#if there is inaccurate info or misgendering

[character-profiles]

Event: The Sun Vanished The Sun Saga

somehow, @nefarious-exclam and @mini-games managed to extinguish the sun. This resulted in the return of the Ice People, ancient people freed from their eternal imprisonment, and with the world frozen over, they were free to reclaim their empires. Their ice magic froze anyone over from mere touch, and it acted like a contagious virus, having infected @mini-games.

Im not sure how, but @glitches-and-bugs managed to clone a glitched version of the sun in @nefarious-exclam's basement and promptly ate it.

Nefarious, likely mad that he now had a competition to take over the world, took on the brunt of the ice people's invasion, while Mini and @advancement-made worked on reigniting the sun.

Advancement managed to squish the sun with an orb of fire and plasma, relighting it. I am unable to offer explanations for this.

status offered a thawing device to nefarious, to help thaw out mini-games. while the deal was for 50gp, he doubled it and got away with the scam.

It is stated that Selection lost his eye to the Ice people long ago, and implies quite a long history with them.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

"Ed Iskandar talked with God. Then it was Lucifer’s turn. Now he was addressing Adam and Eve.

[...]

Right now, Iskandar was rehearsing the plays from Act I, including Madeleine George’s 10-minute piece about the Fall of Man, which she gives the elaborate title,  “A Worm Walks Into A Garden or The Fall of Man, an experiment in motive and comedy.”  In it, Lucifer tells dumb jokes to Adam and Eve, as a way of seducing them. Adam finds them funny. Eve doesn’t.

“You’re missing a crucial part of your anatomy,” Lucifer says to Eve. “The funnybone.”

Lucifer is being played by Asia Kate Dillon.

[...]

Dillon was writhing and entwining themself around Eve.  Suddenly Chase Brock, the show’s choreographer, got down on the floor and started to writhe on the floor along with Lucifer. Brock had researched the earthworm, and showed some pictures of earthworms to Dillon on his laptop to suggest other moves they could make."

"50 different plays by almost as many different playwrights is a massive undertaking in which each vignette varies in tone from the one before it.  The actors playing the characters do not change from play to play; this forces the performers to be as comfortable and convincing with farce as they are playing tragedy.  It is also fascinating to contemplate the mental and emotional gymnastics that each performer of The Bats (the resident acting company of The Flea) must have undergone to ensure that each character maintains the same internal psychological throughline when they appear in different plays by very different authors.

The first act deals with the Old Testament books and the Nativity.  In playwright Dale Orlandersmith’s Song of the Trimorph, the angels in Heaven mindlessly worship God (a deliciously petty, yet shrewdly authoritative Matthew Jeffers), who takes it as His due until Lucifer (Asia Kate Dillon) starts to question whether love without choice means anything.

Dillon’s beautifully delicate, white-haired devil is one of the show’s most complex figures. Watching them evolve from nuanced philosopher to diabolical heavy to world-weary cynic, depending on the vignette, is fascinating.  The narrative speeds its way through the Bible. Highlights include Madeleine George’s surprisingly feminist take on the Adam and Eve story; Hwang’s marvelously urgent Cain and Abel tale, which posits the first murder as a story of vengeance against a capricious God; and Mallery Avidon’s whimsically horrifying tale of Noah’s Flood, which also entails the deaths of everyone who didn’t make it aboard the Ark.

[...]

The show’s second section deals with the Life of Jesus, with Colin Waitt’s astonishingly variegated boy-next-door Jesus shifting from an idealistic dreamer as he travels with Mary and Joseph to a forceful, almost angry philosopher when he argues with Lucifer about the nature of love to a bratty dolt when he confronts Gabriel about his inevitable fate.  The fact that the playwrights clearly have a different idea of Jesus’s personality sets Wiatt a complex task:  He has to make his Christ the same in all situations; whether he’s being comic or tragic, Wiatt is convincing and moving in a performance of stunning versatility.

