Avatar

Fandom is my Fandom

@meeedeee / meeedeee.tumblr.com

I am over 50 and have been in media fandom for 30+ years. I have a love of fandom and its history. I am disabled and use voice recognition software to write so there may be typos and the occasional word salad. Please feel free to reblog or link to my tumblr. I love to meet fans in person and live in the SF Bay Area. Note: this blog is for adults only. If you are under the age of majority in your country, please pass it by.
Avatar

In light of increasing anti-trans and anti-abortion laws in the United States, I am once again humbly requesting you inform yourself about jury nullification, your ability as a juror to vote against convicting people being prosecuted under unjust laws. Nullification was instrumental in legalizing abortion in Canada - it informed jurors can use it to help protect healthcare workers and protesters in the US, too.

there’s a scene in an episode of the 1966 Batman TV series where Adam West watches a woman he met at a dance club die by falling into a nuclear reactor (it’s like the only death on the show) and sadly says “what a way to go-go”, a statement that lives in my head rent free and comes out of my mouth every time someone suggests that an action might kill me

Anonymous asked:

Sooooo… that #endofotwracism thing… I’m familiar with stitch’s hate tirade but not the other scholar and I’m curious and went digging and… gosh I’m already familiar with author she maligned and this author writes beautiful omegaverse and its iteration and exploration of it in every possible combination. I’ve already have the writer’s stories in my bookmarks and recs, just not the one pande tarred and feathered — but I will read it now, and I’m sure I’d find it beautiful and. Ya fed cause I have consumed over a million words written by them (serious).

Am I a racist now cause I liked this stuff that some brown and black FOC (that’s Fans of Colour, thank you semantics anon) have decried so? I’m “coloured” too, I’d be in AAPI if we’re going by USamerican taxonomy, though some days they call me brown, other days yellow… lol… I delved deeper and this author has been unceremoniously ejected from some zines cause of this scholar… I’m speechless… and they said the author is the bully??? I hate twitter and tumblr 🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲

Avatar

Reading a thing about rabbits vs hares ( @gallusrostromegalus‘s conversation) and I kept coming back to the forest. Back in the day of the 80s and 90s my family moved a lot from farm to farm while my father worked a job in a nearby city. For eight years we lived in Lanark County, Ontario. There is a reason, I believe, so much of Charles DeLint’s early work is centred there. Let’s just say… mushroom rings? Don’t step inside. But across the road from where my family lived was a large lot that had been a farm with a house and everything, converted into a pine farm. Trees in rows. Rust coloured needles covering the ground, giving the interior a look of a floor with endless pillars. Already, you see, you know things feel weird.  The first tree in the forest was a massive maple sitting at the edge of one of lots of trees. Big twisting, writhing limbs with leaves and bark you could lose a hand in. Only. Every spring when I walked by it would be filled with green and… clicking. I was told later it’s not common or something but someone needs to go find that tree and tell all the porcupines in it that they’re unusual. Because like spikey rattling fruit of owies and musk, they filled that tree. Silence but the sound of their quills (which at sufficient numbers is just… eerie as all hell). They’d watch you. Fill a tree and watch you.  I once counted to twenty before I stopped. I don’t even know where they came from or where they went. But apparently porcupines grow on trees. And then there was The Tree. As I said in monocultures like a planted pine forest there’s a kind of weird sense that you know This Isn’t Natural. But this one block of trees older by a little bit and more established. It was darker with only random spears of light hitting the rust or blood (after a rain) needled ground.  Except. There was an apple tree. It had long limbs that grew in gnarled curves and clutching branches parallel to the ground, spreading out more than up. Enough so it created a break in the canopy and light would spotlight it. Only. For the few leaves and the command of a clearing of it’s own, with a few sickly saplings that would try to grow from under it.. the bark of this apple tree was black. Like jet black. So, again. A forest of lines stretching out of sight. Floor of rust and blood needles, level as if made. Bone-white needles still on branches except. Where a black apple tree snarled and gnarled and twisted limb to throttle a patch of light from the forest. And it was always a kind of dim light. Like it should’ve been brighter but it never was. While the forest around it was pitch. Every single time I approached it all I could think is. We aren’t the only things that have gods. And demons. And beings from Outside. I was always convinced in the forest with the porcupine moot, where a black apple tree grows untouched, trees have their gods and I’d met one. I’m not at all sure it was kind. But I bet it was fair.

End Racism in the OTW | You'll Be Back [vidlet]

Sure, the Vorlons may have secretly influenced (read: experimented on and manipulated) sentient civilizations across the galaxy, but they also did good things, remember? Probably best to be more understanding of their desire to extinguish all planets touched by the Shadows. But when push comes to shove...

Anonymous asked:

I honestly find the idea of End OTW Racism exhausting because I've seen people be called racist in bad faith for a lot of things - shipping people of two different races together, writing racebent characters, not racebending characters, writing characters who are mixed race who look the "wrong" way (which can be looking too much like one race or looking equally both, depending on the person), writing villains who aren't white even if you yourself aren't white and you enjoy the villain in question and stan them, using the word kinky to describe hair (yes, even if you're black and the character you're describing is black), saying a character's race bluntly in a descriptor as "he was a tall black man", not saying a character's race bluntly in a descriptor and using other words such as "he was a tall man with dark umber skin", and my personal least favorite as a white Muslim, "erasing Arab culture" by having white Muslims exist.

Only that last example happened to me but the point is, I've seen so many BIPOC in fandom spaces called racist by white fans who don't agree with their takes who are using accusations of racism as a shield to hide behind that I don't trust any proposed anti-racist actions or overview committees to make good, sound judgment calls. Fandom has never demonstrated a willingness to understand that words have meanings before. I don't expect it to start now.

