Reblog this to prove your blog was made before the February 2022 tumblr resurgence

i am terrified about what apollo may do with this post

fear intensifies

A guide to swearing in Thedas

These are all taken from the toolset (mostly under “cuss” in the soundsets, but also from various bits of dialogue), organized for your convenience.

These are Dragon Age: Origins ONLY. There are no files that are human-readable for DA:A, DA2, or any DLC or expansions.

Not English the King’s Tongue

Pretty normal

Elves

Invocations of Andraste

Andraste’s clothing

Andraste’s ass

The Maker

Paragons

Ancestors

Dwarf culture

 The Blight

 The Fade

Racial epithets

Pee and poop

Dogs

 Food

Fereldan culture and history

 Animals and insects

what is this i dont even

Angelina Jolie - Vogue (October 2021)

to all the fic writers out there who have made 2021 bearable and have given us all countless hours of happiness and escapism, thank you so much

The hard truth about autism acceptance that a lot of people don't want to hear is that autism acceptance also inherently requires acceptance of people who are just weird.

And yes, I mean Those TM people. Middle schoolers who growl and bark and naruto run in the halls. Thirtysomethings who live with their parents. Furries. Fourteen-year-olds who identify as stargender and use neopronouns. Picky eaters. Adults in fandoms. People who talk weird. People who dress weird.

Because autistic people shouldn't have to disclose a medical diagnosis to you to avoid being mocked and ostracized for stuff that, at absolute worst, is annoying. Ruthlessly deriding people for this stuff then tacking on a "oh, but it's okay if they're autistic" does absolutely nothing to help autistic people! Especially when undiagnosed autistic people exist.

Like it or not, if you want to be an ally to autistic people, you're going to have to take the L and leave eccentric, weird people alone. Even if you don't know them to be autistic. You shouldn't be looking for Acceptable Reasons to be mean to people in the first place. Being respectful should be the default.

I wasn’t diagnosed until my sophomore year of high school! I was weird, yes, and I’ll attest to that, but holy crap, don’t bully me just because of that (I was bullied cuz of my “weirdness” at least once a day from pre-k through 12th grade)!

has anyone else ever had a fanfic that just... haunts them? like it's been months and maybe even years since you read it, but it just lingers with you and you can never truly leave behind the imprint it made on you? and maybe it's just a single line, one sentence that you can't shake off, that takes up residence in your mind and stays there, feeding into your psyche and subtly influencing your brainspace and maybe even your writing or other works?

It occurs to me that there are people who weren’t on this website in 2012 and therefore never saw the magical gif that you can actually hear:

It’s been over five years and that still impresses the hell out of me.

wdym you can hear it?

Basically, it’s a form of synesthesia, movement-hearing. In this case, you expect to hear a thud, so you do. It’s estimated that 20% of people experience this type of synesthesia, as opposed to 2-4% for other kinds.

YO what the FUXK

The longer you watch it the more you get convinced that you can hear a  distant thud and the air displace.

I heard the thud. I closed my eyes and the thud stopped. I opened my eyes and I heard the thud. My goodness but human brains are a mess.

I try to keep my nose out of shit like this but today. man. today I encountered something that really ticked me off.

today I met a professor who does queer studies. she told me that her teenage gay son yelled at her recently for using the word “queer” in describing her discipline and demanded to know how the university “could get away with calling it that.”

so of course she’s baffled right, and asks him where on earth this is coming from. and he told her he read it on Tumblr. 

listen if you don’t want to be called queer and don’t want to be lumped in with folks who comprise the queer community, that’s fine. that’s totally fine. it is 100% okay. people are allowed to have complicated histories with that word. it’s a fraught signifier. it’s a mess and it’s allowed to be. 

what’s not cool is telling young LGBTQ+ people that queer is a slur in all contexts because now you are stripping away not just the language that we use to describe ourselves but also the language that creates the discipline that lets us study our own lives and our cultures. Queer studies has been a part of American academe since the 1970s (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). “Queer” has been a functioning and largely unproblematic signifier in American academe since ten years before the AIDS crisis. If you don’t at least know that much, you have absolutely no business trying to educate LGBTQ+ youth about queer history.

