To YOU it’s bad writing. To ME it’s a very nuanced piece of work that explores subtle intricacies without outright saying it. And also it’s bad writing
I get what internet (often borderline or overt rad)feminists are trying to say with shit about how men never have to deal with x, but sooo many of the examples get shot to shit when you apply any other Man to the example than a cishet rich thin white guy.
“When have men ever had to worry about being killed for something they wore?” Black men. Gay men. Trans men.
“When have men ever been body shamed?” Fat men, balding men, disabled men.
“When have men ever had to worry about walking home at night?” Black men, gay men.
People reinvent “if men could get pregnant” over and over and when someone says “oh they do actually” it’s always viewed as hostile and not a potential intersection.
Like no, you do not have to coddle men, but men saying “hey I do know what it’s like actually” are not outright our enemy trying to center themselves, they are often extending a hand saying “hey I do get it too.”
You get “men shouldn’t be part of feminist conversations” which, hm, and then you get “they should sort this out amongst themselves” but if it’s just men talking about feminism on their own then it’s an insulated boys club being misogynists so they couldn’t ever come to feminist conclusions, but if the group is led by a woman then she’s spending her emotional labor teaching them when the men should just learn it themselves but if they go do it themselves then they’re talking over women (who are not present, curious. MRAs much?) so they should have women present but don’t talk in the conversations because it doesn’t actually involve you and you could never relate to this, so frankly why are you even here? You should go talk to your boys about this by yourselves.
Like, if you think the most bland ass version of Men are so wholly irredeemable and inherently evil by virtue of either birth or identity, why are we even bothering with theory? The fight is over then! There is no hope for change, and things will always be bad forever!
How is this a revolutionary viewpoint?
Forget men of marginalized identities having overlap, the most privileged ass man is going to overlap with the rest of us, and it is as much in his interest to reject patriarchy as much as the rest of us, because unfortunately solidarity means “our struggles are connected” not “in order to be morally pure you must support my cause”, and so any man who sees his struggle as being linked with mine and strives to fight oppressive structures IS my ally because yes the fight involves him too
This has me thinking about Paulo Freire (& by extension, bell hooks) again. If you’ve (anyone) never heard of or perhaps heard of & just not read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I recommend reading at least chapter 1. It’s free online! It can get a little complicated if you’re not used to reading this kind of text, but his most important points are often spelled out rather plainly.
Here’s the excerpt I’m reminded of—
Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.
Obliterate the idea that oppressors are not themselves dehumanized under systems of oppression. Freire makes this point over and over again.
(Another point he makes over and over again is that the oppressed, in addition to being oppressed, have also internalized the image of the oppressor in themselves, and see the image of their oppressor in their oppressed comrades. This causes both deep self-hatred and lateral aggression & violence.)
So yeah. We absolutely need to get the least oppressed people on our sides & in these conversations because they need us in order for them to be liberated and we need them in order for us to be liberated.
Pensions sound so fake as a zillennial. You work for one place for decades (already sounds fake) and then afterwards you leave and they just. keep paying you. the same amount of money. to do nothing. for the rest of your life. if i wasn’t already aware that this was something that readily and commonly existed during my grandparent’s days then it would sound like some kind of socialist pipe dream
American pensions sound incredibly fake as an Australian, you just expect your fucking employer to put aside and manage your superannuation all by themselves and it’s with them until the second they pay it out to you? It sounds like someone scamming you out of your own retirement money.
good news! they do scam you. like all the time.
Australian super funds were scamming people by charging too many fees so we started a royal fucking commission about it and it completely changed the industry.
our banks and corporations got together and explained very nicely to the government that they want to keep all of our money for any reason they can make up and our government said ‘sure’
“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.
“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.
“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”
And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:
Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.
“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know … they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.
Adult ProTip, from a security professional: If a kid tells you, “My parents are gonna kill me / kick my ass / kick me out” for something relatively minor, don’t respond with shit like “Really? ;) that sounds a little extreme, don’t you think sweetie?” because that shit really does happen.
Instead, respond as though whatever threat they are afraid of is fully valid, and offer whatever you can do to help- ask if they believe they are in danger of being hurt in any way, and work accordingly.
