thebiballerina

[thebiballerina]

Can confirm. When I was younger and first started learning about the queer community, I read a lot about aro and ace spectrum experiences, and exposure to these sorts of lessons changed and maybe even saved my life. They are immensely powerful insights and I will be forever grateful to all the people that reinforced, over and over again, that not only do fulfilled lives not need to include any romance or sex, but that I don't owe anyone an explanation for their absence.

Living life without sex and/or romance is not an accommodation that you get if you have the "right" reasons; it is a choice on the same level as living life with them, and we should frame it that way.

"aros can still date!!": boring. tired. overused. frequently used to make aros look more palatable and acceptable to amatonormative society.

"alloros can still stay single!!": fresh. new. exciting. hearing it could change many people's lives for the better regardless of romantic orientation

[thebiballerina]

As someone who has worked in the queer community for a long time, you need to be careful of the people who stretch the reality of scarcity in our community to fit their agendas of making money off of our community.

A major sign of snake oil salesmen is someone saying they are not just the best, but the only option. This is made more believable in marginalized communities, where we are genuinely seeing a lack in resources, but a lack is not the same as an emptiness. As someone who studies queer history, let me say this: queer people (and other marginalized groups) have been fighting to provide for each other and their future for much longer than you'd expect.

There are resources. They aren't always spread equally or easily accessible, but there are more resources than some people want you to believe.

Don't let less get mistranslated into absence. Generation after generation of queer people have fought to make sure there was something for us. Do not let someone disrespect this work by claiming they are the first and only queer person to do something. If someone claims to be a first or only, fact check that. While firsts deserve celebration, we should be grateful to live in a world where they are more rare than they used to be.

[thebiballerina]

For anyone seeing previous versions of this post: The file repository is on Codeberg now, and I am not updating the project on GitHub or any other platform, so please access it using this link: https://codeberg.org/the_bi_ballerina/Easy-Fanfic-Library.

Easy Fanfic Library

Have you ever wished you could have the easy organization of the AO3 site with fanfiction you have downloaded? I've been working on a project that makes setting this up really easy, even for people with little technical experience.

You can access the library files and instructions on this Codeberg page.

The Easy Fanfic Library enables users to easily download works from AO3 and other fanfiction sites into a library in Calibre, a free e-book management software. The library will keep all the metadata (title, author, series, ratings, characters, additional tags, date posted, etc.) intact and in separate fields. This way you will be able to quickly download fanfiction and sort/filter downloaded works similarly to how you would filter on AO3 itself (including by your personal bookmark data and tags).

The library uses the FanFicFare plugin for Calibre, which enables you to download fanfiction and metadata directly into Calibre from URLs. FanFicFare can download works from a multitude of sites, including many with no built-in download option on the sites themselves.

Calibre comes with many useful features as well, such as easily sending your library to an e-reader or mobile device.

I hope this makes downloading fanfiction easy for you all! Enjoy!

[thebiballerina]

Given that the cover story for Leverage Consulting & Associates was a founder named Harlin Leverage III, it is conceivable that post-canon Parker could in some circumstances use the name Parker Leverage in-universe. And I think that's beautiful

[thebiballerina]

It's time... for our Monthly Newsletter!

Believe it or not, it's been a year since FujoCoded LLC was born. A lot has happened since then, and a lot will still happen, including... our April 1st sorta-surprise 👀

While you wait, catch up with our update.

Busy with preparations, some of our flagship projects had to take a bit of a backseat this month, but you know what didn't? Our need for more helpers! This month, we have one paid opportunity: help writing the same newsletter you read above ☝️

If you're interested in getting paid to help us write our monthly newsletter, write us at contacts@fujocoded.com.

