”Wow you’re so self aware for your age!” I’ve been filtering every experience I ever have through a thick sieve of shame ever since I turned 12

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I've been musing a bit on that one post that went around during the recent holiday season, to which someone added their family tradition of Present Practice. My god! Imagine actually telling kids what behavior is expected, instead of expecting them to intuit it and punish them when they get it wrong!!

Separate post because this topic is a little tangential to that, but I think it does a great job of unearthing one of our very well-hidden internal biases, which goes as follows:

Good people don't need to be taught.

A good person (in this case, a good child) shouldn't need to be told to be gracious and grateful when given a gift. A good child should just know that a holiday tradition of gift-giving is a social performance to strengthen family bonds and that personal preference or genuine reactions are secondary to that performance. A good child should just know how to value gifts, how to express thanks, how to praise and compliment. No caretakers in their lives should need to put any effort into instructing or modeling these things.

Good people should just know how to be good. If they were really Ontologically Good, their inherent goodness would simply intuitively guide them to correct behaviors. If they can't do that on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

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...Which all sounds very reasonable and obvious, and surely a mistake that only fundie christian families would make! Except that people in the social justice sphere also do this all the time. It's not anybody's job to educate you. It's 2024, how do you not know this already? If you were a Good Person, you wouldn't need to be taught. You would simply intuit the correct philosophies and gravitate to them according to your superior internal moral compass.

If you were a Good Person, you would already know that everything you were taught by your family and/or background was wrong. You should have rejected it already. You should have cut off your family, your heritage, everything about your childhood and upbringing that was Bad and Wrong. You should have known it was all a lie.

If you were a Good Person, you should be able to find the correct way yourself. You should be able to seek out the proper educational resources, and distinguish them from bad advice leading you astray, and make sense of them all according to your own internal moral code.

If you were a Good Person, you would have found your way by the proper, dignified, official channels, not by reading a comic or watching anime. You shouldn't need entertainment or art to guide you. You should just know.

And if someone can't do these things on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

are you the gay who can drive or the gay who can cook

manifesting , masturbating , and meditating .

I could NOT be in feudal Japan. Here are some reasons why

Bad idea: Age gap discourse but in a fantasy land where there's multiple races who have vastly different lifespans and life styles.

Is it wrong for a 27 year old human to date a 140 year old stone elf, considering most stone elves don't get out of diapers till their 30s?

Is it wrong for a 80 year old dwarf to date a two year old fire wisp, when fire wisps only live up to 5 years (between the eruptions) and have memories of their past lives, so in a way they're "born" at age 400,000+? That octogenarian dwarf is way younger than the fire wisp that's only physically younger than some of the socks the dwarf has!

Is it wrong for a chronomancer who was never born to date, well, anyone? They are zero years old and infinity years old and negative one hundred and seventeen years old all at once. They look like an old human, sure, with the long white beard and the wrinkly skin, but as far as anyone can tell, they've always looked like that. We've seen the cave paintings.

Is it wrong for a 30 year old lizardman (that's old in lizardman years) to date a human who is 60 years old in biological years (because of aging spells), 26 years old in lived-experience years, but only 13 years old in calendar years? (ie, they were born 13 years ago, but spent some of that time in sideways timelines, so they've lived more years than have passed in their home timeline?)

Is it wrong for a 12,000 year old dragon date a pile of 400 kobolds when kobolds only live like 10 years on average, but reach full maturity in one year? And if you disagree, can you do anything about it? You do know what happened to the last policeman who tried to arrest a dragon, right? Their city is still smoldering, 50 years later.

Is it wrong for anyone to date the time worm? It's the same age, every year. So the age gap can only intensify. If you start dating the time worm when you're both the same age, when do you break it off because you've become too much older than them?

And most confusing of all... What about the fairies? They could be anything between a thousand and a day old, they would lie about their age either way, and they can look like whatever they want. There's fairies we know for a fact have been around since the founding of The City of Towers, who met the silent mother herself, and also look like they're at most ten years old. Is it wrong to date them, or just really uncomfortable for everyone who sees it? And on the other side there's fairies who are "born" (hatched? They come from plants, I'm not sure what the verb even would be. Seeded? Sprouted, maybe) this week who are already appearing like middle-aged men and dancing with widows in what looks like a scheme to run off with her fortune but they never take the money, because what would a fairy want with worthless metal discs? Maybe fairies have a hive mind or genetic memory or reincarnation with full memories, they'd never tell you or give you a straight (or consistent) answer anyway.

