shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc it’s easier

shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc it’s safer

shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc they don’t feel like they can pull off anything else

shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc presenting as their real gender is impossible

shoutout to nonbinary people who present as their assigned gender bc they want to

shoutout to nonbinary people whose presentation is mistaken for their assigned gender but is in fact how they express their real gender

just because we might “look cis” doesn’t make us any less nonbinary and tbh fuck anyone who says otherwise

Who i thought would induce gender envy

VS who actually induced gender envy

Hi I love them sm

Tatiane Freitas Splices Contemporary Acrylic Elements Onto Traditional Wooden Furniture

This reminds me of when you see a fossil replica and they've replaced the missing parts with reconstruction in a different material so you can see what the object used to be.

I've always thought that was beautiful.

47 more free and helpful things, that everyone can take advantage of

Music

Art

Games

Knowledge

Cooking

Work, or relax

Boredom

Just for fun

And lastly...

Earlier post

Adding Boil the Frog to the musics list

Radiogarden is Amaaaaazing

I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.

I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.

Here’s a source:

As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!

An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:

The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:

Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.

And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.

I don’t ... have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.

Another thing; as someone who expects overlap because of my cultural upbringing, when someone doesn't overlap me I just start looping and repeating myself because I'm waiting for them to interrupt and they're "politely" waiting for me to finish speaking.

Please read this. Please share this. Please remember us.

whats that one about the commons and the goose

17th century english anti-enclosure poem

trans people i’m happy you’re alive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i’m so glad you’re here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! keep doing your best!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i love you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Slowlyyy but surely adding more sapphics in traditional costumes to my gallery hihi

Palestinian sapphics !!!!!! 10th sketch done ✅️

why is finding trans healthcare so complicated can’t someone just hit me up with boy juice and amputitty me already

“you need documentation” ok fine

i have no idea if this will help with your situation, but erin reed has a map with all informed consent clinics- this may be completely unhelpful but i know these clinics make it easier to access hrt with less barriers.

so I made the original post as a joke, but then I saw this and found an informed consent provider in my area and I’m gonna make an appointment. genuinely thank you, this reblog could make my healthcare journey so much easier. hope this helps someone else too <3

twitter doesn't let people who aren't logged in view tweets anymore at the time of me reblogging this so click here for a direct link to the map :)

[ID: Hands holding a piece of paper saying "i can do whatever i want -me." /End ID]

My take on "why there are many adults that only read YA novels" is pretty simple

The YA book explosion of the mid 2000's-mid 2010's was mostly scifi and fantasy genre, and trying to "get into" adult SFF is a punishment from hell

Sci-fi, fantasy, and other spec fic is collectively a very heterogenous group and poorly organized.

Want to know the tone, mood, themes, narrative style, level of worldbuilding, scope of the plot, pace, qualities of the main character(s), central tropes, and sensitive content within the book you just pulled off the library shelf? Step 1: Put an end to your paltry life

Like yes there are great books out there that you will love, but if you go through a list of the most popular adult fantasy books and read them, there's a good chance you will have the worst book experience of your life

If you just pull a random fantasy book off the library shelf, there is also a good chance you will have the worst book experience of your life

I love SFF books and prefer adult SFF over any other genre or category (I haven't enjoyed YA in a long time) but i'm not going to lie, a lot of the people writing it hate fun and/or MUST rub grime and sexual violence on every page or otherwise make it scrungy and gross and require eyebleach

I think one major thing former YA lovers are chasing when they try to find new books to read is that playful, adventurous, interest-grabbing way of exploring an unfamiliar world where the story shows you glimpses of just a fraction of the fascinating creatures, magic, settings, etc. that exists and makes it so fun to imagine encountering or experiencing those things. Basically asking, "Wouldn't it be COOL if THIS was real?"

And it's always clear that what you the reader are seeing is just a glimpse, and there's SO much more out there in this world, and it makes you want to pry the book open and jump inside just so you can learn about all the cool stuff in this richly drawn reality

And I've found some adult SFF that totally has this (The Divine Cities trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett is one of my faves) but so many of them abandon fun and fascination and it's sad.

Another note—

At the same time, adult SFF is getting YA-ified—newly published adult SFF books resemble YA stylistically more and more.

Which I HATE, because it just homogenizes a bunch of writers' potentially unique styles and makes everything sound the same.

I encountered this while trying to read Robert Jackson Bennett's newer book Foundryside. While the book shares the clever and absorbing worldbuilding of the Divine Cities trilogy, I ultimately didn't enjoy it as much because the writing style seemed very generic-ified.

One of the most noticeable things was the swearing. The Divine Cities trilogy had characters say "fuck" and it made sense and it fit. Foundryside replaced the fuck word with...some nonsensical Fantasy Swear Word that was like "skiffing" or something. It was silly and felt so weird and condescending like...just use grown up words okay

Also a lot of these newer adult fantasy books have young/teenage protagonists and a "coming of age" type story anyway?

When I read summaries of books like The Poppy War it sounds like a YA book that was made "adult" by including graphic rape scenes and genocidal violence.

Which I'm pretty sure is the opposite of what readers struggling to transition from YA to adult fiction actually want!

We want to read books with adult characters and plots that are more applicable to adults, with more emotional and stylistic complexity, but with an engaging approach to worldbuilding and less of the sad presumption that a Serious Mature story has to be painful and unfun. Not a book that is stylistically and characteristically YA but with more grimdark.

I posted this mostly because I'm just getting...exhausted with trying to find books to read that I will like.

