A place where words go and also sometimes pictures. Mid30s enby who has deleted every other form of social media.
website /ˈwebˌsīt/noun Something that you must be connected to the internet to use but do not need to download anything to access.
app /ap/noun Something you must download but do not need to be connected to the internet to use.
unholy abomination of a feature creep's imposition upon my sanity /ˌənˈhōlē əˌbäməˈnāSH(ə)n əv ə ˈfē-chər ˈkrēps ˌim-pə-ˈzi-shən ə-ˈpȯn mə ˈsa-nə-tē/noun something you must download and then have to be connected to the internet to use
I was at DragonCon one year when Avery Brooks was on a panel, and a Black dude stood up and talked about how the year DS9 came on, he became the sole custodial guardian of his small son, and he was *terrified* and felt helpless, because he hadn’t really had a father himself, and he didn’t really know any Black fathers he particularly wanted to emulate, and no Black single fathers at all. He talked about how every week he’d put his kid to bed and sit down and watch Deep Space Nine, and think to himself, “Okay, this, I want us to be this kind of father and son,” and how, silly as it might sound, the idea that Ben could be there for Jake, all the time, successfully, and earn his admiration and trust, was the only source he really had of inspiration, the only voice that was telling him he could handle this job.
I swear to fuck there was a whole auditorium of people in tears by the time he was done, including both him and Brooks. It was one of the most beautiful moments I ever saw about the sometimes bloodless-sounding term “representation,” and about fandom in general, and I will never forget it.
The official Earthling (not “Human”, Earthling) joke is “look at the funny thing on my head”.
Humans have obviously been doing this for years, I’ve seen video of an elephant stealing a human’s hat to do a “hey look, I’ve got a hat!” joke, and there’s that Salmon Hat meme that Orcas have been spotted doing. I’m certain I’ve seen corvids doing a hat joke somewhere…
So I think it’s clear: the official Earth Joke is “look at my funny hat”. It’s a pan-species planetary joke.
Remember to celebrate our planet’s Official Joke today. Put something funny on your head.
I know I haven’t posted regularly on this blog in years but I’m not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what’s happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I’m genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I’m making a post about it.
A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:
2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.
2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris’ running mate in the presidential election. He starts the “they’re just weird” thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.
November 2025: ICE starts showing up to “crack down” on “illegal immigrants” in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.
December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn’t hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went “YUP nobody’s here” as if they weren’t in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)
Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it’s more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It’s a lot.
1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a “fucking bitch” as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it’s the daily mail so grain of salt.)
Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I’m not sure about St. Paul.
The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It’s 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are “commuting with” ICE agents to honk and alert people that they’re there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.
ICE is no longer asking “are you a citizen.” They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don’t comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It’s all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I’ve lived here my whole life because they’re doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.
It’s insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there’s 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They’re taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.
Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.
And from today.
They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They’re saying it’s because of fraud but I think it’s because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.
And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good’s widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don’t even want to read the article to see what they’re saying.
So that’s a brief history.
Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don’t seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.
It’s also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the “commuting” they’re doing and what they’re seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you’re also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I’m kind of curious if this is true. Because I’ve been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I’m sure those two topics aren’t connected.
I don’t really know what my goal with this post is. I’m tired. I’m in the first ring of suburbs, so it’s been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I’m worried for them. And I know it’s a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they’re coming door to door.
Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.
I’ve been monitoring this closely because I have friends in the area, and because I think every city in the country is at risk of having the feds come to do what they’re doing in Minnesota, and we all need to get ready.
There are some Twin Cities activists who have been very clearly laying out what they’re doing, and why it’s effective at slowing down ICE. It sounds like all you really need, is neighborhood group chats where people can let one another know when and where ICE is present, and then people show up, start recording, and blowing whistles, and then ICE will leave again more often than not. This VERY SHORT thread by a Twin Cities activist outlines what to do and how it works.
Also: Minnesota Public Radio has been doing great coverage of what’s happening, and the local NBC affiliate has some excellent interviews with activists who were arrested and detained for hours.
this is your periodic reminder that for all the artifacts and errors and “tells” one could possibly list, the only reliable way to actually determine if an image is ai generated is to investigate the source. it is becoming increasingly common for “fake classical paintings” to circulate around curative aesthetic blogs, and everyone should be using this as an opportunity to not only exercise their investigative skills but also appreciate art more in general. you’re all checking out the artists you reblog, right? 🫣
so what are some signs to look for? let’s use this very good example.
Sometimes you send something you found online to a friend because you want to brighten their day, and sometimes you send something you found online to a friend with the precise attitude and bearing of a cat very carefully lining up their paw with the back of another cat’s head.
Because I was now a man, I could not speak about what it was like to be a woman. Because I had been a woman, I could never really speak about what it was like to be a man. Do the math: I could not speak. It was a double erasure, a double bind, in which every experience I had was false, and so nothing I said was credible. I could no longer derive authority from my experiences before transition, and shouldn’t even cite them — I had never “really” been a woman, so those things hadn’t happened — but those experiences could always be weaponized against me to prove I wasn’t “really” the man I claimed to be.
