"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Not today Justin
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@violent-darts
Thereafter for four years more Beren wandered still upon Dorthonion, a solitary outlaw; but he became the friend of birds and beasts, and they aided him, and did not betray him, and from that time forth he ate no flesh nor slew any living thing that was not in the service of Morgoth.
....you know what that's....really compelling as a fancast.
reminder that you don’t have to view your trauma as some sort of poetic justice or greater part of your development as a person. you dont deserve the bad things that happened to you. you don’t have to turn your struggles into some beautiful aftermath. sometimes things are just bad and no amount of twisting by society will make them beautiful.
…but likewise, you are allowed to enjoy the things @findingfeather calls flood gifts - the good things you might accidentally find bobbing in the rubble after the waters have washed away everything you had.
Being happy about those doesn’t mean you have to be okay with your trauma, and whoever hurt you didn’t “give” you the flood gifts. You were the one who found them.
Yessss. Nobody asked you about the bad shit so nobody gets to say a word about what good you make out of it. That doesn't mean you're saying "oh it was okay after all" or "it was worth it" - it's saying that given you ended up with all this bad shit and you can't erase it, you get to take all possible good shit and run with it.
The anti/anti anti debate in fanfiction is, when you come down to it, a debate about how to keep people safe from sexual violence.
Is it to keep them carefully sheltered from sex, to carefully police all sexual content and only permit sexuality to be expressed in certain ways? Or is it to shift our focus away from sexuality as inherently dangerous, and focus our efforts on allowing people to talk about and deepen our understandings of abuse, and giving children the skills and abilities to make their own decisions about sex?Â
If you permit more sexual freedom, there is in fact a danger that someone will use it badly; but if you keep someone ignorant and isolated about the fact that sex feels good, they might want to have it, and how they pursue that is entirely up to them, they might actually be more vulnerable to the first person willing to break the rules and share forbidden knowledge with them–and that person is more likely to be someone who will violate boundaries in other ways too.
Antis think censoring fiction will reduce sexual violence. Or rather, they feel that it will, even though they don’t have any scientific studies or research to back that up. Anti antis, on the other hand, can point to evidence that pornography doesn’t create more violence, that having only stereotypes and politically correct depictions of abuse means many people don’t realize they’re being abused, and early sex education makes teenagers less vulnerable to abuse.
We can have discussions about consent, who can meaningfully consent, what good sex is, and what makes relationships abusive–that is, unless the discussion has been banned from the server in the first place. A lot of anti antis care really deeply about keeping people safe from sexual violence, and would be the first to criticize unhealthy relationships in fic if they didn’t have to spend so much time fighting against censorship that keep that discussion from happening at all.Â
I SERIOUSLY RESENT THE FACT THAT I NO LONGER FEEL ABLE TO JUST GO "THAT'S FUCKED UP MAN" WITHOUT BEING CONCERNED THAT IT WILL BE USED IN SOMEONE'S PILE ON FOR WHY NOBODY WHO ENJOYS STORIES ABOUT THE THING I THINK IS FUCKED UP SHOULD EXIST AND HOW THEY ARE ALL BAD PEOPLE OKAY.
Not A Radfem in a Gay Hat: I’ve never seen [bigotry happen inside community safe spaces] happen so I’m 90% sure you’re lying.
Approximately 400 billion pan, bi, trans/nb, ace/aro, qpoc, etc people simultaneously speaking so loud they register as an earthquake scaling on the Richter at a 14.3: That has happened to me so many times I’m scared shitless of ever entering a community “safe space” ever again.Â
Not A Radfem in a Gay Hat: Personal annecdote doesn’t count lmao!
They block you when you bring actual studies. XD
This one's for any followers who are Christians and are or would be up for being actively attending members of a church.Â
I'm pretty sure that anyone of that description who's been following me (either here or over at @findingfeather) for a hot minute is, as much as anyone is, looking and searching for things they feel like they can actually do that will actually help against the camps on the Southern US border, and all the rest of the shit Trump is pulling right now, and as it happens, I have a very definite suggestion for you:
PUSH YOUR CHURCHES.
