#and not caring enough about real issues

[hussyknee]

TW: 200th rant about the stupid "HP fans are all complicit in antisemitism and transphobia" discourse, brought to you by my OCD-induced suicidality.

I've by now become so wary of trans people and enbies on social media, especially Jewish ones. I'm like "this person is GOING to be on their Harry Potter bullshit and trigger the hell out of my OCD" and my hackles go up automatically. Then my OCD goes "haha you hate them because they're Jewish and/or trans, you're an antisemitic transphobe so they're clearly right about people who defend HP! SUFFER bitch!" Cue hell loop until my brain is flayed over anything nobody actually even said or did.

I don't even LIKE HP that much anymore, why is wanting to stop having PTSD episodes about stupid shit the thing that also dropkicks me down seven circles of hell??? It's made all the so-called "leftist" enclaves of the internet a minefield. Why are people with OCD everyone's favourite collateral when it comes to stuff shitty rich assholes do? Is it so fucking hard to stop making up thought crimes to attack people over??

It's an extra layer of horrible when the same people have no problems applying "no ethical consumption under capitalism" to stuff like Coca Cola and Nestlé products. Y'all can't possibly live without child slavery chocolate or making brown people drink Nestlé's toxic filth or anything that's subjecting Indigenous communities and people in entire Global South continents to long, lingering, horrible deaths, but this one franchise whose author royalties are funding the UK transphobic lobby is the one line that matters. Fuck all the trans people in those places I guess. Every single Global North consumer moral policing is western leftists's dehumanization of our people writ large. Fuck all of you.

[ssaalexblake]

Why is 13's regen abt a white dude and why is 15's regen abt a white dude when do we get rid of that white man that just Cannot let other people have their own moments I swear this is so old, like really, it's a tale as old as time where white dudes are the center of the narrative and universe and everyone caters to them, and I'm so bored of it being celebrated. It's not innovative, it's not new, it's not brave.

[scarletfasinera]

I hate when people are like "I already didn't like xyz so it's not difficult for me to boycott it unlike those loser customers that actually Liked the thing which I could never understand bc I was never a customer uwu" bc like. That literally isn't boycotting lmao. That is just Never Being A Customer In The First Place, which means nothing actually.

Boycotts are primarily about applying pressure (or completely making it impossible to operate) via financial/commercial/economic impact. AKA it's about money and capital.

If you already weren't spending money on a product/franchise/company, then you were already never part of their sales data, and you just doing nothing & making absolutely no change to your daily life and just continuing to not be part of their sales data as normal, has literally no material impact. You were already never a factor. The people who WERE customers & WERE part of the sales data & ARE withdrawing their money from those sales figures actually ARE making a material impact.

"Supporting" something isn't about vibes or thoughts or feelings or you telling your best friend how much you like a thing, "support" in a meaningful sense is specifically material. It is financial. Refusing to continue supporting something means taking the money you were previously spending on it & putting it elsewhere. If you were never spending money, you were never supporting it, and therefore it doesn't make any difference if you continue to not support it. Boycotting is something CUSTOMERS and CONSUMERS do.

SO STOP FUCKING BRAGGING ABOUT IT & STOP MAKING FUN OF PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY ARE BOYCOTTING FOR "EVER LIKING XYZ TO BEGIN WITH" & STOP SPREADING THIS FALSE IDEA OF HOW BOYCOTTING WORKS LMAO sorry for capslocking I remembered I was annoyed

I just hate this low-morale mean-spirited bullshit some people do in the notifs on boycotting info posts where they arbitrarily moralize about something they just don't understand so they can pat themselves on the back for doing literally literally nothing AND inadvertently spreading misinfo in the process. Be quiet. Go do something that matters. There are plenty of posts going around, including from Palestinians themselves, with lists of references for how to help Palestine & other similar causes for people currently in crisis, please please do something For Real instead of boasting online about your fandom superiority complex as if it means anything.

