nogenderonlyvoid

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me: I'm exhausted, but I need to push through anyway

my brain: get some rest, if you don't have your health you don't have anything

me: ... you do realize that quote is from THE VILLIAN in the princess bride, right? Why should I take health advice from a man who tortures people as a hobby?

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My Queen of Pentacles for "Starcrossed: A Queer Tarot" by @novaandmali! It's a great tarot with so much amazing art, and there is one week left on the kickstarter! Please check it out 😊

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In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option. My thinking around this issue is enriched by the philosopher Brian Massumi’s concept of “esqueness.” He exemplifies it by discussing a kid who plays a tiger:

One look at a tiger, however fleeting and incomplete, whether it be in the zoo or in a book or in a film or video, and presto! the child is tigerized… The perception itself is a vital gesture. The child immediately sets about, not imitating the tiger’s substantial form as he saw it, but rather giving it life—giving it more life. The child plays the tiger in situations in which the child has never seen a tiger. More than that, it plays the tiger in situations no tiger has ever seen, in which no earthly tiger has ever set paw.

Just as the child and an actual tiger are not one bit alike, the words Mary has a huge smile on her face have nothing in common with the picture of Mary holding her diploma. Yet the tiger announces something to the world, its essence, and a kid can become tiger-ized and be tiger-esque, their every act shouting, I am a tiger. The picture of Mary at her graduation is shouting something, and the words Mary has a huge smile on her face are also shouting something. It is at the level beyond each actuality, in the swirl that each stirs up, that the two meet.

(from Against Access, by John Lee Clark - link in notes)

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TIL Humans domesticated dogs before they developed written language

via reddit.com

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Curse of one's life going to waste by dint of being unable to distinguish gifts from burdens

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absolutely kills me when people are like “oh, but without police, who will manage the traffic?” as if traffic management requires a license to kill

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Kneesvember Day 11

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The chemical name for vitamin C is “ascorbic acid”. I always used to wonder about this one. Is being ascorbic like being acerbic? Is it like being ascetic? Absorbent? Some combination of all of them?

Today I learned that scorbi is just a Latinish way of writing scurvy. So a-scorbi-c acid is “no-scurvy acid”.

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Tragic. Tumblr user made a good point but was unnecessarily condescending about it. Will not be reblogging

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tumblr entertain me

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Need y’all to know that in the 1970’s a letter to the editor was published in Daily Telegraph where the author offhandedly used the phrase “Tolkien-like gloom” to describe an area with barren trees and JRRT himself wrote back an incensed rebuttal at the use of his name in a context that suggested anything negative about trees.

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Someone on Facebook said that this was the Aikido version of “POCKET SAND!” and they’re absolutely right

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Erin is referred to as both a sorcerer and a wizard seemingly interchangeably, do these terms mean different things in aurora or are they just generic terms to refer to a user of elemental magic?

They're functionally interchangeable, but "wizard" is a little more derisive. "Mage" is the broadest technical term; anyone who can do magic is a mage. "Caster" and "Channeler" are synonymous with it. "Sorcerer" has connotations of pursuing the study of magic for its own sake, executing complex spells beyond the needs of day-to-day practicalities - one who bends reality to their will, not always positively - but "wizard" is more like "and also they're a nerd."

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This morning I had like the lesbian equivalent of that part from the Brian David Gilbert cooking video about getting called Boss haha

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Skyrim belongs to the skeevers