Obviously, everyone can push their faith communities on this issue, and I think I should. But this is particularly me talking to Christians, because in this case they are - you are - in a unique position that nobody else shares.
As Christians and members of a church you actually have a particular clout in US society that just about nobody else does. For all the US was supposedly founded as a secular nation, if you honestly thing Christianity (and particularly Protestant Christianity) isn't interwoven hard with the social and political history of the USA, you haven't been paying attention.
That means you have a way to amplify your voices.
Churches are already set up for group action: that's what they're for. When the family separation policy at the border first started being brought into practice one of the things that brought huge amounts of attention to it was the vast numbers of faith groups that came out opposed, including Christian groups - ones that nobody would have expected! Like the Catholic Church! And the Southern Baptists!
Churches are also often already set up for advocacy and for (to put it bluntly) political interference. In fact, the people making these camps are already doing that, but in the wrong way.
However, and usefully, these concentration camps are something every single fuckin' Christian church ought to be absolutely dead set on stopping. You know: that whole "least of these" thing! Right out of your incarnate god's mouth! Plus all the huge amount of Hebrew scripture the so-called "conservatives" are so keen on quoting most of the time that has some very definite things to say about welcoming and protecting and seeking justice to the stranger, and so on.
You have LOTS OF PROOF TEXTS, is what I'm saying.
So what does that mean?
Well, maybe you're lucky: maybe your church is already involved in the fight against the camps and against these policies, in which case, great, find out what they're doing and maybe help! Or maybe if they're against them in theory but seem a bit flummoxed about what to actually do, grab a list of potential actions, protests, people to write to, places to send money. Suggest a fundraiser. Suggest some awareness raising. Suggest writing to your denomination's government in Strong and Definite Terms about how awful this is and how they need to be against it.
Does your church have a group of nice church ladies who really need a project? This is a GREAT PROJECT.
Back last year, 600 Methodists filed ecclesiastical charges against Jeff Sessions: maybe your denomination, too, provides actual actions the church community can take against people within your denomination participating in this hideous shit. Maybe they were, and it's time to push them to be followed.
Maybe you're less lucky, though: maybe your church has been silent on the whole thing, or is even making mumbling noises about "well in the current crisis" or some shit.
Now, in anything I ever suggest, always keep in mind: I want  you to think about your safety first. So if it's not SAFE for you to do this shit, if for some reason (and there are many!) pushing back against this stuff will endanger you - because you're a minor or dependant and your family will react badly, because you're in a precarious position in the community and they'll react badly and those consequences will fuck things up for you - then hey, I get it. Look after yourself; there ARE other ways to help and to fight and sometimes those ways are "survive until tomorrow". That happens.
But if it's safe for you to do so, here's the thing:
You've got scripture on your side and you can start making noise.
"Wait a minute, Feather, you're a vocal pagan polytheist?" Yeah but I live in North America, I live in Northern Canada (again, god help me, for now), trust me, I know how churches work, and I also know what the inside of that holy text looks like and trust me if there is one thing I will totally grant that particular god and set of faith traditions it's that it is pretty damn unequivocal about a few things:Â
- "strangers" (that is, immigrants, members of other communities/traditions/races/ethnicities/whatever) are owed protection, justice and help
- children and widows (that is, the vulnerable of society, those who do not have standing and status in the hierarchy of the land) are owed protection, justice and help
- if you persecute the above, you are Bad and God Is Pissed At You, Hoooo Boy.
Further, if you're Christian in particular, Matthew 25:31-46 is, quite literally, the specifically identified criteria for Eternal Punishment vs Eternal Reward.
So take every possible opportunity to bring this up. To centre it. To remind everyone of it. Opportunity for prayers from the Congregation? There's your prayer. Any community news? Oh hey you have some one-sheets on the Situation at the Border from a Godly Perspective to hand out to everyone. Bible study? WELP YOU HAVE SOMETHING YOU'D LIKE TO DISCUSS.
I'm absolutely sure there are progressive and justice-oriented Christian organizations out there who can also provide further scripts, further ideas, and further support in pushing this with any Christian organization. But this time, with this issue, churches have a potential to have a disproportionate social impact - push them!
straight people who say homosexual give the same vibe as men who say female
real talk: I have a stronger negative/fear reaction to “homosexual” in certain tones than I have to “f*g”.Â
This is from experience.Â
Yeeeeeeeep for me there’s two versions
Version A: sneering drawl
Version B: detached tone implying that the speaker considers the topic purely theoretical and not connected to the real lives of actual people.
