#just little usamerican things

[forestkodama]

I will forever be amused by the fact that, when asked about what first tipped him off that my partner and I are "hippies", the independent contractor we hired to drywall our basement didn't say the rotating composter in our garage, but the fact that we drive subcompact cars.

[under-a-lilac-moon]

18th century jon so he can wear his hair in a queue and prance around being a silly pretty little guy and when he travels to the usa he sees alexander hamilton and is like 'el-oh-el these 'revolutionaries' who think they're so great while they're actually just colonisers i'm gonna go back to england and fight for abolition while staying silly through the horrors even though the magnus institute doesn't exist yet'

i think that would be pretty delightful if just for long-haired jon

[butch-reidentified]

finding that I'm very quickly shifting mentally in certain ways. especially when it comes to a lot of things I've routinely held myself back from saying until recently.

it's hard to describe what the feeling is exactly but it's definitely healthy to let it out finally, even if that means more conflict or whatever. i know why i held myself back before, but i no longer feel that way so. 🤷

[dullahandyke]

Films good movies good banshees of inisherin was good

[voidpersonthing]

Do I have to make a pinned saying that I:

Don't have money to spare at the moment

Even if I did, my money is worth less than pennies nowadays

Have No Reach

Just so I stop getting DMs, asks and the like asking me for donations?

[thislittlekumquat]

Fantasizes about the ICJ and the UN putting the USA on some sort of participation hiatus until further notice. Maybe forever. Maybe it's the USA's turn to have zero say in international politics. Maybe!!!!!!

[idontdrinkgatorade]

HELP I TOLD MY MOM I HAD A MEMORY OF VISITING ROMANIA (where my bio mother is from) AND SHE CAME BACK TO MY ROOM AND WAS LIKE. WHAT SPURRED THIS MEMORY? HAVE YOU CONTACTED YOUR GRANDMOTHER? HAS SHE CONTACTED YOU?

[ocotllo]

that is why you're meant to invest your profits back into the community to restore their rail system silly

[b-rainlet]

If the Speak No Evil remake actually changes the ending I will blow up the US, I swear to god

[boy-gender]

To any USAmerican queer and trans person right now, I don't know if this will help, but please try to remember that there are queer and trans people living, surviving, and even thriving in countries where they have NEVER had rights. I live in a very religious and very conservative country and progress is slow, but it is happening. Same sex marriage has never been legal here in a way that the government will accept, but we have local governments who are at least starting to legalize medical and property rights for same sex partners. We have local governments supporting trans rights protections. We have more and more local celebrities and influencers who have braved the barrage of potential hate to live their truth and have found communities that support and uplift them.

People here have been fighting for a long time and are continuing to fight and celebrating any small progress that we achieve, even if the tides are against us. And do you know why? Because we have seen that it can be done! American media is so prolific here and we see people like us on our TV shows and movies and even news channels. Conservatives here love to blame "the Americans" for introducing "these types of thoughts" (aka just letting people fucking exist as they are) to our country. You guys did that. None of what you guys have now (as little as it is) would have happened if people in the past just laid down and gave up.

I have nothing to add. Thank you for caring about us enough to send this. It's the first and only thing that's comforted me this morning.

[headspace-hotel]

because I'm thinking about sustainability, I'm trying to understand why USAmerican houses are so large

I don't just mean McMansions, I also mean why regular houses and especially newer houses are so huge in proportion to the amount of living space they seem to provide. When I look at the square footage of the house it seems like a lot, but when I look inside at what it has to offer, it seems impossible to get rid of any of the individual things inside without impacting quality of life for the residents, and this is puzzling, since I know there are significantly smaller houses that are perfectly fine to live in.

So I have been looking at floor plans for various houses of various sizes and it seems a major problem is that the design of houses is just terrible.

I hate it so much. At first it doesn't look like there's anything wrong with it. But examine how efficiently the space is being used. From this perspective, it's a cursed and evil garbage fire.

So much space is taken up by doors to things that don't need doors. Why do you have a walk-in pantry with a door on it? Why do you have a laundry room 4 times the size of the washer and dryer with a door on it? A simple curtain would look nicer and doesn't need 10sqft extra to allow the door to swing open.

An additional large amount of space is taken up by awkward hallways that wouldn't need to exist if the arrangement of the rooms had been thought out better. There is a short little hallway to reach the garage because the pantry and half-bathroom are in the way, which branches off from a hallway that exists to reach...the laundry room, which is made 2x as big as necessary so the hallway can connect to it where it is wedged in the depths of the house.

The master bathroom has a tub AND a shower AND two sinks which makes it weird to have a half-bathroom right next to the master bedroom. It's hoarding all the bathroom amenities?? There's also a pretty big room that isn't labeled that is only accessible from the master bathroom. Walk-in closet? Sex dungeon?

(Why do walk-in closets exist? It's just an extra room with shelves in it. You can put shelves in a regular room.)

The other two bedrooms are really small and have another weird hallway to reach them, which could have been part of the bedrooms themselves. The closet labeled "linen" opens directly into the hallway and is on the other side of the house from the laundry room.

My dad remodeled houses for a living when I was a kid and this thing looks like it would be pure evil to run plumbing through...

[lordadmiralfarsight]

That anon ask was violently, brutally, unsufferably USAmerican. The fuck even is an "ethnic white" ?

My skin's pale as shit, and I'm not an ethnic white, I'm an ethnic CELT.

And that's not even talking about Jews, which are distinctly not "white", whatever this yankee nonsense means.

