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pool boy at the vampire mansion

@sauntering-vaguely-downwards / sauntering-vaguely-downwards.tumblr.com

a shitty fandom blog - flavor of the week: across the spider verse has rewritten my brain - you can call me Howell

Hi! We’re Queer Liberation Library, aka QLL (”quill”), and we’re building a digital library of LGBTQIA+ literature and resources that will be accessible throughout the US—book bans be damned. 

We’re big fans of yours and hope the feeling might be mutual! The next step in our library-building journey is, of course, raising some money to open our digital doors. From now through July 7th we’re trying to break the internet to hit our fundraising goal of $15,000 (or more! the more we raise the more queer and trans books we can purchase) and were hoping you might be willing to check us out/reblog etc! We’re a 501(c)3 non-profit, so all donations are tax deductible. 

You can find us on our new & improved website, as well as @queerliblib on other social media. 

Thank you so much for reading and HAPPY PRIDE!

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Thank you so much Neil!

@ my fellow adults who use tumblr a lot:

can you PLEASE put your age in your about/sidebar and make sure it’s accessible on mobile. imo if you’re an adult esp 20+ it’s a little weird that you wouldn’t have your age readily available on your blog. if you’re reading this now and you don’t have your age listed, please rectify that. i feel like teenagers get lured into talking to adults in fandom/lgbt spaces that they may not have intentionally sought out because they think they’re talking to other teenagers, and this can lead to a lot of other – much more insidious –problems

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Can you guys step out of the tumblr “everyone over 20 is inherently predatory and creepy towards children” bubble for once and consider that encouraging people to give up their personal information for the imagined safety of the community is like…not safe?

this advice doesn’t even make sense for multiple reasons; if someone is intent on preying upon minors, all they have to do is follow your advice and lie about their age, being over 20 doesn’t mean you can’t be preyed on yourself, you should never be coerced into giving up your privacy on social media (seriously, did a fed write this?), and promoting the idea that turning 20 means your interactions with younger people should be viewed with suspicion is absolutely harmful, like OP do you have any common sense? At all?

“ignore your own privacy boundaries and discomfort and if you don’t idk 🤔sounds a lil sus 2 me, pedophile” will you guys stop larping as conservative politicians for one second please

think-of-the-children fearmongering is not the same thing as actually protecting minors

You’re talking about - much more insidious - problems while telling people if you don’t do what I tell you, you might be a threat to the safety of our community, like okay Dubya!

Let me tell you about the insidious things that happened when I was young in fandom spaces and older fans became my friends

1. I was taught real sex ed by a midwife, including a lot of pros and cons of various birth control

2. I learned you can just get anything printed into a book and having it in a physical book don’t legitimize something

3. I learned how to enjoy other cultures without making people from those cultures uncomfortable

4. I realized my guardians, while better than my past guardians, were still abusive and what I was experiencing was not healthy, even if distressingly common

5. I learned generosity without ulterior motives actually did exist

6. I learned I don’t have to abandon the things I enjoy as I get older.

7. I was taught ways to treat people differently in deference to their age while still treating them as peers.

(they treated me as an equal, but I was not included in any sexual discussions, for example)

8. I learned that friendships don’t have to be quid pro quo

All of these things super insidious and destructive to the conservative agenda.

Destroying the links between generations is part of how the powerful keep us from forming communities and bettering our lives. Don’t do the masters’ work for them.

The language of the OP is such dogwhistley language as well: ‘lured into’ ‘insidious’.

Friendships across generations is not a bad thing.

And also, maybe we are older, but we are also the generation who was told do not put your personal details - including your age - on the internet, because that opens you up to being targeted by people who will take advantage of you because of your youth and inexperience.

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it is so fucking weird to me that there’s this whole culture of “omg what if I TALK TO A GROWN-UP that’s so CREEPY AND UNNATURAL” like…what kind of Kool-aid are they passing out on TikTok these days.