Exactly.Â
Version A: “I didn’t say the bad word so you’re not allowed to get mad at me.”Â
Version B: “You are a lab specimen not a human.”Â
could u imagine if ppl talked about catholicism the same way they talked about like… indigenous ppl’s religions….
girl in horror movie holding a bible open: “according to legend, a mob tortured a half-man, half-god, and nailed him to a wooden cross, leaving him to starve to death. But days later, on this very night, they found he had clawed his way out of the grave. Now those who believe lie in wait for him to rise again, To honour him, they have weekly gatherings where they chant and sing, and at the end of it they eat his flesh and blood.”
girl’s friend: “wow.. thats so creepy…”
horror movie jock: “it’s only a myth, don’t worry”
straight people who say homosexual give the same vibe as men who say female
real talk: I have a stronger negative/fear reaction to “homosexual” in certain tones than I have to “f*g”.Â
This is from experience.Â
Annnnd our parents and grandparents never taught us basic life skills because the baby boomer generation loved outsourcing easy work, like hemming pants and baking cakes. The generations before us glommed onto the fast, easy fix, and important skills have been lost in the process.
(And of course the generation who raised us loves to act fake shocked like “my grandkids don’t know how to boil water” like yeah, Janice, that’s because you took your kids out to eat 6 nights a week and baked Stouffers lasagna one night)
And now we are broke. And can’t afford to pay $60 to have every pair of pants we own hemmed (shoutout to shorties!). We are making yogurt because we can’t afford to pay $2.50 for one yogurt.
I’ve learned to knit to make myself wool hats and scarves. I’ve learned to sew so I can make items that would otherwise cost me 4x the cost to make it. I’ve learned to make yogurt because I would prefer to spend $2 for a gallon of milk and get 24 yogurts out of it rather than just one.
I’ve planted fruit trees in my yard so I can reduce the carbon footprint of the fruit I eat, and because produce is expensive.
I raise egg-laying chickens so I don’t contribute to factory farming.
My husband hunts deer so that we can eat lean, virtually fat free meat, and also not contribute to factory farming. The deer live happy lives and are not allowed to suffer. (Hey PS also, hunting up here plays an important role in ecology, as otherwise the deer population would explode, and deer would starve in the winter. Thanks for coming to my TEDta…)
My generation is going on YouTube to learn to change tires, bake bread and do their taxes because y’all sure as shit didn’t teach us.
THIS
Lets not forget the phasing out of the HomeEc class. Or the Shop Class.
Alleviating one’s ignorance of a subject should NEVER, EVER be looked down on! Learning and growing are never anything to be shamed of, or for!
reblogging for the additions. Â
really if you take a moment to think about the headline it basically just says “millennials are so helpless they’re taking time to learn how to do things they don’t know how to do”
oh no…how awful…
Damn kids and their *spins roulette wheel* commitment to continued education in practical skills…
Also let’s be real: A GODDAMN LOT OF BOOMERS DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO DO A LOT OF THIS SHIT EITHER, AND EITHER LEARNED AFTER A MAKING A BIG MESS, OR NEVER DID.Â
And they mocked each other for admitting ignorance, which just made those who didn’t know a needed, useful skill less able to acquire it. And the only people you COULD really learn from most of the time were those around you, so if nobody around you was actually GOOD at a skill, you were fucked.Â
Skills were often stratified by class, by location, by subculture and by gender.Â
The biggest way in which now is different? Is we’ve decided “fuck it nobody knows everything LET’S HAVE CLASSES.”Â
zeroeternal replied to your post “Hi! Just a genuine question, I was curious as to why you dislike the...”
Watching the point soar over your head is kinda stunning. It’s an allegory on the wealth gap. Especially in this day and age. The whole “gifted” part is projection because the fish doesn’t “do” anything with its gift. It just has it. You know, like inherited wealth. It did nothing to earn it and flaunts it in front of others who don’t have it.
