#especially online.

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

really weird thing ive noticed lately re: hermits getting critiqued for stuff theyve said or done is that as soon as someone holds a shit opinion (even if it's just them being stupid, or a centrist, or saying a bad word without knowing what it means, or whatever) people immediately seem to flock to the 'this guy should die' 'kys' 'why are we giving this person a platform' rhetoric and like. that's not how meaningful change is made?

like, yeah, if one of my beloved CCs posted a tweet or video tomorrow about how much they hate gay people, or believe in conservative ideals, or they just said a bunch of slurs or whatever (these are hyperbolic examples obviously) then yeah, fuck them, they should go rot. but like, having some dumb takes, or saying bad things in the past, doesn't = evil terrible person...

idk, i feel like we can critique content creators without getting so insane about it. like, shit, there are things some of my favourites do that i don't like, but theyre not even really worth bringing up tbh. unless its something actually important, i feel like it just creates more drama out of nothing and all these assholes come crawling out of the woodwork to tell everyone how much they hate that creator. or find their content boring anyway so clearly they have no real merit to anyone.

more of an explanation of what i mean in the tags but yeah.

[morguerue]

puzzling out the things that make me feel weird.. (because of social ideas of what i should and should not do, be, embody, ect) VS (because of my own personal tastes and preferences) is Hard. especially since im used to. not being myself, not only to fit in easily w society at large but also sub-cultures and "in" groups

[madohomurat]

trans women are everywhere and are so eager to be seen and heard but only if they feel safe around you. if you hardly ever have trans women interacting with you, especially online, then consider there might be a reason for that and you should address it

[uncanny-tranny]

This might seem like an "old man yells at cloud" situation, but it's just wild growing up and being told how dangerous distracted driving is - how, at highway speeds, you can traverse the length of a football field (100 yards, 91 meters) in a matter of seconds - how one split second sending a text while driving could result in a potential fatal crash, and then getting on the road as a driver and being surrounded by billboards. Their entire purpose is to catch one's attention, so they're lining major roads, which tend to be highways. How is it that you're told how important it is to never be distracted while driving, but still being advertised to?

At best, this type of advertising is an eyesore to pedestrians and motorists and a general waste of electricity to light it, and at worst, it is an active danger considering they are there to advertise and therefore, must catch people's attention.

I'm not even against advertising in theory, but this particular mode bothers me so much and I hate how pervasive it is - especially in large cities or highways.

[un-pearable]

ngl one of the most useful things i’ve internalized from doing art online is never tell people what to criticize. don’t preemptively apologize for things or point out where you think you fumbled, it’s just priming people to notice minor issues that might not actually matter and hit you where you’re sensitive and throw you off your game. don’t tell people your weak points. if it’s a genuine problem they’ll point it out

[divineandmajesticinone]

4 MINUTES (2024) I EP. 6 & EP. 7 "You're still afraid of dogs."

[stonebutchery]

it's kind of baffling to me that entire sub-groups of queer folks endured a decade of being singled out and targeted for being asexual, aromantic, bisexual, pansexual, nonbinary, polyamorous, etc. and i have yet to see any substantial apologies from people who were directly responsible for causing genuine harm. i find it completely bizarre that there are so many people who want to sweep their past contributions to widespread lateral aggression toward specific queer groups under the rug like it didn't happen so they can wash their hands of it... there are people who are irreversibly traumatized because of this. there are people who took their lives because of it.

i'm wording the post like despite the fact that exclusionism targeting these groups (and more) continues to persist partly because it was a really frighteningly common trend to harass people just because they were ace, aro, bi, pan, nonbinary, poly, etc... and it's crazy to me that many of the people who were affected by this massive multi-pronged public online bullying campaign against the 'unacceptable types of queers' are the ones still receiving messages like "my url got put on an aphobe blocklist in 2016 because apparently a post i made making fun of asexuals got some teenage asexuals harassed and i still distrust asexuals to this day because of that" ...are you fucking kidding me?

we will never achieve any kind of unity as a queer community while we are insisting upon ignoring the hurt that lateral aggression has caused, and acting like the burden lies on the shoulders of the people who were harmed to forgive the people who harmed them and 'just move on', many of whom are not sorry for what they did! or they don't consider what they did to be wrong! how is that not deeply disturbing and troubling to more of you?

