caesar a lot of people think caesar was hot and while he’s probably one hell of a power bottom (every woman’s husband and every man’s wife as the romans said), he also apparently was really weirdly obsessed with removing all of his body hair?? i mean clearly he got around so he was probably bangable but i don’t know how i feel about this. VI/X isn’t being bald on top of your head enough for you julius
mark antony do i even need to talk about mark antony? he’s ancient rome’s greatest slut and proud of it, you know he’s bangable. just don’t marry him because you never know when he’ll end up divorcing you and becoming an enemy of the state so he can hang out with cleopatra. X/X slut machine
brutus honestly historical brutus was kind of a turd and his pillow talk is probably really depressing because he feels all this pressure to be like his king-banishin’ monarchy-smashin’ republic-foundin’ super-ancestor. like ‘waaaah i gotta go kill caesar because blah blah republic’ the republic was failing anyway who cares can we talk about something other than your inferiority complex. II/X extorting provinces isn’t sexy, brutus
pompey the great i guess pompey might have been sexy at one point in his youth but every time i think of him i can’t help but laugh at this stupid fake alexander the great hair and that doesn’t really make him very bangable in my eyes. IV/X please stop with the weird alexander fanboy thing
crassus let’s be real, crassus probably only has sex in the missionary position and almost definitely comes first. he’s got all that money but is it worth it??? III/X probably still worth the money though
clodius pulcher his name literally means clodius hot boi so like, there’s not even an argument there, you know this guy is smokin. the only problem is that he was a TREMENDOUS dumbass half of the time and loved to pull shit like sneaking into women-only festivals like an idiot so you just have to watch out for his nonsense. IX/X bang him and leave before he does something sacrilegious and gets you condemned to tartarus
cicero alright, now i know some of you are reading this and immediately thinking “sarah thoodleoo, please tell me you’re not going to say cicero is bangable because that is one step too far even for you,” but i need you to hear me out, okay? first of all, cicero is an orator so you know he’s good with his tongue. second, he was named a pater patriae, so you know he’s daddy material. maybe he’s not the best bang in the late republic, but he’s not the worst either. V/X i’m sorry if i made you unwillingly think of cicero as a daddy but in fairness this isn’t the first time i’ve said that so i don’t know what you expected
cato the younger like having sexy with crassus but with none of the money and all of the extra discomfort of listening to him rant about the good ol days while you’re trying to sleep and not think about how dissatisfied you are. -I/X stoic more like stoi-ick
i dont want girls sexualising mlm relationships anymore. at all
i dont want them fetishizing our relationships bc they think it’s sexy
i dont care if its a “way for them to express their sexuality”. that aint right and its messed that they can say that they want men in the porn industry to stop fetishizing wlw relationships, only to do the same bc its “fandom”
can yall please reblog this actually ??
bc like. im a boy attracted to boys. and this is making me uncomfortable and i want it to stop
and im not the only one ? a handful of people have agreed with me and im sure there are more
please dont ignore this bc you want to keep writing/drawing/reading m/m porn…. or bc im a boy and you dont care what i have to say….. especially if you disagree with the treatment of wlw in the porn industry its a double standard and this is important to me and i dont want it to be swept under the rug
Add on: you can still write, draw and read about mlm without fetishizing them. By fetishization, OP means that you only see these relationships as sexy and sinful instead of just seeing it as average everyday relationships.
Nearly every girl I’ve met within fandoms with mlm ships has only focused on the men having sex or calling them ‘my nasty gay babies’ and that’s just gross.
Okay I’ve got it. Jason Momoa is a soulful artist turned boat mechanic after his baby sister Auli'i Cravalho was placed in his care. At sixteen, her goals include winning the upcoming inter-school gymnastics competition, getting an A in maths, and finding love for her stupid big brother. She keeps setting him up with tourists coming to Hawai'i - Uzo Aduba, Oscar Isaac, Andy Samberg (they have a hilarious bro date), Angel Coulby, etc.
But then! His childhood best friend, John Cho, has returned to the island after years away, and all of Jason’s old quiet pining returns. Auli'i realises this, and shenanigans ensue involving all the previous dates and basically half the island.
