#i'm just being a pedant now

[boltlightning]

i get recommended a distressing amount of ai art on instagram, specifically for those romance fantasy books that has the internet all athrall (a.cotar, f.outh wing, etc). and these are like...popular accounts, who do a lot of images of the main characters just...standing there looking beautiful.

it bothers me on the base level that ai art always bothers me, but i couldn't put a finger on why this, specifically, both bothered me and seemed absolutely natural. if we take it one step further: it is just another mark that these series are all about aesthetic over substance. i knew nothing about the plot of f.ourth wing going into it, all i knew was the aesthetic (girl with ombré hair, black dragon and gold dragon) and that it was about a war academy. the plot, the driving force, none of it matters — all you need to know is it's a fantasy world and there's hot people having sex. and we're going to build a culture around it that is driven just as much by shallow aesthetics as the books themselves.

not everything needs to be deep, of course not. but i cannot help but feel upset at the lack of creativity in a genre defined by its creativity

[icewindandboringhorror]

examining a seemingly normal image only to slowly realize the clear signs of AI generated art.... i know what you are... you cannot hide your true nature from me... go back where you came from... out of my sight with haste, wretched and vile husk

[icharchivist]

was refreshing myself on some old myth for a bit and i read the french and english wiki page for the Charybdis' mythos, and i'm noticing something that i don't know if it's just the wiki being inaccurate or an actual difference (from the linguistic page it seems to be an actual difference) but

In English there's this expression about choosing between two equally bad horrible situations by saying "choosing between Scylla and Charybdis"

But in French the expression is "to fall from Charybdis to Scylla" and instead of a choice it's about managing to get out of a horrible situation only to get thrown into an even worse situation (the equivalent of the English's expression ""falling out of the frying pan into the fire")

if i believe the linguistic page there was a bit of borrowing around and technically both expressions are used in both language, but you're more likely to find the first one in English and the second one in French (very likely because Victor Hugo popularized "to fall from Charybdis to Scylla" with Les Misérables) (does not mean it started in French the origin of the expression is still Greek anyway, just talking about why the saying is more popular in French with weirdos like me)

idk i think it's cool on a sort of metatextual perspective that English People saw this myth and when "oof imagine picking between those two" while French people just chugged a bottle of wine and went "And it's a BINGO and LIFE SUCKS and it NEVER GETS EASIER you get BOTH OF THEM BABEYYY"

[aydascomprehendsubtext]

I don't want to see animals neglected but it's wild to see >100k notes on a post with the premise "I was correct to steal a guy's pet and now I'm sober." Like imagine if I said "I saw a puppy sitting next to a homeless guy passed out on a street. The puppy was whining and looked miserable in the hot sun so i took him home with me :)"

[kushamisaru]

Cyno and Tighnari: Collei is like a little sister to us

8/10 of posts in these tags: Parents???? Paewnts?,?¿ Parents yes! Hehe mom and dad. Siblings? I don't know her

[juuheizou]

“[character] eats people” not in a condemning hannibal or whatever as immoral art kind of way but “they eat people” in a trying to get people to appreciate the lack of easy answers to tokyo ghoul morals way

[musical-chick-13]

How do you fucking. Share art without feeling like it's the end of everything good in your life forever.

[mosspapi]

Used the word "ambivalent" in conversation tonight (dude asked if I like my watch strap bcuz we were wearing the same one and I said 'I've only ever had this one so I'm ambivalent lol') and then he asked what it meant and walked away when I explained it. What's up with that. Is that just him being him or was that like actually an inappropriate thing for me to have done lmao

[chchchchilisauce]

fucking HATE when someone has a good take but just like has to go and bring up something i'm well versed in and be incorrect about it. like. i'm not gonna be a dick and correct you esp if it's fairly inconsequential to ur argument, but like fuuuckkksaaauauagh can u just not bring up this thing if u don't know about it

[valshi]

Writing duels when you haven't fully designed the decks is hard. So now I'm just designing their decks. I've been doing this for like 7 hours and I'm still on the first of like four, maaaaaaybe five that I want.

