#this is really important as an educator

[iliothermia]

Hey y'all. It's International Holocaust Awareness day Both of these books changed me. Consider reading them or please share for someone else who might. It's never a bad thing to learn more.

Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz by Slomo Venezia This is one of the only books I've found that touches on the living conditions and viewpoint of a Jew from Greece. Reading it, the author felt like a friend. It was horrifying.

Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide this book explained people were taught to completely separate Jews from being human in people's minds in the years leading up to the Holocaust- especially in the medical field. It has interviews with some of the doctors who did these things. The site for the books also has an archive of images, films, objects, publications, recorded sounds and documents. You can find information on many communities. Thank you

[toneelspeelster]

the theory of you.

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

[zevranunderstander]

number #1 tactic that people use to not sound as racist as they are when they talk to black people: 'uhh so you AMERICANS need to stop pretending everything is about YOU. why should i know this im not from the us :/' (= is talking about like. a phenomenally internationally well-known black artist)

[queerpdsys]

seeing disability awareness posts end with “TLDR; no, read it” is fucking WILD

[legolasghosty]

Best wishes during this tax season to Ray Molina, who is staring at his computer and trying to figure out if there's a way he can claim all 6 of his kids as dependents, even though 4 of them aren't alive.

[isfjmel-phleg]

I dislike the love triangle in this book for a variety of reasons (why does there have to be one at all, simply because our heroine happens to be close to two boys? what purpose does it serve besides contriving Love Drama? it's not even like she must choose the one who best embodies who she must become or anything that serves a thematic purpose--she knows from the start which one she loves, and the other one is just an annoying obstacle to the endgame romance), one of which is that it completely destroys the boys' friendship with each other. Here, they're romantic rivals and openly, childishly hostile to each other, with little indication that they were ever really friends even in childhood. The friendship that exists among all three children in the original book--it's never just "Mary and these two mismatched boys who are tolerating each other because of their separate friendships with her," but the boys are friends with each other too--is one of its most delightful aspects, and to lose that alters the characters themselves. I'm not saying that there isn't room for difficulties in the friendship as they all enter adulthood. But replacing a dynamic of mutually caring bonds among relative equals with two guys who dislike each other competing for the prize of the heroine does not effectively serve Burnett's themes even in the context of adult versions of these characters.

[articwolfclawartist]

Bit of a shame that OCD gets categorized as the “neat freak” disorder when the stronger cases are basically a (slightly) less intense version of schizophrenia

Or how ADHD seems to be treated as the “hyper focused” and “unable to sit still” disorder when its rather about repetitive memory loss and the feeling that your insides are constantly exploding

I feel most people these days understand autism a lot better but its siblings get heavily misunderstood. Did you know OCD is an anxiety disorder? Did you know ADHD can cause severe meltdowns? You should.

[al3x-xxxx]

Doodles !

[bonestrouslingbones]

also i hate to admit it and i swear i DO understand the importance of them but fellas i fear i may be steadily morphing into a humanities hater

[starbuck]

going into my final week of classes and we always have one last week after the final paper (so the professors have time for grading) where typically the only work we have is one last discussion post.

usually, this post is pretty simple and light (to go easy on us after the final). my ethics class is like “summarize your conclusions from your final paper! :)” and my communications class is like “tell the class about your career goals! :)”

meanwhile, statistics…

[queen-esther]

Look what I’ve been saying and preaching and preaching and saying!!!

[pochapal]

just realized i've pissed away my entire degree due to cringefail medical issues

[a-bottle-of-tyelenol]

A bit of a ramble about agere and fanfiction

Sometimes I think about steering away from adding agere into fics that aren’t agere-centric because I feel the need to make my fic as digestible for as many people as possible and agere is something that, unfortunately, a lot of people will pass over purely because it’s there.

I’ve had multiple people comment on one shots that ARE specifically agere-centric telling me that they normally dislike agere fics and wouldn’t bother but that they took a chance and really liked mine. And as nice as I’m sure that intends to be, I am not some unique, one-in-a-million writer. Nothing I do is new to the agere space, particularly when it comes to fanfiction. I will admit that I do cover regressors that can be less represented in these spaces (older regressors, older headspaces, ect) but I am far from the only fic writer that does it.

Agere is JUST as valid and acceptable as a trauma response and coping mechanism as anything else that I’d be willing to put in these kinds of fics, and refusing to include it purely on the basis of “well, people don’t understand it and therefore wouldn’t read it” is clearly a mindset that comes from my own shame and weariness of other people’s reactions. And that isn’t great when my fic could be the thing that educated them on what agere is and how it can benefit someone— the thing that has educated people before.

The long fic that I’m currently working on has a main character that regresses due to trauma and it is something that is blatantly obvious throughout the entire story; but I never actually said that was what was happening. When I finally decided to put a word to it, like, twenty-five chapters in and officially say “yes, he is regressing in these moments”, there were some people saying that the story was good but that this was something they weren’t interested in and that they wouldn’t be reading any longer. Which is fine, anyone can read or drop whatever they want, but it is really upsetting to me because this was THERE the entire time. I just never called it what it was. On the flip side, however, I did have other people who didn’t know much about agere and actually learned something from my portrayal of this character, or even felt represented in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t have been. And, to me, that means so much more than how many hits or kudos I get from shying away from something that deserves to exist outside of the community.

So, every time I think about not having a side mention of agere in my fics, I think about the potential people who could learn something new from me and the way that I could help normalize something that means so much to me in a way that makes sense to the average person. That, alone, makes it so important and absolutely worth doing.

[monster-kind]

also… tiny little tidbit here but…

if you believe anything you’re told about something or someone without asking yourself or finding a source, or at least trying to find some sort of proof…

please please try to educate yourself before you get yourself or someone hurt… that naivety can be incredibly dangerous and is often used against you.

please be safe with what you believe others say on the internet, and please take care of yourself.

[funkle420]

a great way to combat genAI in the future would be educating kids (and teens and college students and all ppl) on art way more.