i fucking hate dating nerds one single time i wore a star wars shirt to see a dude and he was like, “wow are u wearing that to impress me” and i said, “star wars episode 4 was seen by approximately 110 million people during its initial theatrical run in 1977”

Congratulations. You’re dating people who for the longest time have been putting up with bullying, mocking, and scorn for most of their lives. That kind of shit stays with people. So imagine their surprise when they see a member of the opposite sex, who I’m assuming is really attractive in comparison to most people, wear attire that reps nerd culture. Which even though is accepted by the masses (if you’re reasonably attractive) is still rare. Now I’m not saying that you’re not allowed to be scornful I’m just saying expect it and don’t be surprised when you hear it. Ok? OK.

why i dont date fucking nerds: exhibit B

Bolded emphasis mine. Gross.

Stands on nearest chair: ATTENTION MALE NERDS. YOU ARE NOT SUFFERING FROM A SHORTAGE OF FEMALE NERDS. THERE ARE VAST NUMBERS OF US, AND WE RARELY HAVE A HARD TIME FINDING EACH OTHER. YOU ARE WITHOUT FEMALE COMPANY BECAUSE YOU ARE WHINEY ASSBABIES WHO THINK YOU OWN THINGS BECAUSE YOU LIKE THEM, AND BECAUSE YOU SOMEHOW THINK YOU SUFFER BULLYING WHEREAS GIRL NERDS SOMEHOW NEVER DO. STOP PRETENDING YOU GET TO BE ASSHOLES BECAUSE YOU HAVE A “TRAGIC PAST” OR YOU WILL DIE ALONE. IF YOU THINK GIRL NERDS DON’T GET BULLIED IT’S LIKELY BECAUSE THOSE GIRLS DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU, BECAUSE OF THIS SORT OF ATTITUDE.

also: fucking no one mocks nerds anymore. Game of thrones is the most watched show on tv, everyone and their mom is playing video games, dungeons and dragons is more popular than it’s ever been.

To conclude

i’m obligated to reblog the Critical Whale

Fucking thank you

The term a-spec has been used within the asexual and aromantic community for around five years, while many, many autistic people have pointed out that they never heard the term a-spec to refer to their own community until within the last six months.

There is a long history of specifically targeting the language of the asexual community with lies, smear campaigns, and accusations, but the community continues to have the right to use their own words to communicate, discuss their needs, and bring awareness to their experiences.

Campaigning against someone’s ability to use self descriptive language on a regular basis is a form of gatekeeping and erasure and has been suffered by many communities over the years. It is not your responsibility to constantly reinvent your communities wheels in response. Use the language that describes your experience.

hello as an aroace autistic i thought i would chime in:

“a-spec” was created by and for aros and aces

“on the (autism) spectrum” is by and for auties

it ain’t hard.

^^^^ Also, would like to comment on some aphobes dislike of the a-spec community's use of the split-attraction model. Many claim that it was rooted in homophobia, and it simply wasn't. It was born out of the desire for a-specs to explain how their attraction works with simple, easy to understand language. Discoursers are constantly trying to police our language, constantly trying to demonize us. And I find it really sad that they are now trying to use those on the autism spectrum as a weapon against us.

Do not let them police us.

I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.

I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”

I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:

citrus 

@vergess

Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.

Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.

YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments

Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.

AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.

Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins

BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.

DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.

Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition. 

Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements

Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements

Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets. 

WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”

Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.

Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.

Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words. 

Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”

Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.

 Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.

Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.

Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.

Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.

Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.

Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.

‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.

Also:

Purple prose: Fic that is excessively flowery and complicated. Basically the “me, an intellectual” meme. If it has the phrase “cerulean orbs” you know it’s purple prose.

Beige prose: The opposite of purple prose. Basically, the plainest (and, if done wrongly, the most boring) type of prose.

R&R: Read & review. Back from when fic comments were called “reviews” and there was no such fucking thing as the kudos button.

*wipes a tear away* I feel so vintage.

Know your history children.

important history lesson

*stares out. breaks fourth wall*

Lemons.

For all you young’uns out there.

Also, I’ve seen people tag a ship-focused fic both M/M and Gen on AO3. Just because it also features friendships doesn’t make it Gen! If the main focus is a romantic relationship, do the Gen readers (which is not me, but they do exist) a favor and don’t tag it Gen.

^^^^^^^ THIS. filters are only useful if things are tagged correctly and i can’t search for non-ship fic when everything is tagged for both ship AND gen :(

please for the love of god tag responsibly and don’t make people who are looking for non-romance fic suffer

Also, AO3 does not have robust ‘not’ filtering, and this is a nuisance, but there’s a way around it. When you are searching for gen (or whatever), first filter for that tag, then put the following into the ‘Search within results’ box, separated by spaces:

Gen = 21, F/M = 22, M/M = 23, F/F = 116, Multi = 2246, Other = 24

So if you like a category that is often full of something else (e.g. background femslash ships or ‘gen’ being marked on shippy fic), exclude all these other categories, and you’ll have a much better set of search results.

@arthoure, @morningmaple, @teacupwarrior I literally feel the weight of my age dragging down my skin and sucking out my youth as I read this

Not writing-related, but I see the words “fandom wank” and all I can think about is CrystalWank, my hed iz pastede on yay.

drunk history but it’s just me explaining the entire warrior cats series to people who have never read it

Imagine if a trending hashtag in Gotham is #ImTellingBatman for all the times people see Robins doing stupid shit like playing rooftop tag or stopping to pet the police dogs 

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

SORRY?? SORRY???? This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen Jesus Christ everyone look at this

@yallneedahero

Local GOP official makes bizarre argument for denying women equal pay, later apologizes

Smooth. 

