Tumblr is apparently doing some crazy nonsense again, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pillowfort.io is a new social media platform that aims to give users control of their content and how it’s seen and shared, as well as provide better communication tools to promote conversation and creativity. If this sounds good to you, you can donate $5 to our PayPal and you will receive a registration link the Friday after your donation. And if you decide the site isn’t for you, you can request a refund for up to three weeks after you sign up. (All money we receive through this process is going towards paying our hosting expenses and compensating our programmers.)

To anyone interested in the site but can’t afford to donate, there are a few users in the replies who are offering to give away extra registration keys that they’ve purchased! And if you are someone who has extra links you aren’t using, you might want to reply to this post so others who are looking for links can find you. :)

ive been on tumblr a long time and i remember when everyone said “oh don’t romanticize mental illness” and it was agreed that doing that was gross and a good way to kill people indirectly

but somehow we’ve come full circle and there are people who legit defend their right to be anti-recovery there are people who don’t want to get better and spread the idea that you can’t get better as if it’s gospel and it’s fucking frightening to me bc nobody seems to want to say “hey? this is toxic and untrue and is your disease speaking, and it’s not something you should accept.”

and i feel like every recovery post gets about 500 of these people saying “this isn’t something that will work” “cool karen i’m depressed” “maybe it worked for you but it won’t work for other people” and that’s… just… im so sorry if you’re 15. i’m sorry if you’re in high school and watching grown adults tell you it doesn’t get better. that nobody says that with time and help and patience the world stops being so heavy, that accepting your illness as a fact is one thing but accepting it as the only way to be is just wrong, that you can learn to live with it and still find some degree of “happy”…. if i had seen this shit back when i was … oh god starting at 12 when i was already self-harming …. i think i’d have actually honest-to-god killed myself. not a joke, not a funny tumblr punchline, i would have actually just killed myself. 

i’m saying this right here and right now to the adults on this site. if you for any reason shoot down positivity that’s causing no harm - you might have indirectly worsened someone else’s condition, and you should try and do better in the future. if you find it necessary to tell people “recovery is a lie”, you need to do better. i know everyone has different circumstances, but i also know that mental illness behaves in such a way that everyone thinks they can’t recover.  if you feel like you should be spreading the Word Of Relapse, you are causing toxic language to be normalized and you need to do better. 

im team “cool karen ive got depression and that means i’m going to try this because i’ve got to try something” i’m team “romanticize recovery” i’m team “it isn’t working now but it might in the future and it’s worth staying to find out” im team “hey this didn’t work for me but it might help somebody else out”

fuck guys it shouldn’t be an unpopular opinion to say “i don’t want any of you to die”.

Oh thank fuck someone finally said it!

Halloween Light Show by Tom BetGeorge

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

Show me what you cooked!

Famous love machine

Reblogging this so I can tag it as important but enjoy

oh my gosh the extended cut

We’re going down!

Another yokai book haul! This time An Introduction to Yokai Culture - Monsters, Ghosts, and Outsiders in Japanese History by Komatsu Kazuhiko. Haven’t given it a read yet, but the book is notable for being one of the few Japanese studies of yokai to be translated in to English so I’m looking forward to digging in.

The bibliography and reading list at the back of the book alone seems to be pretty invaluable, referencing studies both in English and Japanese I’ll be sure to check out when I’m finished with this.

The price is fairly high when compared to other books on the subject, but if you can find an ex library copy like I did (damn you library sticker… -_-) it isn’t too unreasonable. Buy the book here.

THIS IS A CAT IN A HALLOWEEN COSTUME PLAYING WITH A TINY PUMPKIN THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT

IT’S NOT EVEN OCTOBER

IT’S ALWAYS OCTOBER

THE MONTH IS IRRELEVANT

THE CAT IS CUTE, AND THAT IS IMPORTANT

Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”

And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”

Her response was, “Well, are you?”

My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.

The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”

I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.

Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular - but guys, value your allies. Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.

Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.

Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place - when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.

Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.

I remember when the phrase “Intent doesn’t matter” was first coined and spread in social justice circles.  And it did have it’s purposes - even if you (general you, not specific) didn’t mean to harm someone, you can still harm people by mistake and should take responsibility.

The most popular example, I believe, was accidentally stepping on someone’s foot. Even if your actions were an accident, it doesn’t change how much pain the other person’s foot is in.

What I think people forgot, even as they gleefully shouted INTENT DOESN’T MATTER* from the proverbial rooftops is the concept of appropriate response.  While intent may not change the way words and actions may hurt, it should be taken into account in your response.

To go back to the foot example: no matter how much pain your foot is in after someone steps on it, punching them in the face is unjustified.