So like, the Reddit strike going on right now, yeah? I've been seeing a lot of people comment on how they appreciate the protest and then go on to say that this has the notable downside of them constantly looking up questions and not being able to easily find the answers because all of the easily-findable answers are exclusively on Reddit. I am not sure if most of the people making this observation are within the line of thought of "man, maybe this protest isn't such a good idea after all" or "man, it really sucks that we've let the internet get so consolidated," and I'm really hoping its the latter.

Like, all of this? This right here? Reddit making a shitty, anti-consumer grab for money and control over how people are allowed to access the information on their servers, and the website going dark in protest causing tons of people to not be able to access important information? This is exactly what people mean when they say that it's bad that the internet has shrunk down so much and is mostly comprised of, like, 10 websites. It's a fucking problem that one company making one bad decision and causing their website to crash and burn can jeopardize so much of humanity's cumulative information.

This two-day glimpse into the internet without Reddit is the warning shot. Imagine what will happen if Reddit actually goes down for good for one reason or another one day. Imagine what will happen if/when Discord or Fandom bites the dust, or gets rendered practically-unusable without paying an ever-increasing premium because they're owned by blood-sucking corporate leeches.

Another big thing is Twitter clamping down really hard on your ability to DM people if you don't have Twitter Blue. If this goes through, it'll put a ton of artists and sex workers who rely on Twitter DMs for their business operation into a shitty situation. Now, obviously, it's not gonna be the end of the world for them, but once again, it feels like a warning shot to me. Twitter is a sinking ship, and unless something changes and it starts to course-correct, I worry that it'll go under and all of the creators who rely on it will suddenly be in an extremely precarious situation.

These are the sorts of things that we, as the users of the internet, need to seriously think about as time goes on, and if we don't find an adequate answer sooner, we're going to pay for it later. I still hold that the best solution is to start making and using more individual, niche websites. Things like Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. have their place, of course, but I seriously think a lot was lost through the death of things like individual forums and the existence of many different wiki-hosting sites.

We need a concerted effort, not just on the side of larger creators, but on the users themselves, to stop exclusively using these larger websites and support the creation and growth of smaller, more niche websites, and prevent a catastrophe before it actually happens. I simply hope that people with larger platforms than my own pick up on all this and start talking about it and swaying people to act sooner rather than later. I know it's possible to correct the problem of the mysteriously tiny internet before a modern Library of Alexandria moment happens, I just don't know if that correction will actually happen in time.

with soap2day gone, it's important to remember that talking about piracy online is inherently dangerous for the hosting site. if you have a site you like, DO NOT POST ABOUT IT. especially not on tiktok / twitter / instagram. do not turn it into a meme. if someone wants to know where to watch something, dm it to them and explain why you shouldn't share info willy nilly. honestly if you have the resources, get into torrenting.

loose lips sink ships. some things aren't widely talked about for a reaon.

the fact that “the vibes here are rancid” is a power that the jedi actually have is insane to me

can you imagine being a normal dude and you’re getting help from this jedi, and this jedi dude’s like “head’s up, the next five minutes have the worst vibes imaginable” and you’re like “why?” and the jedi dude’s like “inscrutable cosmic power told me so, doesn’t get more specific than that”

like all these weird little men in weird little robes with glowy swords do is meditate because they have sorcerer-induced anxiety. yoda’s always fucking meditating on his little pillow because he has to figure out if he’s nauseous because the arcane will of all life itself is speaking through his midichlorians to warn him or if he just ate a bad burrito for lunch. the force is constantly dunking on these weird little men and telling them “something bad’s going to happen” and never explaining what’s going to happen. do you sense bad vibes because your washing machine is about to break and flood your apartment, or because the government you serve is about to turn into a dictatorship and mow your ass like grass? that’s for you to figure out

mace windu has Double Anxiety because every now and then he gets a pop-up that tells him when he is making a Significant Visual Novel Protag Choice

The Force: This Action Will Have Consequences!

Windu, downing three space ambien: great

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These two weeks have been very busy and I've come home exhausted but happy! Now, I'm back to the routine by uploading more sketches from Howl's Moving Castle Book ✨

I love to see Sophie happy, so I drew her picking flowers after the first book 💙 And I needed to draw Howl with a mullet catching a star , before the book started 🌚