ivyblossom

[ivyblossom]

Imagine thinking two teen boys crushing on each other and kissing each other is porn. Like, have you met porn? The sexualization of anything related to queer people including their basic existence continues apace, I see.

Yes we need more chaste twee baby gay romances like heartstopper and yes we also need more shows where men fuck raw to express their love for one another like Élite and yes we need more toxic gays having hate sex like Interview with the Vampire and yes we need more incidental gay characters like the dads in cartoons like Owl House.

It's not a competition! It's a hoard and I'm like a gay little Smaug.

[ivyblossom]

But it makes sure the bears know you're coming. You don't want to surprise a bear.

Be aware of bears.

I know, I know, gatekeeping the outdoors, that's supposedly bad, right, but I think if you show up to do a hike and you brought a portable speaker with you to play music while you hike, I think, like hear me out, there should be a gate, and someone at the gate should keep you from doing the hike.

[ivyblossom]

I'd say there are no words, but there are these words (do not click through if reading the evidence of what a rape culture looks like threatens your mental health, which, you know, it should, but damn if many of us aren't already used to it):

Dominique Davies: The fact that Gisèle was "completely submissive and reduced to a sexual object contributed to his excitement."

Joan Kawai: The 27-year-old soldier missed the birth of his daughter the night he was in the Pelicot home.

Philippe Leleu: While on trial he told the court, "I didn't know that a finger was rape."

Boris Moulin: He told the court he thought Gisèle Pelicot was drunk.

Fabien Sotton: He didn't go to the Pelicot residence intending to rape Gisèle. He told the court he had no interest in an unconscious woman because he liked to hear them scream.

Andy Rodriguez: He told the court he came into online contact with Dominique Pelicot on New Year's Eve because he had "nothing else to do" after his brothers didn't invite him to a party.

Adrien Longeron: In court, the 34-year-old said, "As long as the husband was present, there was no rape."

Ahmed Tbarik: He told the court, "I'm not a rapist, but if I had wanted to rape I wouldn't have chosen a 57-year-old woman, I would have chosen a pretty one."

Cyprien Culieras: the forklift driver said he visited the Pelicot home to regain self-confidence after intestinal surgery. 

+42 others.

This is what happens when your worldview allows you to convince yourself that women are objects rather than people. This is our culture.

[ivyblossom]

I got my first walkman in 1984. My first tape was Wham!, I think. I got the yellow walkman in 1988 and used it though most of the 90s. I pretty much went straight from tapes to mp3s, I never replaced my walkman with a discman, they seemed so fragile and pointless to me. Walkman to ipod, straight shot.

If we wanted to watch a movie on our tv in the 80s, we would go to the video rental shore, rent a VCR and a movie, and bring it home for 24 hours. Sometimes my sister and I would shove a tape player/recorder up against the speaker of the TV to record the audio so we could hear it later.

We made mixtapes by listening to the radio with our tape primed at the right spot and our fingers hovering over the record button when the song we wanted in the mix came on.

My family got it's first and only shared computer in 1990. It was not networked. If you wanted to put something on it, you had to stick a disk in it. It could use both kinds of floppy disk (actually floppy and not-floppy floppy disk).

I was one of 2 people on my residence floor at university who had a desktop computer in 1993. My roommate had a word processor with a screen you could see 3 lines at a time on, and she wrote her papers on that. She wrote all her papers in the middle of the night, so I have no idea how that thing worked.

I had a dot matrix printer.

The only way for me to access the internet was to go to the computer lab in the building next door, which closed at about 10pm, but they would let me stay after that, I just couldn't leave and come back in again. It was amber or green characters on a black screen. Often, you couldn't see what you were typing until you hit enter. If you hit backspace, it showed up as ^H. If a person didn't know that you can't backspace, they'd contribute stuff like this:

Hi guise^H^H^H^Huys!

I got my first email address in 1993. Most people did not have email addresses at the time, so you'd assume people didn't unless they told you otherwise. I couldn't check my email over the summer in 1993-97, because we didn't have dial up at home.