Or, if you’re an artist who wishes to put their name up for long-term commission requests, use our Artist Business Card Drop-Off form https://forms.gle/bvUhPTdxM6nUGwAYA

[thebiballerina]

NEVER get into anything thats heavy on color symbolism bro . for months you will not be able to look at the color blue without instantly thinking of Squingle Dinglus

[thebiballerina]

tumblr is one of the only places i will actually unmute a video when the tags are like "omg unmute it" bc i know most everyone else on this website loves reading and hates noise like i do so it must be pretty good

[thebiballerina]

Over the course of an episode, I want the other varieties of "whumpa-whumpa"s to be revealed—and not because Eliot's there to recognize them, but because they're included in great detail in Alec Hardison's LEVERAGE User's Guide Vol. 4, and at least one of the other members of the team (I'm thinking Harry?) has been diligent enough to read them all cover to cover

[thebiballerina]

I want to implant Shawn and Gus into every media I watch they just have that immense power to seamlessly fit in and inevitably elevate whatever is going on. it literally wouldn't matter it could be a post-apocalyptic wasteland and Shawn would still show up at the survivor camp wearing shades drinking from a pineapple like "wow this place is sadder than Gus's dating life in high school" and Gus would be all "the water here isn't even being boiled properly Shawn. I'm not staying at this camp I will not be getting dysentery I'm already fighting my sciatica flare-up" and all the people at the camp would be like "what the actual fuck" as Shawn and Gus walk off bickering into the distance and disappear

[thebiballerina]

Knowing a fic author through AO3 is like attending someone’s thesis presentation and politely clapping at the end, knowing a fic author through this hellsite is like going over to their house at 3AM to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar

[thebiballerina]

I’m pretty sure that Australians don’t have more then maybe 30-50k MAX people on tumblr. Like American had some 30 million users in 2020 (aka basically probably peak over the last 7 2018-2025) while Australia only has 26-28million people depending on who you ask (27 to be safe) so I’m just genuinely curious how many of us there must be on here.

If you Currently live in OR were born / raised in Australia and ID as (born/raised + ID, as I know a lot of born/raised here don’t ID as Aussie) you are Australian in this poll!

Please reblog for bigger sample size

[thebiballerina]

when i insist on odysseus as a rape victim i'm not trying to absolve him of patriarchy. he is, in many ways, a hero of patriarchy. even if i think some of the people who use him that way rhetorically have probably not read the odyssey, let alone understood its nuances, the cultural world of the poem and the narrative itself are patriarchal, and odysseus is both a product and perpetrator of that. but when i read about calypso forcing odysseus to have sex with her, i will still call it rape, not because i like him as a character, although i do, but because i think to not do so reveals a very troubling attitude toward rape and patriarchy in the ancient context and now.

i've tried and tried but i don't know how to have this conversation with someone who is determined not to accept the premise that, in the text of the odyssey, odysseus has no choice in the matter. if they've read the text, it's right there. from what i can read of the greek, it's there (ἀνάγκη, force, constraint). i've never read a translation where it wasn't there. if they just don't care, that pretty much kills the discussion.* but sometimes they'll try to sidestep it, bringing up that the text implies he slept with calypso willingly at some point, or arguing that she doesn't explicitly compel him on the last night they spend together before he leaves ogygia forever.** to be frank, that's not the point. i'm not trying to absolve him even of the accusation of cheating on penelope. i'm not saying he was faithful to penelope. i'm saying he was still, at the point that we meet him in the odyssey, raped. period. i'm saying that's important in some way. i'm saying that using that word is important.

odysseus has power, as a man in a patriarchal society, but that power is not absolute. power is never absolute. i've heard it suggested that in the ancient context, the rape of odysseus is comic, in the sense of affirming life even in its indignities, and in the sense that humiliation is amusing (i have a lot of disagreements with the article, but it has given me endless food for thought). i'm quoting at length here, but bear with me:

