sparklypepper

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attention this is your captain speaking chag sameach pesach to all celebrating and a reminder do not open the airlock to greet elijah the vulcan rabbinic council ruled that opening the door to the room where the seder is occurring is sufficient elijah can get on a starship just fine himself he just likes to be personally invited in to your seder we dont need another incident like last year thank you

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trying to explain to tumblr that the Middle Class in not their enemy

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corollary: buildings must be constructed with elephants in mind, notably including doors/hallways

a support group for people with “unconventional” daemons. jeff with his flounder he has to carry everywhere in a huge tank. lois with her poison dart frog everyone is afraid to touch. sam with their elephant that’s the reason they can never go higher than two stories in most buildings.

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What's a video game?

Watch the new episode now on Dropout

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also no twinkling! Not enough atmosphere for that. (and infrared astronomy would be much more feasible than on Earth, where we've got all that pesky water vapor above our heads)

The night sky on Mars

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May I ask for some pacific wrens?

One of my favorite little friends! I saw my first PW in Whistler, BC, Canada!

Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus), family Troglodytidae, order Passeriformes, found in southern Coastal Alaska, western Canada, and the far western U.S.

photograph by Erik Gauger

Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus), HE SCREMMM!!!, family Troglodytidae, order Passeriformes, BC, Canada

photograph by Jerry McFetridge

Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus), EAT THE TASTY BUGS, family Troglodytidae, order Passeriformes, Aleutian Islands, Alaska

photograph by Marco Valentini

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didn't call V:TM that; there's one of it and way way more lil games that I'm sure you're very aware of! but my apologies for not also acknowledging the specific game you'd mentioned.

Maybe someday, if you like, take a moment to consider exactly how pro-queer of a take it is to equate acknowledging the widespread accomplishments and impact of queer people to shilling for the company that made some of the initial building blocks for their work. I promise I'm pretty thoroughly disgusted with WotC too, between D&D and Magic, and you'll never catch me actually shilling.

People have objected to the comparison between D&D fans and gaylors in terms of imagined gayness but like. I'm sorry babes, but the gayness of D&D literally is imagined.

D&D has queer representation in its art and fiction, this is true. Does that representation actually matter for the sake of the themes of the game and its gameplay, as presented in the game? No. You can decide that your elf is gay, and hey, who wouldn't, but the game will just stare at you blankly and not do anything with that information. It's literally fluff in the same sense that your character having blue eyes or being left-handed is. As written the game has nowhere to go with from that information.

But even more so, the thing that inspired that post was people insisting that D&D's gameplay and fiction does somehow interface with queer experiences and is, actually, meaningfully about the experiences of a queer found family and sorry I'm not going to mince words here but that part you straight up did hallucinate.

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I don't disagree with pretty much any of that except the conclusion that it conflicts with what I said!

I know full well that WotC sucks in many ways! I'm not claiming that D&D is the perfect game or community, or that people must support it and buy things because of the queerness of what's been built around it. It's totally great to go elsewhere. Nothing I said is about giving credit to WotC (???).

And yet, because of people in the world (not WotC, often despite WotC) everything I described also exists. The world is complicated and messy and, as with zillions of things before it in queer history and history in general, a thing is associated with both a bunch of positive things for a group of people, and a capitalist entity that's sometimes crappy to those people. A thing is more than the company that owns and makes its """official""" building blocks, a thing is not entirely controlled by that company.

So truly, make all the decisions you want about what to play and what to support, it's great. I love lil things made by lil creators too. And judge the company and its actions too! None of that requires making purity tests that, in the process, also deny the way the world's experience and perception of the game has been indelibly changed by the creations, experiences, and vast amount of hard work of tons of queer folks. (And pretty dang anti-capitalist folks, to boot.) That's made that broader existence of the game queer in a way that, yes, many things in the world are, and this is one of them.

People have objected to the comparison between D&D fans and gaylors in terms of imagined gayness but like. I'm sorry babes, but the gayness of D&D literally is imagined.

D&D has queer representation in its art and fiction, this is true. Does that representation actually matter for the sake of the themes of the game and its gameplay, as presented in the game? No. You can decide that your elf is gay, and hey, who wouldn't, but the game will just stare at you blankly and not do anything with that information. It's literally fluff in the same sense that your character having blue eyes or being left-handed is. As written the game has nowhere to go with from that information.

But even more so, the thing that inspired that post was people insisting that D&D's gameplay and fiction does somehow interface with queer experiences and is, actually, meaningfully about the experiences of a queer found family and sorry I'm not going to mince words here but that part you straight up did hallucinate.

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The rate of presence of queer people, queer themes, and aspects of queer cultures in public/publicized D&D material is dramatically higher than in typical media (or the population), to the point that it's difficult to avoid - think of the most prominent actual plays, or conventions. My impression is that as much as I'm sure we all love a butch working on her car, that's not true in car maintenance, so no, that's not at all the same logic.