Dear Amy, can The Rock also be in this? Love, Kait
Unless in your world you get milk from a “milk-beast” you don’t put people to sleep with “sleep-weed.” There are dozens of real plants that actually put people to sleep: Lemon balm Valerian Passion Flower Chamomile Poppy Lavender Catnip Hops Rooibos Skullcap Virgin’s bower Lady’s slipper Feverfew Motherwort Bee-balm bergamot perilla figwort I found them after 0.35 seconds of googling.
(herbologists out there: I know there are probably some mistakes there. Feel free to correct me)
On one hand, yeah, I get it that it’s nice to learn about something real in fantasy books.
But on the other hand…I am NEVER going to throw real herbs into my stories. Not unless I know it’ll be near-impossible for a child to overdose. Not unless I know I can take time (without an editor removing it) to explain how to safely prepare these tisanes.
Food preparations are one of the most easily made “fan creations” you can have rise out of a book series, since everyone has food on hand or can run out to a store to buy it, or go outside to try to forage it (if they see the internet says they have it living wild in their area). And you really, REALLY don’t want to accidentally lead someone who is young, or who just doesn’t know shit about cooking or chemistry or foraging, down a path where they poison themselves trying to make something. And that’s not even touching on foraging and “false friends”, where a plant might look one way in your area and be safe to eat, but might be poisonous elsewhere in the world where a similar-looking plant is found. There’s a mushroom in the united states that looks similar to an edible variety in Asia. As I understand it, a lot of poisonings occur among immigrants to the US from the region that has the friendly, edible type of mushrooms because they think the US variety is just as safe to eat, and it’s not. I would hate, hate, hate to set up a situation like that as an author, by assuming that a friendly, edible plant in my backyard doesn’t have false-friends elsewhere in the world.
J. K. Rowling handled this by making her potion ingredients fake or improbable to use. She could have had Snape talking about deadly nightshade, but he’s introduced talking about bezoars. Bezoars are from an animal’s stomach–hard to get, and gross.
Patrick Rothfuss handled it by making sure the dangers of fucking chemistry up were very firmly highlighted.
Unless I have a lot of time and place to safely explain how to use a plant, I’m absolutely going to go the “safe” route (”cheap” route to some of you) of using made-up herbs. I’d rather people be irritated with me being cheap or having weak worldbuilding than finding out some reader went and made themselves ill or dead because they trusted that information from my work was complete or correct.
Sure, some or all of those in the list above might be perfectly safe with no poison lookalikes around. I drink Rooibos tea myself–although I’ve never gotten sleepy from it.
But I’m just not educated enough about plants–even after having lurked on several sites online for months–to take a chance in my writing, since it’s just not me that’ll be taking a chance, but possibly readers who assume I know what the fuck I’m talking about. (When I might not!)
A very interesting response. I admit I hadn’t thought of the dangers of realistic herbology, but you’re right, especially for children’s books.
I think there’s a more elegant solution than just making up a name, though. Say “a certain herb” rather than the specific plant’s name and you’re fine. Or smudge the details.
Steven King does something similar with the crimes in his book—describing hotwiring a car in great detail but getting some things intentionally wrong so you can’t go out and do it.
In the vein of ladydomini’s response, I’d favor made-up herb names for an additional medical reason - even if something is super-safe or fairly benign in terms of side effect profiles, people generally don’t take these things in a vacuum, and you can never, ever cover drug-herb interactions in a fantasy world. (You can’t stop and say “Aeryn used St. John’s wort to help her mood, but wouldn’t have if she’d been on SSRIs like Prozac because of the risk of serotonin syndrome, or if she was on birth control, certain HIV meds, transplant drugs…”)
But there’s a second reason why you might choose to make up names, and that’s etymology. (It’s also why I picked St. John’s wort instead of going with one of the above herbs.) Because if you’re in a fantasy world where there are neither saints nor dudes named John, St. John’s wort doesn’t make a lot of sense to name-check, and referring to hypericum perforatum wouldn’t be any better. That’s not going to come up as *much,* but it’s definitely another reason.
(A third might be that you want an herb that has fantasy-world properties - something that doesn’t exist in the real world. Granted, you could randomly say valerian has magic-nullifying powers, but you might want magical plants for a magical reason - or maybe you want a plant with a pharmacological profile that doesn’t exist in the real world. I’m thinking here of ASOIAF’s moon tea and the tansy plant - it’s apparently both a very effective contraceptive and an abortifacient.)
