I Don't Know What I'm Doing

@claracaboozle

you are right this is wild

i love you cities. i love you sounds of people. i love you cacophony of scents at dinner time as everyone cooks different food up and down the street. i love you neighbors playing loud music on the front stairs and laughing even louder. i love you rambunctious kids running down the street in the summer getting up to god knows what. i love you corner stores. i love you big cookouts and block parties. i love you spring wildflowers popping up in overgrown empty lots. i love you weeds growing from in cement cracks. i love you scent of clove cigarettes on the air. i love you friends running into each other on the sidewalk. i love you passing conversations in different languages. i love you grandmas on the bus. i love you graffiti. i love you murals. i love you kids’ sidewalk chalk hopscotch. i love you sounds of people cooking and doing dishes and listening to music floating out cracked kitchen windows. i love y

Being polyam is FR like "I'm not aro/ace but I believe in their beliefs"

Posted this an hour ago and already got the tags peer-reviewed twice so here they are in the main post for all to see: #sexual stuff doesn't make/break/define a relationship #People can be meaningful to you in a variety of ways and these are all valuable #The nuclear family is a false ideal #I could go on

As an aroace, right back at you OP! I've legitimately thought about making an 'I'm not polyamorous but I believe in their beliefs' post before.

It's us together against amatonormativity and traditional relationship hierarchy. ✊

[ID: the epic handshake meme, two muscular masculine arms clasped together, where one is labeled aro ace (spaced for readability), the other is labeled polyam. Aro ace’s hand has text that says “relationships do not need to be defined by sexuality.” Polyam’s hand has text that says, “people can be meaningful to you in a variety of ways and these are all valuable.” Their handshake is labeled “the nuclear family is a lie!” The word lie is in all caps. /end]

thinking about the very common idea among antebellum american slaveowners that ex-slaves would initiate a race war as soon as they were free and that whites would never be safe among people they or their ancestors owned so they should be moved to a different country. and how that was completely stupid and the racial violence post-abolition was racist anti-black violence not slews of anti-white revenge killings across the nation and a dissolution of society. anyway thinking about that and also the insistence from the zionist crowd that if palestinians were given equal rights or even if the occupation slackened its grip a little every single israeli from the river to the sea would be murdered by vengeful palestinians.

i keep seeing people talk about their bfs/husbands weaponizing incompetence to avoid grocery shopping or purposefully fucking it up. mine doesn't do that he'll shop on his own prerogative like an actually functional adult, his issue is he occasionally brings home a Cursed Item

it is. uh. not good tasting

i am also jewish he literally brought this home specifically to offend me

wake up babe the 11th plague just dropped

eye doctors: please for fucks sake try to protect your eyes from blue light pls take breaks from screens pls wear these blue light filter glasses pls pls pls im fucking begging you

car manufacturers:

“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.

“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement. 

“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”

“True.” She glanced at the others. “You can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.”

Things I didn’t know

“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”

You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.

Reblog to save a life

Source

I seethe with rage every time I am forced to sit in a chair designed like this like who is this good for

I AM 5’7 I AM AVERAGE HEIGHT. now explain how this is comfortable

So short people don’t feel left out

All throughout childhood, while my peers were socializing and making friends, I studied the blade read so many books that I am now almost legally blind, which left me with vast and deeply instinctual understanding of English grammar - and next to no ability to explain how it actually works. Friends will often ask me to proofread their writing and then get very mad when I say things like, "You need to completely reverse this sentence and cut this clause entirely; no, I'm sorry, i don't know why, I just know that the way it is now ITCHES 😭"

Now, what I want to see is a fantasy story where this plays out with MAGICAL grammar. Someone from a backwater town deeply steeped in folk magic arrives at Wizard Uni where all their fellow students are like "What do you mean, we should add another '𝞯∘⋇𝞿' to the incancation because it 'sounds better'? What do you mean, 'it could just be a regional thing'?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'THIS SPELL JUST FEELS LIKE IT NEEDS A LIVE RAT'????"

#like...why use this baby word when you can just say how you feel about it

Found this in the original post tags and I just... SIGH

Here’s the thing, anon. Squick isn’t just ‘I don’t like this’, it’s ‘I think this is gross and it makes me deeply uncomfortable but I pass no judgement on those who enjoy it, because I acknowledge that everyone is different and those same people may have the same visceral reaction some of the things I enjoy’ and was originally made popular in the kink community.

So yeah, if you want to say that every time you come across a trope or whatever you find icky then go ahead, say that every time.

Also, this term dates back to Usenet in the early nineties, so sure, go off.

This frustrates me so much because squicks and triggers are fundamentally different things and as someone with PTSD, the distinction is super useful!

Squicks are things I find personally gross but may not be gross to someone else. They don’t upset me or provoke my PTSD, they simply do not pop my corn. Example: Omegaverse. I don’t like it, it makes me uncomfortable and I’m not going to read it, but if you like it, you do you.