03/06/2024 edit: i’m putting a complete moratorium on this post because i am really sick and tired of having my point not only completely misconstrued and distorted entirely but also weaponized against transfems (particularly in replies i have decided to delete about how “ugh yes, exclusionism, and now transfems are bullying transmascs”) i find that really sickening and i’m demanding that it stop, and i can make it stop by turning off reblogs. so i have.

my objective in writing this post was never to request an apology from people who have been laterally-aggressive exclusionists in the past. i don’t think we’ll ever get more than a handful of apologies from those people, anyway. my point was that it was pretty terrifying to witness and experience a lot of lateral aggression that transferred from the real, in-person world to the deeply online spaces back into the real, in-person world in a really fucked up feedback loop and being a young queer person during this time and having that shape me, snd shape the experiences of my queer friends who have been traumatized by it.

however, it is absolutely unacceptable to me that the issue of transmisogyny is so blatantly overlooked by our entire community. for decades, transfems have experienced oppression and exclusion from transmisogyny-exempt women and queers. their exclusion from political queer liberation movements has caused many of the major schisms within our community we are still having arguments about to this day. if you want collective queer liberation, you must uplift transfems. there is no other option. you don’t get to write off all transfems just because one person who happened to be transfem was mean to you online or something.

i have answered and responded to way too many conspiracy-brained transmisogynist reactionaries to allow this post to keep fucking snowballing with people writing paragraphs in the tags about “transmisandry” or “transandrophobia.” please get your heads out of your asses.

this absolutely is the transmisogyny website, as always, and the place where all basic textual comprehension skills go to die, apparently.

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[lilidawnonthemoon]

[mossy-aro]

ultimately i think my insistence on aro positivity honestly is as much a political stance as a personal one.

when i say aro positivity is crucial and that i dislike doomer-ist posts that express sentiments like 'I hate being aro so much I wish I was dead instead’ it's not because I don’t think there can and should be a space for negativity and acknowledging self-hate, or the many ways being aromantic can really suck sometimes. i find that to be very important!

that being said. there is smth here about how self-hate posts are sometimes just arophobia that we inflict on ourselves. and when we put that out into the ether it (intentionally or not) can become arophobia that we inflict on other members of the community. i think there absolutely needs to be a place for negativity and the expression of anger and frustration and self loathing even - these are all good things to talk about because these are things that we experience. that being said, it can also be genuinely upsetting and triggering to people to have what is essentially arophobia shown to them and then have that be validated by other aspec people. your personal thoughts can affect your wider community on a level you may not anticipate. and i understand it i truly do! it took me so long to be able to recover from accepting being aroace - it threw my entire world off kilter and made me question everything about my place in the world.

but my insistence on aro joy and positivity is because ultimately i do believe that building is at the core essence of it all. that ultimately discussions and the purpose of community should be about construction, not destruction. and this is both a personal and a political stance. talking about how much you hate yourself and cultivating online discussions/spaces where negativity about aspec identity is the main and only theme is destructive - if that’s where we let the conversation end. these thoughts can and should be used as a vehicle to look for a path forward!

joy and positivity create a space where the focus can become on forging a path forward, on construction, on community building instead of tearing ourselves and others down with negative thoughts. it’s not productive or healthy when it stops at a place of negativity - it becomes actively destructive to the essence of community.

and i do think that this is especially poignant considering the fact that being any kind of queer, but especially aromantic (and/or asexual) means forging a path for yourself and making your own happiness where there is no obvious way forward. our communities exist mostly online (right now, anyway), there is little recognition of our existence in the real world, the effects of amatonormativity are both pervasive and actively dehumanising, and there are legal, economic and social structures in place actively making our lives more difficult. yes that all sucks! it’s good to acknowledge that. we need to in order to change it. but more importantly, that’s not the end. we are still here and our happiness, our future is for us to determine. even if we can’t change the laws or society, loving yourself and understanding aromanticism as a political identity (as well as personal), as a radical worldview, and as a protest against amatonormativity is essential for both community and personal well being. the personal is political.

tldr. i guess my point is that as a community, we should focus on building, improving, and nurturing ourselves and each other (construction) as opposed to destruction. we should recognise aromanticism and asexuality as political identities as well as personal ones and rely on community and self-love in the absence of anything else as a form of protest and political power. destruction (the recognition of everything that is wrong) is essential as a starting point - but where do we go from there? we rebuild.

