I've seen non-antis doing this for a while now, so here's your reminder that 'proship' is NOT an adjective for describing fictional relationships.

The 'pro' does NOT mean 'problematic,' as in "this is a problematic ship" (which, if you have critical thinking skills, you'll know is a ridiculous statement). That 'pro = problematic' idea is just something antis made up—or they didn't understand that in English, 'pro' is the opposite prefix of 'anti.' You know, how they're anti-ship, which means they are against fictional ships that they don't personally like.

The 'pro' in proship simply means 'in favor of.' And 'proship' as a whole describes the 'ship and let ship' mindset, which has been a core of fandom basically forever. The reason the term 'proship' exists at all is in response to antis crusading against particular ships and harming real people because of their preferences.

So, antiship, proship; antishipper, proshipper.

Just as you can say you're pro-choice, you can say you're proship—as in, you're in favor of letting people ship whatever they want and it's not your business. That's basically the same thing as calling yourself a proshipper, though I tend to see that more from people who are really into the ship war discourse.

Anyway, calling a fictional relationship a 'proship' makes as much sense as calling that ship an 'antiship.' And when you conflate 'pro' with 'problematic,' not only are you playing into antis' moral purity nonsense, but you're entirely changing the subject of the conversation. Please stop doing it.

Brotherhood of The Orb

The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.

It’s the woke shit all over again man, oppressive forces don’t want marginalised communities to have words to explain how they are marginalised, so why not misconstrue it until it turns into a racist dog whistle :/

ALT

It’s over for yall when I can finally decide what project to finish

you guys heard about songs???? Those things are fucking crazy haha

they're ok. I play with my rock

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

"how did you get into writing" girl i've been tormented by the visions since i was eight years old

thank you all for a cathartic week

it's been a long time coming

put rainbow laces on all my shoes recently which is fun and sexy but has the side effect that i have gotten multiple "i like your shoelaces" from strangers and like. i cant NOT "i stole them from the president" in return. just in case. but its recieved mostly awkward laughs and looks of confusion. embarrasing myself in public out here over my damn shoelaces.

Shoutout to the time my partner and I got so excited to see Ea-Nasir's hate mail in person that we failed to notice the Code of Hammurabi next to it

[ID: a cuneiform tablet displayed on glass, with a museum label that reads 'Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper' - 'About 1750 BC (Old Babylonian Period), from Ur'. There is a larger tablet on the left, cut off by the border of the picture. End ID.]

some interesting things about our guy Ea-Nasir and his hate mail

1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it

2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir

3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it

He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.

Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.

At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.

It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.

There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)

Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"

So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"

He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.

At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."

Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"

Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.

Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.

Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.

In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.

So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.

Anyway I think we should try to remember Nanni's name, the person who wrote the most famous of the complaint tablets

just wanted to add some pictures of Ea-Nasir's "hometown" the city state of Ur so you can get a sense of the setting

here it is today

???

happy anniversary to the great molasses flood

Hammock Fight | 9-2-89

Recommendations from my favorite genre: Queer horror

The Lamb by Lucy Rose - Margot and Mama live in a cottage in the woods, and they eat ”strays”, lost people who come by their home looking for help. Everything changes when a woman named Eden shows up and mama falls in love.

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling - a medieval fortress under siege, a starving people, a woman in a tower trying to create a miracle, a lady knight forced to protect her, a disgraced noblewoman looking for revenge and saints showing up in the flesh. Yep, there’s cannibalism in this one too.

Don’t Let the Forest in by CG Drews - toxic and codependent gays at a boarding school with a forest where the horror creatures they wrote and illustrated might be coming to life.

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen - Roos lives a dreadful life with her mother, but at least she has Ruth, the ghost and spirit companion only she can see. One day she meets Agnes, a woman like her who has a spirit companion of her own, and she gets whisked away to her haunted manor.

Bunny by Mona Awad - Samantha goes to a literature class with a group of girls who call themselves the bunnies, and one day she gets invited to hang out with them and participate in their ”art”.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield - Miri’s wife has finally come back from a disastrous deep-sea expedition, but she has not come back unchanged.