Trying to censor the word queer from our collective cultural lexicon is 1) impossible. it’s here now. and 2) an erasure of our lineage of scholarship. I could spend all day lobbing criticisms at American academic culture and I do, but queers created space for ourselves in academe. We built a queer world inside the tower that tried its best to keep us out and now we have a place here. 

I am a queer person and I am a queer scholar. You use whatever words you want to signify who you are and how you live your life and how you love your loves. You won’t hear a peep of criticism from me.  All I’m asking is that you do me and mine the courtesy of leaving our collective body of text very much the fuck alone.

“Queer is a slur” is a TERF grift designed to convince LGB kids to erase a trans-friendly umbrella term from our community, making it easier to exclude trans people from the community altogether. They’re exploiting the fact that a lot of cis gay kids are extremely isolated from their community’s history, plus any well-meaning allies who don’t know enough to understand the history of “queer.”

Also, you’ll notice that the people who push “queer is a slur” don’t also seem to think we should stop saying “gay,” even though that was the slur-du-jour used against anyone not heterosexual or gender conforming for a good portion of the 2000s and 2010s. Pretty striking considering “queer is a slur” seems to have only entered the public consciousness during the early/mid 2010s.

^ this is the problem because it doesn’t matter what the history of the word is or whether or not the people pushing the agenda that it’s a slur know or not…they simply don’t care. Knowing the actual history would only confuse and complicate the issue, better to just point blank spout it as fact just in case a point sticks if they tried to educate themselves even just to lie about it better.

Still pissed off about the person that made a post about how it’s okay for people to identify as “q*eer” but that we need to know that it’s a slur. And then when I called bullshit they got Very Upset and went off about how this was their post and I should make my own post blah blah. Like, no, friend, you don’t get to make a loaded post 100% intended to be reached by queer people and then tell queer people that it isn’t their place to comment.

It’s fascinating, too, I’m 31 and growing up I heard the word queer in no other context but a positive one. On the other hand, you couldn’t go 5 minutes in the early 2000s without hearing “thats so gay”.

There were literal PSAs about it.

By their own logic we should abolish the term gay instead but oh ho ho we couldn’t do that how would we know if people are the good kind of gay you know the cis kind?

It’s vital to know your history but it’s also just as important to recognize that the people pushing this rhetoric are not interested in the actual history.

the word is queer, it’s here, get used to it

Queer as in fuck that

Hey kids, take it from an old forest hag: it's totally okay to half-ass your hobbies

... trace that picture for your journal

... like old cars without knowing how to fix them

... watch the movies without reading the comics

... super glue the part of the model

... learn one (1) way to make a braid

... watch how-to videos for every step of the recipe

... google every second word in that article

... use the automatic setting on your camera

And don't be ashamed. Real life isn't school. The all or nothing mentality is not healthy. Don't gate-keep yourself from stuff that might be fun. Shrug, grin, and hold eye contact with a boomer while you do it. It's good I promise.

yeah!!! good words

PSA regarding tumblr’s latest Censorship Nightmare

For those of you who haven’t seen this announcement, tumblr recently made some changes to the iOS version of the app, purportedly to comply with Apple’s content guidelines. These changes took effect on Dec 21, starting in version 22.5.1 of the iOS app. As some of you may recall, Apple’s strict guidelines were the driving force for the infamous Great Purge of 2018, which coincidentally also happened around this time of year, but it seems banning all of the female-presenting nipples wasn’t good enough for Apple.

Below is a summary of the important changes. Note that these changes technically ONLY affect those using the iOS app. If you’re accessing tumblr through a different app or operating system (Google Chrome, Android app, etc) it won’t affect you directly but it will affect your followers who use iOS so you should definitely be aware of it.

As usual, tumblr was extremely unclear and evasive about all of this in their official announcement. Not surprising, of course, since if more people were aware of these new draconian tactics I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be more of an uproar about it. Tumblr claims that these changes are somewhat temporary and that they are currently working on something that will allow for a less restricted iOS experience, but they refuse to say what that something is and when it will be implemented. And let’s just say, considering their track record, I’m not hopeful.

All of this is horrible and infuriating for many reasons, but the worst part is how insanely counterproductive it is to creating the “safe” environment tumblr (or more specifically Apple) supposedly wants.

