Pinned
xenofeminism sounds cool. I love the whole "let gender exist, but don't let it be used to oppress" mindset. I don't understand the whole gender thing, but if other people need it for some reason, getting rid of it might not be the solution.
I don't know, I feel like humanity is made from a different material than me.
Worldcat is my bestie and my one true love!! Not only does it tell you what library a book is at, but it also price compares different used book sites against each other for easy view! It's how I got Tarot For the Master for $10!!
Oh, and since I have your attention: z-library (books and textbooks) and sci-hub (gatekept scientific journal articles.) I just ripped a textbook for class off z-library and snatched a required reading from sci-hub. Life is good and education should be accessible at every stage and station of life.
information wants to be free
Also this makes me wonder if even the association between "tropical" and "rainforest" today might be due to that trope! There are many temperate rainforests (for example in Cascadia), but rainforests are associated with these narratives as a whole and are turned into this stereotype of a tropical primitive land.
The plant communities that non-avian dinosaurs inhabited were just. So crazy different than the ones we have now. Like, flowering plants didn't even exist at all at the beginning of "dinosaur times" and even into the cretaceous they were nowhere NEAR as dominant as they were today.
Like, in general a lot of contemporary biomes are really new. Grasslands are extremely new because up until pretty recently geologically speaking, there was no such thing as grass, and it was even more recently that grass-dominated ecosystems became a thing.
no haha it's so cool actually how they did not in fact throw her that life preserver until they made her beg for it :)
I'm struggling to reconcile how much I really do believe the hivemind's honesty, with how manipulative some of their actions seem to be. Like yes, I can believe their abandoning Albuquerque could come from an angle of self preservation- but there's no way the combined consciousness of 7 billion human beings didn't consider the mental impact that over a month of absolute solitude would have. Especially on someone as mentally unstable as Carol is...
What I found interesting throughout the show, is how much their aversion to outright lying still leaves room for manipulation. We tend to think of not lying as quality of a good person, and manipulation as something that needs lies to succeed. But this show is flipping that on its head.
Because even though I do believe they don't lie, they don't tell every truth all the time. They avoid answering questions such as if their condition can be reversed, they don't share all of their findings unless they are specifically asked about them. If the definition of being truthful is not telling a lie, the Hive is indeed truthful.
But as humans we attach other attributes to truthfulness that the Hive seems uninterested in. Being truthful is being open and sharing, but the Hive only shares most of their findings when explicitly asked to. Being truthful is being vulnerable, but for the Hive their choice to not lie actually protects them, because they get to control the narrative.
I don't think they are lying when the voicemail says "after everything that's happened we need some space". But I do think it can mean multiple things. Being scared of what Carol will do to them next is probably true. But "we need some space" can just as easily mean "we know that interacting with you isn't helping us reach our goal, so maybe longterm isolation will beat you into submission". That is not a lie. It's the opposite of being open and vulnerable, but it's not a lie.
people saying “don’t use your full government name for your ao3”, “create different emails for work and personal use” but personally I think it’s both sad and dystopian how capitalism/companies/even schools think they have the rights to cross your personal boundaries and insert themselves into your personal life. like, I get it, safety wise, why checking digital footprints can be important sometimes. but a gay fanfiction is not a fucking threat that could ever cause anybody harm. it’s funny (not really, it’s still sad and dystopian) how they now think they can control your personal life and prevent you from having hobbies
Yeah that's a fucking red flag for the university - this is not an appropriate thing for them to demand of you. Contact the ACLU.
carol's parents loved her because she was their child, the simple obligation of blood relation. but they didn't like her as she was, they viewed her (as so many parents do their children) as something they owned and thus were entitled to try to fix and change until she was something easier for them to stomach.
similarly, the hive's love for carol is of a biological imperative. they love her simply because they can't help it. it is an instinct, it's what they were made to do. it's unconditional in its worst form. unchanging, unevolving. and they want to fix her too, don't care what she really wants because they've decided they know best.
helen made a choice, to love carol. she kept making that choice for 20+ years, even when it wasn't easy. she didn't intend to fix carol, but she wanted to help her, to push her to be better, because that's what a good relationship is. and she knew how to do that, how to stop her from going too far, from hurting herself. she didn't claim there was something wrong with carol, and certainly not that she was the solution, but she wasn't enabling her either.
manousos, too, is making a choice. to cross a continent and risk his life to meet her. to not leave when it isn't easy, to stick around for her so she can eventually choose him too.
love is a choice. and choice can be difficult. but love without choice is unsustainable.
Too many people on this site are pro hive. It is a BAD THING. People seem to think Carol is meant to be an example of a racist white lady forcing American individualism onto another culture, this is NOT THE CASE and it is a gross misreading of the text. The Hive is a painfully clear allegory for forced assimilation. They practically state it in the show, the characters might as well be looking at the audience and saying "WE ARE TALKING ABOUT ASSIMILATION AND CULTURAL GENOCIDE".
The survivors who are cool with the hive and refusing to accept that their loved ones do not exist anymore and are (for the time being) essentially dead are the people who assimilate willingly, then refuse to admit that they have done so or argue how it was a good thing.
Manousos is a Colombian man who has watched his home and culture be eradicated through assimilation, with his mother being stripped of her true personality and behaving in a sterotypical 'loving gentle mother' way that contradicts her true personality, while he actively fights against the colonization and destruction of these things. Looking at it allegorically, him accepting the hive would be like him changing his name to something like Mark and getting embarrassed and ashamed whenever anything related to his old culture is brought up.
