posting this again because it is continually relevant. in particular, right now it is relevant to the popularity of accusing trans women of anything and everything for no good reason.

pdf version

we've got a life to love living.

advice that has literally saved and improved my life

what did we do to deserve portal 2. that shit was so good and for what

we got to have this! we got to have a valve game set in the half life universe, and its an enemies-to-lovers-to-enemies-again sci fi comedy story about a homicidal ai created to run tests forever and the test subject she catches feelings for!! how is this game real!!!

happy birthday to the only video game ever

people still clown in the notes of this post so reminder that glados was gonna take you on a date and accuse you of cheating. shes not chells mom

Don't check with your doctor, Rapid Cellular Division is right for you, today!

I have been informed this post implies cancer. It was meant to be about slime. take the slime drugs. do it.

I love nerds. It's like eating gravel but it tastes good.

"okay ❤️ yay ❤️" remains an unmatched response

oh damn Tara Knight's writing is crucial. no wonder the FBI is after her. as well as the one linked just a bit ago (I'll rb again), I DEMAND you all read these.

WE LOVE TARA KNIGHT IN THIS HOUSE

Imagine for a moment there was a voice in your ear

That voice has been there for as long as you can remember, for all you know you were born with this voice whispering to you

Now imagine that voice is telling you your existence is wrong, that you are wrong for being who you are, that you are disgusting and worthless and evil unless you perform your role

Now imagine hearing someone directly contradicting that voice, telling you what you are is a good thing, telling you you're not disgusting or worthless or evil but actually wonderful and worthy of love

Society tells us trans women we're wrong for existing, it very literally forces us to be masculine or else suffer the punishment for stepping out of line

Forcefem is the radical opposition of the societal pressure exerted on us from birth, forcefem is the revolution, and dismissing it as just a kink is a fundamentally cruel thing to do

forcefem is the reclamation of an identity denied.

People don't understand just how common this feeling is. I've seen parents say they don't understand why their daughter would feel so trapped in masculinity, after all, they never encouraged them to act like a boy...

And it's like: it's expected! We just *know*! You might not have said it, but you implied it, all of culture implies it! And generally, those parents don't even realize when they did say it.

Just like how many other people in our lives don't realize when they've spread similarly transmisogynistic ideas.

Contradict these ideas. Not just to crack eggs, but to teach others to contradict them too. Encourage experimentation with gender even to the least eggy people you know — because how can you claim to know they're cis for them?

Transcription, because it is worth reading:

There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”

So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.

I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.

First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.

Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.

Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.

In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]

Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]

Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.

There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”

Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.

And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”

The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.

Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]

A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.

Finally, fifth: Fiction.

However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.

Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.

One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]

Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]

Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.

This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…

The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.

And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.

It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.

Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.

But it plays out along the same general lines: Primary sources replaced with modern fiction, victim perspectives replaced with perpetrators, specificity replaced with Star-Bellied Sneetch-style “Why can’t we all just get along?” metaphors.

The year is 21XX. Miraculously, Tumblr still exists as a somewhat popular brainchip application used largely by neofujoshis and fandomites. One day, a dumb low-effort shitpost by a member of one of the few remaining tgirl posting cells blows up, spreading across the neuronetwork like a wildfire. The therian tgirl who posted it, a hacktivist who augments cybernetics as a hobby, finding itself frustrated by the tags being completely filled with male characters despite the post clearly being about girls, and decides to edit the post. As per Chipblr policy, the edit is immediately applied to every instance of the post across the neuronetwork, but due to a century’s worth of tech debt from the poorly programmed website, the text of the edited post bypasses a vulnerability in the programming of the most popular brainchip models, immediately executing the new text as code. All the brainchips of every user who viewed the post immediately prompt their users to list one (1) female character they genuinely care about, stating that the chip will continue to increase in temperature unless genuine positive emotion is detected by the chip. What was intended as a harmless prank by a tgirl hacktivist turns into one of the deadliest cyberattacks in history, as thousands of fandomites and neofujos across the remains of what was once the United States are killed due to their inability to care even slightly about a single fictional woman. Decades after this unpreventable tragedy, F/F to M/M fanfic ratios across the English speaking internet have come closer to parity than ever in recorded history with an astonishing ratio of 30% F/F to 70% M/M

creating a new OC. He's a doctor who treats weird kink furries. his bit is that every patient who comes into his office he has to figure out how to complete the checkup while working around some weird toon-logic contrivance. He's like the doctor house of kink because he's the only one in his field capable of getting results. He's massively overworked and he's been IP banned from the e621 forums.

His name is Doctor RJ Yiphman and he's one wrong move away from getting fired.

Doctor Yiphman treats more patients

Yiphman's back

If your language lost, it should die with dignity, not be put on artificial life-support because ‘reasons’

#Sorry but I have no sympathy for that fight#let the dead languages be dead#grumping#controversial opinions#because people always get annoyed with me when I say this#but Gaelic (for example) shouldn’t still exist

———–

Gaelic hasnt been lost.  It’s never died or been brought back.  There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language.  That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me.  Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context.  Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language.  It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.

If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language (English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language.  Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.

But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die.  There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?

“There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?” — THIS RIGHT HERE

Also just gonna point out here:

In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off. 

For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished - usually with a beating. 

Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.

And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.

People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents. 

Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can. 

It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language. 

Now im the “legal eagle kink meme girl” :(

I think this is literally my favorite genre of joke. like, straight up.

Now im the “legal eagle kink meme girl” :(

I don’t really Go Here but u can always rely on this man to read a right wing politician’s outfit for filth

I mean. Just devastating 😭

This man has LETHAL comebacks. Idiots keep trying to get one over on him and he has never missed

Actually no I'm double reblogging this I found the one where he *calls a guy's tailor* to confirm his suit isn't actually bespoke

You cannot win in his arena. This isn't "if you come at the king you better not miss" this is "don't fight a shark in the water"

I gotta add this one

he alerted the FBI about a january 6th rioter because he noticed their ugly shoes lol

“Is your blood also off-the-rack?”

I would never survive if someone said that to me after trying that shit goodBYE

Touch-Starved

A doll cracks four eggs into a pan and stares down at them. The doll is panicking.

It's trying to focus on making its owner's breakfast, but it can't help but fixate on how she doesn't want to hold it anymore.

It wonders what it did wrong. It wonders why it's being punished like this. It knows it must deserve it.

It flips the eggs over and continues to stare at them as they cook. It hopes that if it does this right, it might prove useful enough to keep around. Its owner not holding it is bad, but it couldn't bear to not at least be near her.

The doll wraps its arms around itself. This is the only embrace it will ever know again.

It grabs a spatula and moves the eggs from the pan onto two plates, positioning each pair of eggs next to two pieces of toast. This is it. It has to be perfect.

It sits the plates down at the table, one at its owner’s place and one at the doll’s. It isn't sure if it should sit down yet. Maybe she doesn't want to sit next to it. The doll steps back as she enters the room, averting its gaze.

“Oh, thank you,” she says. She starts to sit down, but notices the doll standing. “What's wrong, love?”

The doll flinches. “Th-this one knows it offended you. It understands if you don't want to eat with it.”

“What?” Its owner stares for a moment. “Oh my god, this is because I said we had to stop cuddling. You silly thing. You didn't do anything wrong, we just had to get out of bed to eat.”

The doll’s owner steps forward and puts her arms around it. She doesn't stop hugging it for some time.

(Inspired by my sister @eclipse-kitten!)