And also, even if you got the most well-meaning people ever together to do this proposed job of reviewing "racist" fics... well, the person who genuinely thought Muslim = Arab was genuine in that belief. They would have removed a fic I wrote just so I could see a character like myself - an Albanian-American, asexual, homoromantic Muslim - because they thought it was "an anti-SJW caricature" that had "too many niche identities to be anything but a parody". (They were extremely mortified when I responded that I am, in fact, all of those things, and we had a long conversation about the value of assuming good faith and recalling that very niche experiences exist in the world. They didn't double down, they grew from it, so for the record I'm not saying this to bash them, just to point out an example of how a genuinely anti-racist person can still have unexamined biases that lead to issues.)

Racism is a huge problem in fandom and we should be talking about how to get bigotry out of fandom spaces, I agree with that take 100%. I have yet to see anyone say otherwise. But this just strikes me as being unrealistically idealistic and blind to the pitfalls of the proposed ideas.

today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response

what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.

This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years

I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.

The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.

In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.

I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!

We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost

Avatar

There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don't know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn't making a big difference, and they think that because they haven't seen what it's still holding back.

today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response

what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.

This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years

I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.

The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.

In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.

I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!

We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost

Avatar

There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don't know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn't making a big difference, and they think that because they haven't seen what it's still holding back.

Watch "Noisestorm - Crab Rave [Monstercat Release]" on YouTube

Avatar

Michael Burnham be like: this is my sexy boyfriend who can talk to animals, this the mushroom guy, these are my bridge lesbians, this is my first officer who went through second puberty and no longer fears death, and this is the genocidal dictator I dragged here from an alternate universe whose history of war crimes and cannibalism I overlook because of unresolved guilt at letting my version of her die and she's fine with it cuz she can use me as a second chance with her adopted daughter whom she murdered for treason,

When my mother forgets a word, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher. I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: “You know the time for los jibbities is coming up. You must be so excited!” Oh, is it time for los jibbities already? I must have missed it on my calendar. Are we celebrating something? “Of course! We should all be celebrating, shouldn’t we?” OK, so los jibbities is a happy thing. It’s not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess. “Los heebie-jeebies? Now you’re making things up...and this is my show.” You’re right. The time for los jibbities is coming up. Is this a season? “Yes, the season for love. The season for pride.” OK, los jibbities. “Yeah, sound it out.” Los…jibbities. LGBTs! “Sí, mira cuz you’re gay!” “You couldn’t just say pride season? You couldn’t just… *laughs*

Avatar

Ah yes. The plural of El Gíbiti. Los Gíbitis

Avatar

KID WATCHING THE VIDEO: This guy’s not not tied to his rope… this - dude, this guy’s crazy, does he have a death wish or somethin’? Oh my gosh! Doesn’t he have like a wife and kids at home???

[parachute opens up to reveal it is rainbow]

KID, IN EXACT SAME TONE: Doesn’t he have a husband and kids at home???

Anonymous asked:

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/717426962200723456/i-have-a-genuine-question-concerning-bl-is-it

If BL isn't about LGBT men, then how can it be it BL? Wouldn't the characters need to be both male and attracted to the same sex for it to be BL? How can it be about straight men or about women? Am I missing a new subset of BL that's not about boys or love?

--

I thought they were pretty clear:

Are drag queens making art about women?

No? Well then!

--

Many creators of BL are closer to drag kings than to mlm making literal representation of themselves. Yes, BL is nominally about male characters who want other male characters, but it's only occasionally about What It Means To Be A Cis Gay Man In 2020s Tokyo or whatever. It's far more frequently about cis women's feelings about gender and power expressed through two ken dolls.

It varies, sure. There are all kinds of creators and all kinds of content. But realistic mlm identity isn't usually the focus.

This is not realistic art by, for, and about mlm. It is largely allegorical art by and for AFABs, only a few of them men, and it's about the concerns and feelings of that pool of creators and audience.

Yeah, some cis men and some trans men are into it. Yeah, some of them are creators, and some even make realistic art intended to represent themselves, but that's not what BL tends to be overall.

That anon isn't saying that the dicks don't touch. They're saying that people who want BL to be ~gay literature~ representing gay men's culture are fucking idiots.

Avatar
Avatar

Don’t let anybody tell you that quibbling about canon is an artefact of the modern culture of authorship. We have surviving letters from Ancient Greek poets yelling at each other about whether including this or that legendary hero among the crew of the Argo would cause mythological continuity problems. You are participating in a proud and storied tradition.

Anonymous asked:

I looked at recent endOTWracism stuff linked from previous asks and the main thing they seem mad about is ao3 not hiring a diversity consultant yet? Which seems like a lit of pressure for one person when really broad sensitivity training for the abuse team seems more effective? Also, they kept referring and talking around what they're actually mad about you for. I had to go through 4 diff twitter threads linked within each other to find something about a 16k racist screed? But they don't actually link or name the fic that i saw, so it could be anything from a racist manifesto to idk, bts fanfic?

They just seem really caught up in their own righteousness, to the point of being naive.

--

It's an old rant post from 2016 that's pretty badly written, but you can go read it if you want.

I haven't volunteered with OTW since 2014, and while I did set a few policies (like ignoring duplicate reports of the same work to lighten the burden on the Abuse team), I really don't think I'm terribly relevant anymore to the standard organizational dysfunction that has been all through all parts of OTW since the beginning.

I don't know how many people are on the Abuse team now. In my day, we had maybe 3 active people at a time. I'll bet they're equivalently understaffed now.

Sensitivity training won't do shit if they're operating at way more than maximum capacity at all times. That kind of situation is exactly why so many nonprofits have the type of dysfunction OTW does.

Avatar