Stone golems are really the only inter-race dating situation anyone can agree on. They're unthinking & unmoving solid rock during the day, so those hours don't count. Thus their "real age" is a nice even half of their true age. So if you meet a stone golem who was dug out 30 years ago, watch out: that's a 15 year old, and if you're a 25 year human, that's too young for you, even though their dig-date is five years before your birth-date.

Oh this is easy actually you can only date if you're within one or two challenge ratings of each other, otherwise you need to double the species with the weaker CR. So a level 10 adventurer can date 1,024 orcs or a juvenile dragon, and a commoner can date a housecat (but watch out for bites)

Reminder that a Golem can only be created by someone who is Jewish and is something that belong to Jewish mysticism and folklore.

Golems are not some random fantasy creature/creation. Please respect close cultures like Judaism and do not appropriate the Golem.

You can use homunculus or automaton or something else instead.

I kinda hate this. Everything from the fae to dragons to djinn are part of some culture or religion. D&D uses literal angels and devils in the monster manual. We remix and reinterpret and get our stupid creative fingerprints all over history and folklore all the time, and while I legit think the origin story of the golem is really cool and definitely worth reading, I don’t think it should have some kind of protection from fanfic that literally no other cryptid gets.

uh that's too bad.

Golems are not cryptids.

There are such things as closed cultures, Judaism is one of them. That which belongs to closed cultures are not for those who do not belong to said culture.

Not that hard to understand.

I did some googling and have seen a number of Jews saying there is no issue in using golems.

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-considered-offensive-to-include-golems-in-a-narrative-Mainly-Im-worried-about-offending-Jewish-people-since-theres-been-some-discourse-around-it-in-a-certain-fandom-If-so-is-there-an-alt-mythical-creature-I

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43eqx?Golems-and-the-Problem-with-Them

Let me guess, you also have Black friends who say the N-word isn’t racist?

Of course not.

I had a more nuanced response but timblr suddenly exited the editor and I don’t feel like typing it all up again.

Main points:

N word is all most always used by non black piropee in racist or derogatory ways

Golems are typically used without any antisemitic ideas, it’s just another fantasy creature/thing

Nobody says why it’s harmful

Some Jews say it’s completely unproblematic

Conclusion:

I do not see why it’s bad to use it

Because “some Jews” do not speak for all Jews and we have a closed religion and culture.

Do you also think it’s okay to use Native American sacred folkloric creatures because some Native Americans think it’s okay, even though many others say “no, that’s fucking around with our closed sacred culture”? Or is it only Jews you’re comfortable appropriating from?

x

the housing market is ruining my sex life

nobody can host cuz they all live with their parents and i also can't host cuz i live with my parents AND they removed the LOCK on the bathroom at my favorite punk club bc too many people were giving BLOWJOBS in THERE

Isn't that what the punk club bathrooms are for?

EXACTLY

the future is not female, the future is an evil bug made out of plastic killing your ass

kinda ?

The future is the making of a lasting peace between girls and bugs

One my favorite parts of being Butch is other woman seeing me as safe. Physically and emotionally. Like yes of course I’ll protect you.

The fact that Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian Mckellen are best friends in real life makes me so happy

x

HOW ARE THEY REAL

#squadgoals

Never stops making me smile. I want someone like this in my life. 💜

Okay so the best thing,the best thing about Sirs Patrick & Ian being best friends is that they met because of the X-Men movie.

I saw Sir Patrick speak a year or so ago and someone asked him about their friendship.  He told this story about how I think they’d once or twice worked on the same production but had had very little interaction, and that when he’d been a kid, he’d utterly looked up to Sir Ian, who had had an established theater career at a very young age. 

People assume that they’ve been friends since they were young, which makes sense given the sort of work they’ve done and their career trajectories, but no. Sir Patrick basically had a giant hero-crush-from-a-distance on Sir Ian for most of his life AND THEN on the set of X-Men, their trailers were put next to each other and they were significantly older than anyone else on the set, so they started spending their downtime together. 

And became inseparable.  And this is amazing. 

So everyone who wants a friend like this, you have time. <3

New paladin oath