Tags have always been used for both blog organization and filtering purposes. Tagging posts with triggers and content warnings is a common practice that gives users the ability to filter out content they may find upsetting or just don’t don’t want to see for whatever reason. By choosing to ban a bunch of unlisted “sensitive content” tags, all they’re doing is encouraging people who want to share that kind of content to come up with alternative less well-known tags or simply not tag that content at all anymore if they want it to show up on their follower’s dashboards, thereby making it more likely for someone to encounter it when they didn’t want to.

So really, with all of the alleged concern for safety and “protecting the children,” all they’ve done is make tumblr less safe for everyone. Typical.

Also please note that this appears to only be applicable to THAT SPECIFIC version of the app. If you simply do not update the app, everything seems to still be working as normal (as of December 25th, 2021)

If you’re on apple, DO NOT UPDATE THE APP IF YOU HAVEN’T YET

Angst fics can help people come to terms with their own grief, begin healing, or give people that good cry that they need.

Smut fics can help people affirm and accept their sexuality. It can help them explore their sexuality in a safe way. They can also just be fun, and having fun is a drastically undervalued way to improve your mental health.

Dark fics can help people face their fears or process their trauma. It can make them feel safer and more secure. It can help them find their courage.

Fluff fics can give people rest and respite and comfort. It can give them hope that soft places exist and that maybe there is one out there for them. It can bring up their mood, which, if they have depression, can be a life saver.

And every fic people write makes someone feel less alone.

Point being, just because a particular thing doesn’t serve you, doesn’t mean it lacks value.

This is not to say that we have to consume all fic uncritically. Of course not. It is just to say that entire “genres” aren’t trash or lacking value just because they don’t serve you.

This part:

Point being, just because a particular thing doesn’t serve you, doesn’t mean it lacks value.

I mean, yes, and also people can just like a particular type of fic for no redeeming value whatsoever. You don’t need to justify what you like. It’s okay. You can like things. Even dark things. Even fluffy things. Even sad things. Or porny things. You can just like things. Even if they’re not quite socially acceptable.

You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone.

You can also consume fiction and critique it and its purpose if you want, that’s fine too, but let’s be real: No one is required to defend their fic likes. It’s just that I’m here in defense of “I like this and I don’t want to explain why or what socially redeeming value my fanfic has.”

Pavellan Incorrect Quote

Thinking fondly about how the three big liar companions in Inquisition lie in very distinct ways.

Bull almost exclusively tells the unvarnished truth, really. But he tells the truths that lead you in the direction he wants. The big question with him is ultimately about where his deepest loyalties lay, and he doesn't actually lie about that, either. He just encourages avoidance of the question.

Varric lies constantly, but mostly in a very wink wink nudge nudge way, encouraging you to think of the lies as innocuous storytelling, so that the important lies go unexamined. So he cheerfully hides everything that's most important to him and is, you know, a fucken mob boss while always giving the "lovable uncle who deals under the table sometimes" vibe

Solas lies almost entirely by omission. Honesty and informed consent matter hugely to him, and he'll bend over backwards to tell the truth when directly questioned. He just tries to be vague and cryptic as much as possible to avoid any deeper investigations. And of course his go to "I saw it in the Fade" which is technically always true and thus actually meaningless.

Blackwall is a terrible liar, and relies entirely on his audience not knowing enough to argue.

Dalish children sitting in the mud and drawing vallaslin on theirs and their friends’ faces.

Dalish children running around naked until they become apprentices and the warriors and hunters don armor for the first time.

Dalish children about to become apprentices who steal one of the clan’s halla for a rite-of-passage joy ride that has half the adults screaming and the other half cheering.

Dalish children learning from trial and error which bugs and leaves are safe to eat and which should only be touched if you want a medical emergency.

Dalish children who never get sick catching a cold for the first time and convinced they’re dying.

Dalish children sleeping in and outside of aravels in piles of limbs and smooshed faces.

Dalish children always getting something to eat even if the hunters have to starve themselves.

Dalish children growing up speaking their clan’s colloquial mish-mash of Elven and the country’s Common.

Dalish children learning that lethallin and lethallan are synonyms for trust and love and home.

Dalish children (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

The signs as Brandi Quinones looks

Aries

Taurus

Gemini

Cancer

Leo

Virgo

Libra

Scorpio

Sagittarius

Capricorn

Aquarius

Pisces