sorry to post facebook videos on main but the sound of jello going through an industrial shredder is both mesmerizing and horrible

I still occasionally get the sir uh no ma’am no sorry sir comments almost 6 years on T and a lot of people don’t get why that happens to me but what people don’t get is that most people out in the world aren’t like expecting to see trans people so if they catch sight of my bra line under my shirt or hear me talk slightly high pitched something short circuits in their brain as they try to rationalize that with the rest of my appearance.

I mean I pass the vast majority of the time. Even without binding or packing. But sometimes you’re gonna cause a little short circuit. And you know what? Usually the other person is the one embarrassed in that situation. Not you. For the most part with strangers what gender they think you are isn’t your problem. If you act like your gender should be obvious to them then they’re the ones who will be flustered. Not you.

Make a confused and slightly judgmental face at them or correct them like uh, sir like it’s obvious when they misgender you and that’ll take care of a lot of your problems, I’ve found.

A lot of the way to combat getting misgendered around normies and conservatives is just to act like they’re stupid for thinking you’d be anything other than what you are. There’s mannish looking women and womanly looking men out there and everybody knows that and if they make wrong assumptions about you that’s egg on their face. Like asking a fat person when the baby’s due. The embarrassment in that situation lies on the person asking that question. Not the fat person.

The same principle applies to when a stranger misgenders you. If you act like it’s obvious and you’re confused why they’d think you’re the wrong gender then the crowd is more likely to be with you.

Also if a stranger ever walks up to you and asks if you’re a man or woman you’re within your rights to say “What kind of question is that?” or “Why’s that your business?” and walk away from them.

Astrology's weird bc if you've only ever had fun with it and come across someone w seething hatred for it you're understandably like, what the fuck is this person's problem? But also if you've seen someone take it Too Far, any mention of it understandably becomes a red flag

Like imagine if you really liked Pokemon and you're like, "I really don't see why people would hate this unless they're just assholes for no reason?" Like it's a totally normal opinion opinion to have. But also imagine if you took a quiz and learned you were a Bug type and people stopped talking to you because they were like "It's in your nature to be emotionally manipulative." It would also be totally normal to be like "Oh okay fuck Pokemon fans then."

Now you may be like, "But the latter situation doesn't happen!" and that tells me you are fortunate because you have not dealt with the worst that the west coast of America has to offer

All this is to say, I too was once a "Let people have fun" person, and then I met gay people from Portland and now I am not that person

This might be unpopular but I’m not going to use simpler vocabulary in my writing if it’s out of character for the narrator. If my POV character is a botanist, he’s going to call a plant by its name. If you don’t know what it is you can either Google it or move on just knowing it’s a plant of some sort.

I don’t like this trend of readers being angry that not everything is 100% understandable for them. I want my characters to be believable as people and sometimes people use words people outside of their field will not understand. That’s not a bad thing.

You don’t have to understand every word to get the gist of what’s happening. I’m not going to slow down an action scene to describe every weapon because someone might not know them by name. They can just assume it’s a weapon because that makes sense in the context of the scene.

I just had a debate with myself over using the word mezzanine, wondering if I should describe it instead. Ultimately I decided the character would call it a mezzanine, and therefore readers could look up a new word if they didn't know.

It's how I learned words like myriad as a seven year old reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, why would I steal that experiance from someone else by simplifying language?

I don't know about y'all, but books are how i know my vocabulary in the first place

my favorite thing relevant to this is when a dumb character uses regional or obscure words completely casually, but i have to look them up. To me it's a big weird word, but to the silly town drunk in a story what else are you supposed to call that thing??

anyway, read outside your culture as well, even if it's just the state/city/country next door that you've never been to. you will expand your vocabulary substantially.

marine biology is so scary because it’s such a small field. i was giving a talk on cetaceans and afterward a woman approached me with her husband and she said, “you did very well. [husband’s name] actually pioneered the research and published the first paper on that. We were very impressed by you.”