[teacupsandcyanide]

Something I miss from earlier eras of the creative side of the internet was things just being unabashedly low-budget. Just all unashamedly amateur, unprofessional, ‘I don’t own a good camera but I have a story to tell you’, ‘I can’t afford a good mic but I have a song to sing for you,’ ‘I don’t have any kind of background in editing or lighting and I only just picked up this guitar last Tuesday but here’s an entire musical me and my friends wrote about our favourite book, we filmed it on a potato and put it up on YouTube in ten minute segments because we thought it was pretty funny.’

[ruhlare]

i don't like it when someone is easy to reach. when someone is open to everyone, when literally anyone can get their attention. it is a question of values ​​and principles not to be open to everyone and not to have the need for everyone's attention. people who are easily available won't value soulful connections.

[mellotronmkll]

It is so funny when people talk about how its embarrassing being in your late 20s/30s and still be on here blogging about stuff you like cuz I'm like just wait you're gonna get older and you're not gonna magically stop caring about the stuff you like or wanting to have fun online it literally is just the same but your back hurts more and you're more chill and like that's literally it . But you don't just magically at age like 26 say okay im done having hobbies that involve me being online. Unless maybe some people do I guess but that did not happen to me. I'm gonna be online til the day I die I think

[ambivartence]

이젠 내게 기대 편히 쉬어도 돼 // Now you can lean on me and rest in peace 소중한 널 내 품속에 꼭 안을게 // I will hold you dear in my arms

[fairycosmos]

actually blows my mind that at one point you could walk into a business with nothing but a resume in your hand, do a single interview and walk out with a job that pays you enough to be able to live a full life. what a world

[lyculuscaelus]

So lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts asking people to stop trying to make Odysseus look nice in their works cuz he’s a “messed-up person in the mythology”. Your opinion is valid however I have but one thing to point out:

You want to know who started all this? Who started to “make Odysseus look nice” in the first place?

It’s Homer. It’s nobody else but Homer himself.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would try to murder people out of his own interests. He’d murder Palamedes without remorse (and we’d be cheering over this but it’s a murder after all), he’d attempt to murder Diomedes just to get the Palladium himself, he’d volunteer to kill Astyanax…meanwhile you wouldn’t find any mention of either Palamedes or Nauplius in Homer’s poems, neither did he mention anything abt the Palladium heist (and Diomedes necessity did not happen until Conon’s version), the death of Astyanax, the distribution of war prizes, etc. And all the details in the Odyssey seemed to deny the existence of Nauplius’s vengeance at all, so Odysseus would not take any of the blame.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be depicted as “cruel, treacherous”, meanwhile in book 10 of the Iliad Odysseus was not mentioned to have killed anyone during the marauding, neither did he promise Dolan anything at all. The negative interpretations are denied by these details subtly put by Homer.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be widely known as a “coward” for only shooting arrows from afar. But Homer gave him a spear and had him absolutely slaying in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. That part of Ajax’s speech was invalid already.

Most importantly—a non-Homeric Odysseus would be having kids everywhere else, and the loyalty to his own wife as seen in the Odyssey is no where to be found. Meanwhile his lineage was a single-son line made by Zeus in the Odyssey, and his love for Penelope was one of his main drives, especially seen in book 5 of the Odyssey. He loved his family as a loving parent—something you don’t get to see in most of the non-Homeric writings—for most of the time they followed a different tradition indeed, in which Odysseus wasn’t half as nice as in the Odyssey.

TL;DR: in case you haven’t noticed, the characterization of the Homeric Odysseus was quite different from a non-Homeric version of Odysseus. It’s not that Homer didn’t know of the existence of other versions—he knew them too well, which is why in his version of the story, you don’t get to see any mention of them.