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Doctor with the TARDIS Fez

@docwithtardisfez / docwithtardisfez.tumblr.com

Elliott, 33, cisgender male, Jewish, heteroflexible, panromantic, polyamorous, autistic (Asperger's) and ADHD, massive nerd, Lord of the Puns, 11th Doctor cosplayer, and guy with pretty nice hair

Reblogging things I like feels a lot more goblinesque than upvoting ever did. The upvotes felt like "hmm yes, I approve *golf claps*" while reblogging feels like furtively staring at something before shoving it in your mouth and scurrying back underneath the nearest piece of furniture.

Which isn't to say that I don't like it. But I definitely find myself going "maybe I shouldn't reblog this because I've already reblogged a bunch of things today and I don't want to look like I don't have a life," I say as I close the app and reopen it like one of those little automatic box toys with the switches.

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me every time i take a sip of my cappuccino: do they know it's called cappuccino because the color is similar to the sackcloth worn by capuchin friars (cappuccini). do they know capuchin friars got their name from the hood (cappuccio) they wear. do they know cappuccino is a double diminutive as it comes from capo ('robe') + uccio = cappuccio ('hood' but literally 'little robe') + ino = cappuccino ('tiny hood' but literally 'tiny little robe'). do they know

It was an

Itsy bitsy

Teeny weeny

Hooded capuchin robe drinky

*puts a small hooded robe on a little monkey and gives it a frothed milk espresso drink*

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.

This is the first time I’ve seen this post but I know I’m gonna love reading it every time it shows up on my dash

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Happy los jibbities to all who celebrate and this is your reminder that you, like me, can identify as both bi AND pan and neither identity is inherently biphobic, transphobic, enbyphobic, or more/less woke than the other and there are no rules you have to follow on how to identify, thank you for coming to my TED talk

We need a digital archive of LGBTQ+ works of art, science, and every other conceivable work we can share between each other because we are beyond the genocide warning level in most countries in the west and they're already trying to purge us from libraries.

If other people are interested I'll make this a priority

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Speaking as someone with a background in archives, stuff like this does already exist. No need to reinvent the wheel. Creating an archive and making sure it's accessible and searchable and actually preserves things for the long time (especially digital things) is actually a huge undertaking. Show some love to these already existing collections and maybe even consider contributing. There's the Digital Transgender Archive off the top of my head. I know more I just have to think.

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The History Project, based in Boston, is an LGBTQ+ community archive that's existed for decades. Many of their collections are digitized.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives, based in Brooklyn, is similar.

The Digital Public Library of America covers a great many topics, but they also have LGBTQ+ stuff.

I'd also recommend searching "lgbtq+" and "libguide" in your preferred search engine. Many universities list helpful resources and databases, some of which are freely accessible.

Many public and academic libraries in the US and Canada (not sure where you're writing from) subscribe to the Gale Archives of Sexuality and Gender. If you have a library card or are a student at a given library, you can access it for free.

In general, I'd really recommend searching around to see how you can support existing museums, community archives, college and university archives, etc that specialize in LGBTQ+ history and media local to you, whether that's in your same town or regionally.

You are not alone! People are working on this and some of them have institutional budgets!

But also kind of looping back to the first post: you personally might have relevant records. Photos of Pride or protests you've been to, journals, a blog full of trans headcanons even. That's all part of queer history and that's the stuff these archives and museums are made of.

Label your stuff carefully, make backup copies, and get to know your local organizations!

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We're also working on building an open access archive and actively looking for content contributions! https://about.jstor.org/revealdigital/hiv-aids-the-arts/

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is such a weird theory because it's like there's a very obvious explanation for why middle school kids who didn't have dysphoria before might suddenly have dysphoria. Like huh weird I wonder what very obvious and widely known change that could cause kids to suddenly become very uncomfortable in their gender or sexual identity starts in between the ages of 10 and 14. Guess we'll never know. Must be peer pressure to *checks notes* become the only gender minority in your whole school singling you out for harassment by your peers. Couldn't be puberty suddenly giving you new body parts/bodily functions that are wrong for you.

Dude congrats on being the first person to have a new and interesting observation on this post. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. It's the desire to blame something external for who your child is because if you accepted the very obvious developmental explanation you would then have to admit that your child is a different kind of person than you instead of a mold-able mini me that you can force into your idyllic little nuclear family box you were imagining when you had them. Bigoted parents are terrified of their child not being exactly like them so they have to pretend that something like vaccines or peer pressure corrupted them. So much so that they'll put them through bleach treatments or conversion therapy or whatever in an attempt to fix them before they'll allow their child to be who they are.

so at my new job there’s been a lot of confusion over my gender (which as an enby is great) but somehow in the confusion my coworkers came to assume I’m a trans man and even though I’m AMAB I’ve used the confusion as leverage to get them to put tampons/pads in the men’s room and add a gender neutral bathroom for any transmascs/enbies down the line and I kept thinking “this is like the ‘my gender is whatever makes the joke funnier’ thing but the opposite??” and anyway tldr here is my “My gender is” alignment chart

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Oh this is amazing so many of these are a mood

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And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and there shall no plague be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.

If plague doctors hadn't been a real thing, and you made them up for a speculative history/fantasy story, people would complain that they're implausibly advanced and way too cool.

Like you're like "yeah there's this super lethal illness and nobody actually knows how it spreads so just to be safe they've got these sick gothy fucking hazmat suits. No Greg shut up they totally had all the materials to make them, you can make fabric splatter-resistant by waxing and oiling it. And the mask is because of the- guys shut up, let me finish. The mask is- there's scented- guys shut up. They didn't have germ theory but they figured it has something to do with the air smelling- No shut up, you're a fucking furry. The beak makes it cool. Jerks."

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so apparently in 815 CE there was a common belief that sky pirates sailed ships in the clouds and (working in collaberation with frankish weather wizards) stole all the crops that got damaged in storms and took them back to the cloud realm of magonia.

And this was apparently a common enough belief that an archbishop felt the need to write a treatise to debunk it and insist that only god controls the weather, which is the only reason we know about it.

there are three important points to take from this, i think

  1. This is great inspiration for your next dnd game
  2. Tropes that might seem relatively modern (like airship pirates) can often actually go WAY back
  3. The stuff your average medieval christian actually believed in will often have very little resemblance to christianity. And thats before you even get to the proper heretics.