Which is such a scientific interpretation/public education win I will cherish forever but also for the rest of my life any time I give a talk I will be haunted by the knowledge that the world’s leading expert who literally discovered/invented the topic might be in the room,

which is like, the opposite of what you’re supposed to do for stage fright. In fact I never used to experience stage fright but now I will.

There are limitations to the benefits of being a marine biologist

"hey my husband and I watched your talk on cetaceans from across the room and we were impressed by your vibe"

Just so we are crystal clear, pretending to be a Jew to make your words carry more weight in discussions and at protests is not okay. Let Jews speak for themselves, no matter their beliefs, and speak for yourself.

Excuse me while I sneeze 30 times in a row…

IS THAT POLLEN???????????????????????????????????????

magic spell

I cast “allergies bad enough to delete you from existence”

everyone in the notes either has allergies or is a whore

please guys we need to get this post to people who cant read so "something else" wins because they use their phone

This machine kills AI

Artists Against Generative AI:

"Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:

I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping Ariel forest landscape comes through and it's not bad. They submit a ton of work and one or two of the 40 are ok. Nearly on brief. So first round feedback goes through and I tell them about the perspective mistakes, colour changes I want, layers that any matte painting would be split into. Within a day I get 5 variants. Not changes to the ones I wanted but variations.

Again. Benefit of the doubt I give them another round of feedback making it clear. Next day it's worse. I sit there and patiently paint over, even explaining the steps I would take as a painter. They don't do it, anomalies start appearing when I say I want to keep the exact image but with changes. They can't. They simply don't have the eye to see the basic mistakes so the Ai starts to over compensate. We get people starting to appear in the images. These are obviously holiday snaps.

"Remove the people"

"What would you like them changed to?"

"... grass. I just don't want them there"

They can't do it. The one that can actually use photoshop hasn't developed the eye to see his mistakes, ends up getting angry at me for not understanding he can't make specific changes. The girl whose background was a little photography has given me 40 progressively worse images with wilder mistakes every time. This is 4 days into the project.

I'm both pissed about the waste, but elated seeing ai fall at the first hurdle. It's not even that the images are unusable, the people making them have no eye for what's wrong, no thicker skin for constructive criticism and feedback, no basic artistic training in perspective and functionality in what they're making.

Yes the hype is going to pump more money into this. They won't go anywhere for a while.

But this has been such a glowing perfect moment of watching the fundamental part fail in the face of the most simple tasks. All were fired and the company no longer accepts Ai prompters as applicants. Your training as an artist will always be the most important part of this process and it is invaluable. I hope this post gives you a boost in a dark time."

Something about the idea that voting for president only matters if you live in a swing state, and that all the people in blue states or red states can indulge themselves in principled nonparticipation because the outcomes are preordained, strikes me as akin to playing with fire.

Is it really coherent to say "both sides are awful, write in Mickey Mouse or burn your ballot or just stay home and get drunk, unless you live in Pennsylvania, in which case maybe consider taking one for the team and compromising yourself by voting for the lesser evil?" Is that really the message that will lead to a preferable outcome?

What it sounds like to me is a sign that 1) you take your local electorate for granted, and 2) you see avoiding the worst case scenario as somebody else's problem.

I remember when Florida was a swing state. I also remember when Pennsylvania wasn't.

For the love of fuck, vote in your local elections and don't fuck around with presidential ones either. States are in play now that I would never have dreamed of being 'swing' states. When I first started voting, PA absolutely was not a swing state. The district where I cast my first vote went blue for the first time I can remember last election.

Washington state, universally considered a safe blue state, has voted Democrat between 50.1% and 58.0% in presidential elections since 2000. Those are pretty healthy margins. But they are not insurmountable - Washington was reliably red up to 1984, by similar amounts - and they don't happen by magic. They happen because people fucking vote blue even though it's considered a safe state.

If enough people think, "eh, I don't have to vote, Washington is going to go blue no matter what," then guess what happens? The state goes red. And we don't want that.