Indeed, his likable turns in Gabriel Jason Dean’s beautiful Christ Enters Jerusalem makes his ferocious agonies in Qui Nguyen’s Christ Before Herod and his subsequent crucifixion all the more heartrending. The third act deals with Christ’s resurrection and humanity’s fate at the Day of Judgment, and includes a series of plays set in modern times, as well as God’s final words to Lucifer, Jesus, and to us.  The show’s final Day of Judgment coda by Jose Rivera is an essay of forgiveness and unexpected love."

"Overall, the point of view of The Mysteries leans toward deism, the Enlightenment philosophy that presents God as a kind of clockmaker who created the universe, then left it alone to run according to its own laws. We see God squabbling with, then abandoning, Lucifer, setting in motion the events of the Bible, but even in Eden he is surprisingly enigmatic.

[...]

And, as one of the thieves killed with Jesus prophesies, it may all be for naught; he conjures up a future in which "the religion founded -- haha --upon your existence will be held up to justify the slaughter of millions over hundreds and thousands of years, for the brutal sins of domination and exploitation, the lynchings, the massacres and genocide, the relentless militarism. Everything you stood for will be erased."

[...]

In any case, the company is an almost constant joy. Among the more striking performances, [...] Asia Kate Dillon is a compelling presence as Lucifer."

"Four dozen playwrights take four dozen spiritual positions, which allows bubbles of radical reimagining to emerge only to sink again beneath the waves. For instance, our very first playwright, Dael Orlandersmith, paints Lucifer (Asia Kate Dillon) as a sweetheart Cordelia type refusing to curry favor with an insecure God (Matthew Jeffers). The fallen Light bringer keeps popping up throughout, and yet while Lucifer makes a number of solid points—many vigorously antichurch—they're still costumed as a blood-smeared reptile. Does evil exist? Or does it only exist when it can dress super cool?"

"It begins with a scene in heaven where we meet the lavish Angel Chorus that will be with us for the duration of the play, and witness Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven, something like in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

[...]

We also meet the rebellious Lucifer in that first scene in heaven, played with dazzling cynicism by Asia Kate Dillon, and at the same time the angel Gabriel, played by Alice Allemano, who, obedient to God, in contrast to Lucifer, struggles valiantly trying to make sense out of God’s commands and following through on them.  These two, Lucifer and Gabriel, played by tall, striking people, fine actors who resemble one another, hold the vast array together like bookends.

The scenes in the Garden of Eden are delightful, played, appropriately in the nude, by Jaspal Binning as Adam and Alesandra Nahodil as Eve.  Throughout the play, Biblical episodes are interpreted by the many playwrights in non-canonical ways and the first of these is brilliant:  the knowledge the first couple gain through their disobedient eating of the apple is — how to tell a good joke and how to enjoy one!"

"Act I – The Fall begins with Creation and Lucifer’s fall from grace with God. Lucifer is played by a steady, radiant Asia Kate Dillon who reappears frequently to mix things up with earthlings and the rival angel, Gabriel, played by Alice Allemano makes goodness alluring. God is played by an extremely patient and multi-dimensional Matthew Jeffers whose sense of humor humanizes the Lord."

"As starting points, Dael Orlandersmith’s “Song of the Trimorph (Lucifer’s Lament)” and Liz Duffy Adams’s “Falling for You” are somewhat too abstract, particularly “Falling for You,” which has Lucifer wonder, “How can there be love in the absence of being?”"

"Starting with the Fall, we are introduced to the Angel Gabriel and the fallen angel Lucifer, played by two equally lissome and brilliant young actors, Alice Allemano and Asia Kate Dillon. They compete for God’s affections by using a chorus of singing punk angels."

"Asia Dillon as Lucifer brought the precise mixture of demonic delight and fragility necessary for such an adaptation: watching their performance was like looking at a raw cut in the bowels of the earth, brimming with fire and unimaginable sadness."

