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happy werewolf transgenderism wednesday

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This month's episode of BS-Free Witchcraft is up for early access on Patreon!

On this installment I'm talking about the 90s Satanic Panic era Evangelical propaganda series The Pagan Invasion. The episode will go public on April 26th, but paid patrons get access to it now!

Also, this month Patreon patrons get access to an exclusive 2+ hours long companion video! Watch my reaction to the full first episode of The Pagan Invasion when I was doing research!

A monthly membership only costs $1 a month!

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4chan got hacked so I guess tumblr won the war - didn't foresee that tbh

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Was not expecting to wake up to an overt racist in the comment section on Peregrine Lake, but here we fucking are.

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sorry to be like this and I'm very much not loving it, but tumblr loses around 30M a year. divided by the cost of yearly subscriptions, it means half a million ish people on premium undoes that loss. I saw stats claiming more than 300M users. That sounds super not right since even the sacred texts don't often cross 1M notes. I know there are around 12M posts a day. Yeah, yeah, we post multiple times a day, but there's a quantity of lurkers out there, and I'm trying to goldilocks a number to do math without having real data to pull from, leave me be.

If there are 12M users, it needs around 4% of users. If there really are 300M (still don't believe this) it would be .16%

You know what portion of Spotify is paid accounts? 40% ish (can't find data from the last year)

But, because we are the worst, and so probably will end up with a sundowning social platform... If someone knows of another platform that has this kind of reblog with added comments that doesn't put your comment first, lmk, cause every alternative someone has suggested aint been it for me. Bluesky and pillowfort aint it. TT is video based. Reddit is.... almost? except that there's a reason we got refugees.

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To be a little serious for a moment --

"I really like what you make but I find you personally embarrassing" is such a fucked up thing to send to a stranger, and it really blows my mind that someone could be sitting on Tumblr dot com in the year 2025 and do this.

Like kid, if you weren't on anon I'd name a character in one of my books after you just to have them get pooped on by a bird. This is a genuinely shitty thing to send to someone, and if I were the twenty-year old version of myself and not the forty-four year old version it might have actually hurt my feelings.

Shaming people for feeling joy or being silly is a shitty thing to do, and I honestly and genuinely think you're a bad person if you think that this sort of thing is okay. I'm genuinely concerned that you're walking through life doing shit like this, and that some significantly more vulnerable person than I might end up getting hurt in your wake.

Start doing better, or go fuck yourself.

I really want to follow you but you have so many Tumblr badges it's so off-putting.

That is a weakness in you, not me.

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I was discussing the incident mentioned later in this piece with my wife yesterday and I saw another post by someone earlier doing something mentioned in here and I'm finally going to say something about it.

There is a serious problem in leftist spaces, especially online, especially on Tumblr, when it comes to language.

The way people are expected to speak just to even enter these spaces is incredibly complex, to the point of being outright hostile to those who haven’t already spent time in them. And it’s not just newcomers; people who have important things to say, people speaking from lived experiences, people who don’t have English as a first language but still deserve to be heard, are constantly talked down to or even pushed out entirely for not using the "right" words.

This gets even worse when you factor in how often new terms are coined in English, and then people are shamed for not immediately knowing or using them.

I saw someone reblog their own post saying something like, "I know for a fact more than half of y’all didn’t understand a fucking word I said here."

And honestly? That stuck with me, because yeah, I’ve felt that before. Not because I don’t value critical thinking! because I absolutely do! I just made a post on that too! but because so many of these posts are written in a way that makes them Functionally Inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t already have the right background knowledge. And at a certain point, if you actually want your words to have an impact, if you actually want to create meaningful change, then you’re going to have to accept some things:

People will not always use perfect language.

2. People will not always know the exact terminology you personally prefer they use when engaging in discourse.

3. Dismissing or attacking people for how they say something, instead of engaging with what they’re saying, is actively harmful.

And more than that, if you genuinely want people to understand and engage with the things you’re talking about, especially people who don’t speak English as a first language, especially people without access to higher education, especially people who don’t even know where to begin when it comes to self-education (because yes, that is a skill that has to be taught) then you are going to have to be the one to adjust sometimes. You are going to have to let people say things imperfectly. You are going to have to take a step back and engage with the message rather than just the words being used to express it.

One of the experiences that made me realize that I, as a non-native English speaker, was not welcome in Tumblr leftist spaces was when I spoke about real-life oppression I had experienced. I left one word out of my post, a word which honestly, was not even important when talking about an incident that had Happened To Me, not theory, not hypotheticals or any what-ifs of oppression, a story, a story about something that happened to me.

And because of that, people sat in a Discord server, picking apart my words, accusing me of awful things, and then came into my askbox throwing jargon and buzzwords I’d never even heard before, then got mad at me for being frustrated that this was happening.