So, yeah, this aspect of fantasy has never bothered me - I’d be more bothered by seeing real-world herbs incorrectly used, especially given the potential for RL trouble. (I guess whether you’d want your healers to be super non-specific or to say “I used tansy and athelas” is a matter of preference at that point; given the abundance of made-up names in the rest of fantasy, made-up herbs don’t bother me.)
Given how many times I read stories like that as a kid and tried to recreate ‘potions’ in the backyard….yeah I’m glad a lot of them were made-up names because me being a clever kid, I would have gone looking. Especially if I’d had the internet. Unless it’s like a practical, safe, real-world use (like “Annie put aloe leaves on her burn to help it heal” or “Margaret drank ginger and hibiscus tea to help her get over a cold”), I’d not include it. Made-up herbs work nicely and less chance of too-clever kids getting Ideas that could be a problem later.
Hell, the side effects make this a valid concern even with ‘harmless’ innocent ones. Did you know for instance that only SOME hibiscus flowers are edible for humans? Or that parts of Dandelion or Aloe if consumed can be a diuretic – which can be dangerous if one is dehydrated? Even aspirin (or ‘willow bark’ if we’re going with old-school herbs) can be dangerous to the wrong person – it happens to be a blood thinner, which is sometimes good if you are having a heart attack, but not so good (i.e. potentially dangerous) if you are menstruating, hemophiliac, bleeding or anemic.
I’d actually urge similar caution with crystals and rocks btw; some stones cannot be safely exposed to sweaty skin or water or heat or what not, because they produce unsafe chemical reactions under the wrong circumstances.
as a former dumbass kid that had to be stopped from drinking poison nettle tea after reading a YA wiccan flavored book,
please. Use fake names of plants.
This is the kind of thing I would never even have thought of, but it’s a really interesting and valid concern.
i have indeed thought of it, and would like to propose a solution to satisfy both parties:
use made up plants, but put some effort into designing them.
don’t call it ‘sleep-weed’, call it ‘slugbane’ or ‘ketterling’s false poppy’ or ‘somniflora’ or ‘purple fretleaf’. give it a name that sounds like a real plant name. problem fucking solved.
i hope youre all lying and hyping your cv/resume’s up
i have never gotten an interview and not been offered a job position after it
I mean lets be honest if everyone else is gassing theirs up like no tomorrow and you’re being as honest as you can who th are the recruitment team going to be more interested in
There’s people working in my banks head office with me WITH MUCH MORE EXPERIENCE than me BUT ARE GETTING PAID LESS
we’re doing the exact same job role
the point I’m trying to make here is if you’ve handled finances for a company you’re now what i would call a treasurer my g, if you’ve done admin work you are now a secretary (or as I’ve put Management secretary)
you help some kid with his homework? you’re a private tutor.
keep your bullets points for the job role as concise and important sounding as possible AND ALWAYS EMPHASIS THAT YOURE A TEAM PLAYER IF YOURE GOING TO WORK IN A TEAM.
go into that interview room and get your story straight the night before and remember that interviews are two way conversatons yes they might be grilling you but at the end of it make sure to grill them BACK. do you have any hesitations about my qualifications? my suitability for the job? any feedback on my cv? how long have you been working at this company? do you like it here? whats the work environment like?
I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS GET THE SAME FEEDBACK WHEN THEY GET BACK IN TOUCH WITH ME
“ive never been asked those questions before” / “you were one of the strongest candidates”
throughout the interview emphasise that youre about progression, that you want more responsibilities than you did at your previous job, tell them the hours here are more suitable for me than my last ones were, AND WHEN IT COMES TO SALARY NEGOTIATION its all about continuity. tell them again that it boils down to progression. make up a reasonable figure for how much you were paid in your last role (do your research for how much the industry youre applying to or the role youre applying for pays, base it on that) tell them you expect more than you were previously paid. do not give them a figure. progression is your primary focus, tell them if youre progressing youre happy. leave it at that.
LIE THROUGH YOUR TEETH AND GET THAT MONEY
I had an interview yesterday, at the place I’ve been temping, where I busted out the “is there anything about my skills or background that makes you concerned about my fit for this job” question for the first time.
Neither of my supervisors had never gotten it before either. They had to think for a while, and then it turned into them telling me how great I am and what they love about me.