End me.

[neverendingford]

.

[vibin-in-the-void]

sometimes I don't give a shit and that's ok <3

[luveline]

i'm missing coworker!james so much... is he doing okay?

James is poorly :( fem

James is a cruel kind of ill. Desperate to escape the dreaded ‘man flu’, he tries hard to portray the common cold. Doesn’t whine, groan or moan, simply suffers the near constant sneezing and his twinging neck without comment. 

Luckily, he has two —two! because you like him enough to be concerned! barely!— nice deskmates who ply him with tea and worry alike. 

“Did you take that antihistamine?” Remus asks. 

“I did, yeah. You watched me take it an hour ago and try as I might, I haven’t regurgitated it yet.” 

“Don’t be disgusting, he’s just worried,” you say. 

A month ago, you might’ve said it with deep, genuine ire. James annoys you and his choice of imagery is hardly workplace appropriate, but for some reason you’re good to him lately. You’re softening, and why shouldn’t you be? James is a boy worth softening for. 

He sneezes hard into a tissue in his palm and knocks the desk, sending his small crowd of figurines skittering, their light green bodies scuffed with scratches. They fall over each day. You like rearranging them. 

You also like feeding James biscuits, and pretending you don’t like him. Or maybe pretending you do. It’s hard to tell what’s real. 

“Jesus,” he says, forgetting to be demure as he drops his forehead against his closed fist. “I can’t take it much longer.” 

“You need to calm down, is all. Every time you sneeze you trigger the inflammation in your nose, which makes you more likely to sneeze again,” Remus says. He doesn’t sound particularly pitying, but he does then stand to grab James’ mug as he heads to the kitchen. 

In an office made up of mostly Brits, it’s extremely common for everyone to make one another a tea or coffee when they get one for themselves, but it’s a sweet gesture for Remus to keep James topped up nonetheless. It also provides for moments like this: you and him alone. Not awkward anymore. 

“Do you have painkillers?” he asks.

You open the drawer of your desk and offer him your pouch. “Here.” 

Inside are many things. A box of lil-lets, plasters in sterile wrappings, throat soothers, ibuprofen, a treasure trove of cures for little ailments. 

“Just, help yourself to anything you want.” 

“You’re an angel.” James unveils a shiny purple chocolate bar. “I can have Freddie?”

“Freddo,” you correct. “Come on, James, it’s on the packet.” 

He doesn’t truly want it. He doubts he could taste it, and he drops it back in. 

“Oh, no, you can have it!” you say, softer. “I’m just being pedantic.” 

“Thanks, but I don’t think I can do chocolate right now.” 

“Right, um… well, I have a sandwich?” 

“What kind of sandwich?” he asks. 

“One of those impossible BLT’s. But I can get you a proper sandwich, James. They have those sesame seed rolls in the vending machine.” 

James doesn’t understand why you’re being so nice to him. “I must look awful,” he murmurs, letting his aching, pulsing head drop onto the desk. He sniffs uselessly. Fuck, he hates work. Why can’t he go home?

“You never look awful,” you say. 

James turns his face to see you’ve lowered your own, resting your cheek in your hand, your knuckles grazing the table. 

“You’re being too nice to me. I’m dying.” 

“You’re the one who’s mean to me, James. I’m your unwilling victim.”

“As opposed to being my willing victim.” James hates being ill, his lips are dry and his throat feels sharp and he’s changed his mind, he does want the Freddo. “Please be nice to me again.” 

“You know what’s good for this? Nasal spray. That’ll fix you.” 

“You could fix me,” James says. You don’t answer. He presses his nose to the table. “My days are always good ones when you can't be bothered to pretend you don’t like me.” 

“Who says I’m pretending?” 

James whines. “That’s worse.” 

You tease a bit of his hair behind his ear. James is content to let you, content to never move again, balmed by the softness of your touch as you draw along the outline of his ear to his jaw. “Don’t press your glasses into your nose, you’ll start sneezing again,” you whisper. 

James refuses to move. “Stroke my hair,” he demands.

“No way.”

“You’re no fun.”

