Hiya

I'm Demi I'm a transfem enby, I'm in the Ann Arbor area in michigan I'm also a huge fag, btw my sideblogs are @bunnyboygirlboy for nsfw and @demifur for furry nsfw also 18+, I still post nsfw on here, just mostly not porn Feel free to dm, especially if you're in my area

Staff 1984'd all my blogs but I told them "I sorry" and they restored my main.

My horny sideblog is now @toscompliantdemi

That sideblog will not reblog pictures unless they're ToS compliant, but will have horny text posts and such

Chanting this to myself now that I only have two years left of my 20s

a friend of mine is a science educator. not a classroom teacher - he does the kind of programs you see in museums, fun experiments with lasers and dry ice and shit.

yesterday, a young girl asked him why he was allowed to pour liquid nitrogen all over his own arm but he didn’t want her doing it. I braced myself for some dumb “well I’m an adult so I’m allowed” non-answer, but instead he surprised me by giving some of the best science (and life) advice I think you can give a young person:

“well, it’s one of those rules designed to keep you safe. and following the rules really can help you stay safe, but they’re not perfect. sometimes, usually because they’re too simple, the rules let you do things that aren’t safe, or don’t let you do things that are safe if you know how to do them. one of the reasons I’m good at what I do as a scientist is I try to understand how things work so I can figure out my own rules for keeping myself safe. and sometimes my rules are little more complicated than what I might hear from other people, but they work better for me. like, I let myself play with liquid nitrogen, but only in really specific ways that I’ve spent time practicing. you should follow the rules you’re given at first, but if you take the time to understand how things work, maybe you can make your own, better rules.”

I loved this response. it’s a great encapsulation of two really important things I think people need to learn and re-learn all the time: on the one hand, listen to genuine authority figures; when someone knows more than you about a subject, don’t treat their expertise as “just another opinion” and act like your ignorance is just as good as their knowledge. but on the other hand, don’t obey anything or anyone blindly. recognize that rules and systems and established ideas are never perfect. question things, educate yourself, question things more.

and then, of course, a parent had to butt in and spoil this wonderful lesson by saying:

“but not the rules mom comes up with!”

everyone in the room laughed. except me. I gave her a death glare I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice.

because no. no. your rules are not above reproach if you’re a parent. the thing about the dictates of genuine authority figures - people who deserve to have power, and to have their positions respected - is that they are open to question. genuine authority figures are accountable. governments can be petitioned and protested and recalled. doctors must respect patients’ right to a second opinion. journalists have jobs terminated and credentials revoked if they fail to meet standards of integrity and diligence. scientists, to bring us back full circle, spend their entire careers trying to disprove their own hypotheses! you know who insists on being treated as infallible? megalomaniacal dictators, that’s who. oh, and parents.

I’m beyond sick and tired of this “my house my rules, this family is not a democracy, I want my child to think critically and stand up for themselves except to me ha ha” bullshit. my friend gave this kid the kind of advice that doesn’t just help people become good scientists - if enough people adopt the mentality he put forth to that girl, that’s the kind of advice that helps societies value knowledge and resist totalitarianism. and her mother shut it down because, what, she didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of having someone question her edicts about whose job it is to wash the dishes on Mondays?

we already know you’re more likely to be a Trump supporter if you’re an authoritarian parent - and that this is a stronger predictor of your views on the current president than age, religiosity, gender, or race. I’ll say this another way in case you didn’t catch the full meaning: people who believe in the absolute, unquestionable authority of parents are more than two and a half times as likely to support Trump as people who don’t, and that’s just among Republicans. we can’t afford to treat the oppressive treatment of children or the injustice of ageist power structures in our society as a sideshow issue any longer. the mentality that parents should be treated by their children as beyond reproach and above dispute is a social cancer that has metastasized into the man currently trying to destroy the foundations of democracy in this country.

in short: parents, get the hell over yourselves before you get us all killed. and kids, learn as much as you can, and then make your own rules.

My mother is fond of quoting something that happened once at work (she’s the director of tourism for the neighboring county).

