Failing Forwards

Creative pursuits, including but not limited to, crochet, cross-stitch, drawing, jewellery making, painting and sewing, but also technology, feminism and memes with no coherence. She/They - 30's - neuro-divergent/chronic pain/fatigue

[evergreen-femme]

im just so happy i live in a time period where actual meaningful biological transition is possible. even if we lose rights or the ability to exist in public, nothing can turn back the clock on that, and just by having any sort of access to that our lives are made immensely better. millions of our sisters throughout history would never have dreamed of a day where they could have what HRT does for us.

please don't lose the plot of this. if you're a trans person on HRT you're a living miracle, the dream of hundreds of millions of your ancestors. your lives are all deeply meaningful no matter what anyone says.

[t4t4t]

תפילה להפך – מאבן בֹחן | Prayer for Transformation, from the poem "Even Boḥan" by Rabbi Ḳalonymus b. Ḳalonymus ben Meir (1322) • the Open Si

A prayer by Kalonymus b. Kalonymus ben Meir that appears in his poem ספר אבן בוחן, יג Sefer Even Boḥan (§13), describing the author's wish t

[unabashedllamamusic]

Cursed be the one who announced to my father: “It’s a boy!"... ...How could he twist the course of the stars so much? How could he have erred so in his astrology? A lying tongue, a fool’s mouth it had given him For he foolishly transformed justice to poison He altered the law and transposed the lines

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

I think I'm gonna go lay down for a little while.

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[liberalsarecool]

Billionaires lie. All the time.

[ms-demeanor]

I just have to lock in and get through my to-do list and then I'll start my new system with a clean slate and everything will be better.

[ms-demeanor]

Me, replying to every malingering email in my inbox: "It's going to be such a relief to clear this out finally!"

Everyone I'm replying to sending a response at the same time because I emailed them at the same time: ...

[ms-demeanor]

I'll set a calendar event for two weeks ahead of time and two days ahead of time so I won't forget.

[ms-demeanor]

If I just remember to do it every day it'll become a habit and I won't have to think about it.

[ms-demeanor]

I'll just stay at my desk until all of my tasks are done for the day and then they won't build up.

[ms-demeanor]

That's important, let me write it down on my hand so I can't ignore it.

[ms-demeanor]

If I skip lunch I'll catch up a little bit and I won't have to stay late or start early to stay on top of things.

[ms-demeanor]

I think if I work late all week that'll get me through the backlog and then I just have to keep up.

[ms-demeanor]

I have been out of my ADHD meds for three weeks and won't be able to get new prescription for another two weeks and there is nothing I want more right now than a single massive task that I can drill into for ten hours a day because having thirty small tasks that take twenty minutes each every day is grinding me into a fine paste and piping me onto crackers with a dill garnish.

[mens-rights-activia]

Tumblr in a nutshell

[musicalmelody001]

Is this the girl who made the Anemone Song?

[mens-rights-activia]

Yes

[theconcealedweapon]

The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.

[rostekhorn]

Yet another reason this is insanely revisionist is that it pretends the whole reason millennials felt so much pressure to go to college wasn't that conservative politicians had spent the eighties and nineties wrecking the shit out of labor unions to the point that by the time millennials turned eighteen, it was suddenly a lot harder to count on being able to work at a working-class job all your life and still have a good living.

College, all of a sudden, went from "something I'd like to do if I can get in" to "a lifeline in an economy where blue collar jobs are going to shit."

The wheel's turned long enough that now college students are being treated the way union workers and union-adjacent workers were treated in the eighties and nineties, so now college grads are the ones that it's fashionable to shit on, and the new fix-all solution is supposed to be "go into the trades!" Which means that by the 2050s at the latest, we'll be coming up with some new lie to blame people in the trades for the fact that now they're in trouble. And we'll have some new job that everyone should have been doing instead.

[wherowhero]

It will never cease to amaze me how often the groups with the least power and knowledge are blamed for the actions of those with power and knowledge. The boomer and gen X parents of millennials have *at every turn* caused the economic shitfire we are in and then blamed it on their children. They pushed millennials to go to college, told them there was no other way to live a good life. They have voted time and again as though they are the millionaires and billionaires who have actually benefited. And they live as though they do not have descendants.

[humoristics]

The ocean molded this clump of bricks into a rock shape

via

[pochowek]

real life texture glitch

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Domesticated rock has returned to the wild and become feral

[drlivistoned]

I hate the cosmetic surgery industry for so many reasons I really do. But the line between cosmetic and medically necessary plastic surgeries is as a cloud, and we cannot sacrifice bodily autonomy for bans so. We need to dismantle white supremacy and the patriarchy in order to effectively tackle the issue. I should be able to get elective top surgery without medicalising my transness you get?

[femmeharlequin-deactivated20240]

I had a breast reduction when I was 16. I was so top heavy that my back had started spasming badly by the time I was 12, if I hadn’t been able to get my reduction, I would’ve been in more extreme pain for much longer. The relief was almost instant. Just one example of medically necessary plastic surgery, in case people aren’t sure what that looks like.