The internet was basically lists and directories at the time, mostly Gopher lists and directories, which take you to other directories. There was a directory of songs with their guitar chords, I remember that. Just...tons of tons of different static directories of "pages" with information on them. And there were message boards, the alt boards that were at one point absorbed into Dejanews. There were lots of threaded conversations going on, thousands of message boards. I was on one called alt.shoe.lesbian. It had been created by some guy for porn or kink purposes, but then a bunch of 30something lesbians found it and made it a friendly spot to post about general life stuff.

There were lots of ways to talk to strangers live, too: there was IRC, which is like discord, telnet-based communities (MUD/MUCK/MOO/MUSH), which are not. I made a lot of friends on MOOs. (Julian Dibbell wrote a piece on sexual assault in a virtual world about an incident on lambdaMOO). Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a very good depiction of what the internet felt like at that time, projected forward.

I didn't see a graphical web browser until 1995. It was Netscape, and the first time I tried to use it, nothing loaded. It was still very exciting.

I got my first laptop in grad school in 1997. It was able to connect to the internet from my laptop via dial up for the first time in 1998. I would get my readings from JSTOR and print them out and pretend I got them from the library. It felt like cheating.

In 1999 I was in graduate school again and got DSL cable internet for the first time, but no wifi. I had a 30 ft ethernet cable and a laptop. It took only 3-5 minutes to download a song off Napster! And then Limewire. This was when I first discovered online fanfiction. It really should have happened sooner, I went down the wrong gopher holes, clearly. Got my first blog in 1999 (blogger). Got my first fannish blog in 2000 (livejournal).

In 1999-2000, I would plug earphones into my laptop while taking the bus home, and stick my thumb in it so it wouldn't close all the way and stop playing. World's biggest MP3 player. Still better than a discman. I was very ready for the ipod when it appeared in 2001, RIP the clickwheel.

When the planes struck the world trade center towers in September, 2001, the media said the internet failed because websites and cell reception all went down and people in the thick of it in Manhattan couldn't communicate out. That wasn't totally true. Telnet was fine. I was in touch with several people at ground zero via telnet and called their families for them to let them know that they were okay.

I finally got my first cell phone in 2003. I was in yet another grad school.

I got my first wifi router in 2005 when I got my first real job. I also replaced my crappy phone with a pink razr.

I got my first iphone in 2007. That was just a couple of years ago, wasn't it?

Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes you pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭

[ivyblossom]

I'm writing a story. Gosh, I love writing. I just love it. I feel like I'm living two lives while I'm writing. It's magical.

[ivyblossom]

Yeah. 10-year-old bullied-kid Edmund found someone in a position of power who offered him comfort, safety, a sense of self-worth, some marginal validation, and some candy, and that little bastard failed to resist, so of course he's very evil, a traitor who must be secondary and self-effacing for life because his bad choice killed god.

Aslan is such a dick.

what does turkish delight taste like and is it worth the events that occurred in chronicle of narnia: the lion the witch and the wardrobe

[ivyblossom]

You really do look great in that frog costume.

you look great in that frog costume

[ivyblossom]

much better footage of the haka that shut down parliament today

[ivyblossom]

How did you get the previously mentioned crow army? Any tips on how to get one myself?

Please

It’s easy to befriend crows, they’re very smart. The hardest part is regularly being in close proximity to crows to get started. But if you see a place where you can get to know them, go there and give them crow-friendly snacks when they’re near enough to you. My go-tos are unsalted shelled peanuts (they still have to work to get the peanuts out) and sometimes chopped up boiled eggs. Peanuts are easier to throw. Do this regularly for a week or so and you’ll have some crow friends. They don’t really care about timing as long as it’s during the day. Crows usually sleep in a big group in some central location and probably won’t be around at night.

Crows are very wary. They will jump or fly away when you throw things towards them, but they will get the idea very fast.

My crow friends are very polite. They know what building I live in, and they probably know which unit, but they never bother me at home. They wait for me to come out the front door and out into the open to see them. They may have assigned someone to keep watch for me, because they definitely announce a sighting.

They do not shout at me, though once some of their cousins tried that and I did not reward the behaviour. No one’s done it again.