She was on the phone with my brother, who wanted to do something (I forget what, I think he wanted to go camping with some friends and she was worried it was going to be too cold that weekend or whatever)

And finally she got off the phone and sighed and said, joking, “When I taught them to question authority I must have laid it on thick, because now they’re questioning mine.”

And it got really quiet in the office. And then her secretary pipes up with “You taught your kids to question authority???”

Like she couldn’t believe that you would.

“You didn’t teach yours to?” Says mom, equally incredulous.

“No of course not!”

And mom says that right there in that moment she realized what was wrong with a huge part of the world.

Teach your kids to question, people.

For a short while as a child I had sanctuary from an abusive home in a lovely home with good parents. One of the things that completely shocked my taraumatized little soul was how deeply the adults respected children’s thoughts, feelings, needs and wants.

Whenever a kid thought something was unfair, the adult would ask why it felt unfair and talk to them about it. Sometimes the reason for the rule or decision was immovable, like, “this isn’t safe” or “this isn’t possible with the time we have and the responsibilities that fill it”, or “homework has to be done even if it’s boring, because it helps you practice skills you will need later on.”

In those cases, the rule wouldn’t change but the child would understand why it was a rule, and feel listened to and respected. And best of all, sometimes even if the rule didn’t change, an adult might help the child brainstorm ways to make it easier to follow the rule, or find alternatives to the thing they couldn’t have.

Sometimes, the rule or decision was for more flexible reasons, like “We can’t do this because you need supervision, and I have work to do which means I can’t supervise”, in which case a child’s suggestions, like, “What if I call a grandparent and see if they’re interested in supervising?” were encouraged and listened to. 

This taught the kids, me included, so much more than we ever could have learnt by being shut down by, “I’m an adult and I said so.” The system was designed to teach us to make good decisions and to give us as much information as possible about how to do that before we went out into the world. Teaching us the reasons for certain rules helped us respect them and to understand how to make good rules for ourselves going forward.

In my original household, the central rule was “Do whatever will keep you from getting hurt by the person with the most power.” From this we learned to make choices based solely on fear of consequences, no innate ethical system, so we learned to misbehave without getting caught.

We learned that if you can force someone to do something they don’t want to, you’re allowed to, because that’s how rules are decided, the most powerful person always gets their way.

We learned that asking questions of someone with power over you is dangerous and you have to figure everything out on your own. We learned to keep secrets about how badly we were hurt. There was no oppenness, no conversation, no negotiation or questions or teaching, just fear and hatred and a lot of pain.

Which household do you think taught me the best lessons, the ones I can use to build a healthy and responsible life for myself?

My older son (almost 8 now, god) said to me in a conversation this year, “You can say no to anyone, even grown ups,” and I almost cried with relief.

Just to go back to tdf’s bit: “Whenever a kid thought something was unfair, the adult would ask why it felt unfair and talk to them about it. ” Y'know, after I ran away from home, if an adult had started a conversation like that with me, I would’ve thought it was a trap and clammed up. I’m not sure exactly what I think needs adding here, but there’s something about abusive parents training their children to not trust the absence of power abuse.

Too many people are forgetting these things too quickly:

-SESTA/FOSTA passed. Despite the many, many warnings of sex workers.

-A bunch of apps started their censorship policies because Apple directly threatened their revenue if they didn't promise to cut down on the amount of porn on their sites

-MasterCard and VISA tried to outright stop processing OnlyFans work SPECIFICALLY because of the association with sex work, and no other feasible financial reason.

There is not a sudden regressive movement among individual people. Free The Nipple didn't fade into obscurity because people didn't care. It was stopped. By policies. By laws. By arrests. By censorship. These things have been purposefully put in place by companies and politicians. They saw the work we were trying to do wrt bodily autonomy, sexual liberation, and sexual freedom, and they forcibly put a stop to it.

Bupkis and Beeftongue.

Bupkis and Beeftongue.

Bupkis and Beeftongue.