(no relevant quotes, but throwing in a brief pdf of a grantee project report that focuses on Engagement)

[controlledhues]

/ / do you check your moots' bio/info each time you're writing a reply so you don't misgender them or write something inaccurate about them or are you normal???

[oceanbornnomad]

Gaslighting, what it really is and how you can prevent it:

The term gaslighting is a trendy term that many use and know, specially,  across social media platforms. But even though gaslighting is a trendy term, the behavior it’s meant to describe is incredibly toxic. Gaslighting causes a victim to question their own feelings, instincts, and their overall perception of reality. And while many forms of emotional abuse present similar characteristics, pinning the term on just any emotionally unpleasant situation muddles the meaning for those who experience it firsthand, thus creating confusion and misconceptions about what gaslighting actually looks like. So how can you tell if someone is gaslighting you, or if it’s something else entirely? Let’s discuss.

Let us say you being misgendered and you tell someone: “I really feels so sad about this and angry.” And their response is: “You’ll be fine. Don’t be dramatic.” They are suggesting that your reality is inaccurate, that what you are feeling is not actual sadness or anger, you are just being “dramatic”. To label these feelings or concerns as drama explains the gaslighting concept, kicked up a few notches.

“Gaslighting is similar to the concept of invalidation. It’s undermining somebody’s sense of reality and denying the facts, and their feelings, to create what is a blatantly false narrative. It makes someone question their judgment, their perception of reality, their experience, and sometimes their sanity.” Over time, being gaslit breaks down the victim’s self esteem and their own ability to trust their own perspective on things or values. The main goal of the gaslighter is to assume and remain in control of X situation. They are in control because they have eroded the victims trust and perception of facts. In social media, we then experience the pack syndrome, in which people take advantage of the fragility of the victims reputation and try to further invalidated.

What would be the difference between a simple or complicated disagreement on a subject to gaslighting? Let me give you an example: A crime has been committed and the sole witness of such crime is a prostitute. The fact that she is a prostitute should have no bearing in her account of the facts; however the defense lawyer, “intentionally” brings up her sex-worker status to gaslight its validity. The operating word here is “intentionally.” The gaslighter wants and needs to undermine the victims validity. The prostitute’s choice of work doesn’t invalidate what she witnessed. Lying IS NOT always gaslighting, a person may lie or try to when they feel they are in a certain situation; for example: You catch your boyfriend - girlfriend cheating on a social ap. then they try to lie their way out of it by saying things, like I do not know that person or that is a fake conversation; this would be an habitual liars response. However, if the response goes: “You made that up”, “you faked that so you could have a fight” you are a crazy jealous person”, this is gaslighting.

There are several gaslighting techniques an emotionally abusive person can resort to, including countering their victim’s memory, pretending to have forgotten what actually occurred, and trivializing their victim’s needs, feelings and reputation. “This isn’t a big deal; this person is being dramatic”; “You’re so entitled”; “You’re going crazy”; “There you go again, bringing up *insert thing here*”; “No one else will believe you”; “You are toxic.” The real kicker is that most gaslighters have issues like childhood trauma, fears, control issues, power and dominance. In a social environment they want to give the impression of Money, Power and Fame.

For additional support, the person who believes they’re being gaslit should aim to keep proof of everything—texts, photos, actual receipts, recordings, and more. The documented info is helpful, not only to have proof against their gaslighting person, but to have something that grounds them in reality while confronting the person and eventually “the pack”. On social media a victim needs to find a safe place, do not be afraid to block or exclude people that gaslight you. Surround yourself with people that supports you. The most important part for a person that has been or is being gaslighted is not to win an argument or followers and likes; the most important part is to auto validate yourself, your feelings and emotions and moving forward learning that they do not need external validation to be on the right.