Ethnic whites when you tell them they're white:

girl what

[palms-upturned]

I’m late to this whole debacle but for the record, I have been messaged by people in Gaza who thought that I was involved in the fundraiser vetting process and sent me photos of their government IDs and documentation. I know a little of what Hussein, Nairuz, Ahmed, Ibtisam, and others use to vet people and make sure that they’re legit, and that’s part of why I confidently cite them as a source. To try and discredit them and smear them as scam artists, along with the genocide victims that they’re trying so hard to help, is fucking beyond the pale.

The reason I’ve been inactive on this blog and focusing instead on compiling resources in order to bring more ppl onto the fundraiser blog is that the work I was doing was spiraling into a 12-hour a day endeavor with just myself, and it was making me so physically and mentally ill that I could barely move or think, so I had to step back and figure out a better way to organize things. And I’m not even doing the actually hard part of this work. I do not vet people. I do not have any skin in this game as a white USAmerican. It’s not my family who are dying in Gaza. I also have not been targeted for harassment or account bans. I literally cannot fucking fathom the physical and mental strain that Palestinian bloggers on this platform have been going through nonstop for nearly a year now.

I still remember being shocked when I saw that Hussein had come back to tumblr after having to take a break due to having a heart attack. Ibtisams, who vetted people and organized all sorts of fundraising efforts all while grieving her father and little sister killed in Gaza, was forced to come back to tumblr to make a statement about how she was in an inpatient facility because people had the gall to impersonate her in order to scam people. Ahmed literally escaped Gaza because of a very well documented fundraising effort here on tumblr, no thanks to the cunts at GoFundMe who made things as difficult as possible every step of the way, and has since spent time and effort helping other people who had hopes of sharing his success. Calling these people scammers is fucking unbelievable. Some of you wouldn’t know solidarity if it bit you in the ass.

If getting messages in your inbox from people trying to escape a genocide makes you uncomfortable, fucking suck it up. Or disable your inbox, I guess. Do literally anything else besides using your platform to direct harassment and slander at people who are trying to survive a genocide. This website is already quite literally engaging in tech apartheid by targeting users in Gaza so constantly, you don’t need to gleefully join in by tagging staff and asking them to terminate people. Fucking unconscionable behavior. I hope that it will follow everyone involved for the rest of their lives.

[stackslip]

Transgender people are now banned from legally changing their gender in Bulgaria, according to the country’s Supreme Court, which issued a ruling that is automatically binding on all other courts. “The current law does not provide for the possibility for the court to allow the change of the data regarding the gender, name and uniform civil number in the acts of civil status of an applicant who claims to be transgender,” the decision states. Until now, some Bulgarian judges assumed that the legislation in the country allows legal gender change, but only explicitly after a court decision. In the Supreme Court, however, other judges ruled in the opposite direction, and the country was condemned several times in cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for the lack of a clear regulation. (...) The decision was dedicated to the sharp political and public debate on the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which was finally repelled after a campaign filled with misinformation spread by nationalist parties on social networks.

this isn't just a uk or north-america problem. it's worldwide, and that's not a coincidence. right-wingers everywhere are coordinating in suppressing trans people, sometimes as part of an open effort to also suppress all queer people and gender non-conformity, as well as abortion and equal rights for women; sometimes it's more covert (like in the uk). but here it's overt. the same tactics and use of social media, the same arguments, the same end goals--it isn't simply a usamerican conservative or uk terf thing. it's everywhere and in some countries the situation is becoming that much more dire with little pushback or acknowledgement.

[molsno]

westerners really are primed to see japanese art as inherently perverted, to the point where if an anime character appears naked at any point, or hell even if you can see a little bit of skin, they start ranting about how anime is filled with unnecessary fanservice to pander to perverted otakus.

but, first of all, the human body is not inherently sexual. artists have been drawing naked bodies for millennia, and for a variety of reasons! in ascribing sexual intent to every depiction of nudity in anime, you are endorsing and reinforcing the societal policing of bodies, especially the misogyny that demands women be ashamed of our bodies and cover them up.

second, and most importantly, when you attribute any depictions of nudity in anime to the artists' desire to perform "fanservice", you're implying that japanese audiences are, as a whole, simple perverts who will watch anything as long as it's sexual. this is extremely racist. portraying other cultures as primitive savages who only care about sex is one of the oldest tricks in the racist's playbook.

lastly, why do you single out japanese art for misogyny to begin with? certainly, there are some japanese artists who are misogynistic, and it shows in the art they create; that much I'm not denying. but why is it that western artists are exempt from the same critiques, despite often being just as if not more misogynistic? why don't you criticize the sexualization of women and teenagers in usamerican tv shows and movies? why do you believe that western art can still be enjoyed for its merits despite its misogyny, but you condemn japanese art outright for the same thing?

[nintendont2502]

I'm gonna be a little bitch for a second GOD it's so so so fucking exhausting being a non USAmerican online. Like. Jesus fucking christ the levels of defaultism are just,,,, god. The 'default' audience for every post is Americans. American pop culture is universal obviously, and god forbid you bring up a show from your own country because no ones ever watched that! The millions of kids in your country don't count clearly. When American places are mentioned it's always Town, State, Country, but when anywhere else is mentioned you're lucky to get State, Country, or the closest major city if you're really lucky. Fahrenheit and MM/DD/YY and American spellings dominate even though they're the only country that uses them. People constantly talk about how x and y 'breaks the law'. They mean American laws, because those are obviously universal. American news and American politics are everywhere. You *have* to care about this. If you don't, you're a monster. The only time my country makes it is when we're literally burning to the ground, and even then they don't even touch the political side of things. Even international incidents somehow get brought back to America - call your representative (I dont have one). Go to these protests (they're on the other side of the world). Sign this petition (it's for US residents only). Im going to go insane.