#have ZERO experience with women

[abitohoney]

What would you do if you met Sevika in person?

LMAO. Nonny, this is such a loaded question! If I managed to avoid spontaneous combustion upon first laying eyes on the goddess, I'm sure I'd inadvertently manage to either be ignored entirely because of my shyness, or draw enough attention to myself through my awkwardness and lack of social skills to scare her away.

Some ramblings below the cut cause who tf wants to read this? (besides you nonny, and thank you! <3)

I'd probably try, but fall, to watch her for a while without being caught. If I did get caught, my cheeks would light up cherry red and I'd start sweating. I can just imagine her heated gaze on me, wondering why the fuck this adult woman is acting so damn weird. Or, IDK, maybe I'd be super lucky and she'd find it charming or cute. (Probably not 😭)

I'd like to think that given my age and experience with interacting with my adult coworkers (although they are 99% men and not at all attractive or intimidating like Sevika), I could actually gain the courage to approach her if she's alone. Assuming she's got that awesome prosthetic, I'd likely attempt to open a conversation up with something stupid like, "Hi. I like your arm." Then I'd proceed to just stand awkwardly next to her in silence while waiting for her to say something. And she probably wouldn't say anything, thus leaving me to believe she hates me, I'm stupid and annoying, and my mind would start racing about how to get out of the situation I just put myself in and calculate how long of a fall it is if I drove off the nearest cliff and if anyone has ever died from severe embarrassment or anxiety.

And THEN, with a stroke of genius and perfect social skill, I'd break the silence with something really clever (this is heavy sarcasm) like, "I'm an engineer." Like that statement by itself means something. (In my head I've played through explaining what I like about her arm, how I'd love to see it's inner workings, and how I'm fascinated with all forms of engineering, but my mouth only speaks the very end of the thought process.)

So having just dug myself a deeper hole of embarrassment and humiliation, I would laugh awkwardly and my face would be on the verge of bursting into flames which she would have to notice.

If, IF by some crazy chance she was able to ignore my inability to start a normal conversation, or actually thought it was endearing, and therefore gave me a positive or, hell, even a neutral response, I would proceed to relax considerably and start rambling about her arm and then tangent from one subject to the next to the next until either she told me to shut up or I realized (far too late) that I was rambling and not even giving her a chance to say anything.

She would probably hate me. 💔

[falconfate]

Hello ranger’s apprentice fandom can we talk real quick about the stupidest thing Flanagan ever wrote

It’s about the bows. Yanno, the rangers’ Iconique™️ main weapon. That one. You know the one.

Flanagan. Flanagan why are your rangers using longbows.

“uh well recurve arrows drop faster” BUT DO THEY. FLANAGAN. DO THEY.

the answer is no they don’t. Compared to a MODERN, COMPOUND (aka cheating) bow, yes, but compared to a longbow? Y’know, what the rangers use in canon? Yeah no a recurve actually has a FLATTER trajectory. It drops LATER.

This from an article comparing the two:

“Both a longbow and a recurve bow, when equipped with the right arrow and broadhead combination, are capable of taking down big game animals. Afterall, hunters have been doing it for centuries with both types of bows.

However, generally speaking and all things equal, a recurve bow will offer more arrow speed, creating a flatter flight trajectory and retain more kinetic energy at impact.

The archers draw length, along with the weight of the arrow also affect speed and kinetic energy. However, the curved design of the limbs on a recurve adds to its output of force.”

It doesn’t actually mention ANY distance in range! And this is from a resource for bow hunting, which, presumably, WOULD CARE ABOUT THAT SORT OF THING!

Okay so that’s just. That’s just the first thing.

The MAIN thing is that even accounting for “hur dur recurves drop faster” LONGBOWS ARE STILL THE STUPID OPTION.

Longbows, particularly and especially ENGLISH longbows, are—as their name suggests—very long. English longbows in particular are often as tall or taller than their wielder even while strung, but especially when unstrung. An unstrung longbow is a very long and expensive stick, one that will GLADLY entangle itself in nearby trees, other people’s clothes, and any doorway you’re passing through.

And yes, there are shorter longbows, but at that point if you’re shortening your longbow, just get a goddamn recurve. And Flanagan makes a point to compare his rangers’ bows to the Very Long English Longbow.

Oh, do you know how the Very Long English Longbow was mostly historically militarily used? BY ON-FOOT ARCHER UNITS. Do you know what they’re TERRIBLE for? MOUNTED ARCHERY.