Athena leaves Odysseus lingering on Calypso’s island in what is certainly the most unheroic, most challenging of all the trials that befall him on his return home. The narrator describes Odysseus as desperately wanting to leave Ogygia, crying in homesickness, but having to stay and, more to the point, share Calypso’s bed. I mentioned much earlier that an audience of that period would not expect celibacy from a married male away from home. Yet the situation must produce, it seems to me, quite another reaction in the males in the audience when the narrator emphasizes Odysseus’ profound unhappiness with the arrangements. In a patriarchal society of that time, where marriages were arranged and wedding nights were more likely than not sanctioned rape scenes, households teemed with female slaves, the highways and byways with prostitutes, men were no doubt accustomed from puberty to have their way easily with women, and on their own terms. Nothing in their experience would prepare them for enforced sexual servitude to a woman. [...] With this episode, the narrator has introduced a comic counterpart to the ubiquitous comments on the faithful Penelope’s celibacy, that is, the image of her husband manfully performing his nightly duties in the home of the insatiable Calypso. It is comic, yes, but also every man’s deepest fear.

why is it comic? because it's a reversal of expectation, of roles, of fortune. why is it unexpected? because it exploits the fear that a man could be treated by a woman the way he treats a woman; because a woman becomes monstrous by acting like a man. these are misogynistic ideas and fears, and they sound strikingly modern.

which means that: i understand the impulse to salvage calypso's image. i understand how it could be interesting or productive or empowering maybe, for some women, because homer is so concerned with any fault in penelope's sex life (reinforced by clytemnestra’s, and those of the slave women that odysseus and penelope own) and seemingly not at all with odysseus’. but calypso is arguing for the right of female gods to treat human beings however they want to, not for the rights of human women.

it also means that: the rape of odysseus becomes remarkable, when the rape of countless others is not, because of who he is. it's humiliating for him to be treated like a sex slave because he's a man and a king; other slaves are just slaves. similar logic is found elsewhere in the odyssey (it's humiliating for him to be treated like a beggar, but the other beggar in the house is just a beggar). this is not a text that believes in equal rights of any kind. but i think we have to ask the question, is it not rape because of that? should we not call it rape because he's a man, because he's a man who perpetrates specific evils, because other people have it worse? and why do i keep arguing that his situation is important to remark on?

god. i don't know. sometimes? just because we don't.

i've lost count of posts like this, comments like this, attitudes like this, of how many times i mention the odyssey and immediately hear about calypso, of how at best odysseus weeping on ogygia becomes the butt of the joke. and i'm not sorry that i don't find it more progressive than treating calypso as a shrill misogynistic stereotype. i do not find it interesting or original to take a man who is not in the position of power in a sexual encounter and say that he's being either disingenuous, ungrateful, or mystifying.

when we refuse to name what calypso does to odysseus as rape, absolutely regardless of what we feel for him, just that it happened, that that's what's going on, i think we do something sinister, potentially to real people. especially because this exists in a text where slavery is also often unnamed in translation and discussion, and other forms of rape and captivity and human suffering, and i think we need to name them all, without being afraid that naming one will take away from the others. saying odysseus was raped doesn't mean we excuse the intense misogyny penelope is subjected to, the enslaved lives of melantho and the other hanged women. it all matters. it's all important.

*as does the suggestion that odysseus could be lying and actually had a great time. but odysseus isn't the one telling us what's going down on ogygia; the narrator is. when given the opportunity, odysseus himself says very little, only maintaining that his heart wasn't in it. of course odysseus could be lying. he could always be lying. but calypso is the most relevant counter-perspective we have, and even she doesn't claim that odysseus wants her, just that she thinks he ought to be happy with her. it's to her obvious frustration that he isn't. without another authority in the text, saying "it could be straight lies" is a conversational dead-end.

and if, by the way, there's a lost version of the odyssey in which odysseus was philandering, and the version we have was written to clear him of those charges... it's still the version we have. how we deal with it says something about us.

