Points Point Nemo is the remotest place in the ocean and home of the Spaceship Cemetery.

by andrewdc_nz

Humor me, Tumblr,

Your extremely nerfed fairy godmother appears and offers to magically resurrect one discontinued corporate food item for you, in perpetuity.

What do you ask her for?

Personally I'm still pining for peanut chexmix.

Real sour cream. Not "milk products" crap with gum and corn syrup. But actual sour cream that Gay Lea bought out and killed off around here in the past couple of years in order to sell us their own "you can imagine it's related to sour cream" product.

PSA: Winterfox/Requires Hate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Maria Ying

I'm starting to see recs for Benjanun Sriduangkaew crop up in fandom again, so here's your reminder that Benjanun Sriduangkaew, aka Maria Ying, is actually Winterfox/Requires_Hate, a well-known serial harasser, blackmailer and abuser who decided that the best thing to do with her multimillionaire heiress time and money is to do real and lasting harm to many communities and many writers (especially writers of color) that she saw as rivals.

with how fast things move online right now, I imagine she's banking on people just forgetting everything she pulled: please don't! But even if you won't deny her your attention, at least keep yourself safe and remember that her modus operandi used to be either love bombing people until they let slip something she then blackmailed them with, or literally decades of unhinged harassment.

feel free to share.

original sources:

Mixon report: https://feralsapient.com/?p=889

The letter to Apex editors: https://web.archive.org/web/20170216003240/http://awitin.likhain.net/2017/02/a-letter-to-apex-editors-re-the-intersectional-sff-roundtable/

Zen Cho's report (start here of you never heard of any of this): https://web.archive.org/web/20200808225250/https://zencho.org/being-an-itemised-list-of-disagreements/

*she had once upon a time deleted her blog, hence the Wayback link; but now it's re-uploaded by her here, as she explicitly still stands by her words: https://zencho.org/articles/being-an-itemised-list-of-disagreements/

Rachel Manija Brown's report: https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1288081.html

I know, I know, gatekeeping the outdoors, that's supposedly bad, right, but I think if you show up to do a hike and you brought a portable speaker with you to play music while you hike, I think, like hear me out, there should be a gate, and someone at the gate should keep you from doing the hike.

playing music in public should get strong social disapproval

Recorded music, anyway. Live music is different rules. If you want to lug an entire cello up a mountain you can do whatever the hell you want.

Carrying a speaker on a hike to make everyone listen to your bullshit, and simply sitting under a tree and playing a fiddle in the woods, are two activities so different they may as well not exist in the same world.

I think the critical difference is that the bringing of recorded music with you ties the space to Elsewhere, whereas the creation of live music with an instrument you brought both binds you to the space, and drags everyone who hears you play into it as well.

I think you're right.

Yeah I'll accept this into my belief system.

A BEAR ATE MY BEST HUMMINGBIRD FEEDER.

Rude.

Someone tell that bear he's not supposed to eat that with the skin on.

I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks. 

I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.

This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell? 

north americans don't all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:

like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.

TELL ME AGAIN HOW AUSTRALIA IS THE DEATH COUNTRY We have two spiders and (apparently) 12 snakes but we don’t have lions, bears, wildcats, AND crocodiles. We sometimes have crocodiles and large boas in certain areas. We don’t have to worry about a bear attacking our halloween decor. Or moose deciding to joust on the front lawn. Maybe similar to Africa, America’s fear of Australia is because you all assume our wildlife is exactly as huge and space-invadey.

oh yeah i forgot about the gators

I live halfway between two large cities in a pretty damn suburban area and hearing the sentence “did you hear there was a bear* spotted on [road that is pretty built up and I don’t think of as wild at all]” only left me a little surprised. My mother once saw what she described as a coyote going to school- just walking around a university campus.

so.... yes I was absolutely picturing elephants reaching over your back yard fences for some tasty leaves.

* Ursus americanus for clarification not homosexual sapiens

Couple years ago we had a bear in the market of downtown Ottawa. Ottawa has a population of 1 million, and it made it to the largest market (byward), and had to be removed with sedatives.

yeah, like. the US is big. a lot of it is much wilder than you think.

We (okay, technically, Anchorage) keep getting moose in the hospital because they see the plants in the lobby and walk inside through the automatic doors to try to eat them. It’s just. A thing. That keeps happening. 

Perfectly normal.

A BEAR ATE MY BEST HUMMINGBIRD FEEDER.

Rude.

Someone tell that bear he's not supposed to eat that with the skin on.

I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks. 

I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.

This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell? 

north americans don't all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:

like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.

