Ace and her Doughnut

Embarrassing for you if you love Ace and hate Mel, and shit on Mel as part of your hyping up of Ace. They're girlfriends 💖

There’s a particular attitude I often see on the internet that goes something like “If you aren’t part of a particular marginalized group, then you could never understand their experience, so don’t pretend to relate.” And while obviously you’re never going to relate to every aspect of that identity unless you are also of that identity, I feel like this attitude really diminishes opportunities for finding kinship and bonding in similar experiences even if those experiences aren’t exactly the same and/or are the result of different identities.

For example, I’m white and neurodivergent, and I was talking to a Black neurotypical friend about masking, and how I feel like I have to change the entire way I present myself in order to not be considered weird in public. She responded with “Oh, some of that sounds kind of like code-switching— how I have to switch away from using AAVE in white-dominated settings in order to be accepted.” And then we bonded over how frustrating and ridiculous it is that AAVE and stimming are both considered unacceptable in “professional” settings.

Another time, a straight Jewish friend was telling me about a book she had just finished reading, which was written by a Jewish author and had a Jewish main character. She was saying that it was really nice to read a book written by a Jewish author, because even when gentile authors do their research and write a pretty accurate Jewish character, they never quite feel Jewish— you can always tell the author was a gentile. And I said “Oh that sounds kind of like when I read queer characters written by straight authors— you can always tell the author was straight even if they do their research and get things fairly right. So even though I’m happy when any book features queer characters, it’s really especially nice to read queer characters written by queer authors.” And we bonded over this similar experience, and we were both excited that the other understood even if we were coming to this experience from different angles, and then we swapped book recommendations. This conversation is also a great example of when that internet attitude DOES apply— when someone outside of a particular group is trying to understand that group’s entire experience well enough to accurately write the world as seen through their eyes. They’re never quite going to get it right, and that’s ok! It just means it’s important to also have Own Voices authors writing those types of stories also.

Sometimes it seems like people who have been in internet circles exhibiting this attitude for too long are afraid to ever try to relate to the experiences of anyone in any groups other than their own for fear of causing offense, which is honestly pretty counterproductive. Understanding each other and bonding across groups should be the goal! Relating to each other is not a bad thing!

everyone more pretentious than me is an insufferable poseur and everyone less pretentious than me is a clueless philistine

romantic and sexual partner.

weirdest side effect of the pandemic is how many people i know who get sick and say 'but my covid tests are negative so i should be fine' like you know other illnesses. exist. right.

12/Clara photoshoots aesthetic, it’s what I thrive for

HUGE shout out to purple for being the only color that has like no losers. Deep purple royal purple bluish purple redish purple pastel purple dusty purple lavender periwinkle violet like. Banger after banger after banger!!

look at these. there r all absolute fuckin stunners:

I realize that's what's missing from "queer" gear these days.

The absolute pride in being a God damned freak. In being something society saw as wrong.

It's all uwu you're valid and society should accept you

Like no fuck your society. Your society is bullshit and relies on oppression to create its "norms". I don't want societal norms expanded to include me. I want to blow those structures the fuck up

yeah like when people say “normalise” about everything and I’m like, I don’t care how normal it is, I just want people to stop being punished for being weird. We can either attempt to normalise everything one by one, or we can do the whole thing in one fell swoop of “so what if it is weird? Nothing wrong with a bit of weird”

my 2022 highlight was when a guy was driving me home after a date and his phone was playing songs on youtube thru the aux on autoplay BUT he was also using it as a satnav so we had to just cope with whatever song came on. anyway we listened to the isolated vocals for "eye of the tiger" in silence because neither of us acknowledged it and it got to a certain point where it would be even weirder if one of us did say something

/edit: I realise a text post doesn't even do it justice, it went exactly like this

if you're curious there was no second date and I'm pretty sure it's 46% because of this

Every Doctor Who Companion

I would like to wish everyone an uneventful new year

May we live in very uninteresting times

may you experience very precedented events