*My “favorite” bit about intent doesn’t matter is how fast it was used for the hypocritical idea of “if you hurt me any retaliation is justified”. And by favorite I mean ‘thing that really, really irritated the hell out of me’.

luminous-lu:

omg

NOOOOOOO

there’s a post that’s like “its amazing how much you can get done if you just sit down and focus” with a second comment thats like “imagine being nt” and it has like thousands of notes but the op has adhd and was talking about how their meds were working really well there’s another post that’s like “how do you block gay men on okcupid” or something with a reply like “have you tried christianmingle” and it has thousands of notes but the op was a trans girl who wanted to avoid chasers there’s another post that’s like “date a quiet boy who will bring you a glass of water in the middle of the night” with a reply making fun of her “low standards” that has thousands of notes but the op was a teenage girl who was in an abusive relationship at the time that she made that post (and the reply was made by a grown man who had to apparently had to dig through months of this girl’s posts to find that one post & make fun of her for it so: yuck) point is, can we please stop making these assumptions about total strangers on this site, harassing them over innocuous posts theyve made that have been misinterpreted by literal hordes of random people and unless somebodys being outright hateful and disrespectful can we leave each other alone and mind our own business lmao

Things YoI Fans/Ficcers Should Know About Skating (#27)

JUDGED (PART TWO): AN OVERVIEW OF PROGRAM COMPONENT SCORES (PCS) IN WHICH I EXPLAIN HOW KATSUKI YUURI IS A PRESENTATION GOD

I got a request from a lovely anon to break down Program Component Scores. If you know nothing about the judging system, you can check out my introduction to the ISU system here. And my introduction to Grade of Execution (GOE) here.

The Program Component Score is meant to replace the old “Presentation” or “Artistic” score that existed under the 6.0 system. It is there to make sure that the artistic side of the sport is paid attention to and that the sport doesn’t get too jump happy (which it’s totally doing anyway).

The Program Component Score is broken down into five categories or components. (I unashamedly stole these descriptions from the ISU website)

1. Skating Skills-which is the overall quality of the skating ability (e.g. balance, cleanness and sureness, flow, edges, multi directional skating, power)

2.Transition/Linking Footwork and Movement-which is the variety, difficulty and purposeful use of intricate footwork, positions, movements and holds that link all elements.

3. Performance/Execution- the physical and emotional involvement of the skater/couple as they deliver the intent of the music and composition (e.g. carriage, style, personality, variety, contrasts, projection).

4. Choreography/Composition- an intentionally developed and/or original arrangement of all types of movements according to the principles of musical phrase, space, pattern, and structure (e.g. idea, concept, unity, pattern, phrasing, originality, design)

5. Interpretation- is the personal, creative, and genuine translation of the rhythm, character and content of music to movement on ice.

To read, in detail, about what each component entails, here is an official memo from the USFSA which breaks each down.

During competition, each judge assigns a skater a score between 0.00 (you would basically have to not skate to get a zero)-10 (as the highest) in intervals of .25 points (so you can get a 5.25 as a score, but not a 6.15 or something).

There are nine judges on a panel, but the two outlying scores for each component are tossed (the highest score and the lowest score). The average of the scores is then factored through the same equation as the technical scores, so that, in theory, the presentation side of the program is of equal weight and importance to the score as the technical side (jumps, spins, etc.)

The technical scores are not capped, but the highest score a male competitor can get is 100 for his PCS (free program, 50 for the short) and the Ladies are capped at 80 (free program and 40 for the short). This is due to a difference in how the male scores are factored vs. the ladies, I believe. 

The program component scores are much more open to judges interpretation than the technical elements and they can really help or hurt your score.  

For instance, lets take a look at Yuuri’s score card. This is the example scorecard they use to explain judging in Episode 4…but I’m not sure what competition this is from cuz they gave him -2 GOEs on the triple axel but I’m pretty sure it’s from a short program. 

Note: You can see a clean version of the score card here, on @yoimeta‘s blog. It’s a really cool blog a) because i’m mentioned (kidding) but b) there’s just a lot of fun thinking and great posts. You also get to listen to the soundtrack while you scroll! So check it out and show some love!

But regardless, he is a PCS GOD. Back off JJ, Yuuri is the King of the PSC and he’s not sorry. Look at these scores! Nothing below an 8.00 across the board, and he hasn’t even hit his stride int he show yet. He even gets a 9.75 for interpretation (which would probably get thrown out as an outlier) but that’s crazy. His total PCS for this program, which was not great, is less than eight points away from perfection. 

Victor isn’t even kidding when he suggests they downgrade some of the quads in Yuuri’s program and count on the PCS early in the season…because our precious Katsudon would just fry the competition anyway if he skated clean. (Yes, that was a food pun. I am not ashamed). 