TELL ME AGAIN HOW AUSTRALIA IS THE DEATH COUNTRY We have two spiders and (apparently) 12 snakes but we don’t have lions, bears, wildcats, AND crocodiles. We sometimes have crocodiles and large boas in certain areas. We don’t have to worry about a bear attacking our halloween decor. Or moose deciding to joust on the front lawn. Maybe similar to Africa, America’s fear of Australia is because you all assume our wildlife is exactly as huge and space-invadey.

oh yeah i forgot about the gators

I live halfway between two large cities in a pretty damn suburban area and hearing the sentence “did you hear there was a bear* spotted on [road that is pretty built up and I don’t think of as wild at all]” only left me a little surprised. My mother once saw what she described as a coyote going to school- just walking around a university campus.

so.... yes I was absolutely picturing elephants reaching over your back yard fences for some tasty leaves.

* Ursus americanus for clarification not homosexual sapiens

Couple years ago we had a bear in the market of downtown Ottawa. Ottawa has a population of 1 million, and it made it to the largest market (byward), and had to be removed with sedatives.

yeah, like. the US is big. a lot of it is much wilder than you think.

google drive has decided the whole thing should be in german. sadly i am not a german… phone…?

went back to check the order of events at the end of the book (so much happens in this book) and once again i can NOT believe that evs says ‘so i’m meant to believe you did this out of affection’ and biggles basically replies ‘i mean, why else would i do it’

#‘i couldn’t care less’ said biggles who in fact cared very much all the time forever

And all the way through the rescue Biggles is all ‘I don’t care if you want to walk away now, go run off into the forest if you want, it doesn’t matter to me at all what you do. Also are we going too fast, do you need to rest, are you okay, no you are absolutely not allowed to be the suicidal rearguard, I want you alive and well so shut up and let me protect you.’

They have so many moments when you think, is that really canon? and have to go back and check because SURELY Johns didn’t write that - but nope, he did.

I love that so much. Their entire relationship is just amazing. Also, Johns definitely wrote this: ‘Then how do you know?’ ‘A little bird whispered in my ear. Now let me whisper in yours.

you know that tumblr post that goes "I don't want my fantasy media to be realistic, I want it to be convincing"?

I think a corollary to this is I don't want my fandom experiences to be unique, I want them to be sincere

That's why I enjoy reading the same tropes over and over again. Those authors are writing those stories from a genuine love of both the tropes and the characters.

It's why I enjoy 17 gif sets about the same 3-second interaction on screen. Each one of those sets was pulled and recoloured and captioned and adjusted because each one of those gif makers wanted to capture that moment and celebrate it.

It's why every "I'm glad you enjoyed it" reply makes me smile when I get one on a comment I left. Because I know replying to comments is hard and kind of awkward, but I also know that the author really *is* glad and I'm happy that I could let them know I enjoyed their work.

I love things that are new, sure. But I also love things that have been done a million times already because I know the person doing it loves that thing too. I love the love they're showing. I love the genuine joy and celebration and community it fills me with.

Tell me a soft memory

My oldest brother is 10 years older than me.

When I was in first grade, he took me shopping for new school clothes — which was huge because, as the youngest of six kids, I lived in hand-me-downs.

He bought me a little navy blue, polka dot dress with a Peter Pan collar and red alphabet buttons. But, on picture day, I lost one of the buttons on the playground. I had a total meltdown because my brother spent his own money to make sure I had this new dress and I ruined it. I was a mess, totally inconsolable.

My teacher was also the mom of one of my brother’s best friends. She told him, and he, my brother and the entire football team searched the playground after practice for my lost button. Which they actually found.

My brother sewed the button back on himself in the car all while trying to explain that he wouldn’t have been mad even if I did lose it.

It was just a button and a dress.

But I did have one of those little red alphabet buttons sewn into my wedding dress.

we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.

when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.

the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.

my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.

when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.

and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.

in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.

I imagine that the last generation to really feel this way, to really feel a before-and-after kind of world, was at the last turn of the century, which had 3 huge, life-changing inventions happen all at once.

In 1890, everybody rode horses, used candles to see at night, and communicated through letters.

By the 1920s (only 30 years later!), everybody had automobiles (or access to another form of 'self-driving' transportation like busses or trams) and nobody had horses. Nearly everyone had electricity in their houses. Nearly everyone had a telephone, or access to one.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine growing up, being taught by your parents all about how to ride horses and care for them and hitch them to a wagon, only to...not ever use that knowledge as an adult, because you have a car? Can you imagine learning how to make candles, finally getting good enough at it to be useful to your family as a teenager, only to flick a switch to turn on a light bulb as an adult?

I feel like that last huge change in technology is the same thing we are going through. I know how to read a paper map. I will never need to use this knowledge. But it's still in there; including the many patient hours my mother spent teaching me, and a lot of fond memories I have of her doing it. I know how to research a topic in a paper library, with actual books. Pretty sure I will never do that again. I memorize phone numbers, 'just in case'. In case what? The automobile (smartphone) gets un-invented? But I hold that knowledge in my head. It's there. It's part of me.

I wish I could speak to my great-great-grandmother, who had her first baby in 1900. To ask her, if what Millennials now are going through is what it was like for her Centennial generation. The absolute whiplash, from one way of life to another.

Kids born in 1890 knew how to make candles, and kids born in 1920 could not fathom why you would need to know this.

