The Kids Are Alright 🏳️‍⚧️

I do think there is a difference between how men and women are socialized to express emotions but I cannot STAND when men twist that to imply that little girls are never told to “stop crying” or women just have a peachy easy time expressing emotion while men are forced to suffer in silence. Like literally women and girls are CONstantly told that we’re hysterical and overdramatic and irrational for expressing emotion and we explicitly get taken less seriously than men do when we express emotion. Be for real.

christmas music in the us: nothing better than building snowmen and waiting for santa as a family :)

christmas music in france: and so the THREE POOR ORPHANS who have to PICK UP THE REMNANTS OF THE HARVEST TO SURVIVE get LOST in the deserted fields and it's DARK so they ask the local butcher for shelter and HE SLAUGHTERS THEM LIKE PIGLETS AND PUTS THEM IN THE SALTING ROOM FOR S E V E N Y E A R S until the nice st. nicholas comes along and asks the butcher for shelter and a meal but then he refuses the ham he's offered and instead asks for the meat that's been in the salting room for seven years and the butcher cries for mercy and THE SAINT RAISES THE ORPHANS FROM THE DEAD but actually death was fine because they thought they were in heaven all along :)

One of the most healing things I’ve strove (striven?) to do in my life is viewing sex as just another thing people do, among a host of other things like eating and pooping and playing with cats.

Our entire society, feminists and puritans alike, pushes the idea that sex is uniquely powerful and dangerous, capable of inflicting The Worst Trauma or the Highest Fulfillment, and that’s…just flat out untrue. Other experiences can cause similar trauma: violence, disasters, war, instability. Other experiences can result in transcendent pleasure: trance states, live music, non-sexual intimacy, tattoos.

I think this is where the disconnect in perception about sex positivity comes from, because the phrase itself makes people who already view sex as being uniquely powerful think sex positivity means viewing sex as uniquely good, when actually…it’s mostly about taking sex off that pedestal. Normalizing sex. Making it into just another thing people do. Because that’s the first step in making sure people can engage with sex on their own terms in a healthy way.

Taking sex off its cultural pedestal was the thing that allowed me to overcome the deeply-instilled shame I developed from being raised within Christian purity culture, and from being queer, and from existing as a woman. I think a failure to do that, in feminist circles, often leads to an overblowing of the (very real) harm that sex has the potential to do at the exclusion of other problems facing women and other marginalized groups, which often leads to more shaming rhetoric - just rhetoric that shames different people for different reasons.

Sex is not the enemy and it’s not our savior. It’s just one more thing people can do with their bodies.

Je suis totalement d'accord si tu initie un fandom Les lames du cardinal ! Je n'ai lu que le premier tome pour l'instant, mais je le trouve génial ! C'est décevant qu'il y ait si peu de contenu en ligne à propos de ce livre...

Pourquoi faut-il encore que j'aille me fourrer dans un fandom anglophone, hein ? J'sais plus comment on écrit en anglais, j'ai oublié, et pis j'aime mieux écrire en français d'abord. Je vais finir par initier un fandom “Les lames du cardinal” ou n'importe quoi où il y aura des francophones, na !

No offence, but Alan Turing didn't kick the Nazis' collective ass for you to run around saying that you're too gay to learn mathematics.

Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.

We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.

The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.

Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.

Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.

There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.

Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.

We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.

Terry Pratchett started his career as a crypto-monarchist and ended up the most consistently humane writer of his generation.  He never entirely lost his affection for benevolent dictatorship, and made a few classic colonial missteps along the way, but in the end you’d be hard pressed to find a more staunchly feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, unsentimental and clear-sighted writer of Old White British Fantasy.  

The thing I love about Terry’s writing is that he loved - loved - civil society.  He loved the correct functioning of the social contract.  He loved technology, loved innovation, but also loved nature and the ways of living that work with and through it.   He loved Britain, but hated empire (see “Jingo”) - he was a ruralist who hated provincialism, a capitalist who hated wealth, an urbanist who reveled in stories of pollution, crime and decay.  He was above all a man who loved systems, of nature, of thought, of tradition and of culture.  He believed in the best of humanity and knew that we could be even better if we just thought a little more.

As a writer: how skillful, how prolific, how consistent.  The yearly event of a new Discworld book has been a part of my life for more than two decades, and in that barrage of material there have been so few disappointments, so many surprises… to come out with a book as fresh and inspired as “Monstrous Regiment” as the 31st novel in your big fantasy series?  Ludicrous.  He was just full of treasure.  What a thing to have had, what a thing to have lost.

In the end, he set a higher standard, as a writer and as a person.  He got better as he learned, and he kept learning, and there was no “too late” or “too hard” or “I can’t be bothered to do the research.”  He just did the work.  I think in his memory the best thing we can do is to roll up our sleeves and do the same.

"I'm not lazy, I'm just tired. and I don't mean because I've been working hard. Not at all. I'm tired from forcing myself to get out of bed everyday. I'm tired of distracting myself from the thoughts in my brain. I'm tired because all my energy is put to surviving and people don't understand that because all they see is how unproductive you are."

— depression is a disease and it's tiring

been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter