalized and educated on anti-transmasculinity RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

*ironically, the collection i got this from also includes a letter written by a person talking about why feminine boys are actually good (as long as they aren't too girly) because they are polite and helpful and studious, while masculine girls are problematic because they are rude and dirty. this was not a pro-transfem statement by any means, but its literally the exact opposite of what people like to claim about how this works. gosh, its almost like maybe we should stop trying to figure out which binary gender is more policed, because its an exercise in futility that only encourages us vs them binary thinking!

[kitchen1]

I wish I took a better pic of this writing in a bar bathroom in toronto bc I think of it so often. Be So Completely Yourself That No One Is Attracted To You Or Wants To Employ You

[herpsandbirds]

[tractorgoth]

Mood. Have to add my other fave Darwin Being Hyperfixated On Invertebrate Taxonomy quote

[animentality]

[specialagentartemis]

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

[prokopetz]

The reason you can't be the next J R R Tolkien isn't because you don't have the talent, but because you're not the right kind of unwell. Tolkien wasn't bent for fantasy worldbuilding; he was bent for constructed languages, and got into fantasy worldbuilding in order to provide a material context in which to ground the notional evolution of the languages he invented. If you want to be the next Tolkien, you can't start with the worldbuilding; you've gotta find something extremely specific to fixate on, and develop it in such depth that inventing a world to contain it is genuinely the most logical next step.