This is one of the things that fascinates me about my current fandom, which is the Biggles series by W.E. Johns written from 1930s to 1970s approximately. A character born before airplanes are invented becomes a RAF pilot. Planes and cars change. Phones that are used one way at the start of the series are used in a completely different way later as long-distance calls become more common place. So many geopolitical shifts occur that the map of Europe is entirely different. It's just such an interesting window into that world, and is also in some ways relatable to the world we live in now, the before and after a major technological shift.

Don’t get attached to unpopular ships because you will run out of fic and die

Alternatively: create the content and become adored by like 3 people forever

Or a secret third thing: passionately create content for your unhinged pool noodle of a ship until those three people can’t help but also create something and then live forever on your happy raft of cringey little friends.

For anybody looking to do more whump in June, some fellow whump fans encouraged me to make a prompt list!

Please feel free to participate with original or fan works of any kind (writing, photos, gifs, mood boards, videos, songs, whatever creative medium your heart desires!). You can do one or all of the prompts on any given day, and if none are to your liking, check out the alternate prompts!

My only rule is that you tag your stuff with proper warnings, plzkthnx.

And don't forget to tag your entries with #juneofdoom so I can reblog them here! Have fun!

I have no patience for negativity toward "boomers" anymore.

Almost everybody doing the work to restore ecosystems, grow native plants, and preserve rare species is 50 or older

The people I work with IRL have told me that my presence is encouraging because it means "the younger generation is getting involved with this stuff too." There's really not very many people my age

Who do you think was fighting this fight in the 1970's

I'm saying this as a Gen Z who is woefully lacking in these skills

Social media and the internet have really decimated my generation's ability to network and organize with people IRL

Not in the sense that That Damn Phone causes your skills to atrophy, but rather, Gen Z has no idea how people organized before social media, and no idea what anyone over 40 is doing for good in the world

The vast majority of local native plant, wildlife, and gardening organizations have NO social media presence

I could never have understood this until I started working IRL with people who are absolute powerhouses of knowledge, resources, and action about plants, animals, ecosystems, and conservation...who simply, barely know how to email

Google is not a resource

It can link you to a few resources, but it is ultimately a complicated device to make you Buy Product

Google will not even show you the best websites out there for learning about the ecosystem. At all. Google recognizes few possible interpretations of your query other than "Google, show me a bunch of advertisements for [thing] so I can Buy Product." If your research doesn't end in Buy Product, Google has no interest in helping you.

Many people think that the way of finding things out before Google was books

But that's more wrong than right.

The way of finding things out before Google was community.

Because there's some old lady in your community who has been gardening and observing wildlife for 40 years who is somehow running a sprawling native plant gardening organization and providing everyone else in your town with seeds and random produce, and she has a library's worth of knowledge absorbed from reading every book and talking to every guy who has any experience about plants, and this old lady has 87 close friends who are somehow involved in every local governmental department and private organization and business, and if she can't answer your question herself, she will be able to hand you a little scrap of note paper with the name of the exact person you need to talk to. She doesn't have an email address

Gen Z seems to regard "having connections" as a bad thing and a way of cheating your way into opportunities that you don't deserve

In reality, it's "opportunities" and "deserve" that indicates something deeply wrong and dysfunctional with our society. Outside of the numerous artificial competitive scenarios we are placed in where we strive against others to perform the ideal persona of worthiness as a human being, "having connections" is just how things get done.

Same with "being a Karen." Taking out your petty frustrations on a powerless retail worker is one thing, summoning every ounce of Upstanding Member Of Society in your middle aged white woman body to rend asunder the guy who approved of bulldozing a wetland is another

@false-binaries I mean honestly that's not far off

1. go to physical place that seems closest to the thing you want to learn about (community garden is great, nature center or farmer's market is also great)

2. observe a person that seems open to chatting with others

3. ask something along the lines of "Hi, I've been trying to learn about [thing], but I'm pretty new to it, do you happen to know anything about it?" Express curiosity about the work done by the place you are in

4. If you manage to hit it off with someone, just kinda hang out. Other people will show up to chat with the person you are talking to. You are now talking to those people as well.

to be fair this works very well for me partly because it's the south and people will talk for 30 minutes after meeting in the middle of the grocery store. but we need to normalize community

Libraries are great for this! Also, just hang around places you know there's people interested in what you're interested in.

I used to participate in a knitting circle at my library. Met all sorts of people there without a email or any social media. At the aquarium I volunteer at, there's an old dude who is very passionate about whales and he sits in front of the beluga exhibit every Thursday. He knows everything about local ocean conservation and collaborates with the local river keepers. Again, no social media and only has a joint email with his wife.

Thing to keep in mind is these people love to talk about their interests so you'll get lots of info. You can also check local news papers as many people put community events in there!

^ can recommend libraries, professionally. also check out cooperative extension programs - they can be a great way to connect with people who are into this kind of thing

and yeah. local newspapers! the actual print copy, which you can also probably find at your local library. plenty of places still do the bulk of their advertising there