“But I’m having a much better day than you are.” 

He sulks. This is exactly why James hides your stuff and leaves you off of email chains you should probably be in. You’re horrible, awful, evil, with no sympathy for him and no friendliness, either. James was far better off when he was solely annoyed at you, and not whatever useless state of being this is where his mood depends on your willingness to make friends. If James could, he would—

“Are you okay?” you say, your voice as soft as your fingertip where it traces slowly through his curly hair. “Maybe you should go home and rest. I’m worried about you…” 

James might fall in love with you if you keep whispering sweet stuff like that. You hesitate at the nape of his neck before dragging your hand up through a tuft of curls. 

“If you don’t get better soon, your voice will go and I’ll have to talk to Lang and Co. on the phone again. You know I hate their finance team leader,” you finish. 

You sound so pretty that James almost misses your slight. Then decides he’ll allow it as long as you keep stroking his hair.  —

coworker james au

[tevanbuckley]

some low points from the ry*an g*zman interview because i need you all to feel my pain.

when talking about his celibacy (yes he uses that word): "I haven't entertained any interactions with any other females" — gave me the ick 0/10

uses the phrase "a woman's touch," to explain why women are inherently good at interior decorating(?) and that this skill is how women are able to enrich a successful man's life — side note: at no point do they talk about how men enrich women’s lives.

immediately after this the religious imagery takes a left turn and exits my frame of reference, bc instead of just asking "do you think you still have things to work on?" like a normal person, the host says "I want to know what one Thorn is in your flesh." — someone raised more religious than i was needs to chime in on if this is normal christian doctrine or a sign he might be in a cult. (is it a reference to the thorns in jesus' crown?)

ryan makes a weird comment about how "you've seen civilizations built on [a man in love]" — genuinely idk what the fuck this means — but it leads into a tangent about like, men as providers and how "I would do anything for my women."

"peace is key yeah we got enough problems in the world outside the house and so long as I come back to the house and I get peace," — maybe i'm being pedantic but the way he keeps framing woman as belonging in the home is 🚩🚩🚩🚩

"for the next woman I would have in my life I can see that they navigate their their problems and still offer peace to their men." — again 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

surprisingly claims he has been to therapy, which assuming is true, idk it worked.

the host: "women may be fighting internal battles you know kind of themselves do you believe that a woman still fighting those battles are able to still bring peace" — because remember ladies, no matter what you're going through your job is to bring peace to your man's home.

there's some more brief gender essentialist bs where ryan talks about how men "like to fix things," but are bad listeners, and how "problems within women are so specific to women that I wouldn't even try and and say that I have a grasp on them."

then the host randomly asks him if he thinks men need to be financially stable before entering a relationship or if dating a broke guy is a way to "present loyalty."

weirdly ryan actually kind of dodges this question, but ends up suggesting social media is a good place to get "great examples of what does and what doesn't seem to work." in relationships — and no. no it isn't.

oh and then he starts talking about conor mcgregor for some reason? and how it's bad he disrespected his wife by stepping outside their marriage — and i mean sure, although infidelity feels second to the rape accusations??

says it's harder for a woman to come into a man's life when he's already established because "now the man has proven to himself that he never needed a woman." — which, interesting given how later he talks about how women need to stop trying to do the independent woman thing.

he also gets weirdly possessive over his daughter at one point. does the classic "God forbid I find out that man disrespects my little baby." — idk, on the surface he talks about how he wants her to know her value, but it seems like he has a pretty limited view of what that value is.

the host drops lore about how she moved out of her parents house at 14/15 and how she had to "stop thinking like a woman and start thinking also like a man," but stay feminine and "know what a man wants and how to cater to that but also still be soft." — i mean good lord, i don't even know where to start 🤢.

this btw is the preamble to ryan's rant about "independent women."

and god the more i read the more i am deeply concerned about the woman hosting (i saw someone earlier say she's 21). this woman is barely an adult and has so much internalised misogyny, talking about how "us women don't know how to direct our emotions." and "in today's generation a lot of men are deprived of even the small things because a lot of women are takers."

this whole interview is utterly bizarre and i feel like it's taken years off my life. like i said earlier, this isn't a normal podcast he got weird on, this is straight up christian propaganda

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

It's Bothering me so much that Taylor Swift is so fake smart-girl coded, I need to say this:

I have a degree in both Philosophy and English Literature....