This stuff is real. I would also say: none of it is lying. This is taking experience that you normally downplay and write off, and putting it in accurate words they’ll understand.
It’s hacking the capitalist system. Why ISN’T helping a kid with homework “tutoring”, when the only thing missing is a paycheck?
It’s especially important for anyone who isn’t a cis white man, because many of us are so thoroughly trained to feel like we are not good enough.
Privilege tells people they can fake it, and that they’re good enough just as people and can learn the skills on the job. Abuse and oppression tell people they aren’t good enough as people and that even their high skills are probably below average, and that unless they had the specific job title or were using certain skills officially, nobody will think it counts.
The goal is to at least fake the confidence of a privileged person, to give the employer a chance at seeing the skills that you’ve been trained to undervalue.
You are learning addition. You blink. There is differential calculus written on the whiteboard. The longer you stare, the less it looks like numbers. The sky is a different color than when you closed your eyes.
Your final grade has not been posted yet. It has been two days. Your final grade has not been posted yet. It has been a month. Your final grade has not been posted yet. It has been a year. Your final grade has not been posted yet.
You look at the posted list of required math credits for your major. It is not written in english. It is not written in any language you know. It is not written in any language you don’t know. You close the list of required math credits before it can look back.
You cannot remember a time before your 8 AM. You leave the auditorium only to find yourself back in the auditorium. It is time for class.
You have had the same advisor your entire college career. Every time you see him, he has more teeth. Eventually, you stop seeing your academic advisor. He still sees you.
Students that go to look through the reference section of the library return different. The unlucky ones don’t return at all.
You go to a school of 20,000 students. You see the same 10 individuals at random points on campus every day. There are 19,989 other students. You’re not sure if you want to know where they are.
People are screaming in your dorm. People are always screaming in your dorm. “Somebody must be going out partying,” your roommate says. You both know that isn’t true.
You have a paper due in four days. You never finish it. The deadline never draws any closer. You have a paper due in four days.
A man sitting alone on the snowy, empty quad tells you that you will die in exactly 47 minutes. You walk away. You glance back, from a distance, and see only your footprints. You walk faster.
The squirrels fear no one. You do not make eye contact with the squirrels. They grow bolder every year, graduating from stealing trash to stealing food off of your plate. You shudder to think what they will steal next.
There is always someone in the study room. You have never seen them leave. It is always the same person. You have never seen them anywhere else.
Greek Town gets larger every time you pass it. There are houses with letters that aren’t in any alphabet you know. The residents have hollow eyes. A baby emerald sleeps here. You don’t know what it means. You don’t think you want to know.
heres an actually helpful executive dysfunction tip that isnt “just do one thing so you can do other things” or some bullshit
narrate what you need to do. out loud. in the present tense and first person. “i’m picking this shirt up off the floor. i’m picking is empty can off the floor. i’m putting the can in the recycling. i’m putting the shirt in the hamper. i’m taking the hamper to the laundry room.” etc. it’s one of the only actually effective things ive figured out. i think what happens is it tricks me into thinking im already doing the task, which is the hard part (starting). keep doing it as you do the task until the initial frustration is alleviated. give it a shot if you want. or dont im a blogger not a cop
For months, every morning when my daughter was in preschool, I watched her construct an elaborate castle out of blocks, colorful plastic discs, bits of rope, ribbons and feathers, only to have the same little boy gleefully destroy it within seconds of its completion.
No matter how many times he did it, his parents never swooped in BEFORE the morning’s live 3-D reenactment of “Invasion of AstroMonster.” This is what they’d say repeatedly:
“You know! Boys will be boys!”
“He’s just going through a phase!”
“He’s such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!”
“Oh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!”
“He. Just. Can’t. Help himself!”
I tried to teach my daughter how to stop this from happening. She asked him politely not to do it. We talked about some things she might do. She moved where she built. She stood in his way. She built a stronger foundation to the castle, so that, if he did get to it, she wouldn’t have to rebuild the whole thing. In the meantime, I imagine his parents thinking, “What red-blooded boy wouldn’t knock it down?”
Her consent didn’t matter. Besides, it’s not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down. It wasn’t a “legitimate” knocking over if she didn’t throw a tantrum.
His desire — for power, destruction, control, whatever- - was understandable.
I know it’s a lurid metaphor, but I taught my daughter the preschool block precursor of don’t “get raped” and this child, Boy #1, did not learn the preschool equivalent of “don’t rape.”
