We're on the outside looking in. @weareontheoutsidelookingin - Tumblr Blog

my favorite thing about the spanish harry potter translation is that instead of calling voldemort “the dark lord,” they call him señor tenebroso, which basically means “mr. spooky”

ksdfjhks-deactivated20180929

mi parte favorita de harry potter en inglés es que en vez de decirle a voldemort “el señor tenebroso” le dicen dark lord, lo que básicamente significa “don oscuro”

I think I might come back to write here.

I said that, already, before.

September was more than half a year ago.

Time passed. Fall turned into winter turned into spring.

People say that’s what happens when you get older.

People also say that you change less, but I think I’ve changed more.

I played hooky from work in order to plant onions and sunflowers today.

it’s hard to turn a patch of grass into a garden, and you take out so much dirt in the process.

I wondered what we would do with all the dirt that the compost heap produced, but I’ve already gone through so much of it just filling in the garden.

My nails are so dirty and broken and I don’t want to have to make them presentable again but I guess I should.

I really like where I live.

I was right all along, for me being an adult is so much easier than being a kid.

I am thinking about maybe coming back to this Tumblr for a bit.

Writing out words feels more awkward then ever, the gap between my thoughts and what I can express on a page ever widening.

It feels not worth trying, what good will it do, even if I have something of worth to say what reason do I have to believe that I will ever get it out adequately,

I am tired, and I still have a dinner to go to and laundry to do and homework to finish and tonight is my turn to do the dishes even if I’m not eating dinner here.

I am tired and I’m tired of being tired and I am not sure what to do to be less tired.

#text

tenaciousvoidcycle-deactivated2

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/08/ted-cruz-parents-canada-voters-list/

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/01/11/2746384/

The Far Right’s inane definition of citizenship is actually leading to people rejecting Cruz as a citizen. Yay! This is great. Actually, the articles are surprisingly “neutral”. The first just tries to say that it doesn’t matter and the second just reiterates that a stupid version of originalism leads to the conclusion that Cruz is not a citizen. Neither are interesting.

weareontheoutsidelookingin

Oh! I forgot to tell you that Fox News was talking about this too!

(When I was watching at the dentists.)

#you are having more fun than you should with this #I expect to win many bets

I did better on the reading portion of my New Years resolutions then I did in 2014, with 2015 having a total of 34 books read, 7 of them either non-fiction or fiction that was significant in some way (asterisks indicate what I’m putting in that category).

I think this year is going to be a good year for reading.

#year in review #books #new years #2015

linmanuel

TUMBLRICO!

I made this for you today. It’s the scene in Hamilton that goes between “Dear Theodosia” and “Non Stop.” I made a decision not to record this scene on the album, for two reasons 1) It really is more of a scene than a song, the only SCENE in our show, and I think its impact is at its fullest in production form. 2) As someone who grew up ONLY listening to cast albums (we ain’t have money for a lot of Broadway shows, like most people) those withheld moments were REVELATIONS to me when I finally experienced them onstage, years later. Hamilton is sung through, and I wanted to have at least ONE revelation in store for you. I stand by the decision, and I think the album is better for it.

I know, I know. “But what about people who won’t get the chance to see it…” I know. “And Laurens is already so underrepresented in history…” I KNOW. THAT’S WHY HE’S SO PROMINENT IN THE SHOW. So here’s where we meet in the middle. The missing scene is above. Please understand that the reason I left this scene off the album is precisely BECAUSE I value it (and Laurens) so much. Happy #Hamiltunes listening, Tumblrico. This is your extra credit reading. Yr Obd Serv, Lin-Manuel

after being away for so long, the internet feels weird.

i have a keyboard. a keyboard!

there are at least three end-of-year, beginning-of-new posts that I want to make but they’re all going to be late because I couldn’t have plausibly started working on them any earlier than this and there is a lot of internet stuff I want to catch up on.

I am glad to be back.