**if i say "calypso raped odysseus" and a hypothetical person (actually several real people i have encountered) makes this counterargument, that implies that the threat of force is, then, what? not real? if 'at some point' being willing means that the harm of whatever came after that point is negated, it casts him as someone who mopes around out of boredom with an equal partner, when the text seems much clearer on the point that he's in this position against his will than under what circumstances and for how long he might have slept with her willingly. they are clearly not equals by the mere fact that she is a goddess; his mortality is, in calypso's eyes, the barrier between them. rip to everyone who finds the decision to leave ogygia a "surprising choice" but i am never less surprised by odysseus than when he's handling calypso as delicately as possible, in order to leave her as fast as he can.

[thebiballerina]

random poll just to learn more about all of you lovely people (please reblog with your answer + how you take your coffee/tea)!

[thebiballerina]

There was a phrase that I used in my classroom when my students would ask me about doing questionable things, and my response was always, "Technically you can, but should you?"

The reason I used this instead of a simple yes or no answer is because it opened up conversation. Instead of blindly looking for permission, the conversation became more about cause and effect. Usually it navigated the "well you can't tell me what to do I'm going to do it anyway" instinct in kids when I'd say no, because all they were looking for is something to challenge them.

For example: "Can I jump off the slide?"

"Technically you can, but should you?"

If they answer no, I'd ask why. Usually they'd say because it's against the rules or I don't know.

If they say it's against the rules, I'd ask them why they think it's a rule. And if they'd say I don't know, I'd explain that the slide is five feet off of the ground, and jumping that high is a good way to hurt your knees or worse.

And then the most important part: if you did do it, how can you make it safer?

That's when the creativity juices started to flow. I'd get anything from pillows to beds to bouncy shoes to wings to someone catching them (which became a whole different conversation). And I told them since we didn't have those things here, it wasn't safe. And safety is everyone's number one job at school.

It stopped them from doing it behind my back. It got them to engage in critical thinking. And it helped them figure out how to do things without help.

However, there's always been an itching thought in the back of my head. Somewhere out there, did one of my past students drag their mattress out to the slide and jump off of it?

[thebiballerina]

[thebiballerina]

that's it, I can't take this anymore. I'm so fucking done. I feel like a non-Christian person in fucking December. Listen, people: the Ides of March is a FINE holiday, it's fun and nerdy, I like it - but I've seen like 6 memes for it in the last 3 days and not a Single one for its sibling nerd holiday, MARCH 14, aka 3/14, aka

PI DAY

3/14, optimized at 1:59 and 26 seconds, AM or PM (3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399... that's as far as I ever memorized).

Celebrations around the world - as is ONLY appropriate for the one and only celebration of the constant ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter!

And the radius to its area, and the radius of a sphere to its volume and surface area, AND one of the key five numbers in Euler's Identity, aka e^(iπ) + 1 = 0, aka the sexiest, simplest mathematical equation in the world.

There's going to be an HOUR-LONG LUNAR ECLIPSE this year, visible throughout East Asia, Australia, North and South America, and most of Africa and Europe!

It's even Albert Einstein's birthday!

Is Pi Day underrepresented because math is continuously viewed as the subject it's culturally acceptable to hate, where even "boring" history and "pretentious" literature can be lauded? Does every holiday need a centuries-famous play in order to get attention these days? DO PEOPLE NOT WANT AN EXCUSE TO EAT SAVORY PIES FOR DINNER (PIZZA, SHEPHERD'S PIE, ETC) AND SWEET PIES OF FRUIT AND/OR CHOCOLATE FOR DESSERT??

So help me god I'm going to start making a new Pi Day meme every time I see an Ides of March meme. I'm going to blaze them. PRETENDING TO KILL A DICTATOR IS FUN, BUT IT IS A TREAT BEST PAIRED WITH THE ELEVATION OF SCIENCE!

[thebiballerina]

I was gonna make a joke about how I say “I need to go the circus again” the way people used to say they need to go to the sea to balance their humors. But I realized the circus balances humors too