Not once did his parents talk to him about invading another person’s space and claiming for his own purposes something that was not his to claim. Respect for her and her work and words was not something he was learning. How much of the boy’s behavior in coming years would be excused in these ways, be calibrated to meet these expectations and enforce the “rules” his parents kept repeating?
There was another boy who, similarly, decided to knock down her castle one day. When he did it his mother took him in hand, explained to him that it was not his to destroy, asked him how he thought my daughter felt after working so hard on her building and walked over with him so he could apologize. That probably wasn’t much fun for him, but he did not do it again.
There was a third child. He was really smart. He asked if he could knock her building down. She, beneficent ruler of all pre-circle-time castle construction, said yes… but only after she was done building it and said it was OK. They worked out a plan together and eventually he started building things with her and they would both knock the thing down with unadulterated joy. You can’t make this stuff up.
Take each of these three boys and consider what he might do when he’s older, say, at college, drunk at a party, mad at an ex-girlfriend who rebuffs him and uses words that she expects will be meaningful and respecte, “No, I don’t want to. Stop. Leave.”
This is so brilliant. We learn things from socialization process. What our parents, friends and peers do, media and all. I think perhaps rape is because parents think boys will be boys, they bully, fight and destroy things, it’s their characteristics so they don’t bother to stop them. But it manifests in them, knowing or unknowingly, they will just think, because I’m a boy and boys tend to do these, so it doesn’t matter even if the girl hates it, says no, because I’m a boy.
Just reblog this, this message is really powerful. For parents and future parents.
What’s also interesting, is if you frame this as about spoiling your children, and about spoiled children, people tend to agree and get it. They’ll agree that children whose parents lay down no boundaries for them when they hurt others, who let them have whatever they want at the expense of others, and justify away the harm they do, will probably grow up thinking they can do this to others (usually weaker than them, or they perceive as weaker) as adults. But if you mention the word “privilege”, “entitlement” or anything relating to gender, everybody freaks the f- out and will deny up, down, back, forth, and sideways that how you raise a child, what you allow them to get away with, or training them that their hurtful behaviour will always be justified, can affect them at all.
TOP FIVE STORIES PEOPLE HAVE ABOUT VICTOR "MY HUSBAND" NIKIFOROV
HOW CAN I PICK JUST FIVE, DADVANS, HE IS LIKE, A CRYPTID THAT JUST WANTS TO SHOW YOU PICTURES OF HIS BEAUTIFUL HUSBAND AND ADORABLE DOG. WHO PROBABLY DON’T EXIST. HE PROBABLY BOUGHT OUT SOME DUDE’S STOCK OF MODELING PHOTOS. THERE’S NO WAY A DUDE THAT CUTE EXISTS IN THIS TOWN, WE’D KNOW ABOUT IT.
“okay you know that guy who comes in, the russian one that tips well?” “wait, the one that’s always talking about his husband and their dog?” “yeah, that guy! he came in with cupcakes he said his husband made, they’re in the break room.”
“so we had this girl being harassed, and like, this super gay dude just sat down beside her, whipped out an ipad, and started showing her pictures of his husband and their dog like he’d known her for years, and the guy trying to hit on her tried to tell him they were talking, and the super gay dude says, in this super Russian accent ‘don’t be stupid, nobody would want to talk to you. go away. we’re looking at pictures of my husband’.” “LMAO that’s My Husband, he’s always here when his husband is travelling.”
“this guy came in to get an actual fucking blue rinse on his hair and spent the entire time talking about how his husband learned how to knit and made him a scarf and he went on and on about how talented he was” “was the scarf good” “lmao it looked like someone threw yarn against a wall and picked it up all tangled” “what did you say?” “what do you think I said, he tipped me 40% and took ten cards.”
“I think My Husband is catfishing us, because I looked at the pictures he has of My Husband and lmao that’s like, Yuri Katsuki the skater.” “what, really?” “I mean, My Husband is hot or whatever, but can you imagine being married to him?” “lmao he probably downloaded the pictures and built this entire imaginary life about him and Katsuki, poor dude.”