They call it erasure, when this happens. I wasn’t prepared for how literal the term was. Every day, I could feel myself disappear.
There are many good paragraphs but this stuck out the most:
“If “man” and “woman” are opposed and mutually exclusive categories, if men can only ever be predators and women can only ever be prey, then trans men can’t exist. We are logically impossible under the terms of the current system. You either “treat us like men” by voiding out half our lives, or you write us back into womanhood by denying our male identities. I knew all that, at least in theory, but when I came out, I actually saw my life story disappearing into other people’s blind spots. I watched myself become unthinkable in real time.”
Also these:
“This wasn’t about accountability. This was people tactically forgetting my entire life,including incidents from my life they had personally witnessed or been involved in, so that they could shame me for transitioning. It was bad for me to be a man; if I was a man, I was a bad man, I was all the worst things men are. I was hulking, I was threatening, I was predatory, I was violent.”
“I was treated as both genders, but only the most monstrous stereotype of each one.”
Because that is exactly it. Anti-transmasculinity is being both erased and vilified, and then gaslit out of speaking about those experiences by the people who are erasing and vilifying you.
This resonated:
“The idea that I had always occupied a privileged position within patriarchy was, frankly, untrue; nor did it seem to me that a trans person was any less gender-marginalized than your average cis woman. What privilege I had was conditional, and these books were no guide. Men who wanted to “forge a positive masculinity” (and everyone was very clear that I needed one of those) were encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine sides.” Maybe that was healthy for cis guys, but I had been forced to do feminine things, and present in feminine ways, for the entirety of my young life. Whatever liberation I had achieved came from giving myself permission to stop.”
As did the ending:
“When I write these days, I try to remind myself that whatever I’m afraid of saying is already true, and denial will not change it. I remind myself that the wrong people benefit from my silence, and will use it to write a version of my life I can’t recognize, or just write me out of the world. There is no established story or role for me; I belong to a category the world is still learning to imagine. I cannot account for the world as other people imagine it. I cannot give you every man’s story, every trans man’s story, every trans person’s story; I don’t know them. What I do know is that every new story helps map the territory. All I can do for you, from where I’m standing, is tell you how things are."
knitting ebook bundle! $18 for 17 books all DRM free so you can read them wherever. bundle goes until february 5th, if you use my affiliate link it helps me out. here’s the plaintext version to copy/paste if your adblocker won’t let you click affiliate links: https://humblebundleinc.sjv.io/APx6xx
i think “bedtime abolitionist” is an unserious pejorative and i think less of people who use it. it’s bad that children’s lives are so heavily regimented, actually, and it’d be good for them to have more autonomy in these matters.
but, yknow. ruthless criticism of all that exists unless it makes you look like a whiny child, or something.
I used to work extensively with kids and I am unironically a bedtime abolitionist.
Specifically at summer camp, I noticed that trying to enforce a bedtime would result in nights of me going cabin to cabin telling kids to be quiet repeatedly until 1-2AM. Then we would all be cranky and exhausted about it the whole week, and it made me come off like a controlling asshole to the kids cause…I was being a controlling asshole. And like, I was young enough to have really salient memories of having been a camper, so excited to talk to new friends that I didn’t sleep - the kids had good reason to stay up!
So I figured out that I could, instead, lay out the first night that they could stay up as late as they wanted, and talk to their friends, as long as they were physically in bed with lights off. I would get a lot more sleep and was better able to function in the morning, and if a kid complained about being tired the next day, I would ask about how long they stayed up the previous night and let them connect the dots themselves. Inevitably, most kids would stay up really late the first night, and then they would self-regulate and get to sleep way quicker, because they were motivated to balance their own wants & needs instead of an adult breathing down their neck about an arbitrary externally-imposed sleep deadline.
I started extending this method to more things, trying to make sure my role was less Authority Figure and more resource for learning how to care for themselves. I went through college and found it was backed up by a lot of the research out there on parenting and teaching styles. Literally just respecting the autonomy of kids in my care and talking them through decisions instead of telling them what to do would make “behavioral issues” evaporate, and make both me and the kids happier. It helped even more when I started working with traumatized kids and teens in foster care after college. Sometimes a kid would even point out to me when a given rule in a workplace didn’t make sense and I could give them an exception and/or go to my boss and try to get things changed. Often, arbitrary rules from higher-ups made things way more difficult for everyone.
Trying to explain this to authoritarian parents AND my worse bosses over the course of my childcare career was like pulling teeth.
Kids deeply crave autonomy and responsibility, and if you give them the former they will often gladly take up the latter, but you have to give them the chance to make their own choices and make non-life-threatening mistakes first. But to someone who views a kid as property, or even a well-intentioned perfectionist parent, the idea of giving a kid that autonomy is terrifying, so they try to make it sound absurd to justify maintaining control.
Anyway, yeah, bedtime abolition forever. The kids will do just fine without bedtime.
17th January 2026
Reblogged From watermelon-wolf
Notes: 35992