[unopenablebox]

the way people talk about """"building community"""" feels so weirdly like. abstract? artificial? alienating? idk. i see those posts and have an immediate reflexive feeling of "this could only be done by some entirely other kind of person with whom i share no skills or interpersonal approaches" and it takes me a while after that to remember that i organized a union

[polyamorouspunk]

The first time I ever heard the phrase “pick your battles” was when I was about 12 years old in eight grade. The grade above us was filled with kids who drank and smoked and did drugs and the grade below us was filled with kids having sex in public bathrooms and somehow we were stuck in the middle, reaping the restrictions put on us for crimes we didn’t commit. One of these being that we were not allowed any personal bags in our wing.

Now, if you’re like me, you carry a *lot* of shit. I mean, there’s textbooks, reading books, food, water, phone, pens and pencils, an eraser that actually works, FeMiNiNe hYgIeNe pRoDuCtS, and idk? Random other shit? Too much to reasonably carry from class to class in your arms and pockets.

So my friends and I wore bags. Purses, if you will, though I hated that term because it was a bit too girly for me, and my “purses” came from the military surplus store. In fact, I still have the last one I got from there. Regardless, my point being that we wore personal bags to carry our shit in.

Except that wasn’t allowed because kids *before* us would sneak their alcohol and shit with them in bags.

Now, nowhere in the handbook did it say we weren’t allowed to have bags- trust me, we checked. Our parents helped us take up the cause- us being me and my 2 friends. But our teachers collectively decided we were not allowed to have them in our wing, they had to stay in our lockers. And so we asked: how them are we to transport them outside of our wing if our lockers are in said wing. If we can’t have them in the hallway how can we have them outside the hallway if we have to store them in the lockers in this hallway.

One day my teacher who had a soft spot for us pulled me aside. He told me he knew that I was on a campaign against this, but that sometimes we need to pick our battles. I had never heard of this phrase, so I sat on it for about .5 seconds before saying “then I’m going to pick this battle and continue fighting it.”

I understand now what he means though. We can’t change everything that we want to. There are so many causes out there, so many things that we should be aware of. But we’ll burn ourselves out trying to take them all on ourselves. It’s been said before to pick a few causes you really feel passionate about and focus on those because you can do more for change when you aren’t stretched out thin.

Beyond that, though, I think we need to pick and choose our battles because realistically there are not just things we can win, and at the end of the day some things *are* more important than others.

We live in a surveillance state. That’s clear in a lot of countries, including the US, but that’s clear on a global level. While this sucks, at least here in the US, it really seems like not enough people care to fight it. Hell, people are actively bringing surveillance devices into their homes in the name of convenience. Realistically, overturning our surveillance state doesn’t seem likely. While it’s a battle that’s noble to fight, it’s probably in vain.

But think about when Roe v Wade was overturned. How much outrage it caused. How much outrage it’s still causing. Enough people are fighting that there is hope to rectify it, I think. And when it comes down to it, if you have to pick a battle to “not be surveilled” or to “legalize life-saving medical treatment (again)” one of those seems a lot more pressing and important than the other.

It’s okay to personally put causes on the back burner. It’s okay to not reblog every single “awareness” or “woke” post you see. You’re not obligated to fight every fight. Even just reblogged activism post after activism post can be draining. It’s okay to take a step back, take a break. Don’t forget about these struggles. Keep them in the back of your mind. Maybe go back and reblog them later. But don’t burn yourself out fighting too many battles, especially if they’re losing one. Focus on a few, solid, tangible changes you can make: being kind to strangers; donating goods, services, and money; volunteering; teaching children; etc. and if you have the energy go above and beyond that. You can make a difference just by being kind. You don’t have to fix every single problem. But together we can fix a few at a time.

[lucabyte]

🐮

[lord-squiggletits]

Wanted to send an ask as well to hopefully provide some distraction from…recent events.

Are there any parts of world building in the TF IDW universe that you wish were explored/expanded upon more? Or that you want to explore in your writing? Like certain aspects of pre-war Cybertron, cybertronian culture, post-war Cybertron, etc?