If they’re overreacting, they’ll usually realize and dial it back, self-correct and begin thinking a bit more rationally.
If they’re not overreacting, and the danger is real, then they’ll need a level-headed adult in their corner, not another condescending authority figure who doesn’t believe them.
thank you so much for saying this in such an elequent way. Because this is how I’ve been approaching working with kids in general.
But older adults around me always criticise me for taking what kids say at face value and you know taking them seriously. I’ve always thought it was bad to not do that, but I didn’t have the words to explain why as I’ve always been met with the notion that kids exaggerate or just don’t know what they’re saying. Which I also don’t believe
The trope where a character overhears something out of context and assumes the worst is usually annoying and bad but I really think it works well in Shrek
We, the audience, know that Fiona is talking about herself but, regardless, she’s calling herself these terrible things because she is an ogre. If Fiona is these things because she is is an ogre what does that make Shrek?
If Fiona says no one could love her because she is an ogre, she is saying that Shrek is also unloveable whether she wants to or not.
Imo the scene is a really good portrayal of how when you talk poorly of yourself or others for having a trait, you’re also talking about every other person who shares that trait; even if you love them or think what you’re saying doesn’t apply to them.
Not going to lie, I saw the word “Shrek” and never expected this to be a deep post.
fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes
May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love
May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love
i get the point of the polls informally showing that the vast majority of tumblr users have been here for years and barely anyone is new. the problem is that the suits don’t look at that kind of data and go “ah, we understand. the majority of our users are oldheads who want things to stay the same. we misunderstood our audience.” they absolutely have hard numbers on these things. they surely know most active users have been here forever. but they look at these stats and go “wow, our growth rate really IS shit. we’re still relying on an ever-dwindling pool of users who have been here since they were teenagers in the early 2010s. we need to be working even harder to make this place appeal to new users”
the higher ups and investors on sites like this want infinite growth forever. this is why they keep changing the layout to make it look like other, more popular sites, even though we hate it. this is why they try out shit like tumblr live that doesn’t appeal to the established core userbase in the slightest. it’s not for us. it’s also not for the ~5% of active users (if the poll going around is to be believed) who signed up within the last year. no, they’re chasing after the hundreds of millions of people who use twitter and the BILLIONS of people who use tiktok, hoping to appeal to them and make tumblr more popular again
this is, of course, deeply stupid. nobody is leaving tiktok to hop on tumblr live. they already have tiktok. and we’re on tumblr because we like tumblr, not because we want it to morph into something else. but i’m sure automattic’s got venture capital investors breathing down their necks going “why isn’t tumblr more like twitter or tiktok or facebook or instagram or” etc. etc., and so here we are
“RPG Maker lets you create games without knowing how to program!” is both technically a true statement and a trap.
To be clear, this isn’t snarking about whether RPG Maker is a “good” program or not, nor about the limitations of its feature set. I could opine about both of those things, but the problem is more basic.
RPG Maker is designed by programmers, with – as far as I can tell – no non-programming-related UX expertise or oversight whatsoever.
Have you ever seen that xkcd comic with the two geochemists discussing whether the average layperson knows the chemical formula for feldspar?
That’s the situation we’re looking at here. The advertising claim that RPG Maker requires no programming knowledge is being made by people who fundamentally have no idea what actually constitutes “programming knowledge”. To them, “programming” simply means writing code, not the vast penumbra of related knowledge required to do so with any fluency.
There are plenty of ways that RPG Maker could insulate the user from needing to possess this knowledge; it just doesn’t, because its designers have programmer brain, and their idea of being accessible to non-programmers stops at not having to literally write code.
The upshot is that making effective use of RPG Maker in all but the most basic of cases is going to require a great deal of specialised coding-adjacent knowledge, even if you never write a single line of the stuff yourself.
This is right about every single “no-code” tool ever made.
Everyone’s always like “poor Prometheus all he did was give humans fire and now he’s cursed to suffer for all eternity,” what about the eagle forced to return every sunrise and eat his insides until he knows Prometheus more intimately than he knows himself and still he has to keep coming back day after day to do it all over again, what about that huh?
I'm a bisexual in their twenties, I'm generally stoned and caffeinated, and I wish there were a sarcasm font. Whichever ship has currently snagged the entirety of my dopamine.