Trust me. Go look up right now “mounted archery longbow.�� You’ll find MAYBE one or two pictures of some guy on a horse struggling with a big stick; mostly you will actually see either mounted archers with RECURVES, or comparisons of Roman longbow archers to Mongolian horse archers (which are neat, can’t lie, I love comparing archery styles like that).

Anyway. Why are longbows terrible for mounted archery? Because they’re so damn long. Think about it: imagine you’re on a horse. You’re straddling a beast that can think for itself and moves at your command, but ultimately independently of you; if you’re both well-trained enough, you’re barely paying attention to your horse except to give it commands. And you have a bow in your hands. If your target is close enough to you that you know, from years of shooting experience, you will need to actually angle your bow down to hit it because of your equine height advantage, guess what? If you have a longbow, YOU CAN’T! YOUR HORSE IS IN THE WAY BECAUSE YOUR BOW IS TOO LONG! Worse, it’s probably going to get in the general area of your horse’s shoulder or legs, aka moving parts, which WILL injure your horse AND your bow and leave you fresh out of both a getaway vehicle and a ranged weapon. It’s stupid. Don’t do it.

A recurve, on the other hand, is short. It was literally made for horse archers. You have SO much range of motion with a recurve on horseback; and if you’re REALLY good, you know how to give yourself even more, with techniques like Jamarkee, a Turkish technique where you LITERALLY CAN AIM BACKWARDS.

For your viewing enjoyment, Serena Lynn of Texas demonstrating Jamarkee:

Yes, that’s real! This type of draw style is INCREDIBLY versatile: you can shoot backwards on horseback, straight down from a parapet or sally port without exposing yourself as a target, or from low to the ground to keep stealthy without banging your bow against the ground. And, while I’m sure you could attempt it with a longbow, I wouldn’t recommend it: a recurve’s smaller size makes it far more maneuverable up and over your head to actually get it into position for a Jamarkee shot.

A recurve just makes so much more SENSE. It’s not a baby bow! It’s not the longbow’s lesser cousin! It’s a COMPLETELY different instrument made to be used in a completely different context! For the rangers of Araluen, who put soooo much stock in being stealthy and their strong bonds with their horses, a recurve is the perfect fit! It’s small and easily transportable, it’s more maneuverable in combat and especially on horseback, it offers more power than a longbow of the same draw weight—really, truly, the only advantage in this case that a longbow has over the recurve is that longbows are quicker and easier to make. But we KNOW the rangers don’t care about that, their KNIVES use a forging technique (folding) that takes several times as long as standard Araluen forging practices at the time!

Okay.

Okay I think I’m done. For now.

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[sendmyresignation]

ok so knee deep in girls to the front which is incredibly interesting to hold up against dance of days. but the number one thing that keeps itching at my brain is like. I feel like so much of the discussion around riot grrl does a disservice to the fact this community was full of literal teenagers, both from the standpoint of why they were taking the specific actions they were, with what little political power young women are able to wield, but also explains why riot grrl... isn't perfect like god forbid the radical thought i had at seventeen doesn't just start a very public and easily hated youth moment but is also scrutinized and held up forever as The Thing You Believe Now. so much of my personal issue re: riot grrl is with the Canon and the retrospective understanding of the scene and much much less to do with the actual things fermenting in young people's minds/motivating them into taking actionable steps to mitigate unrelenting patriarchy because it's admirable to see young people take those steps.

[always-a-joyful-note]

Messes me up that the closest we get to legitimate criticism of the idol business is the stuff that probably happened with Zero, Kujo, and Haruki as well as Takanashi, Yaotome, and Musubi. This isn't to say our current generation of i7 doesn't give us entertainment industry criticism (it obviously does), but I mean to say that, personally, the conversation between Torao and Ryu about Ryu's image was a horror story to me personally. Like, I can extrapolate the sincerity and heartwarmingness of surviving a terrible world because you have loved ones who see you for who you are AND be horrified by his acceptance of being sexualised by the media because he's an idol, right?

[redheadedfailgirl]

I really wish people who think trans women aren't treated like women could see the endless amounts of social and emotional labor demanded of them, both to be legitimately seen as women, and as payment for rejecting maleness. Because holy shit I don't think they understand. The amount of people who have asked me to be their lifeline when they need a suicide watch is insane. The amount of people treating me as their personal therapist is astonishing. There is genuinely no other explanation for some of the shit people do than that trans women are the proverbial whipping girls of the queer community and we have to shoulder people's emotional burdens alone.