“GUYS. GUYS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ALERT. ALERT. GUYS. MY HUSBAND’S HUSBAND IS AT THE BAR, AND HE HAS OUR DOG WITH HIM. ALERT. ALERT. MY HUSBAND’S HUSBAND AND OUR DOG ARE REAL, AND THEY’RE SITTING AT THE BAR. ACT CALM.” “holy shit it’s actually yuri katsuki.” “are you fucking kidding me.”
Tony couldn’t seep. Sometimes he managed a few hours if he was tired enough, so usually he went to the gym and worked out until he was exhausted. Tonight, though, he found the gym already occupied: Barnes, with his hair tied up, working steadily at the heavy bag. Normally Tony would make an awkward comment and leave him to it, but instead he just heads for the opposite side of the gym. After setting up at one of the far treadmills, Tony worked his way to a easy run. Barnes was laying his fists rhythmically into the bag, and the quiet thumping was sort of strangely soothing. Between the running and the thumping, Tony slipped into a near-trancelike state.
And then Barnes let out an ungodly howl, drew back his left fist, and slammed it straight through the heavy bag with a roar of, “DIE A THOUSAND BURNING DEATHS!”
Tony fell off the treadmill, scrambled to his feet, and booked it to the elevator.
kingofmemes posted:
holy shit you guys there was a spider on my punching bag !!! thanks to my many years of combat experience & martial arts training things are okay now
well okay so morgan is this movie where they bioengineered this kid to be a weapon (or technically they made IT for PURPOSES) and rose leslie is in it and i love her and kate mara as well but anyway!! i thought it had great potential, and that the characters deserve screaming about BUT plot-wise it fell flat on its face like a third of the way in and never got back up AND I WAS DISAPPOINTED. more info: directed by ridley scott's kid, released 2016.
WHOA I THOUGHT I DREAMED THIS RESPONSE. Actually I definitely dreamed half of it. Kids, take it from your Auntie Moran: do not check your notes on your phone while half asleep, it makes your brain do weird shit.
But for real, that sounds like a great premise and honestly I might watch the thing to that I can bitch about it and then rewrite it.
so on the subject of stolen property, i’ve seen various arguments on this point but it is in fact true that inheriting something from a relative, when you know full well that it was stolen, does not make it yours.
this clearly goes doubly so for powerful magical artifacts, and especially for artifacts which are strongly implied to contain part of their creator’s soul!
you can talk about consequences - maybe the artifact in question has benefits for you, maybe you’re not convinced its rightful owners would use it responsibly - but talking about the consequences doesn’t erase the fact that whatever benefits you think you’re getting are achieved through wrongful means.
which is why i, too, think Frodo should have given the One Ring back to Sauron. thief.
Hahahahaha here comes the law student nerd ready to complicate your wonderful post, op.
(Really this is just pretext for me to study for my property final in a week, so thanks yeah)
Because according to the principles of common property law, the matter of who actually owns title to the One Ring becomes really complicated really fast.
Buckle up babes for the pedantic law lecture no one asked for.
HAVE YOU WATCHED MORGAN AND IF SO WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT IT
I have not, and some googling has not produced a show or movie by this name, so EITHER my Google skills need work (POSSIBLE, because this is the first time I’ve dragged myself out of the PubMed hole in a while) OR there is a typo here. Regardless, feel free to hit me up with a pitch.
for the ask meme: dog person or cat person, and are you a musician? cheers!
Lol I said I’d be on top of my shit with this ask meme, but then I discovered there is in fact a physiological limit to how long you can sleep for four hours a night before your body hits the Off Switch.
Dog person or cat person?
Normally I’d say I like both (DOGS ARE AFFECTIONATE AND FLOOPY, CATS RUMBLE LIKE TINY ENGINES, WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE), but the new RD in my dorm has a pupper except he’s not a pupper he’s like a woolly bear who is probably bigger than me, his name is Charles and he is the most amazing thing in the world, he goes “boof” whenever he’s wandering the dorm and someone comes through the door. Also he loves scratches and to have his ears flopped and he always tries to follow me back to my apartment and I AM GOING TO STEAL HIM, so per force I am currently a dog person.
Musician?
I sing, to variable degrees of success, and I used to play the flute, HOWEVER, I can’t read sheet music for love nor money. I’m just fucking incapable. But I have excellent pitch and I learn pretty well by ear, which is pretty much how I fumbled by with the flute thing.
if you hop over to @elidyce's blog, you may enjoy a recently reblogged post on legal possession of the one ring!! wasnt sure if u were ok with me tagging u in it. have a nice day!!