*chinhand* Gosh you are definitely the very first person to completely fail to engage with what I actually said, and everything you’ve said here is totally new, rather than something that I actually fucking talked about and dealt with in the post!Â
Well done you. You have told us all! Here’s your gold star. Now fuck off please, the grownups are talking.Â
oh something i learned recently that i feel more people should know about is that “plant-based plastic” is not biodegradable! when advertisers say that a product is made with “plant-based plastic,” it just means that the ethanol used in the production of the plastic is made with corn or sugarcane instead of petroleum. advertisers are just betting on consumers not understanding the difference between “biodegradable” and “plant-based,” and using the term as an eco-friendly selling point when plant-based plastics actually create just as much harmful, non-biodegradable waste as traditional plastics.
To be fair petroleum plastic is also plant based. The plants are just very very old.
you: stalin is right and his idea of communism is the best way forward me, an intellectual: [in my unmarked mass grave where i was shot during the purges, and therefore cannot respond]
T1J -Â How Patience with People Makes the World Better
Summary: “People don’t get “woke” overnight. Sometimes we have to be patient and help them get there.“
Transcript below:
Keep reading
I’ll never be able to reconcile Shel Silverstein’s art and stories with his appearance. He looked like he would gladly murder you with a shard of broken glass and then throw your body directly into a shark.
you have odd notions about masculine faces.
real gentle-lookin’ sneer
really gentle looking when not say, in the grainiest over inked newspaper photo you could find.
buddy it’s literally the photo he put on the back of The Giving Tree
KSJQLJWLEJDKENELNFLUEODJE
....I mean The Giving Tree is straight up a horror story, so I don't find that presentation totally unreasonable.
You turn on your PC to keep working on your novel, but to your surprise, when you open the file, it is writing itself. You read some of what has already been written and it seems your characters have created free will, and the plot is progressing without you.
“oh thank god” says the writer
The thing is this is literally what happens except they still need me to actually type the things and make sentences about it so like.Â
Stop writing men as if modern Western toxic masculinity were the default throughout time and space.
Your medieval knights can share a pallet at night because it’s cold in this castle and they’re demonstrating their respect and affection for each other by sharing physical proximity.
In the far future, your dude can be a scientist adventurer robot captain, but he can also make food for people to demonstrate his affection and dance to show off his happiness.
Many cultures alive today expect the average man to be good with children, to be able to diaper a baby, to know how to assist in childbirth. Your men don’t have to go, “Oh god, an infant, I’ve never touched one of those before.”
Before modern Europe, there was nothing unmanly about loving colour, fashion, art, and decoration. Flowers weren’t always emasculating. Emotions weren’t always considered signs of weakness. Men got to want and have warm, close, affectionate friendships with other men.
In many ways, Western toxic masculinity of the last few centuries has been the exception, not the rule.
Hmm, will have to look up some sources on the medieval knights - if anyone knows of any good ones let me know, my googling skills aren’t really great.
I’d suggest the search term “medieval bed sharing”, which gets you articles like The Once-Common Practice of Communal Sleeping, or Three Wise Men in a Bed: Bedsharing and Sexuality in Medieval Europe.Â
This is kind of a tough subject to source, like medieval underclothes, because it only shows up in the surviving texts if people are doing something OUT of the ordinary. So in many medieval romances the issue of co-sleeping comes up when a knight needs to share a bed with a lady and then he has to promise nothing sexy will happen, so he puts his sword between them in bed.
