#i think!!! personally!!! that is very misguided!!!!!

[darkfictionjude]

you don’t have to put it on this blog but was going to address ur analysis of the US election because I don’t think it’s entirely accurate (as a woman of color myself). She ran a very misguided campaign that was filled with celebrity endorsements (who are in image and in reality so far removed from the conditions of regular folks) and Liz Cheney (who’s a unpopular war hawk amid a year that saw the most anti-war protests), most of her messaging was catered to right wing voters and centrists which historically never works well.

This leads to working class people, who mostly care more about material conditions than ideology or image, to move towards right wing populism because regardless of how harmful or horrible the ideology might be, they saw her image as one far removed from their concerns and Trump took advantage of this. In fact even tho Trump is probably more pro-war, he pretended he wasn’t and even campaigned on ending wars. In fact Trump had fewer votes than he did his first time, but Harris had even fewer because voter turnout was just not good esp when her whole campaign was just “im not as bad as the other guy” and no concrete domestic or economic platform. She also never distanced herself from the Biden administration so people saw her as a continuity candidate to one of the most unpopular presidents of all time.also Her messaging to Arab Americans, who have been most affected by the conflict in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, was just very tone deaf (there’s a speech where she says she knows the deaths in the Middle East is tragic but people need to prioritize the prices of groceries)

before she was a candidate she was also a prosecutor and was responsible for so many horrible things so anyways I can understand in many ways why she lost and I think just saying she’s a woman reduced the issue to identity politics when it’s much deeper than this

So the reason I said that was because like I said a few times I didn’t want to get into politics on this blog. I wasn’t going to go on a whole explanation for an ask that wasn’t even about politics because it makes no sense. That person who sent me that ask didn’t ask for that. Like I wasn’t going to go into extreme detail on this blog because this is a game blog

Obviously there’s more reasons, the fact that she didn’t have long to campaign also didn’t help but it isn’t wrong to say that so long into its history America has never had a woman at the forefront while other similarly advanced countries have, gender and race is a problem in American politics

The only reason I’m answering this is because I feel like I’m being talked down and I don’t like that. I wasn’t reducing anything and it wasn’t an analysis I literally just a quick answer for a question that was mostly about the game. I’m educated, I’m politically aware, and I really would have preferred to have talked about this on the other blog like I said I’m not comfortable doing it here but I did so because this is the blog the message on

[shotgunbambi]

fair enough.

i thought i was being protective but octavia you are correct.

@angeldustanalog you are loveable, you are strong, you love people, you love starlight, (they/some of them unsure do not want to assume) love you. you are not alone. even in this past year of bullshit, you have made new friends, you care deeply for mischief. you met starlight. you stayed in touch with your friends even if you couldn’t have real conversations. you help your friends as much as you can.

that piece of human excrement was in fact not your oldest friend. them being a worthless, pathetic group of people is not a reflection of you.

you have known bunny for years longer. you have fought to stay in contact with castiel, you spent years not even knowing if he was still alive. you spent hours trying to find out, googling obituaries constantly, and now he’s still one of your best friends. you’re almost definitely going to see him soon. you have stephanie. you have dara. you have star. even werewolf girl still loves you and you love her. (i know that your relationship with her is complicated, it’s ok. the fact that she still talks to you after everything that happened is very cool. even if it’s, kind of weird sometimes)

you love your bio sister so fucking fiercely. i continue to be impressed by your hard limit regarding that. you love your bio dad, he loves you despite everything.

you still have friends from that shithole abusive boarding school, you’re always the most popular boy in the psych ward. you are a fun person, you’re smart and creative and you try so hard to be a good friend/roommate/partner/pet/whore/son. you are so excited to be a good little boywife and that is genuinely very sweet. especially after beelzebitch using all of those things to exploit you. you are kind, and forgiving, even after being hurt so much, by so many. you think of yourself as weak but you are so protective in your own way, sometimes to your own detriment. and sometimes it is actually helpful. you are the only true indigo child. just kidding but also.