antinegationism

What do these people object to? They’re tired of the prioritization of the symbolic over the substantive; of the ever-more-obscure left-wing vocabulary; of the near-total silence on class issues; of the abandonment of labor organizing as a principal method of political action; of the insistence that people who aren’t already convinced must educate themselves, when convincing others is and has always been the basic requirement of political action; of the confusion of pop culture ephemera with meaningful political victory; of the celebrity worship; of the clumsy Manicheanism that divides the world into all good and all bad; of the use of cruelty, shaming, and character assassination; of the insistence that people within a political movement should “just listen” when someone makes a claim, no matter how outlandish, misguided, unfair, or wrong; of the expectation that everyone should know how to speak and act in perfect congruence with obscure and elitist conceptions of righteous behavior; of the profound conservatism of demanding that everyone occupy a narrow band of cultural practices, refusing to enjoy the world’s vast cultural bounties, out of fear of appropriating someone else’s culture; and, more than anything, of the willful obscurity and inaccessibility, the total and complete indifference towards actually reaching out and building a bigger movement by meeting people halfway and trying to adapt to them as you ask them to adapt to you, the replacement of a mass political movement with an exclusive social circle. I’m an academic, and a proud one, and many of my friends and family are academics, and I grew up within the academic left. But I’m perfectly willing to say that the academic turn within the American left — the way in which the university system has replaced the labor movement as the primary incubator of left-wing ideas — has been an unmitigated disaster. It has taken the materialist philosophies of socialism and corrupted them with a reality-denying postmodernism that prevents us from doing the basic work of politics, which is understanding reality and working to change it. It’s made the left’s behavior the behavior of a cloister, a political straitjacket that compels us to direct our appeals to a tiny fringe rather than to the vast world outside the campus walls. And in replicating that cloistered behavior on social media, the public face of the left has become synonymous with these obscure practices. Meanwhile, unable to articulate its value to the wider world thanks to these same pathologies, the humanities crumble within our universities, despite how badly the world needs them.

DeBoer (via antinegationism)

theunitofcaring

A couple days ago there was a thread on r/legaladvice in which a woman going to prison asked about her rights. Specifically, she had (and was in therapy for) OSFED, an eating disorder, and would not eat food that contained inseparably mixed ingredients. She was wondering if there was a way she could get food she could eat in prison.

The answer was ‘no’, of course. But it wasn’t just ‘no’, it was a fairly condescending and gleeful ‘no’, a look-at-this-entitled-brat-thinking-she’ll-get-accommodations-in-jail. She said that she’d rather die than eat mixed food, and they said that she’d be isolated and forcefed.

(I asked my grandmother, who was a county judge for several decades, if the commenters were right. She said almost certainly yes, though jails differ wildly.)

I am not really surprised that our prison system works this way. But I do have something I feel very strongly about: she is not entitled. A system that won’t provide you with plain bread and plain vegetables, but will strap you down and torture-feed you when you’re unable to eat the food it does provide, is evil, burn-it-to-the-ground evil, and expecting better than that is not entitlement at all.

And the mentality on exhibit in that thread is one of “people who go to prison are bad, and because they are bad they deserve to suffer. and people who have mental health problems would stop having them if they were forced to suck it up.” And I find both of those ways of thinking absolutely loathsome, and would like to burn them to the ground along with the prisons only I don’t know how. But when people wonder why I’m so stubborn in my conviction that no one can ever be so bad as to be deserving of suffering, this is why. The fruits of “bad people deserve to suffer” is a prison system that would rather torture its inhabitants than support them, and a general population that calls it entitlement to be appalled by that.

#unitofcaring

oldwordcubed

On the one hand, it was rude of me to pop up on someone’s personal post about their struggle to define an identity for themselves just so I could insult them. On the other hand, that identity was literally “Bay Area techno-libertarian.”

Yes, I could’ve spent multiple paragraphs explaining why (1) libertarianism is bad, (2) technology-centric solutions to complicated human problems are bad, and (3) the Bay Area (here used, as the original poster did, as a metonym for a geopolitical identity held exclusively by IT professionals) is the nexus for old bad ideas given a fresh coat of paint and new, impressively innovative, bad ideas.

But I wasn’t in the mood to piss away my time writing a 10-page essay that won’t change anyone’s mind anways. “You deserve to be punched in the face” is shorter and still honestly represents my opinion.

nostalgebraist

But it still wouldn’t be any less rude to pop up on someone’s personal post with a 10-page essay explaining why you don’t like them, instead of a brief insult. Personal reflections are not posted on tumblr with the expectation of this kind of feedback and this kind of feedback is rude while, as you note, not likely to change anyone’s mind.

bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

the thought process that leads one to go “I know! I’m going to tell a neurodivergent person who struggles with the idea that having an identity means they’re evil that having this particular identity means they’re evil! socialing the justice!”

like come on

theunitofcaring

“On the one hand, I am capable of understanding how abominably rude my behavior was. On the other hand, the person had a political opinion I disagree with” is such a revealing post. The poster sincerely considers “I disagree with them about politics” a legitimate counterweight to the observation “popping up on someone’s personal post to tell them they deserve to be punched in the face is rude”. That only makes sense if you think human decency is only for people who earn it by having all of the correct opinions.