Is there a word that’s a mix between angry and sad

malcontented, disgruntled, miserable, desolated

smad.

there are two types of people

i’ve only seen this legendary post in screenshots

It’s always so cool when you find these legendary posts and the OPs are not deactivated. It’s like, the gods still walk among us.

By popular request

goodbye cis people

you don't exist at all

no more cis people

my ideology can't account for you so i have to think of a world where you aren't real

What books have you done this to?

Instagram / Shop

This post is nearing 50,000 notes! I think that’s really cool, despite the occasional VERY judgmental notes about how I should respect my paperbacks. The ‘after’ picture is based on how my copy of Mort looked after I took it on holiday camping as a child and read it 4 times then let it get mouldy from dew by leaving it in the grass. Still readable though.

(For those interested, 50,000 notes translates to around £260 in bookmark and print sales of this design so far)

This post now approaching 60,000 notes 😯

I’ve reduced the price of the mini print of this one on my shop, just a fiver now. Also available as a bookmark right here

i'm so tired, honestly it's exhausting to see this weird constant infighting from everyone. It's like, trans women feel like their issues are not being listened to and taken seriously, trans men feel like their issues aren't listened to and taken seriously, non binary people, intersex people etc, which is in ALL cases, TRUE. but then we get into this is "I have it worse, no one can understand my struggle" feeling, and you get the pushing and the shoving and blame, getting hurt and then smacking the person next to you in the face because they were there.

I'm tired. No one is "Exempt" from bigotry. The reproductive rights, Healthcare, working, school, there is no case where we aren't all affected. No one is "talking over" anyone else by wanting their suffering to be acknowledged. There's no "one true oppressed group" and everyone else is pretenders. That stuff is reductive and only helps those who want to hurt us. those feelings make sense, we all want to be listened to and not talked over, but we continue to engage in oppression olympics, while our rights are being stripped from us and it's not helping. So I'm really tired.

our solidarity is our survival.

@lisxdumbr excuse me as I borrow your tag for a moment, cause we're onto something.

Rent-lowering gunshots aside, I think this highlights a pretty fundamental quality to tumblr memes, which is they're meant to be fun, not funny.

Most Goncharov content aren't funny. They don't make you laugh as an audience. In fact, there's some serious and awe inspiring quality fanarts, music, fanfics, and analysis on a non-existing flim. It's not about making the funniest joke, it's about having fun making the joke.

Tumblr memes aren't meant to entertain a passive audience. The entertainment value is in the participation. And this quality is present in a lot of long-form tumblr memes. Colour theory, urban gothic (short lived but glorious), hawkeye initiative (short lived but glorious), making shitpost arguments into shakespeare, @theshitpostcalligrapher (excuse the tag) and other shitpost calligraphy. A lot of these memes are about taking silly things seriously. And even passively reblogging these memes are about participation. "I can take this seriously too." Or, in Goncharov's case, "yeah I'll help collectively gaslight the internet".

Another big part about sharing it isn't about how funny the joke is, but how impress you are with the effort. As an audience you can feel the love artists/musicians/writers put into their Goncharov fanwork, and can't help but have respect.

This same logic goes for how coffeeshop fics are fun to write, but they aren't funny. The charm for the reader is that someone loved these characters as much as you did.

In contrast, when you look at viral tweets, they're often one-shots. They're very funny and witty but you don't tend to get the same degree of repetition and variations. Because twitter is built for consumption and snappier participation, and the increasingly algorithm-driven navigation makes content more competitive, which means quality lies in individual tweets, and not in the whole phenomenon.

tldr; Tumblr memes/jokes are about how fun they are to make/share. Twitter jokes are about how fun they are to consume.

THE ENTERTAINMENT VALUE IS IN THE PARTICIPATION!!!!!

If you're looking for a summer blockbuster, and you go to improv night, you're going to be disappointed and bored, and so will everyone else when they try to toss you a bit and you just sorta no-sell it because the bit isn't already fully developed and funny.

We wanted to see what you would do with it.