Okay this is actually perfectly timed for a rant I wanted to go on about the way mnemosurgery is written in IDW1 because I hate how JRO basically made it an ontologically evil field of medicine both intrinsically and in terms of the average person who does it, like

First of all I want to preface this by saying I'm not accusing JRO of having any particular beliefs, this is just my commentary on how things came off and how his writing style contributes to both virtues and flaws in his writing. So I might say "he's basically saying this" but in the sense of "unfortunate implications, accidental or purposeful, in his writing."

But like... it makes me so mad because the worldbuilding around mnemosurgery kind of makes no sense to me? It seems like a really fucking wasted opportunity to cast basically every mnemosurgeon in the continuity as evil and to make it so that even just doing mnemosurgery is basically a toxic, destructive act that will literally kill you? Honestly, I don't think JRO even came up with mnemosurgery as like, "here's a thing that exists in this world and how it works" so much as, he took a character-first approach to writing (as he always does) and wrote mnemosurgery to work whatever way would work best for Chromedome and other character-related conflicts and plot points.

Like, mnemosurgery can view/alter memories from a living person but from a dead person it can only get moments from right before death. Makes sense. Mnemosurgery slowly kills you every time you do it??? Uh... honestly that comes off more as a handwave to make it so that any time the LL needs information they can't just needle it straight out of whoever's mind they need bc of course Chromedome can only do it when it's really important after all. Mnemosurgery... is only ever used for brainwashing people? Like, literally every mnemosurgeon except Chromedome is evil (and cartoonishly so, for Trepan and Sunder, like literally unredeemable monsters in every way) and any time they actually enjoy their field of medicine it's bc they're a sadist that likes to manipulate and oppress people? Kind of... uncreative.

Mnemosurgery is ADDICTIVE?? You're addicted to needling people's brains because mnemosurgery is ontologically evil and then it literally kills you? Okay like... do I even need to explain how tone-deaf it is to incorporate addiction of all things into the worldbuilding here? "You're an addict which makes you dangerous to society. The good ones stop doing the addictive thing because they're morally strong/care about others/aren't hedonists, but the bad ones who only care about doing their drug of choice are evil because the fact that they don't quit shows that they don't care about other people and OF COURSE the main/only fate that awaits addicts is their inevitable death by their own addiction!" Like, we get enough of that shit in real life, JRO. Did you really have to take an already heavily stigmatized condition like ADDICTION and slap it onto your ontologically evil mnemosurgery where the evil ones are evil because they love abusing/manipulating people and don't care enough about dying to stop being addicted to mnemosurgery? Come the fuck on.

Like, I understand that "the science of studying/altering memories" is heavily laden with nightmare fuel as is, and I don't have a problem with that (and stuff like the Institute) because the mind/memories are an intrinsic part of personhood, so any scientific field around it (or any government that wants to sponsor it) will abuse that knowledge just like with any other field of medicine. But to use human examples, why the fuck does mnemosurgery have to be inherently evil? What about stuff like Alzheimer's that degrades ppl's memories to the point of not even remembering a few seconds ago? Wouldn't it be beautiful if mnemosurgery could help with that? What about psychological issues where maybe people with intense PTSD/trauma/etc could have their worst memories be removed/dulled so that they become mentally stable enough for psychiatric/therapeutic interventions to become effective? What if someone has a TBI and wants help recovering the memories they lost?

What about non-scary, non-medicinal applications of mnemosurgery? What if someone just really treasures the memory of a particular day with their best friend and visits a mnemosurgery every couple years so that information creep doesn't slowly alter their memories of that precious day? What if it was possible for mnemosurgeons to intensify memories, so that maybe someone could have a happy memory intensified and think of it any time they're sad, struggling, having mental health struggles, etc? What if mnemosurgeons could take/copy memories from people's brains and convert them to video format in a way that other people could watch it? Imagine the sheer potential present in that when it comes to preserving history through literal firsthand testimonials of what happened! What if a mnemosurgeon could transfer memories from one person to another-- what kinds of breakthroughs in empathy, communication, and understanding others could happen if you could LITERALLY see a conflict from another person's perspective? In those ways, mnemosurgeons would basically be able to act as a hybrid of doctor, psychologist, diplomat, mediator, and archivist all in one!

