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The Wizard House

@vaspider / vaspider.tumblr.com

I PUBLISH ALL ASKS. Please block "harassment tag" to avoid the terrible shit people sometimes send me. Send all NerdyKeppie questions to help @ nerdykeppie.com He/They. Jewish middle-aged non-binary butch lesbian. Find my writing in Scion 2e, Changeling: The Lost, Vampire: The Requiem, & others. NerdyKeppie.com - Quality Queerwear Become a Patron, get queer writing for $1 wish list
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Intro Post, updated February 21, 2024

I post all asks under the name they were submitted under, and I answer at my whim and not upon demand. I will never honor a request to answer an ask privately or anonymously. Anon is never turned on. These are hard self-care boundaries. Please block the tag "harassment tag" if you don't want to be subjected to some of the horrible shit I get sent sometimes.

If you like what I do, please consider hiring me, buying something from my company, NerdyKeppie, buying me a coffee, becoming a Patron or tossing some money in my PayPal tip jar. I am a disabled, queer, Jewish non-binary butch, and those sources plus freelance writing are my entire income.

If asking me to boost a post for you, ask at most once per week, and please don't make that the only way you interact with me, or follow me just to send an ask that I boost your posts. I notice, and I'll end up just blocking you if you make me feel used.

I will not debate my identity with anyone. I am a transmasculine non-binary butch lesbian, a cripple, a dyke, and lots of other things, too. You don't get a vote in that, and if any of those words are words you can't stand to have someone use around you in reference to himself, go ahead and block me. I won't censor my identity for your comfort; it took a lot of hard work over many years to become proud of who I am.

No, I am not an anti or an anti-anti. Leave me alone.

Do the work to root out TERF/2nd-wave "man bad woman good" philosophies from your head. Do the work to root out the gendered behavior you were taught. I am not here to raise other people's children.

ACAB includes gender/sexuality cops. You aren't the mayor of Dyketown, fuck off.

I do not consent to responsibility for other people's children. My daughter is an adult. I raised my kid. I'm not raising you or any other kids. By continuing to interact with me, you acknowledge that you chose to do that.

No, I won't DM you.

Curate your own online experiences. If you don't like seeing what I write, then add 'vaspider' to your "filtered content" list and don't bother me about it. Tumblr is a 17+ environment and I am not responsible for you seeing things you don't like. Adults having adult conversations do not need to be filtered for children. This is your notification.

I’ve been Out for over 30 years. I don't tolerate lectures from strangers, especially people half my age, about history I lived through.

Anyone who tries to turn you on your fellow trans people is a fucking Fed.

No, I won't answer your question about Israel.

The only "feminine" term I accept is Mom, which is a job title to me. Some people call me Mama Spider, and that's fine by me.

My icon has lore, apparently.

I post all asks and anon is never turned on.

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First base is violence second base is convoluted codependence third base is applying pressure to the vulnerable parts of their body to keep their entrails from spilling out

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reblogged

Recently read the article(?) on Claude Cahun, a personal hero of mine + of course a part of jérriais/jersey queer history (celebrated island-wide as a part of our history and culture). Thank you to all involved who handled their identity with respect and connected it to the modern nonbinary community, especially as many nonbinary people on island admire them and I know some who have even named themselves in honour 😊!

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Thank you so much! (For those interested, here is the article in question: https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2019/8/31/claude-cahun-part-i ) I am happy you felt that this article handled the nonbinary part well! I know that was a goal when writing it, and I am so glad it came through. Also, I am delighted to hear that some people are naming themselves after Claude on the island! What a fantastic way to honour them!

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every person can feel freddie’s presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH I’VE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs i’m not joking

it’s fucking crazy to think about the amount of people who have sung bohemian rhapsody? like it’s such a unifying song, by nature of the fact that so many people know it. it holds so many good memories for me and other people. it’s a song you scream in the car with your friends while you drive around your boring hometown, it’s a song you drunkenly sing with your arm around your best friend, or a song you sing along to with strangers when it’s on in public. it’s bittersweet to think about freddie’s legacy carrying on like that through his masterpiece. freddie carries on because he’s a part of so many people’s good memories and bohemian rhapsody is a huge part of that.

Reblog if you have sung bohemian rhapsody with your friends

every time i see this post i’m reminded of the video of 65,000 people singing bohemian rhapsody in near-perfect harmony

like, what other song can make that claim?

Some of the highlights of that video include:

  • The crowd cheering after the first stanza when they realize what they’re all doing
  • So many people audibly ‘doing the guitar parts’… like ya do
  • The sheer number of voices joining the rediculous falsetto (thanks, Roger)
  • How they all start jumping at the ramp-up “so you think you can stomp me”
  • Hands up, hundreds, thousands deep for the final “ooooo”s and the last line to close the song

Only days before my state went into lockdown, “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on in the restaurant kitchen I’d just been hired at and, no shit, every single worker in that little diner started singing along. Me (the only queer afaik), the manager, all the other kitchen workers, the dishwasher up front, the two people on the counter, all but two of the men over 30. Just belting out Freddie Mercury at the top of their lungs. And you can bet when “sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all” came around, we every single one of us ramped up the intensity and basically made sure Freddie could hear us in the afterlife.

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zohbugg
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solitarelee

One of the things that struck me, listening to the video, is that you cannot distinguish the original vocals from the crowd, and sometimes you can barely hear the music. And the POV is on the stage the speakers are playing the song from!

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

(And how albums left lying about in cars will eventually metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.)

Something else that’s rather incredible about this is, Bohemian Rhapsody is a very difficult song from a technical standpoint. Like–humor me, okay, go flip it on and try to sing the whole thing at the top of your voice without falling off-key, out of breath, or cracking at least once. Then come back.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

Do you know how insane that is?

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rosiefingers
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rimonoroni

this is actually a perfect addition. the hebrew in the tags there is a Jewish proverb/song, and it translates to “the whole world is a narrow bridge; the essential thing is not to fear at all.” the point is that, like. the whole world is scary, and that is exactly why you can’t live in fear of it. walk the bridge anyway.

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I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

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sol1056

from what I know of just the general history of building codes and osha rules, I would not be the least surprised if every single one of those healthcare codes exist not just to prevent someone from dying, but because pre-code, someone did.

osha rules, building codes, food production rules are all written in blood

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cumvvelt

"Guy" and "man" have different connotations with adjectival nouns. Like "tree guy" = arborist but "tree man" = he lives in a tree, or maybe he is a tree.