silaaicha

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"i fear that it is true about myself that i am not easy or good to be around."

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Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.

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No hate because I love The Bear but in real life if my favorite local sub shop turned into a place where you pay $56 for three tortellini and a sea scallop I would be inconsolable.

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tumblr removed my header which was literally just this image

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since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for "mage"

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The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

[silaaicha]

To me Kermit the Frog is like one of those characters who’s every letter of the LGBTQ+ acronym at once based on who’s looking at him. Kermit is transmasc? Sure. Kermit is a lesbian? Okay. Kermit is a gay man? Why not. Kermit is transfem? I should’ve known.

[silaaicha]

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

[silaaicha]

really love dynamics that are like 'it honestly doesn't matter if you view them as romantic or platonic, the point is that they love each other. the type of love is inconsequential, all that matters is that it's there'. gotta be one of my favorite genders.

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I noticed an interesting parallel in "The Wizard the Witch and the Wild One" from @worldsbeyondpod, and decided to make a little fan animation of it.

MILD SPOILERS for Episode 11!

This is kind of a style test and practice run for the full scene I'd like to animate soon.

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Ever since the beginning of popular literacy there always has been and there presumably always will be anxiety about people reading the “wrong” things in the “wrong” way (in the “wrong” physical formats at the “wrong” times in the “wrong” places...), and this anxiety historically concerns itself most with women (they're uncritically reading Gothic and sentimental novels and it’s going to destroy their ability to perceive reality!! they’re reading by candlelight in bed and it’s going to get them sexually excited!!!) and the newly literate lower classes (they're reading penny dreadfuls and trashy romances and magazines and other trite immoral drek printed on flimsy paper of terrible quality and it's turning their heads away from their work!!!).

What interests me about this phenomenon in a fandom context is that it makes perfect sense for fannish behaviour to be derided in similar ways—given that fans (at least since the inception of modern fandom culture and fanfiction with Star Trek, and arguably earlier with the Janeites) are widely stereotyped as inadequately analytically and rhetorically sophisticated and unable to read in the “right” ways, and also inappropriately feminine, inadequately “grown up,” and inadequate to the tasks of everyday (masculine) life because of their emotional attachment to and identification with a fictional text (i.e. “nerd who still lives in his parents’ basement and can’t get girls”).

This is why the history of Jane Austen studies is in effect a recovery mission of Austen’s legacy on the part of the professional literati from the “Janeite” fans—mostly men but widely referred to with explicitly feminising language. And this masculinising mission impacts the dominant readings of Austen’s works to this day. And of course “Austen fandom” nowadays is broadly composed of women and broadly written about in feminine terms, so Austen studies (of a particular conservative strand) have to shore up their right to produce and safeguard “correct” readings against the rabble who just want to take a vacation to the place where Colin Firth jumped into the lake (read: who are illicitly getting sexually titillated by what should be high literature—so an "inappropriate" sexual response to fiction is again connected to "bad" reading practices, femininity, and immaturity).

And while early Star Trek convention fandom was primarily male, these men were stereotyped as immature, emasculated, overly obsessed with fantasy and incapable of distinguishing it from real life. And the fanfiction and zine cultures that arose around Star Trek were primarily female in composition. The Kirk/Spock zine scene, in particular, was overwhelmingly female, and again consisted of women being "inappropriately" sexually titillated by the fiction which they watched and the fanart they produced, distributed and consumed (as opposed to being "appropriately" sexually aroused by appropriate sex "in real life," which for a woman of course consists of erotic submission to a man... I wonder who benefits from this idea).

So there was anxiety surrounding how these fans were “reading” and interpreting the Star Trek, anxiety surrounding how and what they were writing, and anxiety surrounding how fans were reading what other fans produced. “Bad” reading practices produce “bad” writing which produces “bad” reading practices. There's a direct line from this kind of attitude to the derision that fandom-based erotic, reading, and writing behaviours come in for today (people who create and consume fan art are "freaks," "immature," not "adults," not "normal," not "well-adjusted," not having sex in "real life" which btw is bad).

I don’t necessarily want to lose the ability to criticise anyone’s interpretation of anything or to call any show or book or writing “bad,” to be clear. But it seems to me that a lot of animus against “bad” reading practices, insofar as it is centred around misunderstandings of what fandom reading practices actually are, owes a lot of its vigour to this ideological genealogy.

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Text on page 3 and 4 from The Children's Adventure Ep. 1 on the Worlds Beyond Number podcast

Short lil comic about re-listening to wwwo stuff when I have to go to bed early because it's too hot upstairs.

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what a joy to hear brennan describe the watery deaths of a bunch of shitty soldiers and wizards

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VI - the lovers

(attempting to figure out digital watercolors!)

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These character playlists are so perfect but this is my favorite song and liner note out of all of them! Ame and Suvi singing this song in the shrine is such an incredible visual!

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this is how that scene went right