[compassionatereminders]

defer to your friends as to what terms they're comfortable with personally, but understand that not everyone is okay with it, and while amab and afab arent inherently misgendering terms, as they can help in some conversations about trans issues and topics, to apply these terms to all trans bodies and people without their consent is inaccurate, transphobic and very much misgendering as it outs them immediately and reduces them to a gender that is not theirs. not that you were doing this. just a heads up. talk to other trans people and find trustworthy resources, saying this as an anon, dont rely on random anons to learn how to be an ally to trans people. got to put the work in yourself and also know who you're getting the info from

I get where you're coming from, but I wasn't applying the term to trans people in general. I was specifically referring to my friends - and I had them both read the posts in question to make sure that I used terminology they were personally comfortable with. But that being said, if any of you have some book or podcast recs which covers subjects like this, I'd love to check them out and learn more!

[hazardous-femme]

Tw: Transphobia, PragerU

Hey guys, so this new HORRENDOUS ad is going about youtube that is so awfully transphobic I gagged. If you see an ad of a blonde woman with a white lab coat who can’t really look at the camera, and it’s a PragerU ad, skip for your own comfort. Report it. Do what you will. There’s a little info under the cut but i couldn’t make myself watch the whole thing, so it’s a brief summary of what I could manage to sit through and what the comments were speaking about. p.s. this shit is marketed as a fundraising ad to “stop youtube from censoring their videos”. there’s a fucking reason your videos are censored. This shit is gross.

I couldn’t believe this shit show. I never even heard of PragerU before but this- this is shit. They describe the “trend” of trans men to be “disturbing.” and constantly refer to trans men as women. “You will know some women who identify as transgender.” The whole time! Blatantly misgendering all of them. I looked at the comments of the video to see if this was just some sort of.. misinformed speech? A complication of words? Nope! The whole five minute long video is just transphobia. Trans individuals are blowing up their comments talking about how terribly inaccurate it all is. She uses the excuse of “There was less transgender individuals during (this time).” You wanna know why? Because it wasn’t safe to come out then. given its not 100% safe now but it’s safer. there was MILLIONS of transgender individuals through time. you’re just ignoring all of them in favor of making them “disturbing.” They figured hey! if we put this lady in a white coat she’ll look like she knows what she’s talking about! It’s just horrid.

[rotationalsymmetry]

I know some people on here are “you shouldn’t get your news from tumblr” and it’s not wrong, but sometimes it comes across as “if you aren’t absorbing news regularly, you are failing at a basic adulting skill.”

Which is also probably not wrong exactly, but I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of the barriers to getting regular news and some things that can help with that. (To a large degree I’m sorting this out myself: I haven’t had a reliable news habit, well, in my life tbh. At one point in my teens I tried to read the newspaper daily, but I didn’t know how to filter the articles for importance, so that didn’t go well.) Sometimes one person’s basic adulting skill is someone else’s virtual marathon.

People who regularly follow the news generally have some daily routine around it. With older media that might mean reading the newspaper over breakfast or on one’s commute, or watching the TV news at the same time every evening.

With the internet available 24/7 I’m not sure what people who follow the news online do for habits. (Maybe some people still have an over breakfast/during commute news habit? Some people have a “whenever I reach for my phone, even if it’s an hour past bedtime” news reading habit, which is not ideal to say the least.) Since the coronavirus hit, I’ve been checking the news app on my phone pretty often, but it’s...as likely to be right before bed or when I have no spoons as at a time when I’m actually likely to be able to absorb info. This is a thing: being able to interpret and make sense of news is work, it requires a certain amount of effort, focus, and clarity. It’s not just something you can fit into any old corner in your day. (I mean, you can, but it’s probably not ideal.)

There’s the issue of how do you decide what’s important. If you have one physical newspaper from a major daily news organization, you have several hours of information. With the internet, you have a more or less infinite supply of news. So, how do you decide when you’ve followed *enough* news?