Carol is a lesbian woman who believed she had to hide her homosexuality from her readers, else risk no one being willing to engage with her media. She literally changed the gender of the main love interest of her novels because she believed it to be the 'safe option'. She is also literally a Conversion Therapy survivor. Carol ALREADY had to actively fight to remain true to herself as a member of a marginalized group. Joining the hive would completely erase her identity as a lesbian. Looking at it allegorically, it would be the version where the conversion therapy traumatized her so badly that she ended up marrying a man and pretending to be straight for the rest of her life.
In the hive there are no lesbian's, there are no columbians, there are no real people. When Koumba says that skin colour does not matter, that is literal and all encompassing. It doesn't just not matter in the fact that there is no oppression, it doesn't matter in the sense that all culture has been eradicated. It does not exist anymore. It is essentially a full and total cultural genocide of the entire planet. When The Hive tries to comfort Carol by telling her that they are very accepting, she is really saying that when Carol is a part of Them there will be nothing to accept, because they will all be the same anyway. The Hive is the social pressure for trans people to detransition to avoid being assaulted, it is little girls being forced to play with dolls if they want cars, it is little boys being forced to play with cars when they want dolls, it is being made fun of for you accent until you learn to erase it, it is autistic people being mocked for stimming. The Hive is colonialism, it is cultural genocide, and it is conversion therapy.
Marie Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me
I’ve noticed some posts around about how you can’t romanticize your life during a fascist regime and while I deeply sympathize with this sentiment, I want you to try to understand that’s what they want you to believe.
Fascism thrives best in the cesspool of hopelessness. They want us so confused and hopeless that we give in. When you give in, you don’t fight back.
If you wait for life to look good to do the things that bring you joy; life will still be bad - you will just have less joy.
As someone who has struggled with my mental health a lot for the last thirty years, I know this struggle firsthand. And changing this belief system - the one where you spend all of your time expecting bad things so you won’t be surprised when they happen - it’s the hardest work that I have ever done. And I’m not perfect; I still have setbacks. I still experience really real fears about the state of the world and the US, in particular, because that’s where I live.
But I made a vow to myself that I will not let the choices of others ruin my life. When I made that vow, I was thinking of my parents - but it applies to the state of the government right now, too.
There are still flowers in my garden, and ripe tomatoes, and it’s almost pick-your-own apples season, and I have plans with my friends to go to as many cemetery ghost walks as we can find this October.
I still deserve to live. I still deserve to laugh. I still deserve to love. I still deserve to be as happy as I can be.
And you do, too.
Dan Savage.
*gestures broadly at the resistance movements in europe during the last reich*
“Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”
— The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
“One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”
— The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
cw: ableism, eugenics, disability discrimination, infanticide mention
I just learned that the whole “creepy or evil kid” thing in horror actually started from old beliefs about disability. there’s this 1917 film called the black stork which was inspired after a real situation where a doctor let a disabled baby die (this led to many more similar situations) and called it the “right” thing to do, the film showed it as a holy and moral act, saying the baby went to heaven because it was “better off” and if the baby had lived it would’ve been a hindrance on this world, it was even believed that disabled babies would grow up to be criminals. they really believed that being disabled or “different” made someone evil or unworthy and that they weren’t meant to live. and because that real and horrifying idea was turned into a film, it set the pattern for a lot of horror stories that came after, that the idea of a “creepy” or “wrong” child needs to die in order to restore balance. I was literally saying to my husband not long ago “why are kids always the creepy ones in horror films?” and now it makes sense, it wasn’t random, it came from a fear of difference. what’s also interesting is how so many of the so called “creepy” children in horror show traits that we now recognise as autistic, being quiet, monotonous, intense, sensitive to sound or touch, “wise beyond their years”, being “gifted” and even immense pattern recognition that lead people to believe that they are psychic and so on. these things aren’t frightening at all, just misunderstood and I personally feel that this overused horror trope has contributed even if just in part to why some dislike autistic people today. although it can be devastating to realise where some stories come from, it’s also so fascinating to trace their roots and to see how history such as this is still present in media today.
Leonid Pasternak (Ukrainian, 1862–1945) - The Torments of Creative Work
oh leonid, we're really in it now
Leonid, you really understand it.
Save me Leonid, from my empty Word document
Leonid what should I do about the emails
Babe are you okay? you reblogged Leonid Pasternak's Torments of Creative Work again
Leonid Pasternak is the best! My favorite of his is The Night Before The Exam (1895).
i think some people are under the impression that if you weren't raised in an explicitly religious or sexual-purity-obsessed environment that you probably have a normal balanced cultural relationship to sex. & i am saying especially to my fellow usamericans. being Weird About Sex is not just a explicitly religious thing, sex negativity is deeply entrenched in our culture in a lot of ways, you have almost certainly internalized at least some of them especially as it relates to sex work and masturbation, You Are Not Immune To Propaganda etc etc
I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
First my sister, now relentless Tumblr ads. Stop telling me to find Jesus! Im Jewish! I don't care that you lost him again, that's your problem!
Smh they should really get one of those toddler leashes for him to stop him running away
Have they tried nailing him down?
my daily affirmation as an author
Stop just asking "is it normal?" and start asking "is it harming anyone?" Lots of harmful things are normalized in this society and lots of things considered weird or rare are completely harmless. Whether something is considered normal or common shouldn't be the deciding factor in whether it's okay
Like a lot of disabled and neurodivergent and mentally ill ways of living and expressing yourself are both not normal and not harming anyone and it's the last part we should focus our attention on
@heterodox-heterographer you've hit the nail in the head
Thinking statistical norms are moral prescriptions or ideal goods is one of the founding philosophies in a lot of eugenicist thought