Like yes yes read reviews, do research on authors, find recommendations from people who share similar tastes, just put aside books you don't like, use StoryGraph's content warnings...but consider this. I am tired. The amount of work and practiced skill it takes to narrow down a pool of potential books that I have a chance of liking is EXHAUSTING.

I don't like reading reviews, because I don't like having random other people's opinions shape mine before I read a book. And not only are reviews downright useless for lots of recently published books because all the top reviews are by youtubers who got ARC's, even reviews by presumably impartial random people fail a surprising amount of the time to warn me about things like "this book talks about characters peeing themselves like 30 times and there's a scene where the love interest licks a puddle of pee in the street"

It's not necessarily that I'm looking to avoid "grimdark" content, either. The Malazan series is one I enjoy and it is plenty "grimdark."

Nor am I really bothered or repulsed by sex.

What I truly hate is books where the author seems so up their own ass about writing a Serious Novel that nothing is fun. There's no vibrancy and richness and enthusiasm radiating from the worldbuilding.

Malazan is so absorbing to me because you can tell Steven Erikson is absolutely OBSESSED with his world and characters and concepts and he writes things just because they're fucking cool. Sometimes it's "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was an army of giant undead wolves and they were in a war with an army of giant sapient velociraptors with swords for arms. Fuck yeah." And sometimes it's "What if there was a scungy guy who bickers with his wife like Miracle Max from the Princess Bride and sometimes his wife shapeshifts into thousands of spiders? Fuck yeah."

That series is basically the worst possible series to recommend to someone trying to get into adult SFF, since there is a lot of sexual violence (there is war happening and the impacts on civilians get a lot of focus) and also every book is like 1200 pages long, has over a dozen POV characters, and requires active note taking to comprehend. The author is an anthropologist and It Shows. I haven't moved on to the sixth book because I don't know if I have the space in my brain for it.

But despite the overall inaccessibility and the number of criticisms I could make, the Malazan series obviously came about because the author's brain worms Compelled him. You read these books and you're like "this guy probably can't carry on a regular conversation about anything except orc burial mounds." Steven Erikson has something deeply wrong with him and if he didn't write 200k words a year about it he would just die.

Books that exist because the author was Compelled By The Brain Worms are different. With many recently published novels, I get the impression that the author did only exactly as much worldbuilding as they thought would be sellable and marketable, and no more.

We don't like that. We like the brain worms.

obsessed

the iconic bop that is Dragostea Din Tei is 20 years old today!

Was just listening to it yesterday by coincidence. “Alo, sunt eu, un, Haiduc!”

i have this cleaning mode that's evolved from some other ADHD habits called Abandoned Tote Bag. If you have too much shit on your countertop or desk or whatever, you take the entire fucking pile and either immediately throw it out, put it back in its obvious place, or chuck it into a large tote bag. Place the tote bag out of the way, but in an easy to access place. Let it sit there for a few weeks. If you need items from the tote bag, feel free to go grab them and leave them near where you used them. Eventually you may get the urge to actually take care of the tote bag. If there are items in the tote bag that remain, unused, you can more easily justify putting them in deep storage, giving them away, or throwing them out, since you very clearly didn't touch them. I have done this many times by accident but I think it might be an okay organization system now that I think about it.

Oh. Oh this is good. Oh I’m stealing this. Oh that’s going to be so helpful.

the best part of this is that you can leave the tote bag out as long as you like. but watch out

there is a cardboard box near my desk I haven't touched in over a year

MAKE UNIONS GREAT AGAIN.  That is the only way that workers can finally receive the salaries they deserve.  The reality is that businesses CANNOT SUCCEED WITHOUT EMPLOYEES.  

WORKERS UNITE.

i think queer people should be more confusing actually. i think we should make everyone as confused as possible until they give up and realize that total understanding of other people isnt the gateway to respect and compassion

comfy bed. take me home. to the place. where i belong. pillow blanky. sleeping soundly. take me home. comfy bed

This makes me so sad and also I'm trying to remember if any of the Discworld books dealt with late stage capitalism

i need the time blindness people and the gender blindness people to finally understand that you're not fucking exempt from

"stop using vision impairment as a metaphor"

they're both so fucked up in their own ways because in the case of gender blind you're literally just using blindness synonymously with "doesn't care" which is ableist as fuck. especially because pan (which this term is often used for) is also defined as "attraction regardless of gender". cool. so you're literally just saying that blindness means disregarding something. it's not a choice.

time blindness may not equate blindness with something quite as horrible, but it's still a metaphor, it's still misappropriating a disability term. blindness, here, is equated with "not perceiving, not knowing". but blindness doesn't refer to perception in general, it refers to visual perception specifically. and portraying blind people as unknowing or ignorant or flat-out refusing to perceive something is already common with other metaphors ("blind date", being blind to something", walking into something blindly" etc.). but time blindness is especially fucked up because it's mainly used by disabled people in a disabled context, and i would have honestly expected disabled people to know better. like, we've asked sighted people to stop with the metaphors so many fucking times and there's no way that a fellow disabled person hasn't heard one of us say it at least once.

these two are especially weird because... no one can fucking see time! no one can fucking see gender! even the most sighted neurotypical cannot see time. even the most normative nonqueer can't see gender.

you're not only ableist but also talking utter nonsense.

instead of time blindness you can say:

(chrono means time. agnosia means not knowing, see prosopagnosia.)

instead of gender blindness you can say:

*pan doesn't always mean that in every interpretation of the term, but it's still one of the definitions.