you and via and miami and stolz and blitzø and sarah and 626 and toxic. you all have such a capacity to feel and express love. it frightens me. but i will not allow myself to use fear as an excuse. i will help you find external outlets, i will help you maintain relationships that are good for everyone involved. and i will continue to troubleshoot communication. it is hard for me to communicate, but in different ways. and i should not have spoken to you that way. it was abusive, or it will be abusive if i continue without consent. and i can see that now. i could see it before, somewhat. but i thought if i was the one abusing you it would keep you safe. i can see that that is misguided logic. you did not consent to me doing that. and i didn’t ask prime.

it scares me that you are on grindr again, especially after last time especially in an area you’re familiar with. at least when you were scared to go outside it limited exposure to external abuse. kind of. not really. obviously. but. it was some kind of barrier. it scares me to see how many people approach you, it scares me how desperate you get. i t scares me how people talk to you when they first meet you, and it scares me how little you think of yourself. it scares me to know how easily you can find people who will hurt you in ways you don’t really want, in ways i can’t protect you from. it scares me how impulsive you can be irl. i don’t want you to get hurt in ways that are bad for you, by your own standards. i don’t want you to think that the only way to get your needs met is through people who don’t give a fuck about your safety. i know you find it validating and i understand your thought process and it scares me how willing you are to hurt yourself in exchange for the smallest crumbs of affection.

it scares me to think of how vulnerable you are, and have been. how vulnerable you can become at times. how genuinely limitless you can become in specific circumstances. it’s not safe, it’s often not that kind of risk you even like. and sometimes it’s not even just that you’re vulnerable, but actively seeking mortal danger. ignoring red flags, seeking them out. i understand why you do that. it doesn’t mean you deserve to be abused in ways you don’t want. i thought if i could fill that need for you it would be safer. if i could keep you to myself. but i am not safe for you either, at times.

my job is help you get your needs met, not isolate you, not keep you to myself, not to abuse you without your consent. that is not protection, nor is it safety. it is love but it’s not healthy (by our standards)

it is reactive and not appropriate. it is cruel to people and beings who do not want it. it is damaging to your relationships for me to say those things.

apologies, angel.

octavia, rude. but, necessary. so thank you, you emo little shit.

edit:

it also was especially not ok for me to say these things publicly as it was implicitly(explicitly?) derogatory to your current external relationships, which i know both of you value and love. i do too, in my own way. i know you have people who understand you. it’s ok to find understanding in different relationships and just because you can’t do everything with one cohort or person does not make those relationships invalid.

i am afraid of you both getting so attached to anyone outside of us. it’s risky, it opens you up to being hurt in ways i can’t protect you from. it opens you up to hurting our body in ways prime has not approved. but it’s necessary, important, real, and enriching.

and it was insensitive and cruel for me to say or imply that your/our current relationships are less valid than our internal relationships.

i’m sorry for posting so impulsively, so carelessly. i am better than that and i apologize for my lapse in self control.

@xxpreycodedpredatorxx thank you for being so assertive. i should not have teased you in my response, it was not the appropriate time. and i know it can be hard for you to speak up. especially to someone who is even slightly perceived as older than you. and i know you are very fragile right now. i respect your loyalty, and love of your partners and friends and family. i respect your boldness. i respect your desire to protect others. i respect you standing up to me, so much. to insult me even. the host was never able to speak that way to its mother and i am both indignant and full of pride. you are a very good kid. i am so proud of you. i know you miss your parents. i will help you find ways to meet those needs. i will help you with your bio mom. and, i am so deeply sorry you are in so much pain.

i was being shitty because i was scared and i thought i was being protective by making angel feel more isolated than you realistically are. but me being scared is not a valid reason to denigrate and abuse you angel. it is not an acceptable reason to question the validity of your loved ones. our loved ones. to question their love for you. all of you.

i will remember this interaction. thank you for your patience, nonjas.

npd dom x bpd sub

[stellaclaw]

sunbeams mind drifting to her new husband DURING HER MOTHERS FUNERAL is probably one of the most deranged moments of this series making every female character revolve around a man she likes.