Hey, OP, by any reasonable definition I think I’m a Bay Area technolibertarian. I live in the Bay Area and it’s been a huge improvement for me over Hometown, because it’s safe to be gay and people don’t threaten me over political disagreements and there are more options for work environments that suit my needs. I think artificial meat alternatives are going to solve one of the biggest moral problems of our time, and I’m passionate about expanding access to assistive tech and I get crazy excited about every wild edit-their-genes/giant-lasers/better-nets/better-insecticides mosquito eradication proposal I hear, which is totally ‘thinking technology can solve problems’. And I want a smaller government that doesn’t start foreign wars or arm its police like a military or deport undocumented immigrants or throw people in jail for drugs or sex work! There you go, the enemy is before you. And I’m asking for an argument, so you’re not even being rude. Care to explain which of these beliefs mean I deserve to be punched in the face?

wordsnquotes

Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.

C.S. Lewis (via myfairgolightly)

More Lewis here…

“…Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.” (my emphasis.)

And G. K. Chesterton:

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

The usual misquotations, listed by Neil Gaiman, are something like:

“Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know the dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

All good stuff.

(via petermorwood)

#not usually a fan of Lewis but this is probably my favorite quote by him

it is after my first final, and I am sad.

I am sad because I could have done better.

on some level, it doesn’t matter. my grade in Human Evolution is unlikely to have an impact on my life. if I am applying to graduate school, my less-than-stellar grade in an anthropology course will likely make no difference.

I mean. besides the lectures in which we watched movies which we had to do write ups of, I think I attended maybe two or three? and that was in the first two weeks of school. I attended every recitation/lab but one, but I couldn’t have paid attention if I tried - teaching CS recitation is a high energy expenditure, and I’m not equipped to pay attention immediately afterwards.

considering that, it seems fairly clear that I earned an F in this course, and it is fairly implausible that I have lower than a B. I still might have gotten an A - really, I just need to have done as well on the final as I did on the midterm, and I don’t feel like I did that much worse. could be more of a curve here. but I don’t expect it.

it’s not the overall attending lecture and inattention in recitation that got me, I think. it’s a couple of things that all happened pretty late in the semester.

the zero on the skeletal quiz in the class I skipped in order to interview. hurt me double - first the missed points, second because I didn’t study that section at the time at all because I knew I was missing it.

the grade on the lab final - medium term preparation was thwarted since I needed to prepare my thesis proposal, immediate term preparation was thwarted because I would sooner fail a test than shirk a job.

those two things set me up less nicely for the final than I would have liked, but I still could have gotten an A, or at least guaranteed a minimum of a B+.

at the end of the day, it was the lack of studying for the final. I could have studied Saturday, but I was in the city LARPing. between Sunday and Monday, I finished three books and spent the night out, and looked over the study guide for the first time some 18ish hours before the exam.

I mean, I’m not sure how much clearly I can fail to deserve an A.

I’m still sad that I’m not going to get one.

tenaciousvoidcycle-deactivated2

A friend pointed out how many econ theses had the word “impact” in the title. I said “why not just use the ‘effect”?” and the response was that “then we would have to know whether to use ‘effect’ or ‘affect’!” I am now trying to figure out whether the use of the word “impact” and its relations “impactful” are because most people don’t know when to use “effect” or “affect.” This worries me.

weareontheoutsidelookingin

To be fair, I’m also the person that picks between “calander” and “calandar” and “calendar” and “calender” at random. Also “sentance” and “sentence”.

The reasoning behind my word choice is probably not representative.

brutereason

Obsession with “correct” language plays an enormous part in making social justice inaccessible to many people. Feminist terminology changes practically every day, it seems, and making a mistake with it can be cause for intense social backlash. And no, I’m not one of those folks who is always moaning about how the “PC generation” is ruining the world. I know what it feels like to be constantly misgendered, to hear racist slurs about my people casually tossed out as a joke. I believe that when people say things that reinforce oppression and cause pain, they should be made aware of it. However, I’m also starting to realize that being considered a “good feminist” is an endeavor that can require an enormous amount of privilege: It takes time and certain kind of education to read and keep up with social justice ideas. Not everyone’s style of learning or thinking lends itself easily to learning new ways of thinking and talking.

9 Ways We Can Make Social Justice Movements Less Elitist and More Accessible — Everyday Feminism (via brutereason)

This is creating the same grammar, style and punctuation crap that Sj calls ableist/elitist/prejudiced in the rest of society.

(via warpedellipsis)

This is a good point actually. It’s worth considering to learn to look at people’s actions/opinions rather than their choice of words. Sometimes you’ll run into people who say things in the most cringeworthy ways possible because they don’t know the latest lingo, but they’ll really come through for you when it comes to standing up to bigots. The opposite is true as well, sometimes you’ll run into people who have very oppressive stances on issues, who think that what they say is perfectly acceptable because they sprinkle their shitty opinions liberally with the latest ‘hip’ words.

(via snow-anne)

shadesofmauve

On Fanfiction

I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.

We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!

But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.

I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.

Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?

lsbaird

I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.

Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.

But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.

roachpatrol

Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.

Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.

kyraneko

Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.

That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.

But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.

A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This is what stories are supposed to be.

This is what stories are.