Medically necessary plastic surgery also includes removing excess skin when someone loses a lot of weight: skin folds can become infected. Burn victims’ skin grafts, those are plastic surgery too. The field covers a lot more than people think.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Harold Gillies, now considered to be the father of modern plastic surgery, developed most of his techniques (many of which are still in use today) specifically to reconstruct the faces of men who'd been injured in WW1.

Advances in weaponry meant that, for the first time, men were coming home from war with literally half their faces blown off, on a regular basis. This was not only traumatic— there were cases of men cancelling engagements or being afraid to see their families, because of their disfigurements— but also caused problems with every day tasks like speaking and eating, in which your face plays a pretty key role.

Gillies arranged for a whole ward, and later a hospital, to be dedicated to the treatment of these men, and took steps to ensure that all soldiers who received these kinds of injuries on the battlefield would be sent to him directly. He developed methods for applying skin grafts so that larger portions of the face could be repaired.

He continued his work treating wounded soldiers throughout WW1 and WW2, and when both wars were ended— just in case he hadn't done enough to establish himself as a full on hero— he was then approached by a medical student named Michael Dillon, a trans man, and was able to use the same techniques he'd developed to reconstruct the penises of wounded soldiers to give him a phalloplasty. The first one ever performed on a trans man. He even diagnosed the guy with a condition to explain the frequent operations, so as to avoid outing him.

Dillon later wrote a book about trans-ness, which inspired Roberta Cowell, who became the first British transwoman to get a vaginoplasty, also performed by Gillies.

In both cases, the techniques he developed were still being used in similar operations decades later. Gillies himself stated that he wanted no publicity for performing these operations, saying that "If it gives real happiness, that is the most that any surgeon or medicine can give.”

[princesssokphanny]

A once-in-a-lifetime shot — the moon perfectly framed by a rainbow. Caught at just the right time. 🌈 🌕

[kedreeva]

Sourcing the photos as taken by Mark Ham on Instagram, according to one of the replies.

[leebrontide]

Happy Pride month to the moon

[therobotwig]

One year ago today I posted this miniature Star Wars Andor inspired photo I created. Shot practically using real figures, lighting & a couple of broom heads to create a crop field and a few perspective cheats.

[calciumcryptid]

I feel like a lot of people get "All Art is Political" confused with "All Art is made with Political Intentions" which is not the same.

[pixelartpeach]

E—m—d—a—s—h—N—e—c—k—l—a—c—e

[pixelartpeach]

Y—o—u—P—e—o—p—l—e—W—i—l—l—R—e—b—l—o—g—A—n—y—t—h—i—n—g

[seven-oh-four]

needs an em-dash at the beginning and/or end, otherwise the first or last letters will be right next to each other

[pixelartpeach]

϶—O—h—T—r—u—e—ϵ

(added clasps)

[pancake-blogging]

϶—F—r—i—e—n—d—s—h—i—p—B—r—a—c—e—l—e—t—ϵ

[too-many-blorbos]

϶—C—U—R—S—E—D—A—M—U—L—E—T—ϵ

[bees-official]

Cursed amulet necklace that doesnt have a cursed amulet its just the phrase cursed amulet

[sentientballofpeas]

϶—C—U—R—S—E—D—(¤)—A—M—U—L—E—T—ϵ

[pixelartpeach]

϶—T÷h÷a÷t÷s÷A÷G÷o÷o—d—P o

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⠀⠀⠀⠀M⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Y

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[estro-boi]

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bittorrent or utorrent.

[prokopetz]

It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.

[prokopetz]

Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!

[prokopetz]

@lunchm34t replied:

what adventure games softlock you like that?

I'm usually loathe to suggest TV Tropes as a resource, but given that only a person who's entirely unacquainted with the genre would be asking that question, a primer is probably warranted. Check out the Unwinnable By Design article and read the preamble for context on the types of softlocks we're discussing, then hit either the "Sierra" or "Infocom" links (yes, those two publishers each have their own dedicated sections!), pop open the "Cruel" tab, and get ready to read some stuff that makes you mad.

[sd-d0-l1y]

There really is only one correct way to play some of these games huh.

[prokopetz]

A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!

[prokopetz]

(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)

[dana-ategina]

were these like, rented out blockbuster-style and the devs got a cut out of said rent, or

[prokopetz]

It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud crowd really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.

[wherowhero]

Even though I have never played any of the mentioned games, I begin to realise that a significant portion of my playing ethos revolves around this feeling that I must search every room and pick up and keep every item that can be picked up.. just in case I need it later. If food seems to be rare, I don't eat it until I can see it's not required for quests. And when there are clearly two tasks to be done in order to progress, I worry that there is an order they need to be done in. It is WILD that what is essentially fear of 90's adventure game softlocks *continues* to affect my game play today.

[animentality]

[beggars-opera]

So I just found the most useful photo album in existence for tumblr arguments

[noldorinwa]

I HAVE FOUND MY FAVOURITE POST ON THE INTERNET

@georgeorwell @lordhellebore @francisperfectionbonnefoy @janiedean and everyone else have you guys seen this gem

[janiedean]

OH MY GOD I’M SAVING ALL  OF THESE RN

[quakerjoe]