civilianlillian

[civilianlillian]

“All of the ace/aro rep in Borderlands 2 comes from Burch’s ask.fm and isn’t canon!”

Not quite.

Zer0’s aromanticism is straight-up in the game as of Moxxi’s Wedding Day Massacre. They are asked if they have any romantic entanglements, and their exact response is: “combat is my love / brutal violence, my partner / I need no one else.” The only debates that are ever brought to this are almost word-for-word the same arguments people make to dismiss aromanticism as a whole.

Maya is implied to be aromantic in official supplemental materials and even more strongly in Moxxi’s DLC (likely due to trauma, which is its own problem, but that’s for another post) and oblivious to being considered attractive in Son of Crawmerax, supporting the notion that she doesn’t see herself as a sexual entity at all–a common asexual experience. 

People have argued that she can’t be aro because she has been in a relationship, which is not only horribly misinformed, but ghastly when you consider that the relationship she mentioned was one she was coerced into by Brother Sophis, the man who raised her.

The usual argument against Maya’s asexuality is that there isn’t enough supporting canon, which may be fair if you isolate that part of her identity from its context, but we’re kind of past that point when there are multiple articles about her asexuality–including one by Mikey Neumann, the original lead writer of Borderlands 3. He stresses the importance of representation in media and commends Anthony Burch for his part in the fight for it:

“And the rub of it all, is the best representation I’ve seen of asexuality anywhere in the massive space that is consumable media, was in a game I wrote on, but didn’t even think to do!”

Is this enough to acknowledge us?

[civilianlillian]

We are in SILENT hill. Girl shut up

[civilianlillian]

Fascism thrives on ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Here are some ways you can combat it:

There is an ongoing literacy crisis. Teach kids how to read phonetically (other methods produce poor literacy) and introduce them to fun books, both fiction and educational non-fiction.

Teach kids about critical thinking and the scientific method.

You can also introduce kids to edutainment like Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, The Magic Schoolbus, Bill Nye The Science Guy, Beakman's World, etc.

Help kids develop media literacy skills by asking them literary analysis questions about the media they engage with. Even very young children can begin learning literary analysis if the questions are phrased in words they can understand.

Learn and help other people learn information literacy, ie, how to locate and evaluate information.

Learn the red flags of pseudoscience, and educate other people about them.

Educate people and share media on real science and real history, because fascist narratives are full of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. (Miniminuteman, Gutsick Gibbon and Bart D. Ehrman's YouTube channel are great, by the way!)

Make learning a joyful experience, and show people the beauty and wonder of what's real. Being a discouraging killjoy will spoil your efforts.

[civilianlillian]

whenever i see a post about someone wondering how an  asexual and a sexual can be in a healthy relationship there’s always someone being applauded for saying well asexuals can have sex too or just because someone’s asexual doesn’t mean they won’t have sex but i have never, not once, EVER seen someone say well hey, some sexuals don’t have sex. you can have a full relationship without sex. just throwing it out there

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(and don’t let them convince you otherwise !)

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yeah.

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censorship is a plague. the rest of the internet is not tiktok, stop censoring triggers and tags. i cannot blacklist suicide if you tag it on ao3 as “su!c!de”, i cannot avoid a show with bestiality if you mark it on a site where the entire point is to list potential triggers of a show, specifically doesthedogdie, as “b********y”. if i didn’t see additional comments, i would’ve never known they had an episode about bestiality unless i went in and watched the show and figured it out myself, which destroys the entire purpose of doesthedogdie.

you are not protecting people with triggers, you’re actively harming them by shoving a potential trigger in their face that they can’t avoid. you’re harming people with screenreaders, disabled people, and nonenglish speakers because you are uncomfortable typing out a word. pro tip: just don’t talk about it then. go away. we don’t need our hands held by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing OR doesn’t respect us enough to do it properly. have you people learned nothing from the tumblr porn ban.

[civilianlillian]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[civilianlillian]

[civilianlillian]

This is a really good thread.

[civilianlillian]

Yusei and the hair problems.

[civilianlillian]

Hunter Schafer had her passport gender marker changed back to M after years of having at as F, and she said the only document not changed was her birth certificate. Implies the agency responsible for passports is cross referencing with other documents and is not just denying new gender marker changes but will start forcibly reverting them to their original marker. God knows what else they have access to but I'm sure it's not pretty.

I need people to understand how serious it can get. And if you only start noticing now and ringing alarm bells, better late than never; but it's also a shame if it takes a white celebrity to sound off in order for people to take institutional transphobia and transmisogyny seriously. Even if this is a notable escalation, it displays a serious devaluing of the violence faced by any invisible transfem, seeing as we are typically the canary in the coal mine. Marginalized transfems of all stripes, nonwhite, disabled, poor, have been begging for people to pay attention and take stuff seriously and it's a disgrace that it's just been met with, at best, performative gestures. We need to keep us safe, and we need to do better to do that.

[civilianlillian]

NASA released the clearest pictures yet of our neighbours in the solar system

Oh and of course us

Honourable mention

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I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip

Using a random fic of mine as example..

The left example: ✅✅✅

The right example: ❌❌❌

Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!

If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…