Or he could do this instead: One Easy Thing Men Can Do to Help Close the Gender Wage Gap

What kind of archaic, heteronormative bullshit is this.

Reblog if you think Native American Lives Matter

Let’s see if this gets any reblog

i downloaded this god damn episode just so everyone could watch this fukkin clip

The feedback bit is inspired.

why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:

@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.

unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.

in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.

the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.

but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominance which they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.

when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.

this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.

history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.

and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.

and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.

You know everyone complains about how in DA2 you only get to visit like 3 areas in Kirkwall and every alley/dungeon/path is linear and looks exactly the same and like, youre not wrong, BUT… 

last night I was comparing Skyhold to Kirkwall and I said how Skyhold feels like a miniature while Kirkwall feels massive. I know one is a keep and one is a city BUT hear me out

Kirkwall you only run down the same handful of streets, but they are all lined with countless buildings that you cant enter, blocked side streets, and beyond the road youre on you can see MORE buildings and walls and warehouses and areas that are unreachable. It makes it feel huge. You dont go EVERYWHERE because why the fuck would you enter every building in a city? You wouldn’t! 

Meanwhile, Skyhold houses hundreds of war horses (somewhere) and a whole standing army (somewhere) and the hundreds of mages or templars you chose to rescue (somewhere) not to mention the random healers/craftsmen/domenstic workers/guards/stablehands/messengers/spies and others I probably missed AND MIGHT I ADD any dependants they have (you think the people who traveled to skyhold to be safe and to be part of the inquistion didn’t bring spouses/children/parents/other dependants?) but skyhold is like a fucking clubhouse. 

The biggest problem is that you can go almost -everywhere- in skyhold. You can explore almost every room. And by doing that you realize this place is the smallest fucking hub for a powerful faction, theres not even enough places for the named fucking companions and characters to sleep.

It could have just been solved if they had inaccessible towers or buildings you can see peeking just beyond the walls, areas that are blocked off, or something. Yanno, LIKE KIRKWALL.

Anyways its a “less is more” issue and a “SHOW DONT TELL” issue. Like great you tell me we have hundreds of people here but where the fuck are any I have only seen like 20 people today.

Fucking this, though???? Skyhold is beautiful and amazing, BUT WHERE IS EVERYBODY?! And wasn’t Kirkwall supposed to give you that kind of maze-like, closed off feel anyway?

It drives me nuts cause honestly its a reoccuring issue in DAI where you are told things like “oh wow this thing is happen!” but they dont fucking show you in any meaningful way. And like in skyhold Josie is like “oh wow all these nobles are here Im so busy” and there are like… 5….. and they have no place to go. Or when you talk to the horse master and go “How are all of the horses” and meanwhile youre sitting there looking at the only fucking mount in the stable while hes like “oh yes they are all adjusting well all fucking hundred of them I take care of” and like what the fuck way to ruin my immersion. 

And YES!! Its so buried but like Kirkwall got a fucking titan under it and the roads are built in weird directions that look like sigils and the fucking place was a goddamn mine full of tevinter slaves like city is cursed to its fucking core

Not to mention Cullen is the COMMANDER of the Inquisition's army and like, you don't see this army at Skyhold? He basically just sits in his tower looking stressed AF. You see some soldiers walking along the walls and sparring in the courtyard, but that's basically it. Haven at least showed a decently sized battalion of soldiers sparring outside the gates and many more wandering about inside. And THAT'S when the Inquisition barely has anybody fighting for it. Definitely ruins the immersion at times.

Kirkwall is dense and confusing, but at least the population that you see inside it makes sense??

You know everyone complains about how in DA2 you only get to visit like 3 areas in Kirkwall and every alley/dungeon/path is linear and looks exactly the same and like, youre not wrong, BUT… 

last night I was comparing Skyhold to Kirkwall and I said how Skyhold feels like a miniature while Kirkwall feels massive. I know one is a keep and one is a city BUT hear me out

Kirkwall you only run down the same handful of streets, but they are all lined with countless buildings that you cant enter, blocked side streets, and beyond the road youre on you can see MORE buildings and walls and warehouses and areas that are unreachable. It makes it feel huge. You dont go EVERYWHERE because why the fuck would you enter every building in a city? You wouldn’t! 

Meanwhile, Skyhold houses hundreds of war horses (somewhere) and a whole standing army (somewhere) and the hundreds of mages or templars you chose to rescue (somewhere) not to mention the random healers/craftsmen/domenstic workers/guards/stablehands/messengers/spies and others I probably missed AND MIGHT I ADD any dependants they have (you think the people who traveled to skyhold to be safe and to be part of the inquistion didn’t bring spouses/children/parents/other dependants?) but skyhold is like a fucking clubhouse. 

The biggest problem is that you can go almost -everywhere- in skyhold. You can explore almost every room. And by doing that you realize this place is the smallest fucking hub for a powerful faction, theres not even enough places for the named fucking companions and characters to sleep.

It could have just been solved if they had inaccessible towers or buildings you can see peeking just beyond the walls, areas that are blocked off, or something. Yanno, LIKE KIRKWALL.

Anyways its a “less is more” issue and a “SHOW DONT TELL” issue. Like great you tell me we have hundreds of people here but where the fuck are any I have only seen like 20 people today.

Fucking this, though???? Skyhold is beautiful and amazing, BUT WHERE IS EVERYBODY?! And wasn't Kirkwall supposed to give you that kind of maze-like, closed off feel anyway?

Happy St Valentine’s erryone 😘