Being Sensitive Is Embarrassing, Ohhh Your Tone Was Different Than Usual Well I'm Gonna Go Jump In Front

Wacky Tumblr challenge. Level: IMPOSSIBLE

Part 1: Compare a transgender woman's appearance or voice to another woman

Part 2 (BEYOND HUMAN CAPABILITIES): don't describe a transgender woman's appearance or voice by comparing it to a famous cisgender man, and then slap a "but a woman version" onto it

"In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option."

--Against Access, by John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind educator

The asexual community's antiblackness is so heavily tied towards ignorance about Black sexuality in music. There's some viral post on here of predominantly non-Black aces being upset that 'match my freak' is about sex and upset about 'how allos sexualise everything' 'allos are obsessed with their sex lives' 'why does everything have to be about sex' 'why are the allos making it about sex again' when the allos in question are BLACK MUSICIANS expressing sexuality freely in their own music. The way you lot talk about Black people ace or not is just horrid.

Tinashe's song Nasty helped popularise 'Match My Freak' last year. R&B literally stands for rhythm and blues. Black singers have always sung about romantic and sexual yearning in R&B. Going back to slavery, Black people's sexualities have always been stigmatised and demonised as an animalistic, insatiable hunger. Through music, Black artists especially Black American artists would express sexual attraction on their own terms to push back on those myths. The Black "allos" never stole Match My Freak from you because it was never yours to begin with.

Antiblackness in the ace community manifests in this narrative of Black people 1. As thieves and 2. That we force sex onto things and people. But also 3. Through colonialist attitudes and mindsets.

'We should asexualise it' 'Allos shouldn't hoard it' 'Well it can mean both!' 'Words evolve its linguistic change!' Pardon my French, but fuck off.

The gag is, there's already loads of phrases in AAVE for platonic relationships. 'Match my energy' 'homie' 'twin' literally hold the same meaning. (But seeing how ignorant some of you are I think you should leave AAVE tf alone actually). I briefly covered this another post on main but the (white) ace community feels the need to have ace versions of existing things e.g. 'How comes there's no asexual___' 'We need an asexual__' 'We need an ace ___!' instead of creating something original. Hence the invading Denmark 'jokes'. Some of you don't know how to create things. And honestly, I think some of you don't want to create. I think some of you like complaining about the lack ace representation instead of making it. I think some of you like to 'asexualise' things from marginalised forms of sexual attraction because you look down on them. I think some of you like being complacent.

So, this whole narrative Tinashe took a pure uwu platonic ace phrase with her lightskin fingers and made it all about sex is complete nonsense. It's one thing to consistently demonise Black sexuality but to take from it and then claim Black people have sexualised something that was originally ours is just foul.

Workbooks to improve executive functioning

Since the post I made last night about improving executive functioning was so popular, I figured I should pull these out of my comments and give them their own post, in case it's helpful for people.

I have worked with the publishers of all of the books linked below and can vouch for their psychology books. The publisher of most of them, New Harbinger, is an extremely credible evidence-based psychology publisher.

Obvious disclaimer that everyone's brain is different and what works for someone else may not work for you.

Is there evidence that executive functioning can be improved? Yes. This book appears to be a very thorough overview of the field, and contains both advocates and detractors of cognitive training, for a balanced perspective. From the table of contents, I would really recommend jumping straight to Part 3: Developmental Perspectives for executive functioning (EF) writ large.

Certain therapy modalities are specifically designed for skill-building in areas like impulsivity, decision-making, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility, all of which are EF skills or very dependent on EF skills. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is probably the best field to look at for these - skill-building in those areas is its core goal.

Some DBT workbooks:

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Teens

There are also a lot of workbooks for ADHD that are sometimes more broad but also can help with executive functioning:

The Adult ADHD and Anxiety Workbook: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Skills to Manage Stress, Find Focus, and Reclaim Your Life

The CBT Workbook for Adult ADHD: Evidence-Based Exercises to Improve Your Focus, Productivity, and Wellbeing

The Neurodivergence Skills Workbook for Autism and ADHD

General executive functioning workbooks:

The Executive Functioning Workbook for Teens

Executive Functioning Workbook for Adults: Exercises to Help You Get Organized, Stay Focused, and Achieve Your Goals

Hope these are helpful to someone!!

Being insane but cognitively aware of how insane you are is a special kind of hell because you know that you aren't normal and you can pinpoint the behaviors that label you as other and make people kinda go quiet and twitchy around you but you can't change them or your neurosis so you're stuck in a brutal cycle of trying to emulate normal people and failing horribly cus you know in theory how normal people look and act but in practice you can never change what you are and everyone else knows it too and this goes on forever until you die

Progressively fewer emoji are approved by the Unicode Consortium every year. Flags, however, are automatically approved for addition. Thus:

Seize some territory and declare its sovereignty as either a nation or quasi-national entity

Get this sovereignty widely recognised

Design its flag to be a transparent field with an image of your choice in its centre

Enjoy your free emoji

wawa warmups

(have somehow never drawn his Stare, so I've fixed that)

the word slop is overgeneralised, generic and imprecise, applied with a minimum of analytical thought to anything the user categorises as low quality or beneath their consideration. its ubiquity neutralises the expression of individual taste or creative flair in describing what is objectionable, or even unremarkable, about the work to which it is applied. in this way the word slop itself is slop. be ever vigilant.