For emotionally sensitive people, people with anxiety or depression, people with PTSD etc, following the news can be extremely stressful and draining, or can throw you off emotionally for hours after. This makes it very hard for some people to follow the news, especially since (see above) with internet news you have to build in your own off switch and decide for yourself how much news is enough news. (One way to minimize this is to follow news on a schedule and plan some buffer time afterwards, but also I think for many people choosing to go on a temporary or indefinite news vacation can be a completely justifiable step in improving mental health. Sometimes accepting “this is in theory a good thing to do, but in practice it’s just not going to happen right now” is really good self-care.)

Too many options: which news do you follow? With newspaper and TV news, you can pick one station or your local newspaper. With internet news, again, it’s a bottomless well. So even knowing where to start can be challenging.

Price: the old “buy a newspaper for a quarter/a few quarters” option is no longer available. At least I haven’t consciously registered seeing a news box in a while. It used to be possible to just pick out a newspaper once in a while when the headlines were particularly interesting; now, some news is free (apart from the cost of wifi/cellular data) and some news has monthly subscriptions (which can be intimidating for people on a tight budget, people who have unpredictable finances or a history of overdrawing their bank account, or people who just aren’t sure how much news they’re actually going to read.) It’s harder to follow news just a little bit, which means it’s harder to go from basically not following the news (or only reading what’s on your social media feed) to independently following the news.

Screens: it’s harder to follow news without following it on an electronic device, which is often a problem. It can be difficult to switch from phone or laptop as entertainment to phone as news source. It can also be hard to switch from laptop as work to laptop as news and back.

News sometimes missed important stuff -- it’s possible to “follow the news” and still miss things you would have wanted to hear about. This is a problem by itself, and also a problem for perfectionists: if you aren’t going to find out about everything relevant even if you’re trying hard, why try at all?

There is an increasing perception of the news as being biased or outright lying (”fake news”); this isn’t just a problem on the right, it’s also very much a concern for leftists (’mainstream media”, corporate influence, bias towards the status quo.)

News -- respectable, mainstream news sources that hire fact checkers -- can also perpetuate harmful stereotypes, among other problems in terms of how groups of people are portrayed: racist stereotypes, stereotypes about mental illness, misgendering trans people, etc. Marginalized people who see standard news sources as being full of microaggressions against people like them may be less inclined to follow or trust the news. (Sometimes this and the previous point can be countered by finding less hostile news sources -- in particular I know Americans who follow non-American news sources to get better world news.) (In general whether the news is written for people like you or not for people like you can make a huge difference in how comfortable it is to follow the news.)

Social media isn’t intrinsically bad for sharing articles you find important, it’s only a problem when people share inaccurate news. (And also, I have found for myself it’s often hard to switch between reading short posts and reading articles, so often I really don’t absorb more than the headline when other people share articles, or the headlines plus the poster’s comments.)

There’s probably other things I haven’t mentioned, more basic stuff: not everyone is literate, people can have sensory processing issues or disabilities that make it harder to follow certain types of news, some people have language processing problems, many people have so much going on in their lives and so little energy/time/spoons/etc to deal with it that it’s very difficult to make following the news a priority. Access to technology. Difficulty accessing news in a language one is fluent in.

Going back to the first points, people whose parents/whoever raised them didn’t have a regular news habit might have a harder time developing a regular news habit themselves due to it not being modeled for them -- I know the schools I went to had us doing assignments around reading newspaper articles, but I’m pretty sure that’s less effective in getting people to follow the news regularly than seeing your parents read the news over breakfast or watch TV news in the evening. One potential way around this is posts like this and asking other people how they follow the news.

[uncanny-tranny]

Likely you are right: after all, she grew up in post USSR country, but I.. just don't know how to handle her and what to do. Last time I shared some info with her she called it trans propaganda, then corrected it to "pro trans stuff", saying that she won't read it properly. It's very frustrating for me, I can't even properly talk to both of my parents considering the topic and I still live with them. Being exposed to this mishandling with all the misgendering and just denial is.. painful.

