#like no offense but i'm not constantly on the cos tag to see what people have and haven't posted?

[horrorshow]

Can you talk about why you think blocking and moving on is a bad thing? I thought it was a way to curate your space and avoid drama

idk maybe i'm too idealistic but fandom is a much more friendlier, welcoming, supportive, creative, engaging, active, diverse and interesting space when it's treated like a community where people are encouraged to participate and talk about their interests and where there's space for niche or more unpopular opinions without these people having to worry about being blocked and feel unwelcome by the majority of the fandom they are in. i can't stand how blocking everyone you disagree with has become the first thing to do.

you say its 'to curate your experience'. but blocking people does not only curate YOUR experience. you're also forcefully curating other users' experiences. and not for the better.

people say 'i will block you for literally anything' and then those same people wonder why engagement is down, why no one sends asks, why no one reblogs, why rarely anyone talks in the tags anymore and why this place feels so dead and boring and quiet. i wonder why!!!!

people treat real people as annoying ads they can dispose of at their whim. but that's not how a fandom or a site like tumblr works. (besides, if you really care about people curating their own experience you wouldn't block people. you can filter and blacklist and never see them again while still granting them the same freedom instead of actively making their experience worse.)

you say its to avoid drama. but seeing a post you dont agree with is not 'drama'. and blocking is not solving anything except for you personally. fandom was more fun when we remembered that every user is a real person you share a space with, and probably some mutuals as well, so you find a way to live with each other. starting with a restraining order seems a bit excessive and is not contributing to anything. it's not that hard to be respectful and tolerate others and acknowledge people have different opinions and interests and still co-exist in peace. its not that hard to be nice to people and try to find common ground with them and interact with the stuff you DO like. you do this in every aspect of your real life, so why not online?

i hear you say: 'but that requires WORK and i don't NEED to do any of that bc i can just block them'.

yeah, you can try to create your own bubble and only hang out with like minded people but you wont EVER fully achieve that (no matter how much you block, social media WILL keep feeding you posts you disagree with bc it makes them money). social media WILL pressure you into an 'us vs. them' mentality where you constantly feel like everything online is a threat or an argument you have to win and where being mean and unnuanced gives you the most notes and where you don't even see, let alone be able to treat, other users as people anymore bc you don't interact with them anymore other than to block or fight them. that's not how i want it to be online. it's not fun to me. and maybe i'm a pessimist but i think it will eventually be the death of online fandom and sites like tumblr. look at the state of twitter right now. DOES blocking give you a better experience in the long run? i doubt that it does. overall, i think it makes people even less tolerable and more vulnerable to hate and fear mongering, and social media an even more hostile place.

it's everything i hate about social media and everything i want to fight against and WILL fight against. i won't pretend my meager contribution will change anything, but i LIKE to just scroll past posts i don't vibe with and not see every argument online as a personal offense. it keeps me curious. most posts aren't that bad when you know the person behind it. i mean, you do you, i'm not gonna say what you should or shouldn't do bc that's up to you, but i recommend it: free yourself of the block button and bring back supportive user communities based on a shared love for the same thing and focus on what you have in common with people, just like you would do in real life. save the block button for the rotten apples who DO keep trying to pick fights and exclude others.

(which is, now that i think about it, probably the main difference: most people see the block button as a neutral way to prevent worse. but. that's only the case on an individual level. and treating everything online as an individual choice to which there are no further consequences, especially if they happen on a larger scale, is already a loss.)

[nevermoretoleave]

buddy, your second to last paragraph describes exactly how you, at your table, avoided the actual issue that i'm bringing up. if the player knows and is hype for that, that's absolutely fine. the player gave informed consent. that is not what i'm talking about.

like you said, knowing what you might see and consenting to that is important, and (I'm assuming) you gave them the opportunity to tap out if they didn't want that. idk what kind of safety tools you have in place at your table, but I'm assuming your player could have pulled the X card or a safeword or something along those lines if the revelation changed their mind. what i'm talking about is uninformed consent.

also, you don't know me. you don't know my traumas, nor am i going to disclose them, let alone in a public forum. but something that is very much public is the amount of ttrpg horror stories with similar scenarios. just bc my concern is misplaced on you (which it is! you did great by your players /gen), doesn't mean it is misplaced in general. like ngl if it keeps one player from having a bad experience at the table i think it's worth it.

hey uh, fellow curse of strahd DMs, you shouldn't need to be told this but don't let your players sleep with vasili or rictavio.

[genderisareligion]

12 and 23; with an addendum to 23, what do you think about someone saying using the word “abolition” in “gender abolition” is racist? (( i’ve read black trans women and tras say so — that it is a word with too much history for black ppl for anyone to just tag it onto gender ))

12. What is your opinion of femininity/masculinity? 

Well, neither actually exist. The words themselves are simply descriptors of people, adjectives of the nouns male and female which describe one of two sexes, but unfortunately they've been imbued with stereotypes and other definitions that benefit the heteropatriarchy. The only behaviors that are actually "masculine" or "feminine" are whatever behaviors a person is currently doing. Wearing suits and ties, being assertive, rocking a shaved head and dating women are all feminine behaviors so long as a female is doing them.

23. Do you believe in gender abolition?

First I'm gonna talk about your addendum because this discourse is news to me. While I can sort of see where they're coming from, as the African anti slavery movement has sort of become synonymous with and defined itself using the word abolition, we aren't the originators of the word as far as I know. And with TRAs tendency (especially the nonblack ones) to falsely conflate racism and transphobia and constantly act like the two have always happened for the same root causes because it gives their pseudoscience at least the appearance of validity, I don't trust that they actually think it's offensive to refer to "gender abolition" and are just desperate for more reasons to call radical feminists "white supremacists" a.k.a. "feminazis." I mean, black people can personally decide for themselves whether or not it offends them I guess, but anyone else has no stake in the game. And I hope they have that same energy towards every other political and social movement that has ever called for the "abolition" specifically of anything ever.

And they're one to fucking talk co-opting "Trans Lives Matter" and "Walking While Trans" directly from BLM. Hypocritical much?

On that note, fuck yes I believe in gender abolition (and as a black woman I'm allowed to use that word for it lol) because I'm sick and tired of the historical revisionism claiming things like "biological sex was invented by European colonialists and gender is what we've actually always had and POC have always believed in it" despite the ENGLISH word itself not being used to describe sex stereotypes until the mid 20th century by crackers like sexologist John Money and despite POC still violently segregating females from males for millennia. I'm sick of the words feminine and masculine snowballing in societal importance to the point that now they're being used to describe some kind of "gendered soul" that can be "born in the wrong body" and people are spending tens of thousands of dollars "correcting" this soul that, as an Atheist, I don’t believe exists because no kind of soul exists. Gender is sex stereotypes and nothing more.