I'm very fond of this video

allow me to tell you of the grave error i made yesterday. it was 8pm. i was cooking moroccan stew. needed to let it simmer for 25 minutes before i added the chickpeas. i shall go upstairs, thought i, and take a shower, and leave the chickpeas on the counter to drain. puddles the cat is sleeping near the stove. i briefly consider locking her out of the kitchen - but surely even she, leviathan of unconquerable appetites, will not concern herself with hard, drained, uncooked chickpeas. surely not.

with this set-up in mind, what do you imagine i found when i came back downstairs?

i'll not keep you in suspense.

the moral of this story is never own cats

everything

[ID: Discord screenshot from me, Rotting Mistake, saying "From age 0-17 you're an innocent angel who has never had an impure thought in your life, from 18-25 you're an adult minor who also can't have sex, and then at 25 your brain has fully developed (very real science) and you have about five years to have sex because anyone 30+ is a decrepit ancient hag". End ID]

This is breaching containment already please realize in this post that "porn" meas Team Fortress 2 hentai

People be normal about human sexuality challenge!

When I was underage on the internet I would quietly read the rated M fics that I wanted to read and would not interact with the adults. I chose to expose myself to content, but didn't drag in any of the adults into the fact that I was a teenager exploring adult themes, as most teenagers do. I stuck to writing/drawing age appropriate content so to anyone on the outside looking at me they wouldn't know I was secretly reading lemons. I didn't see any other kids my age reading lemons, but they probably were. We were all just quiet and respectful about it.

When I was in that 18-25 age range I remember kids (17 and under) getting upset at me and others my age because we'd say things like "I will not RP or collab with anyone under 18" or "If you are not 18+ I will not draw/write you porn." because the kids all wanted to do that stuff and they got mad at adults for protecting themselves.

Now that I'm in my 30's, the kids get mad at adults for enjoying adult material period. I think it's time to slow down the swingset and settle safely back in the middle with "I'm not an adult so I will not push my way into adult spaces and make the adults uncomfortable, but I also will not get mad at adults for entering adult spaces." It's ok to explore by yourselves in a safe way, if that's what you want to do, but don't drag adults into it and don't go shaming adults for enjoying adult things.

Don't know why you're all worried about losing icons, I feel that there's an easy way to tell. Your friends apart.

What if we all make our text and individual colour to us ans maybe mix up the way we type in an way to really make us stand out

*blocks your dashboard*

one of my fave posts honestly

NO MORE TAYLOR SWIFT!!

If you choose to complain about running out of things to watch because of the strikes your options are either I cave your face in with a lead pipe or you sit down and watch One Piece.

This is not what I meant

So I was made to feel old today...

Two decades today

The only good thing staff added recently

Mutuals we are doing this

“In Russian, Baba Yaga’s name is not capitalized. Indeed, it is not a name at all, but a description—“old lady yaga” or perhaps “scary old woman.”  There is often more than one Baba Yaga in a story, and thus we should really say “a Baba Yaga,” “the Baba Yaga.” We do so in these tales when a story would otherwise be confusing. We have continued the western tradition of capitalizing Baba Yaga, since the words cannot be translated and have no other meaning in English (aside perhaps from the pleasant associations of a rum baba).  There is no graceful way to put the name in the plural in English, and in Russian tales multiple iterations of Baba Yaga never appear at the same time, only in sequence: Baba Yaga sisters or cousins talk about one another, or send travelers along to one another, but they do not live together.  The first-person pronoun “I” in Russian, ‘ia,’ is also uncapitalized. In some tales our witch is called only “Yaga.” A few tales refer to her as “Yagishna,” a patronymic form suggesting that she is Yaga’s daughter rather than Yaga herself. (That in turn suggests that Baba Yaga reproduces parthenogenetically, and some scholars agree that she does.)  The lack of capitalization in every published Russian folktale also hints at Baba Yaga’s status as a type rather than an individual, a paradigmatic mean or frightening old woman.  This description in place of a name, too, could suggest that it was once a euphemism for another name or term, too holy or frightening to be spoken, and therefore now long forgotten.”

— Sibelan Forrester, from her introduction to Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales

I feel like this suggests that - with much dedication and study - you, too, could go out into the woods and be a baba yaga.

my long term retirement plans kinda hinge on it, yeah

#i didnt realize this was about the writers strike i thought i was being presented with two groups of college students#i was like yeah the buisness majors aren't making it out alive.wait this is about something

OP will be hunted for sport if the asker ever changes their name

OH FUCK

lest we forget

Just tgirl problems