[teafiend]

[cowboy-robooty]

no guys you dont get it itager isnt sweet and tender in the domestic gay lovey dovey way theyre sweet and tender in the BRO way

[smile-files]

this might be a hot take... but if you care about disavowing media made by bad people out of fear of looking like a bad person yourself more than you care about actually doing good things... you might have your priorities (and your morals) screwed up a bit :/

(see my tags for more of my thoughts on this topic! please try to avoid making make bad-faith assumptions about what i mean!)

[hooved]

nothing makes me block someone faster than them writing paragraphs about how much they hate odo in the tags on my posts about him

[sugarkillsall]

The strangest thing I see ppl not mention around the argument that the devs would be "hurt" by a boycott of the HP wizard game is the fact that this is a insanely well known IP and there are plenty of ppl out there not online enough to know/care who are going to be buying this game regardless?? There is a zero chance in my eyes this won't make money, it's just too big. The devs are gonna be perfectly fine, ppl are fully within their rights to not buy a game and discuss their reasons why bc the IP creator is garbage 🙄

[obstinatecondolement]

Try though I may not to get invested in people who are Perfect Strangers to me just because they have an affable online persona, I do find myself very endeared to Brandon Sanderson. I have read none of his books, but I think his YouTube videos are very enjoyable and I am much relieved that he has both vocally affirmed his support of LGBTQ+ people in general, and trans people specifically, and has apologised (in a way that seems very sincere and earnest to me) for clumsy and unintentionally homophobic things he has said in the past. Which is, like, more than can be said of some fantasy authors.

[reikunrei]

wondering about how Kali’s doing...

i always always think about that final shot of her, watching El turn around and run away, to go back to her friends and family because they need her, and how heartbroken Kali looks because of it

and you know that ate at her. that moment where El said “no, these people who you are saying are trying to suppress me. they need me. and i need them. i love them. i can’t stay.” you KNOW that ate at Kali. you KNOW that she thought about it for months and months and months and she thought “am i doing this wrong?”

i like to think that, because of that goodbye, she realized that she can’t be going down the path she has chosen. that maybe El is right and it’s better to have mercy, to forgive, to strive for goodness rather than sticking to revenge because of the temporary relief. love will always be the better choice

[hadoriel]

Love suddenly bursting into tears because I want my life to mean something but life is inherently meaningless

[wild-at-mind]

I get this but also talk about the trans narrative the media sells is so strange to me. What media? The trans narrative the media sells in the UK is concerned parents who need to be informed by teachers the same second their child asks about using a different name and/or pronoun. No one can hear enough from these parents. A phrase the mainstream media loves here is 'born in the wrong body', which isn't something I've ever heard a trans person say about themselves, but if they did that would be fine. However instead all you hear from the media is 'people are learning online they must be born in the wrong body if they like things associated with the opposite sex!' They fucking love that phrase because it sounds ridiculous to the layperson, it's easy to make fun of. This is the trans narrative the media is selling, and it's not our narrative because it doesn't come from us.

Online spaces are really toxic and full of people correcting each other and I agree with all the messages about people not doing this. We can always tell people to stfu with their 'disagreement' of what we call ourselves, and people should stop engaging others in weird label policing. But I also want to caution against the idea that your identity can be more or less radical than someone else's because of what it is called, or how comfortable you perceive it makes people. We all just are, no matter how well or not well our identity fits with the mainstream narrative (which of course does exist, and is things like 'you always were your gender' and stuff- I get what was meant by that really, I just wanted to remind people, perhaps patronisingly, of the media landscape we actually live in). Maybe we can only support each other if we see that.

don't use "ftm" it's outdated and offensive. it implies that the trans person was their agab, which we never were. i was always a boy, never a girl who became a boy.

i'm 35 years old. i've been IDing as trans or something similar to trans for nearly 20 years. i was probably calling myself FTM while you were playing tag during recess, anon.

i WAS a girl. i IDed as a girl early in my life. i recognized myself as a girl, called myself a girl, lived as a girl, and was a girl. who then IDed as a man. hence, F t M.

spend more time worrying about yourself instead of strangers on the internet, anon.

sorry not sorry if this comes off as needlessly hostile, but i've been getting a lot of shit from a lot of teenage trans kids about the language i use to describe my own goddamn experience, and i'm growing real fuckin weary of it.

i have elder trans friends who call themselves transsexuals and transvestites and trannies. are you going to seriously go to a 60-year-old trans person who survived the reagan years and tell her she's not allowed to use certain language to describe herself because it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some teenager on the internet?

do yourself a favor and log off, find some real-life trans people who are over the age of 20 or 25, and spend time talking to them instead of getting all holier-than-thou at random strangers on tumblr.

