#im talking not a single thing

[the-kneesbees]

m sick :[

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[hinamie]

binding vow

[iooiu]

good to know all casey jones’ are the same

[lemongogo]

they should get to kill each other at least twice .i think

[daily-grian]

Mod Owl lore: I used to be an artist for an original closed adoptables species called Wuffies on a niche rp forum board and I've been thinking about them again recently, so I thought i'd doodle Grian as a wuffy. Bonus fun fact - wuffies do not usually have wings, but I was the only person to ever get a wuffy with wings cause it was a birthday present from the species owner and I still have it :3 It would feel criminal to not give Grian wings though

[alicenpai]

buncha wanpee busts from may (boa) + 2023 (the sketches) that i never uploaded.. saw da wanpee news on twt today so ive been in the mood

[kyonshi-8610]

more than one week i will be gone

translations and img descriptions in alt thing

[katabay]

original thief series basso & garrett :)

ngl, it's about quality over quantity for me. an npc can have a total of three minutes of screen time, but if they have a cool name, they can live rent free in my head and I'll spend several hours trying to decipher drawable features from a blurry screenshot of pixels

there is a vague hint of a story here, and that's because every time I try to play thi4f, I get incredibly frustrated with how Not Fun the game play is. like, is the story good? well. but it has a PLAGUE. that should've given it instant 'I'll replay this once a year' status in my heart, but the game play sucks so bad that I've never finished it. I can't believe Not Fun gameplay beat out my obsession with narrative plagues.

anyway, the idea is basically if the original era had a game with a plague centric narrative and some other stuff I liked out of thi4f thrown into a narrative blender, with a heavy dash of horror thrown in because some parts of the thief games were scarier to me than entire dedicated horror genre games.

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

[mamawasatesttube]

this might be mean but. it really ticks me off when people respond to authors and artists wishing for actual community and engagement with their works by saying "oh but you see im just so anxious i cannot offer you any kind words." with the optional "but do please keep making things for me anyway!" because like...

a) do you understand how anxiety-inducing it can be to pour a little piece of your soul into a work of art and share it publicly? i feel like you don't see the people creating these things as people like you and that is an issue. we are people who just really love a thing and want to talk about it with other people who also love that thing.

but moreover, and this is the part that might be mean, b) damn why doesn't your anxiety prevent you from making excuses to us then? i wish it did! like if you're SO anxious about a fic author blocking you for saying something nice, why are you not anxious about getting blocked for telling that author "okay but i don't want to comment on your works though"??? because i can tell you which of these two things is way more likely to piss me off and it isn't the comment.

like. idk man. if you really don't want to comment on and engage with people's creative works, no one can force you to. but also consider maybe not commenting on and engaging with those people's posts just to explain that you don't want to comment on/engage with their works. if you are so committed to staying quiet and being a passive consumer then commit to the bit and stop asking creative people who put way more of themselves out there than you are to pat you on the back and reassure you that you'll still keep getting free content even if you can't do so much as drop a "this was really good!" in the comments.

[applecranberryjuice]

Something something it's a metaphor. Hair as a form of communication but also as passage of time and also as a way for letting people in and also as a detail etc etc you get it

Actual explanation in the tags btw

I'm really nervous about this comic actually, is not the best. It doesn't make sense, and the art is mid, but I put love in it and I think that's enough

[bonefall]

i found a god awful doc about this one person (who, too, is a god awful being) trying to reason why mudClaw would be a bad leader. I'ma try to find the doc but meanwhile I'll submit this because someone could have the link, I'll need your honest thought about it bcs why are we defending oneWhiker now

Anon, buddy, I'm gonna have to sit you down and gently discourage you from casually calling random human people "god awful beings" in my inbox like this. Not when you're just talking about relatively basic media analysis. That isn't ok or normal.

I hope that when I speak harshly, it's coming from a place of condemning hurtful actions and the tangible harm that they cause. I don't appreciate people trying to get me to directly beef with other people directly by requesting I break down their individual posts or analysis documents (when I ask for people to share links, it's so I can see and prepare to counter the ideas because they usually "float downstream" if they get popular); but in a second ask, you linked this document and there's nothing harmful in it. In fact, it's got a far more neutral tone than I'd take if I was writing an analysis about Mudclaw.

If you couldn't tell the difference between a document like this and one that contains active abuse apologia rhetoric, I would be filled with concern. But I don't think you read it. I think you maybe skimmed it and stopped reading, or just heard the title.

Because this document literally says this;

and your takeaway, something you felt so strongly about that you came to me hoping I'd validate it, was "Why Are We Defending Onewhisker Now."

Art is a tool we can use to explore our own biases, and teach us something about ourselves. That overwhelming sense of anger and disgust that you probably felt when you saw "Mudclaw Would Be A Bad Leader" made you jump to an emotional conclusion and you assumed something that was not said. I know the feeling. You might have had a reactionary impulse.

You are not a bad person for doing that-- you're human. You can grow.

Why did it upset you this much, though? Is there something very personal about this that set you off? ...are you spending a lot of time in spaces online that keep you angry? These are questions for you to reflect with.

I do not know the owner of this document or "what they've done," if anything, so I will not link it, because their Discord is at the bottom of the doc. If they are truly a "god awful being", please do not engage, just block and move on. Nothing is accomplished by following around 'A Bad Guy' and boosting their cat takes.

But something VERY bad WOULD be accomplished if I indulged an anon for a situation I know nothing about and unwittingly became part of a harassment campaign. How do I know that you've got good intentions?

I usually just delete unsolicited links to docs and videos that are 'fightbaiting' like this-- trying to get me to beef publicly with a 3rd person. But I've seen more of these than usual lately so I would like to try and cool it down.

[stuckinapril]

so unimpressed w men rn. it’s just so whatever

[insomnya777]

joel etho single dads au .........

[amphirrhvx]

ooo he's eating 🍜(HS'05 AU takeda was made by @kiinuuzzz <3)