[dolokhoded]

simon peter is the funniest apostle to work with because in theory he's the most loyal, most by-the-book of the apostles so you'd expect him to be the most logical and collected one but 80% of his concerns (pre crucifixion then everything went downhill and they all died) are that he has a crush on every person he encounters

[rez-urrection]

hey a post about transmisogyny !! I sure hope the poster doesn't deliberately say trans and cis men can not be the victim of genital sexualization, sexual or verbal harrasment, fetishization or violence !

*reads*

oh :(

[cienie-isengardu]

I don't want you to get upset," Vau said, "but Fi's not as you remember him." Etain nodded gravely as they waited for Aay'han to land. Vau wasn't sure if an emotional shock was a good idea for a pregnant woman so close to term, but he had Rav Bralor here if any of that female stuff needed attending to. Mird followed Etain around, staring fascinated at her belly. "He's still Fi, and I think I understand post-coma recovery now," Etain said. "You have no idea how much medical literature I've read recently. But Mird's worrying me." Bralor flicked her thumbnail against the butt of her blaster, making Mird whip its head around to stare balefully at her. "And I can worry Mird. Can't I, my little stinkweed?" Vau felt the need to defend his comrade. "Strills have very acute senses, remember. It knows the baby's coming soon." "As in snack opportunity?" "As in parenting, Rav. Mird is hermaphroditic, remember. It's capable of being a mother, too, and you know how female animals will mother anything." "Even you, Walon ..."

Republic Commando: True Colors

[headlessstar]

i finally did... i found the drakengard 3 intoner OSTs with zero's interruptions!!! i was looking for years how did I accidentally stumble upon it now of all times

[chaserofstarsandtheabyss]

If I have to hear one more “a surprising number of trans men are misogynistic :/“ take it will be too soon

[magicdyke]

dude is just not smart

[oysterie]

i do acknowledge i need to watch what i say wrt gender women men cis ppl etc just augh.

[saerotonins]

yk, for someone who hasn't been w a man (or anyone at all), im writing so much abt romance and angst like ?? where is this even coming from

[kyouka-supremacy]

Honestly, i don't want a stormbringer anime adaptation, i love the light novel sm (chuuya stan here) and i'm afraid of an adaptation, what if they animate like shit an important scene? or one not so important but that I like a lot? :( and if they skip something? they would definitely skip something :(( But yk what i'd love? A stormbringer manga, if it's with hoshikawas art even better! :)

Oh OH I'D PAY MONEY TO READ AN HOSHIKAWA STORMBRINGER MANGA. It doesn't even feel *that* unlikely, I really hope they continue the trend of adapting light novels as manga because it's such a wonderful way to experience the stories (and I mean Hoshikawa's art style. c'mon. it's something else.). I do agree manga is the optimal medium for novels adaptations as it's often the most faithful to the original story and even leaves space for new interesting expansions!! Like how Fifteen gave us an insight of how Mori and Dazai met for the first time with the Fifteen manga, I found it such an interesting new puzzle piece to better understand what their relationship used to be like.

I do feel like they will adapt Storm Bringer to anime at some point; I mean, they already adapted Stormbringer in all the ways they could, and the anime production LOVES Chuuya fanservice. Anime-style Verlaine even appeared in the April Fools special, so you know. Also this. Maybe for the second half of this season if they're really going to divide it in two cours like people have speculated. But I hope not, looking at the length of the novel alone it's true it seems way too long of a story to adapt it within a season without cutting too many scenes... Maybe they'll make a movie out of it, but it's hard to tell if they'd invest on that. It's unheard of to me for anime movies adapt novels which are an uncertain investment, opposite to movies like Dead Apple that have the added value of being a brand new story people are curious to learn about. Then again Stormbringer is remarkably popular so! who knows!

I know it can get upsetting to get an unfaithful adaptation– trust me, I really get it! But I think a trimmed adaptation is still better than no adaptation at all? Like look at Untold Origins, it left out so many compelling details and aspects of Ranpo's characterization (and, by the look of it, a lot of Fukuzawa internal screaming lol). But would you rather have gone without it? As bad as the sb adaptation could be we'd still at least learn what Verlaine sounds like and watch him being fabulous in animation‚ which I guess is a win!! But maybe take my words with a grain of salt, I know very little about sb to begin with. Anyways shout-out to Stormbringer Chuuya in Hoshikawa's art style

[samaspic31]

Nothing makes me angrier than people trying to validate trans people’s gender through sexism. That’s not fucking helping anyone im not here to validate your misogyny and i do not agree with your gender stereotypes i don’t care that you accept gender conforming trans people in it