If you don't want to think of this as it being queer, don't! It's a label, and as with everything queer, labels are descriptive not prescriptive, the beginning of a conversation not the end of one, and the important thing is to understand the meaning rather than police the language. But the things I used the label for are real, and it's not an uncommon way to use language.

For example, people talk about basketball being a Black sport. That's not prescriptive (the rules aren't about race), and it's not historic (the sport was invented by a white guy, segregation was common, and the NBA didn't have a Black player until its fifth season) but descriptive. For a variety of reasons, including resistance specifically to that segregation, and lower barrier to entry combined with racialized redlining and economic inequality, it became a popular sport in Black communities, and it remains so to this day. NBA players are majority Black. Especially in the US, Black culture is an integral part of basketball culture.

As with everything to do with race, that's a complicated relationship, but it very much exists, and people do sometimes talk about it in direct language. Often there's tiptoeing, but when it comes down to it, not acknowledging it isn't actually sticking it to the man (whether the man is WotC or the NBA); it's more a disservice to the marginalized than anyone else.

People have objected to the comparison between D&D fans and gaylors in terms of imagined gayness but like. I'm sorry babes, but the gayness of D&D literally is imagined.

D&D has queer representation in its art and fiction, this is true. Does that representation actually matter for the sake of the themes of the game and its gameplay, as presented in the game? No. You can decide that your elf is gay, and hey, who wouldn't, but the game will just stare at you blankly and not do anything with that information. It's literally fluff in the same sense that your character having blue eyes or being left-handed is. As written the game has nowhere to go with from that information.

But even more so, the thing that inspired that post was people insisting that D&D's gameplay and fiction does somehow interface with queer experiences and is, actually, meaningfully about the experiences of a queer found family and sorry I'm not going to mince words here but that part you straight up did hallucinate.

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The Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River superimposed on a map of Europe

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this is all true... some of the time!

a choice of how to make oneself look doesn't become fundamentally evil just because that choice is often associated with bad things. it is okay if people like to make their face look a different way. we don't get to tell people "all the versions I do and approve of are pure and good to want, but the version you do is always bad to want." that's, frankly, almost as patronizing as beauty companies telling us we need to cover our faces.

and hi I'm transfemme and I have had the experience of not paying any attention to makeup for a good chunk of my life, then having thoughts about how I wanted my face to look - mostly not about dysphoria, just aesthetic! started relatively late in transition - and I promise you they came from me, not from makeup companies. I have done way too much introspection and therapy to have anyone tell me that my own wants are actually just due to being tricked by marketing.

I've never worn makeup constantly, I've never gone beyond light to medium coverage, I barely wear makeup these days, and I'm fine with my no-makeup appearance. but when I really want a confidence boost in public, when I want to feel like I'm wearing battle armor, makeup is an option for me, including a bit of foundation and friends.

if you really mean it when you say "should be a thing you wear because you want to be creative" then you have to actually let people decide what they want to create. obviously non-mainstream creations are great! but they are not the only """acceptable""" choice. black lipstick does not have fundamental moral superiority over skin-matched foundation.

by all means, talk about the numerous harms of the beauty industry - and luckily it's possible to do that directly, without generalizing to entire categories like all foundation/face makeup.

face makeup is evil. i don’t care. like eyeshadow can be a fun and creative thing and it’s not like anybody is going to think you genuinely have purple eyelids but face makeup that’s made to look “natural” just ends up making you think your normal skin is something to be covered up and distorts your perception of your face. the whole “it makes ppl more confident!” thing is a lie because it’s not that the makeup itself is making you feel confident it’s that it creates an association with confidence and the results of that is you end up hating your face which is the opposite of building your self-confidence.

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the classic game of fuck/marry/kill/be/be killed by/please check all options that apply

CHARLIZE THERON as ANDROMACHE THE SCYTHIAN in THE OLD GUARD (2020)

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2007 eBird gem

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true - though also if you'd seen the houses around here, you might start imagining a property tax that's really just a wealth tax

"Uhhhhhhhhh dont romanticize china" nobody is, stupid. People are learning that Chinese citizens are regular people like themselves. They have big problems with their government too, just like us. They do not, however, appear to struggle as much as Americans do just to survive. A bunch of them have expressed shock and horror at how easy it is to become homeless in America and how hard it is to get back out of homelessness. Literally that one thing alone would make China a safer place for many Americans to live. That and the cheap health care, cheap housing, and lack of property taxes. Literally the country our own government paints as a suffering hellhole is still easier to be poor in than this one.

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Ominous apple cider vinegar? @ominous-signs

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thanks for taking the time!

I am not religious, but have learned a lot from how you talk about Judaism, not just the specifics, but also a broader sense of what religion is and can be - thank you for that! Sometimes I end up talking to folks who (frankly, like me a couple decades ago) have formed notions of religion primarily based on Christianity in the US, leading to some general hostility. Do you have any advice or resources that'd help me help folks separate those feelings from their overall perception of religion?

Try asking them what about religion really sticks in their craw and then like... you can maybe point out that at least some of what they're talking about is not universal to All Religion but it's really just Xianity?