So a lot of our examples of medieval bedsharing between men come with this back-and-forth of “Wait, that sounds gay” and “It’s totally not gay, men just slept together and kissed a lot back then!” and honestly it’s a bit of both. Some examples of bedsharing, like Henry II and William Marshal, have no known overtones of queerness. Other medieval pairs, like Edward II and Piers Gaveston, had VERY strong overtones of queerness. Men were more okay sleeping together and kissing back then, AND they were sometimes gay.Â
For a glimpse into that debate, Google “medieval knights gay marriage” and read all the articles explaining that we have no way of knowing exactly how platonic those male brotherhood ceremonies, sworn in a church where a pair of men clasped hands and exchanged kisses and vows of eternal loyalty and lived together in one house for the rest of their lives, were.Â
And I mean part of that is very likely a matter of “we’re totally cousins. COUSINS. totally.” on the part of those being involved in them.Â
Because same-sex sexuality was still actually, genuinely Not Okay. In fact, no sexuality except Properly Married Heterosexuality That Fulfilled The Three Goods Of Marriage (one of which was procreation!*) was Okay, and even then like if you could just be celibate and chaste and just never have sex your whole life, that was holier, okay? The whole Proper Married Union thing was a safety-catch for the fact that most people just couldn’t be asked to give up sexuality entirely.Â
Lust was bad, hetero marriage was a sort of safety zone for lust, and otherwise no good people are having any kind of sex at ALL, are they? That’s what we thought!Â
But the fact of the matter is, humans are shit at even that kind of set up and we find ways. It’s just that at that point in time it’s important that these ways are Plausibly Deniable.Â
Nunneries? Were absolutely hotbeds of sapphic relationships. And as such they were also subject to significant attempts by those in charge to clamp down on sapphic relationships depending on whether or not whoever was in charge at that time felt that it was worth the effort. Ditto all-male monasteries.Â
And knightly orders and all kinds of shit.Â
But in some ways because the fact was that nobody was supposed to be having a same-sex relationship, it was at the same time easier to hide your semi-official same-sex relationship behind the fact that no for reals: we’re just bros. With a man and a woman there was ALWAYS the fully socially recognized chance (even likelihood!) that Sex Was A Factor, so that’s where you get the things with the knight sleeping with a sword between them.Â
Since sex between men and between women was Simply Not A Thing, why would anyone think anything of two men or two women pledging forever together in friendship on and on and so on?Â
(This was actually a feature in Reformation anti-Catholic stuff, although even they preferred to Allude Circumspectly to the issue.)Â
So to some extent, it’s deliberately opaque whether or not any given case of a life-long pledge of whatever between two dudes who then shared a house forever was basically them being gay-married in plain sight, or whether it was in fact Just Really Great Friends. And both totally happened, and the latter obscured the former because as long as no convincing witnesses with malice aforethought actually saw you fucking, nobody could argue.Â
(Of course, if they could, you’d be very possibly executed. That’s the downside to this model, or at least one of the many, many downsides to this model.)Â
(And of course the ways in which ace-spectrum stuff is also naturally obscured in there is a thing!)Â
(*by which I mean there were literally specific cases where infertility could viably annul a marriage, which is to say make it so that the marriage had never happened; they were specific - and “this woman has just never had a baby so she MUST be barren” was NOT one of them; it was actually more frequently, let’s be blunt, erectile dysfunction on the part of a husband that could do this, as long as the wife didn’t know about it before they married** - and limited, but they EXISTED, because reproduction was One Of The Points Of Marriage.
**if she knew about it and married him anyway then the sacrament of marriage was still probably valid and they were still united in one flesh in the eyes of God so then the marriage was still real and yes she had to stay with him and not sleep with anyone else; the very specifics of mediaeval Catholic marriage are COMPLEX, DETAILED and actually VERY INTERNALLY CONSISTENT when it comes to their logic, as long as you accept their first and fundamental premises of the nature and purpose of marriage.)Â
Alternative to the tired old wizard-with-a-sugar-daddy interpretation of the patron/warlock relationship in Dungeons & Dragons:
Clueless boss and long-suffering employee, whose powers are basically the magical equivalent of pilfering office supplies for personal use
Scheming master and duplicitous apprentice who are totally open about their loathing for each other and are keen to see who betrays whom first
Bureaucratic devil and soul-peddling diabolist with a contract a mile long, each honestly believing they’re getting the better of the other
Glowering quartermaster and loose-cannon operative, whose record for getting results just barely justifies the expense of employing them
Indifferent parent who pays their estranged offspring’s allowance like clockwork but otherwise prefers to deal with them as little as possible
Vast, slumbering god-monster and amoral parabiologist who knows which spots to poke with a stick to provoke particular autonomic responses
You forgot the most important
Mom-friend and train-wreck-friend.Â
This one can go in EITHER DIRECTION.Â