Think about that. People who are directly impacted by oppression are being pushed out of spaces meant to discuss it because the way they speak doesn’t conform to certain expectations. That is not justice. That is not solidarity. That is not progress.

There is a fundamental disconnect here between theory and praxis. Ironically so many of you do not know what praxis is, because most of you engage with a lot of theory, and not a lot of praxis, you use the word praxis a lot, but, ironically, you have no idea what it means.

{to put my money where my mouth is, it means Doing Something, in the simplest possible terms}

In theory, leftist spaces should be accessible. They should be places where people can speak openly about their experiences, learn from each other, and work toward meaningful change. But in practice? There’s a gatekeeping of language so intense that many people, particularly those who are marginalized in ways beyond just their political beliefs, are outright excluded.

And this is something I need people to sit with: The assumption that the "right" language is easy to learn, or that anyone who doesn’t use it is being willfully ignorant, is an inherently privileged stance. Knowing where to find information, how to process it, and how to integrate new terminology into your vocabulary is a skill that is largely tied to education. Having the time to engage with leftist literature and theory, to stay up-to-date on every new term that gets introduced, is also a privilege. And the fact that so many people refuse to acknowledge this, that they expect perfect articulation from everyone, regardless of background, and punish those who don’t measure up, is a huge problem.

Worse still, the same people who act as gatekeepers of this language often fail to communicate their ideas in a way that is accessible at all.

This doesn’t mean that complex ideas should never be discussed. It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t strive for accuracy in their language. But it does mean that if your goal is to educate, if your goal is to spread awareness, if your goal is to help people understand and join the movement, if your goal is to engage with fellow oppressed people, then you have a responsibility to meet people where they are. You have a responsibility to make your language understandable.

Because if people can’t even process what you’re saying, then what’s the fucking point?

And before anyone says, "Well, people should put in the effort to learn!" Let me make something very clear: They do.

People who are new to leftist spaces, or who are coming in from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, are often trying their best to engage. They are listening, they are learning, they are processing. But if the response to every mistake, every slightly off phrasing, every unfamiliarity with a new term, is immediate hostility,

or even if it's just 'hey I see you're sharing a personal moment, but can you change your language to make me, personally, more comfortable with you discussing your oppression?' then you’re not teaching.

You’re just making sure only the people who already think and speak exactly like you get to stay in the room.

Your language, your terminology, your theory? none of it means anything if you can’t make it accessible to the people who actually need it. And it means nothing if you use it to Exclude rather than Include.

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A decade since this gift was given to the community.

A proposal

Sometimes, in fandom, we just want to write id-tastic fic that rolls around in tropes that might be viewed as problematic. But we don’t want to address the problematic side of things in this particular fanwork; we just want to roll around and wallow.

It is considered courteous to give readers a heads-up via use of AO3 tags. I propose a tag that signals that a given fanwork is for rolling around, not giving a measured evaluation of anything. The MCU has carved out a space for this sort of fic with the “HYDRA Trash Party” tag, for which I commend them. Trash Party is a bit too specific to cover all of the ground I’m thinking of here, though; I propose “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.”

For those of you not familiar with Arrested Development, Michael Bluth finds a paper bag in the freezer labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.” He opens the bag, finds a dead dove, and reacts as follows:

[gif of a white man saying “I don’t know what I expected” in a deadpan manner]

The “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” tag would essentially be a “what it says on the tin” metatag, indicating “you see the tropes and concepts tagged here? they are going to appear in this fic. exactly as said. there will not necessarily be any subversion, authorial commentary condemning problematic aspects, or meditation on potential harm. this fic contains dead dove. if you proceed, you should expect to encounter it.”

(more at KnowYourMeme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-dont-know-what-i-expected)

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I really want to follow you but you have so many Tumblr badges it's so off-putting.

That is a weakness in you, not me.

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Romeo + Juliet (1996) dir. Baz Luhrmann

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I had a dream last night where I was watching an Hbomberguy video on The White Lotus, and he said "But it's not like I know what it's like to take a human life."

Smash cut to a title card: "And then I got convicted of murder"

Cut to Hbomberguy in a prison bathroom, recording on a presumably smuggled smart phone: "Look, a lot has happened since we started making this video..."

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Oh, you thought it was the REAL me you let in? That's just the artificial social personal I've developed for human interactions.

I've been trying to figure out how to get rid of it, guess it can live in your head now instead.

Oh, you're trying to get through my emotional walls??

Those aren't there to keep people out, fool. I will now being bricking you in with my truest self. Good luck!

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If we’re supposedly gonna outlive him then How did Trump get a perfect score on his health exam??

I don't know how to explain to you that the man is 78 years old and that linear time exists. I intend to outlive every 78 year old out there no matter what their health is.

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Is your natural hair color the same as when you were a young child?