Oh I totally get that. I didn't mean to make it sound as though I was trying to purposefully diminish how you feel about her attitude. It's certainly an inaccurate way to think, but perhaps it's something she may need to get used to? Like, my dad can sometimes come across as intolerant, but I can't deny that he's grown over the years after I've come out. To some people, they don't know how to include trans people into their understanding of gender and gender identity, so it's easier to deny trans people agency or the ability to decide. After awhile, some people realize that this way of thinking is only a hindrance not only to trans people, but to themselves. I believe this is starting to happen for my dad, so perhaps it'll be something that may happen to your parent/s in the future? I know it sucks, I'm in your boat. But their opinions about trans people aren't a reflection of you. You're not your parents, and while it is unfortunate, what I hope you can do is to focus on yourself and your well-being.

[freddieandersen]

I don’t think it’s right to refer to fleming as cis tbh when he has specifically said I am not a man lol pronouns /=/ gender and he doesn’t have to make a statement about being nb

i have literally no idea when this is from but thanks for the info! good for him! you're absolutely right that it's both inaccurate and straight up misgendering to say he's cis when he's not lol

[thiost]

My sibling is trans, and I'm wondering what deadnaming is? And, like, I generally use "male" words like dude anyway, but I'm mostly just wondering if thise times I forget, or I have to say "my sister" to my grandparents, is that genuinely damaging? My sibling talks about dysphoria, but I also don't understand what that is? If you can answer my questions, thank you. If you can't, I'll just have to do a more in depth Google search, but I'm worried about inaccurate info. But yeah, bye now.

hey! im typically fine w questions like these as long as they're respectful (which u were), but id advise asking if it's okay first since some ppl arent as comfy with that!

but, to answer ur question:

deadnaming is a form of misgendering in which you use the birth name of somebody who is trans instead of their chosen name. it's called a deadname cause the name is dead! it doesn't exist anymore, it's gone!

slip ups will happen sometimes, and while you should apologize and correct yourself, dont turn it into a big deal, as it'll make it awkward for the other person and usually leads to us trans ppl having to comfort the cis ppl in our lives. most of us aren't gonna get angry, although it can negatively impact us, especially depending on the severity of their dysphoria.

now, onto dysphoria! being transgender is described as having an incongruence with your assigned gender at birth. a common symptom of this is dysphoria, which usually means being uncomfortable with your own body or the way others perceive you due to the feeling that these traits are associated with their assigned gender. trans men will have dysphoria about their chest, hips/curves, and voice a lot of the time. being misgendered or deadnamed can also be a source of dysphoria. some trans ppl dont have dysphoria, some have mild dysphoria, and for some it can be so extreme that it causes sever anxiety/or depression. and trans ppl will be dysphoric abt different parts of their body! not all trans men hate their chests or their voice, and that's okay!

and, the topic of what to call your brother in front of other ppl comes down to this: ask him!!! set boundaries!! make sure you know who he's out to/wants to be out to before you go blabbing it out bc although we love hearing our right name and pronouns, coming out is absolutely terrifying and even dangerous. it's best to allow him to decide how and when he comes out, and even if he doesn't want to, dont pressure him!! it's okay to take your time on this stuff. it's a huge deal to come out as trans, sometimes.

so, my general advice

a. support him when you can! dont be weird about it but even just calling him by his chosen name and pronouns can honestly make his day

b. dont over apologize/make this experience about yourself. this is his identity and his struggle, not yours. you have no idea what he's dealing with.

c. be sure to set boundaries and ask him what he is comfortable with, how he wants to be addressed and around who

d. ask him how you can help!!! many trans guys will want things like a binder. make sure you know the dangers of it and make sure he does too, and that he's keeping himself safe primarily.

if you have any other questions, my inbox and dm's are always open!