[concupiscentlyashen-blog]

.

[queerautism]

It feels kinda wild I've seen no one mention the huge controversy NaNoWriMo was in about 7 months ago (Link to a reddit write up, there's also a this google doc on it) in this whole recent AI discourse. The main concerns people had were related to the 'young writers' forum, a moderator being an alledged predator, and general moderation practices being horrible and not taking things like potential grooming seriously.

About 5 months ago, after all of that went down, MLs or 'Municipal Liaisons', their local volunteers organisers for different regions of the world, were offered a horrible new agreement that basically tried to shut them up about the issues they'd been speaking up about. Some of these issues included racism and ableism that the organisation offered zero support with.

When there was pushback and MLs kept sharing what was going on, NaNoWriMo removed ALL OF THEM as MLs and sent in a new, even more strict agreement that they would have to sign to be allowed back in their volunteer position.

This agreement included ways of trying to restrict their speech even further, from not being able to share 'official communications' to basically not being allowed to be in discord servers to talk to other MLs in places not controlled by NaNoWriMo. You also had to give lots of personal information and submit to a criminal background check, despite still explicitly leaving their local regions without support and making it very clear everyone was attending the OFFICIAL in person events 'at their own risk'.

Many MLs refused to sign and return. Many others didn't even know this was happening, because they did not get any of the emails sent for some reason. NaNoWriMo basically ignored all their concerns and pushed forward with this.

Many local regions don't exist anymore. I don't know who they have organising the rest of them, but it's likely spineless people that just fell in line, people who just care about the power, or new people who don't understand what's going on with this organisation yet. Either way, this year is absolutely going to be a mess.

Many of the great former MLs just went on to organise their writing communities outside of the official organisation. NaNoWriMo does not own the concept of writing a novel in a month.

R/nanowrimo is an independent subreddit that has been very critical of the organisation since this all happened, and people openly recommend alternatives for word tracking, community, etc there, so I highly recommend checking it out.

I've seen Trackbear recommended a lot for an alternative to the word tracking / challenge, and will probably be using it myself this November.

Anyway, just wanted to share because a lot of people haven't heard about this, and I think it makes it extremely clear that the arguments about "classism and ableism" @nanowrimo is using right now in defense of AI are not vaguely misguided, but just clear bullshit. They've never given a single shit about any of that stuff.

[naptimeclown]

Watching the greatest showman for the second time ever just so I can make myself mad enough to motivate me to clean

[jaybirddraws]

I like this even more with the analysis @/pepplemint made about how vash isn't right.

he's noble, sure, and committed, definitely, but unfettered pacifism is as much a maladaptive coping mechanism as knives's fear-driven genocidal tendencies (just....with much less violence). And OBVIOUSLY when faced with those two choices you're gonna choose pacifism, but that doesn't make it the Perfect Choice

which just makes Meryl choosing to follow Vash because "It's the right thing to do" even better because it puts Vash into the same position of being a cult leader/religious figure that Knives is with the plant worshippers/eye of michael/etc, but Vash isn't forcing anyone to follow him or listen to him, the most he does is makes it clear that he severely disapproves of it when people act against his beliefs in his presence. Which, yknow, most people do that.