Triggers are things which directly provoke my PTSD. This means that my triggers may seem completely normal and innocuous to someone else, because my triggers are so personal and intrinsically linked to a specific event in my life. My reactions to these triggers can include panic attacks and flashbacks to this traumatic event. Sometimes being triggered can affect me for several hours or even days.

Describing something as either a squick or a trigger allows me easily establish the difference in my potential reaction to something without having to go into painful detail about why bodily fluids might make me back button quickly but poker games might leave me a crying wreck. 

Making this distinction, and having a specific word for something that is not your slice of pie, but also not an actual psychological trigger, is also REALLY important for making sure that the word “trigger” can retain its original, specific, purposeful, and collectively understood clinical meaning (both inside and outside online fannish communities).

If we encourage everyone to lump things that just make them slightly uncomfortable or simply aren’t to their taste in under the word “trigger”, it actually dilutes the meaning of the word. It makes it harder for us all to, for the most part, collectively agree on and understand what exactly is being described when the word gets used.

And that destruction of shared precise definitions is a problem! It is really useful to have the communal language to be able to clearly and quickly delineate between “this grosses me out, no thanks” and “this is going to set off a trauma episode, rattle my brain, and probably throw off the rest of my day/week as a result” while also maintaining your privacy, and to know that you will be understood in what you are saying. Not having it is actually detrimental to the effort of making our communities safe and navigable for people living with trauma. Which is a goal that is much more important to me, personally, than the idea of not being “cutesy” (a word which in this case which sounds a lot like it’s being used as a euphemism for “cringe”).

(Also, one has to wonder if people told Shakespeare he was being childish when he made up entirely new words that are still widely used in the English language today...... 🤔)

My understanding is that “squick” was also created to avoid using more judgmental terms like “gross” or “disturbing”--like yeah, I do find X kink gross or disturbing, but that’s my personal feeling, not an objective fact about the world, and if I’m explaining to my friend who is super into X that I’d prefer they leave it out of the story they’re writing me in the fic exchange, I want to use politer language!

“Squick” does sound silly, like onomatopoeia, but I think that’s part of its role--it’s a word that defuses if, again, you’re saying something squicks you in front of an audience that may include its connoisseurs. When I say I’m squicked, I’m clearly not getting onto a high horse of dignity and moral righteousness. At the same time I’m not being so indirect for the sake of politeness--”oh, it’s not my favorite thing, I’m not sure it works for me, I haven’t found a fic about it that clicks for me”--that someone could misunderstand how much I do not want to see it.

And, to reiterate, it is a grown up word made by grown up nerds in the 90s so if you think it was somehow born on and limited to Tumblr I'm going to need you to actually do some fandom history research before you ever speak authoritatively again about anything fandom-related or adjacent.

I love and deeply miss the term “squick” and really want to see it brought back. It allows dislike for its own sake and without judgement. It’s polite, gentle, and has an air of “you do you.” A squick is not a trigger. Triggers are related to trauma. You’re allowed to not like things and not have them related to anything other than just finding them unpleasant. And that aversion can be strong! That’s okay! I really don’t like watersports. Like, gag-reflex levels of aversion, but it’s not triggering. I just really don’t like it.  I feel like we’ve lost the right/ability to just... quietly not like things and move on with our lives. Not everything is for everyone, and you don’t need a reason to not like something. Just politely and quietly excuse yourself. No need to draw attention, and if someone asks you why you just say, “No, it squicks me out.” No judgement. No narrative necessary. 

There is a sad trend of trying to make everything you personally dislike morally reprehensible in some way to justify your dislike of it. You're allowed to just not like something for no real reason. You do not have to justify why you dislike something, and the word "squick" is perfect for that. It say "look I really really don't like this thing, but it's ok if you do" and that is useful.

I think the biggest problem is that a lot of these kids are VERY into the whole fandom purity culture thing, so they actually DO want to make it out to be morally reprehensible, and they DON'T think it's ok that other ppl might be into it.

Cheerfully using “squick” since 1992, because it means a specific thing and other words do not mean that thing.

Very much SAME.

HAPPY MAY THE FOURTH, YOU GUYS!!

star trek heritage post (December 20th, 2015)

With the Reddit 3rd party app crackdown and the ongoing horseshit Elon Musk is pulling with "X", I realize a lot of people here might be pretty new. So I put together a quick and easy guide for using Tumblr for anyone new who might need it.

*choking gurgling blood dripping from my nose choking and gurlging on the blood pouring out of my nose*

Reviews are in! Reviews are glowingly positive! Reviews are glowing like the cloud we All Hail.

purpose of this poll: basically im wondering if my gran having a pistol was a typical american experience

Ok I'm gonna fix this poll

I'm surprised there are folks in the US who haven't, honestly.