The lesson they learned about interacting with me is that getting into my eye line is the way, so they often get right in front of me, wings spread open for maximum visibility. When I’m on my scooter going 35 kph that sometimes means flying beside me, inches over my helmet or right in front of me.

I always talk to them. I’m hoping the gift I get from them is a response, so I try to say the same things to them. But often I just talk to them like people (because, hey, they are people! Non-human people, but still people.). They will fly and perch along fences in front of me over and over again when I’m walking somewhere, and will keep that up as long as there’s fence.

It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. They know what clothes are. They know what a helmet is and they know my scooter is a vehicle. They recognize faces.

Good luck! Tell your new crow friends I say hi!

[ivyblossom]

My murder is ridiculous at this point. There are about 50 of them, and they fly along behind me en masse when I get on my scooter and jet off down the road. There might be 10-12 crows around me at any given time if I go outside. They perch around me just to say hi (in case there are any snacks in the offing). It's pretty witchy, I may have let it go too far. I definitely have big main character energy when I have a couple dozen crows flying behind me everywhere I go.

I love them.

i’m obsessed with this

and then, two months later....

🥺

[ivyblossom]

So I had this dream last night (that's always a great opening, isn't it?) where we lived on this distant planet where there was a terrible climactic event and our industrialized settlement was almost entirely wiped out by sudden and extreme cold (like The Day After Tomorrow), but the cold never lifted, that was just the new climate now, and the survivors were left to navigate through tunnels to get from one industrial complex to another, not knowing whether there were more survivors in there or whether they're just floating frozen bodies.

Now that I think of it, those bodies were definitely floating, so obviously there was a gravity issue. Yeah, we were all floating. Okay, so I guess what happened is that the planet lost its sun and its orbit, maybe it became a rogue planet or something unexpectedly, I dunno, but it was dark and cold and there was no gravity, and we were scratching out whatever existence we could, it was very grim.

But the grimmest part was that the hot hobby among the teens was spelunking through these elevator shafts and industrial towers looking for human bodies and collecting specific body parts. Gotta catch'em all, I guess.

I ran into one kid whose thing was collecting femurs. He was floating there in mid-elevator shaft, sawing through a frozen human body in order to collect his signature piece of it.

The body wasn't wearing a suit like the rest of us were, to protect us from the cold and the lack of atmosphere, it was in a jumper like Marsha on The Brady Bunch, she had no coat on, even. They had clearly been caught completely by surprise, no warning whatsoever. Her eyes were open and there was this look of shock frozen on her face. She was solid like an object, and I guess the victims of that calamity became objects to everyone else, and the terror and horror of what they went through and represent became just, I dunno, no big deal, just how it is. This kid a whole stack of femurs in his collection, still frozen with skin and muscle on them, and his mom was like, okay, Henry, just keep it organized, don't make a mess. It was so normal and not anything to worry about, I guess. And he grinned like his teeth were sharp.

No more chip and dip before bedtime for me.

[ivyblossom]

No more twitter. I won't be a part of that. I love you guys.

[ivyblossom]

PSA for fanfic writers

[ivyblossom]

Upon meeting a queer couple, straight people often ask uncomfortable, bizarre questions. They want to know which of them is the "man", and which is the "woman". Who's the top? Who's the bottom? Who's the giver, and who's the receiver, etc. They ask these nonsensical, ignorant questions and bypass the only relevant line of inquiry there is, the only one with an answer that's meaningful in any way.

Don't ask queer couples who the "man" in a relationship is. Ask who's the Bert. Who's the Ernie?

[ivyblossom]

I just want to stay home and sleep today, but I am still labouring under the false belief that that would be unprofessional, so here I am.

[ivyblossom]

me.

[ivyblossom]

Mad this. It literally says he got jailed for ignoring a court order telling him to stay away from the school - yet the headline says it's for not calling a kid they. He broke the court order cos he was being a self righteous stalkery Christian weirdo. I know the sort, they did the same to us at school cos we were scruffy poor unfortunates / desperate people that apparently needed god to save us. Loads of Christians are like this, proper weirdos.