But no... instead we just got "Mnemosurgery is evil and pretty much only used for brainwashing, 99.8% of all mnemosurgeons are evil creeps, oh by the way it's also addicting and will literally kill you if you do it too much." SMFH.

[laniidae-passerine]

catch me laughing in the club awkwardly because this season has a 19 year old blonde female companion from London, a space travelling left of law brunette queer boy who flirts heavily with the doctor, absolutely zero writers of colour and no mention of sensitivity readers…….and next season the new companion is a woman of colour. uh oh!

[liquidstar]

This is such a tangent btw but on the topic of guilt tripping and reblogs... I remember a few years back there were some terrible fires in Greece (and again this year, entire island villages are gone now) and at that time I had family who were caught in them. I can't describe the desperation I felt with these horrible things happening to my family and loved ones in my country. And I remember being frustrated and desperate with how no one around me in America really seemed to give a shit. I remember blogging asking people to PLEASE care please share something please reblog this link for mutual aid please think about the stories and fires etc etc etc. And the thing is I was very much in a state of grief myself, maybe not every word or action was perfectly reasonable, because I don't realistically expect everyone everywhere to care about every tragedy in the world. You can't. Emotionally it's just not possible, especially with all the stuff going on in the states rn too. Yeah it's a lot. It's not like I blog about every tragedy that ever happens either. I understand.

HOWEVER what I also remember was at this time there were a couple mutuals very clearly making vagueposts along the lines of "remember not everyone has the energy to care about everything in the world uwu" while I was posting about family who died and family who were drifting in the ocean for hours as their homes and loved ones burned. Listen. You have to understand sometimes that when a person in grief and frustration with things going on in their countries and communities impacts them very personally beg you to care... It's coming from a place of needing to see that care in the world in general. They're not holding a gun to your head Specifically saying you have to reblog the posts, if you don't have the energy just ignore it.

You don't have to go out of your way saying "um actually I can't care about the horrible stuff you and your family and your country are experiencing rn. I'm too busy focusing on my own stuff so can you be quiet or more reasonable with your grief thanks." Like. Just keep it to yourself then??? Have some fucking sympathy for other people and understand that maybe it's not always logical. The same way you don't have the emotional energy to think about every tragedy in the world, people who've been impacted by them often don't have the emotional energy to handle that alone and may seek somekinda community or solidarity. Idk. It's not about forcing shit on you sometimes it's not about you

[starlooove]

No one is asking you to like cops IRL, not even the show. If you look at Arcane and what you see is copaganda, if you look at Cait and only see PoLiCe OfFiCeR and not the character, the problem is YOU.

1. I never said anyone asked me to like cops irl

2. I know that’s what I said.

[gonnadosomethingwmylife]

I always find it funny when people are more mad at a character than the people they supposedly hurt are? I get it happens when a fandom is younger or it’s been truely written incorrectly based on the characters, but a lot of the times it’s not and it’s funny to see idk. I am looking at the teen wolf fandom.

[seaweedstarshine]

RIP Krakoa 🌹 I can’t lie I’ve been kinda behind since midway through Fall of X I’m gonna catch up before my first SDCC this summer but I hear Vulcan didn’t see much action anyway. Anyway my hand slipped and I found myself looking into the eyes of my canonically psychotic son the best Summers brother who’s never done anything wrong in his entire life, (he’s done lotsa wrong things but I love him more for it)

[selamat-linting]

resignation letter is the most potent painkiller. i love you resignation letter i love you one month notice <3

[lesbianralzarek]

not putting this in the tag because i KNOW its meta-bitching but i do hate people treating the wyll ravengard tag like its a discourse tag and not, yanno, an actual character tag. "its so fucked up how larian made their black character so much more boring than the rest!" is character hate and the average person scrolling his tag is trying to explode you with their mind. he does have fans, you know that, right?

[r0achlezbian]

i will forgive all of larian's sins both past and present if we get a quest to kill mizora btw

[jinstronaut]

this is also why i stopped using my tracked tag for a while tbh