I got into a conversation about Disco Elysium with @isozyme, whose wife thinks Kim is just a Normal, Rational Guy. And I was like "Does she also think Richard St. Vier is a normal, rational guy?"
And I've been trying to teach myself to draw better on the tablet.
So anyway, here's this PROFOUNDLY NICHE piece of fan art.
something that i think about a lot was what ocean vuong said abt choosing he/him pronouns - "Years later, in another life, before giving a reading, the organizer asked me for my preferred pronouns. I never knew I had a choice. “He/him” I said, after a pause, suddenly unsure. But I felt a door had opened—if only slightly—and through it I had glimpsed a path I had not known existed. There was a way out.
But what if I don’t want to leave this room yet, but just make it bigger? ... since as a cis-presenting male, I don’t need to flee he-ness in order to be seen as myself, I will stay here. Can the walls of masculinity, set up so long ago through decrees of death and conquest, be breached, broken, recast—even healed? I am, in other words, invested in troubling he-ness. I want to complicate, expand, and change it by being inside it. And I am here for the very reasons why I feel, on bad days, I should leave it altogether: that I don’t recognize myself within its dominant ranks—but I believe it can grow to hold me better. Perhaps one day, masculinity might become so myriad, so malleable, it no longer needs a fixed border to recognize itself. It might not need to be itself at all. I wonder if that, too, is the queering of a space?"
yeah, this is definitely the vibe! making the room bigger is important to me. femininity and masculinity become myriad is a really beautiful hope for the future
thanks for sending this quote <3
i have been feeling weird and alone in queer spaces lately because i'm butch and cis. i get well-meaningly misgendered with they/them after telling people my pronouns are she/her. it feels like the definition of woman is being contracted to exclude me from both sides.
i feel a lot of solidarity with trans women, who are also always getting shouldered out of the category of "normal" woman. but there's a tension between me and my transmasc friends where i'm anxious they view me as an incomplete version of them, like someday i'll figure out i'm not really a girl. every time somebody i thought was like me comes out as not a woman either that feeling intensifies, and then i feel like i'm transphobic for being sad that there's one fewer butch woman for me to relate to in media.
my struggles aren't so different from transmasc struggles. i had to change my name at work. i needed to figure out how to fit clothes from the mens section fit on my body. cutting my hair short was the first time i genuinely felt attractive. i'm constantly fretting that i'm not masculine enough. except i'm still a woman, binary-style.
i would like there to be more space for crossdressers in popular internet gender discourse. i'd like butch to be treated like a modern identity and not a brave relic of a homophobic past. i wish gender was seen not just as a thing you are but also a thing you do. me and my collection of denim jackets and novelty snapbacks would appreciate it a lot.
“google is free” actually now that you can’t turn off ai answers google is 5.6 billion gallons of water.
Not that google forcing its fuckshit AI isn't a bad thing, but the clear implication that Google's servers WEREN'T guzzling obscene amounts of water and energy before they started forcing AI on their searches is exactly what I mean when I say that anti-AI posting is unbearably vibes-based
While experts disagree on the scale of data center expansion that can be attributed to AI versus other tech and communications industries (online gaming and streaming, for instance, are hugely energy-expensive activities), I don't think you can fairly say that AI isn't having an environmental impact. Companies are citing AI as the reason that they're massively increasing investment in building new data centers:
(source)
(source)
Even if generative AI flops and this increased capacity isn't needed, the speculative scramble to build more and more data centers is damaging. Once the investments are made, the new growth will be filled with something, whether it's AI or not.
The damage to the environment by the AI craze compared to other applications is hard to quantify. Data center companies are very secretive. However, I don't think it's fair to call this line of critique completely vibes-based. Personally I'm much more worried about AI threats to privacy, education, labor, and our information landscape, but I respect people's environmental concerns as well.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all.
I read A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy (significant trigger warnings for rape and abuse and all forms of intimate partner violence and religious trauma), by Tia Levings, who’s also interviewed on the Prime documentary about the Duggar family, Shiny Happy People (trigger warnings for rape and CSA and religious trauma). A lot of things to think about and unpack.
One of those being: I already knew that there was a lot of themes of gender essentialism and tradwife ideology in omegaverse fic, but I didn’t realize the extent to which it was connected to Christian fundamental ideology.
The high level, extremely basic understanding I have of the structure of Christian fundamentalism is that there is a hierarchy. God above men, men above women, women above children. Women belong to their fathers until they are married and then they belong to their husbands. Their only place is at home, doing domestic labour and having as many children as they are physically able to.
There is currently in the world a very real and increasingly widespread idea that women must be submissive to their husbands. That the female ideal is to be a submissive wife. Christian fundamentalist content slips references to Taming of the Shrew as a signal of a certain world view - the idea that women should be trained into submission through physical abuse.