She used the term Soliloquy wrong in her song by using it to refer to people espousing nonsense while complaining in an echo-chamber about her.

Instead, a soliloquy is the most honest and introspective a character will ever be. Often the character will stand to the front center of the stage and, as if in a dream, speak openly to themselves (and in respect to the audience) lay out the truth, or the agony of whichever conflict haunts the plot. So, anyway she's just plain wrong in her usage of the term.

I am not giving a sanctimonious soliloquy. Miss Taylor Swift, you are wrong, and I am speaking honestly.

She finishes the lyric "sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see" and I just want to mention that a soliloquy requires an audience... so she does not know what she is talking about by saying that there is no audience for a soliloquy.

Also, for the record, I don't think Taylor Swift knows anything of substance about Aristotle. I, on the other hand, took a three-hour long oral exam over Aristotle's life work while out-of-my-mind-high on Dayquil and pain meds after a surgery. I got an "A", and, somehow, I lived through that, I doubt the validity of Swift's claims to know anything at all about philosophy. Especially, considering how all her songs are about as deep as a puddle.

She's completely lost her credibility.

The woman did not even finish High School in a traditional, well-rounded way. I think she read a handful of Joe's books and now thinks real highly of herself.

Edit: I don't mean to make fun of her for being dumb. I'm frustrated that she's "stepping on my lawn" and making her legion of fans think that she totally knows what she's talking about when it comes to literary references in her work or philosophy. It's obvious that she does not actually understand the concepts she attempts to engage with.

Her only real literary skill is name dropping actually talented writers or philosophers in her songs.

Edit 2: Since some people want to come on this post and tell me that I am being needlessly pedantic about her use of words. Go away. A soliloquy is an ancient literary form, one which transcends cultures and centuries, and I, as a scholar of English Literature, am in the position to say that Swift is speaking about the form incorrectly. She obviously did not even google the form, it's clear she has very little real acquaintance with half the literature concept or authors she names drops.

Sure, soliloquies can be unreliable (Hamlet's "To Be, or not to be" is the most obvious example). However, the fact of the matter is that soliloquy hinges on the Honesty of the character. Swift writing that it's actually the opposite of honesty proves to me that she has no real idea about the literary form.

[doberbutts]

So I'm going to ask an honest question here and ask you please explain in layman's terms. Every trans person I know irl has no concept of the transandrophobia discourse but every time I see more of it online I'm...unsettled, and it takes a lot to power through all the terminology.

I initially was really receptive to transandrophobia because the rationale behind being against it sounded stupid and akin to label discourse in the queer community. I saw "being a man is not an axis of oppression therefore you don't get your Own Word" and thought that was pedantic nonsense, that language doesn't need to adhere to that rule, and that it's helpful to have a term designated towards transmasculine experiences so people can find those experiences easier. Not that trans women's experiences aren't also beneficial! But that, well, obviously no matter how similar the experience birds of a feather and that sense of comfort of sharing identity still matters. This is true for other issues of identity too, I find, weather that's a good thing or a bad thing idk, but it is human.

The thing is I follow a lot of transwomen and have been seeing some alarms being raised about the community being formed around this word. You blocked one of the most egregious offenders so I trust you (which is why I'm asking sorry) I've seen a lot of misogyny and essentialism from people using the term "transandrophobia" and more egregiously "transmisandry." Idk your opinion on the latter term (I haven't scrolled down far enough on your blog, sorry if you talked about this before) but to me it's unconscionable. I was taught that transandrophobia existed as a term specifically NOT to use that term, that elevating misandry to a legitimate issue was dangerous for obvious reasons and it was one of the reasons why I was so supportive of transandrophobia. To me, it seemed like an awareness that misogyny was the prevailing issue behind all issues of gender oppression, but when I actually look at the tag I...get uncomfortable.