I will tag you in anything and everything. Honestly its basically me scrolling through things and going 'oh I know a human who would like this' and bam....you get tagged
AND I AM SO THRILLED THAT YOU DO. Honestly I suck spectacularly at remembering to tag people in posts but DO NOT BE FOOLED BY MY POOR MEMORY it makes me so happy when people tag me in stuff.
“You know the difference between subjective and objective,
right? ‘Some rabbits’ is the former, ‘three rabbits’ is the latter, and much
more accurate. So I’m going to need you to be very clear when you say there are
‘a few’ dragons outside.”
Dorian
Pavus, formerly of House Pavus in Tevinter and lately of Skyhold, Altus and
ex-heir of the Magisterium, had borne witness a number of strange things in his
life, the vast majority of which had come to pass in the last six months. These strange things have included, among
others, an archdemon, a Qunari with a jovial temper, a Seeker and a Templar
working side-by-side with mages, a truly preposterous number of demons
all-too-solid for his liking, and whatever the blessed hell that sword-horned terror
in the stables was called. And, of course, there was Rhosyn Lavellan, Dalish
elf, Inquisitor, Herald of Andraste, and presumptive savior of the world, whom
he had personally seen get into fights with no less than seventeen great
bears.
Seeing that
sort of person walk out of a ravine and immediately turn on her heel, looking
distinctly pale under the black ink of her lacework vallasin, was notably
strange, even among such a prodigious collection of oddities.
So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.
The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.
This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.
It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.
Like, fuck off?
Fuck off.
I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.
And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like
Fucking, why would I ever.
Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?
I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.
I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.
The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.
So yeah.
Queer as in fuck you people in particular.
And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.
I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.
My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.
but it’s fuckign not.
We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.
And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.
Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?
You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”
And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with
Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs.
That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question:
what group has managed to spread their posts and their ideas far and wide on Tumblr, because people reblog without checking the source or reading between the lines?
and what group has had a vicious ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’ as both a self-descriptor and an umbrella-term for decades now?
The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride.
So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles).
If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.
I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts.
Please note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.
ok but have any of you thought about pacific rim from the perspective of the precursors
it’s like. you just bought a new house, but it’s infested with termites, so you call the exterminator thinking “alright, yeah, just get those termites gone and then we can get moved in”
the exterminator drops off the face of the planet. you never hear from them again. so you send in another, and you just keep sending them, and it’s always the same. you’re wondering if there’s something up by this point.
and then one of them comes back, battle-torn and bedraggled like “THE TERMITES HAVE BUILT HUMAN-SIZED CONSTRUCTS OUT OF SAWDUST AND SCRAP WIRING AND ONE ESTABLISHED A PSYCHIC LINK WITH ME.”
by this point you’re saying “what the entire fuck.”
so you call in the best of the best, the Elite exterminators, and guess what? the termites slaughter them all in a coordinated assault, and then come to your house disguised as one of the exterminators and set off a pipe bomb in your garage.
Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you have cosmonauts from Russia. And obviously it’s very important to get your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the Earth or going somewhere. You don’t want to have a miscommunication there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. And so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian because those are the languages of space.
Lauren: Yep. Wait, the language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’ and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it?
Gretchen: I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment forums, which I have gone on to research this episode…
Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen.
Gretchen: I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do astronaut linguistics. And one of the things these forums say, is, you need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly planes and so on. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language training course.
But then when they’re up in space, one of the things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian and the Russian speakers speak English. Because the idea is, if you speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. Whereas if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive at a level where where people can be sure that the other person’s understanding. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian language that’s developed. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a-
Lauren: Space Creole!
Gretchen: Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to see a grammar of Space Pidgin.
I’ve repeatedly seen British people make fun of American food for apparently always being either “too sweet or too salty” but our cuisine is still pretty mild compared to a lot of other countries, and having repeatedly tried British food, I’m pretty sure the term you’re looking for is “having any flavor at all.”
Britain invaded over half the world for spices and then decided they didn’t like any of them
“You know the difference between subjective and objective, right? ‘Some rabbits’ is the former, ‘three rabbits’ is the latter, and much more accurate. So I’m going to need you to be very clear when you say there are 'a few’ dragons outside.”