It’s not submission in the way people consensually do kink, where the submissive person ultimately has all the power and is able to choose what happens and when it stops. Tradwives, in the Christian fundamentalist ideology, are not allowed to say no. They’re not allowed to get divorced. They’re not equal to their husbands. There is no such thing as rape within a marriage because a man is entitled to sex any time he wants it and if a woman resists, the problem is that she’s being disobedient. Men are the sole decision makers. Physical abuse of wives and children is encouraged. It is necessary to break willfulness. It is necessary to provide correction. While it may be the case that, if given all the freedom and choice, some women would choose that life, in a context where it is not possible to say no and there are no other alternatives to choose from, actual consent is impossible.
In my observation, omegaverse has shifted from being a mechanism for the previously more common sex pollen trope (mating cycles having the same impact) and themes of body horror, social commentary, and reflections on biological expressions of self. To, now, becoming a common place, baseline setting for fanfic. And it makes sense: there’s a lot of porn fodder. There’s a lot of complexity to play around with - power dynamics, biological determinism, any number of different fetishes.
But omegaverse is invented. We can write it any way that we choose. So we should be aware of the choices we are making and the fact that many of the choices common to the trope are ultimately upholding a patriarchal world view. That an omega (wife) is submissive to the alpha (husband) they have bonded to (married) and will feel a biological imperative to reproduce and "give their alpha pups" (quiverfull), compelled to obey the power of an alpha's voice (the rule of their husband). That there is a biological necessity for this. That all of society would agree omegas are weaker than alphas.
If someone wants to take the extreme gender binary presented in this world view and write some breeding kink because that’s what tickles their fancy… great! You do you! I'm just suggesting that we have a responsibility to be aware of the larger real life context to what we’re writing - and the world views are we endorsing, explicitly or implicitly.
There is nothing inherently and biologically submissive about a person in a body capable of giving birth. While there are many valid reasons why people may wish to write literally any dynamic (including: it's hot, nothing deeper than that), we should be aware of the ways that we may have internalized patriarchal messaging. Christian fundamentalists are trying to convert people to their worldview. We receive messages designed to indoctrinate from all sorts of places. It's in traditional media, it's in social media. It's in politics. It's in commencement speeches.
We can do and write and read whatever we want (an opinion not shared by Christian fundamentalists), but we should be aware that we are making choices. We should do so intentionally, with enough information to understand what we're choosing to portray.
We are not required to take patriarchal worldviews as inherent in our world building. Gender essentialism is just as fictional as omegaverse.
I've had this scene from @isozyme's you're not a religious person (but) since I read it a couple of months ago...
(Tagging @goodomensafterdark)
"porn isn't misogynistic" tell me you haven't been to the front page of pornhub in 3 words
i agree with the argument that there's no reason that people having sex on video has to be bad. i write bdsm porn as a hobby, i watch all kinds of porn (yes, including the pornhub garbage, sometimes i gotta see some big hot titties), i follow softcore insta models, and i'm happy people make these things i enjoy! the ongoing, intensifying censorship of the internet unjustly punishes people for their profession and is robbing us of an important and intimate element of the human experience. we should throw all throw bricks at the visa and mastercard headquarters for their refusal to support sex workers' transactions (for legal reasons this is fun hyperbole haha)
but for the love of god let's look at the actual porn on the internet (and i mean mainstream shit like pornhub, xvideo, redtube, xhamster, etc) using our feminist eyes for one second please. ask a few questions like "who's pov is represented" and "what expectations for women's behavior during sex are demonstrated here" and "why are these videos all segregated by the woman's race" and "how come the bisexual category is all M/M/F threesomes while F/F/M threesomes are in the straight category" and "what does the obsession with videos of teenage girls (especially 18yos) having sex say about our society" and so many more
we live in a profoundly misogynistic world, and much of our porn reflects that world's disdain for women. it's not pornography's fault that there's still work to be done, but the work remains.
"I'm in a bit of a pickle, my dear," Aziraphale said over the telephone.
Crowley was seized by immediate fury. Not even a decade, and they're at it again, he thought viciously. You'd think they'd be embarrassed enough to stay out of things for a few centuries at least, after botching the apocalypse like that.
"Who's done something to you?" hissed Crowley.
"Ah," said Aziraphale, in the quiet tone of someone who didn't mean to learn someone else's secrets and was mildly sheepish about it. "This crossword clue -- I'm stuck -- 1980s French fencer, thought you might know. It's eight letters and has a Q in it."
"Trinquet," Crowley snapped, in the tone of someone who had revealed one of his secrets and was annoyed about it.
An account pertaining to the cultivation of figs, the ecstasy of St. Theresa of Avila, the ontological uncertainty of mammoths, the nature of temptation, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the ten years following the end of the world.
Words: 19,728
Status: Complete
Rating: Mature
By @isozyme
Some doodles from the amazing Newt/Hermann fic “First a Darling, Then a Marvel” by @isozyme
Emotional highs and lows, Newt obsessed with cloning a kaiju, and some smooches. Cannot recommend it enough!