Blogs I follow have repeatedly been upset at misogyny from this community, and have been using the term "transandrobro" to describe behavior they find akin to cis MRAs. I've truly seen horrible things with hundreds, sometimes thousands of notes to it that do, unfortunately, feel like women are being blamed for the plight of trans men. I've seen cis people say they were originally on MRA reddits and then came to tumblr to "confront the misandry directly" only to wholeheartedly adopt transandrophobia into their worldview. It's hard because I KNOW I shouldn't judge a community based on a few crazies but it truly does feel sometimes like "transandrophobia" gives misogynists a venue to air their woman-hating to an eager audience, kinda like how "Karen" has been co-opted beyond the og meaning of being for racist white woman to any woman being mildly rude.

So like, here it is: can transandrophobia exist without being co-opted by misogynists? Is there a threshold of proliferation for misogynists destroying this word until a new one needs to be made? Or will every word trying to identify the transmasculine experience be inevitably co-opted by misogynists because misogynists are just that powerful, so people should double down harder on the word and work to push misogynists out?

(Also am I going crazy, or did this word a year ago used to have a WAY better community than the one I see nowadays. Back then I could find your blog and really compassionate people easily, and now it's just...bad.)

It is a little hard to understand some of this post but I will do my best to answer what I think is being asked.

To put simply, I think the reason why it was better a year or two ago is because the majority of the people who were actually trying to further the conversation and not just circle jerk in the echo chamber got chased off. Transandrophobia, anti-transmasculinity, transandromisia, transmascphobia... the guys who coined these are largely either not posting at all anymore or post far far less than they used to. They were harassed and the constant exposure to transphobia made them shut down their blogs for their own mental health. Not all of them, but a lot of the so-called "big names" had this happen.

Even I stopped posting for a while and shuttered the doors for a bit outside of a long queue of dog photos because of how much it was affecting my mental health.

In their place remain people who are not committed to the same conversation. Perhaps they are younger, or less familiar with the building blocks of theory that really should be required reading, or are still stuck in their "everything sucks and it's YOUR fault" phase. Maybe they do come from different places, like 4chan or reddit, which are less prone to this sort of discussion. A lot of the original crowd had been on tumblr long enough to remember when we could still edit posts, and I keep seeing people who would have been in elementary school at that time posting to the tag nowadays.

I was discussing this problem on discord with a small group of friends and one of them- a trans fem- called it second wave transandrophobia discourse as a bitter joke. I think she is more right than wrong, regardless.

I'm not sure who you believe I've blocked- in general I don't air out who I block on this blog because at nearly 12k followers there are too many people who would love to dogpile someone for the sin of disagreeing with me and I do my best to prevent that. I don't want anyone to be harassed, after all. There's a lot of assumptions that have been made about my block and follow behavior that vary from "hilarious but untrue" to "outright offensive slander".

People are people, and some people are shitheads. Trans mascs and people who want to support trans mascs are not exempt from that. I say this all the time- Kayne West is objectively a shitty person but his existence doesn't prove the concept of antiblackness to be a myth. Caitlyn Jenner is objectively a shitty person but her existence doesn't prove the concept of transmisogyny to be a myth. So why do shitty trans mascs prove our own theory to be dangerous or nonexistent? Why hold us to a higher standard than any other marginalized group?

I could ask you the same question- there are posts on here with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of notes made by trans fems and cis women who blame their problems with transmisogyny on trans mascs. There are people coming from reddit, Twitter, 4chan who are being actively transphobic and misogynistic and claiming they're doing it for the good of transfeminism. There are posts filled with misogyny and bioessentialism and gender essentialism and even interphobia and racism and transphobia being left completely unchecked. Do you think it would be acceptable for me to ask if that means transmisogyny theory should be abandoned or if we should just accept that it will draw people with bad intentions?

Or do you think the better answer is to focus instead on finding those with a good head on their shoulders, and making sure it's them who has their voice heard? Do you think we should maybe not judge entire demographics because there exists some shitty people who claim the same identity?