Vash is indoctrinating people just like his brother, without even purposefully doing it. his religion is just less overtly violent. and I really love how framing it this way points out the flaws in both ideologies (and you could even extend this to an argument about the Follies of Accepting One Man's Gospel if you wanted)

Meryl COULDVE heeded Karen's advice and stepped away! That's the reasonable thing to do. That's the best option for her own self preservation and her own sanity. But she decides that Vash's cause is worthy enough to take on as her own, or that Vash means enough to her that she would value being at his side more than her own safety/happiness, which is just delicious commentary on the sacrifices we make for the people we love.

it's also fuel to the guilt fire vash feels about how he drags people into his mess and gets them killed, because yeah. He does. He may not want to or may not even intend to, but he ends up converting a lot of people, who get tangled up in this religious war he has with his brother, and then they die.

What do you do with that?

This panel stuck out to me when it showed up in TriMax Chapter 3, but honestly, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it at the time. Or, rather, I wasn't sure where Nightow might be going with it.

Meryl is trying to defend her time with Vash as not being a that bad, but then her coworker (amazingly named Karen) calls her out, telling her that, as a woman, there's no way Meryl could have been happy having her life constantly threatened while running around with Vash.

My first instinct is to defend Meryl, to shoot back at Karen that what defines Karen's life may not define Meryl's, and Meryl might be the more adventurous type who genuinely doesn't mind the danger. And besides, having one's life constantly under threat is psychologically wearing on anyone regardless of gender. So shouldn't she just shut her yap?

But then these words come up again later in the chapter. For (what I think is) the first time in the series, Meryl finds herself with an actual loaded gun leveled directly at her head by a person who fully intends to pull the trigger. She has no known help in sight, and the gunman calling her foolish makes her remember what Karen said.

And Meryl just... closes her eyes, and she thinks about all the danger she's been in with everyone from Gosef to E.G. Mine. She thinks about the Fifth Moon Incident. And she thinks about Vash.

But she doesn't think of gunman Vash. She doesn't think of Vash in a panic telling her to run away from danger, of Vash fleeing for his life over and over and over again.

She thinks of him smiling.

Not only is he smiling, but compared to the darkness and chaos of the other panels, he's a beacon of light in those memories. (You can almost hear the tense, dark music that's been flowing through the scene break into something lighter at his appearance.) And that image of him smiling kindly, still striving for love and peace, grows to dominate her mindscape.

It would be easy to write this off as her growing crush on Vash, or as her seeing him telling her that it's alright and dealing with things like being hunted and having your life regularly threatened aren't actually that bad, that perhaps these things appeal to a sense of adventure and/or what makes life worth living. After all, we've seen similar messages come up in similar fashions in so many other anime and manga series.

But that's not what Meryl concludes from it. Instead, she thinks about Vash's smiling face and concludes her coworker is right. There isn't a way for she, Meryl, to truly be happy when she's constantly getting thrown into these situations.

Her conclusion doesn't end there, though. She doesn't look at the situation and go, "Well, I guess it's time for me, a girl, to throw in the towel so I can pursue a happier existence."

Instead, she concludes that she has to keep doing this sort of thing anyway regardless of any danger or fulfillment.

She realizes that what she dealt with for the time she followed Vash around was crazy and terrifying and, yes, life-threatening. And she realizes that this is how Vash lives all the time. Unlike her, it's not something he has the option to just tap out of when the mood suits. As we were shown in the previous two chapters, Vash genuinely can't just make a new life or career choice or whatever and just... hunt for his own happiness instead. Chaos is going to follow him unbidden wherever he goes.

But he keeps going. And he doesn't just keep going, but through it all he keeps smiling kindly at others, offers them encouragement, and despite all he's seen and been through, keeps trying harder to work for a world with more love and peace. Not because it's safe or happy or appeals to a sense of adventure. It's none of those things. He continues on this path because it's the right thing to do.

Meryl realizes the same thing is true for her. Accepting another assignment from the company to follow Vash around isn't going to bring her the kind of life Karen suggested was ideal. In fact, it's more likely that following in Vash's footsteps (whether figuratively or literally) is going to end up with Meryl in additional stressful situations with her life on the line far more than is truly reasonable for anyone (regardless of gender). It isn't necessarily going to bring her happiness. It certainly isn't going to bring her peace.

But it's the right thing to do, which makes it the only path forward for her, and so she'll embrace it despite all the struggles it brings.