TAKEAWAY FOR OUR BELOVED FIC AUTHORS: As far as I know, no one has maxed out the PCS score yet, but they have gotten close. (I’ve been looking into it, but my internet is being SO. SLOW. RIGHT NOW but the ISU records on the website don’t show the score breakdown, just the total. So, if you have info, you may politely drop it by the ask and I will updated this, if it is wrong, or until such time as my internet decides to move at a normal pace). So, if you wanted Yuuri to achieve a non-jump related thing…or oust Victor in an unconventional manner, he could literally skate clean and max out this bad boy AND make some history. 

As an extra note, Yuuri’s PCS score for Eros in Cup of China was 47.93.

47.93

2.07 points shy of perfect.  I wish they’d shown us the score breakdown for Rostelecom because damn.  God doesn’t quite cover it.

If he brushes up on his technical scores that boy is going to win all the gold.

does anyone have a reference sheet for who can do which quads in YOI?

There’s an official list out there on twitter about who has landed what jumps, but for the life of me I can’t find it.  IIRC:

Quad Axel: No one

Quad Lutz: Victor, Christophe

Quad Flip: Victor, Yuuri

Quad Loop: Victor (exhibition only), JJ, Emil, Seung-gil

Quad Salchow: Most everyone (Notable exceptions: Phichit, Leo, Guang hong, Minami)

Quad Toe Loop: Almost everyone (Notable exception: Leo, and maybe Minami if he didn’t land it in episode 5)

why is everyone en masse deciding to vent their hatred for bi women at once like I’ve unfollowed 5 people this week who I thought didn’t have backwards dehumanizing views of them but turns out uh they did? and I feel really rattled by that and ashamed. 

in the past 7 days I have seen all of the following from fairly respected leftist bloggers (+ one anon) coming out of the woodwork: 

^ all of these I’ve seen/heard from people showing their true colors in the last week. what is going on with y’all? 

this is what happens when you get so carried away with separatism and nursing your own wounds in unhealthy unproductive ways in an irrational echo chamber, that you start treating other women (who, while they have some different experiences, share a MULTITUDE of both positive experiences and experiences of oppression with you) like lower than human. 

some of this came from bloggers who regularly advocate for abuse survivors and against violence against women too, so like wow isn’t that fresh and hypocritical seeing as half of the items on that list are abuse apologism and/or harsh disrespect to bi survivors. 

bi friends have confessed to me that calling themselves bisexual makes them feel sick, and that they wish they were lesbians because they feel politically lacking - bi women I know including ones in relationships have other women have confessed unhealthy levels of self scrutiny and self hatred and the desire to give up and isolate themselves from LGBT spaces because of this type of rhetoric - we are letting bi women down while simultaneously telling them we need their ongoing solidarity. if you support any of this crap or consider it a good “way to center lesbians” or “protecting our own” (as if any of this does anything to help lesbians who are struggling, in danger, or vulnerable - it just wastes time and embitters you, wake up) feel free to leave I don’t want to interact with your toxic bullshit, it’s not helping me as your “lesbian sister” lmao u aren’t mine. 

Tom Holland on Lip Sync Battle

Did not expect that

He really Did That

*parts a bead curtain as i enter the room, carrying a glass of lemonade* 

hey….

nothing you ever read, watch, or participate in will be ideologically pure and without its problems. your quest to consume the most unproblematic material will be, in the end, fruitless. your enjoyment of anything will be sapped away, leaving you a husk starved for media.

 it is okay to enjoy things that have problems to them, so long as you do it critically and with an open mind, and take care to consider others.

*leaves the way i came*

This is possibly the healthiest post I’ve seen on this site

Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.

So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.

Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.

THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING

vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core

humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast

vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast

humans: hahaha yeah

humans: it did tho

vsa: IT EXPLODED

humans: it exploded twice as fast

I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.

Yeah, I love this.

Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.

Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.

All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.

klingons: okay we don’t get it

vulcan science academy: get what

klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way

klingons: why do you let them run your federation

vulcan science academy: look

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip. 

vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how. 

vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want. 

klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation

Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.

you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.

you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus, testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do? do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey, while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.

“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.

“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.

there must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten it.”

Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.

Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”

“That was ONE TIME.” 

There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity. 

And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”

There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”

reblog for new meta.  RE that last line: McGuyver. 

“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.

during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words. 

“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”

“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”

there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’. 

this is amazing

This is so perfect and just makes so much sense.

I lied.

The transformers fandom strikes again

The fun thing is that it’s the first of April for me.

@fulcrumisthebomb