Fleabag (2019) // Derry Girls (2019)

TV writers will come up with vaguely weird & awkward mannerisms for a character and unwittingly craft exemplary autism representation, then try to write an explicitly autistic character and commit a hate crime

shakespeare wasn't lying that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow can creep in this petty pace from day to day

neither was Smash Mouth. the years start coming and they don't stop coming

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.

someone I follow on the bird app just announced they're starting a very exclusive private fic server because they and a bunch of other people want to talk about how much they love the fics they're reading, and as an author can I just say that a really great place to talk about a fic you love is in the comments for that fic

I understand that people are trying to create safe spaces, but as the number of comments that I get on my fics dwindles with each passing year, knowing these spaces exist where my fics are being discussed, places that I am excluded from, makes me want to write fic LESS

I mean I guess who cares, right, because if I stop writing, there's 10,000 other people that will continue...but if you participate in a fic "book club" server and you say nice things there about a fic you loved, maybe copy and paste that into a comment on AO3?

the only thing fanfic writers are asking for in return for hours of hard work is attention. please don't rob us of the one thing that we hope for when we hit "post"

this is directly related to this post I made about how fanfic authors now are treated like content mills, and not like valued members of a creative community who thrive on interaction. for the past decade, we've watched the fandom ecosystem disrupted over and over, as NSFW fan artists seek safety by putting their work behind paywalls, and self-conscious fic readers squirrel away their feelings in invite-only communities

an easy way to do your part to fight against the evils perpetrated by social media is to leave a comment on a fanfic you love

but don't take my word for it -- here are some responses that my fellow authors have left on this post:

The fact I had a fic that was fairly beloved and NO ONE commented on it because it was all being done in a fucking book club server made me want to scream.

I haven't updated that fic in two years now.

I cannot express enough how imperative it is to show the writer how much you love their work. The comments don't have to be novels themselves - even just an "I loved this so much!" Or keyboard smashing works wonders to keep the writer going. Please, we need to bring back supporting writers and artists now more than ever!!!

What I love about this, though, is that the little nails will become an outline of where the water was. It will trace the shape, show someone later what was there once upon a time. It will be a testament to how much this guy wanted to capture the amazing things he saw and experienced, and though it will never truly keep it, it will hold a memory, something that in itself is beautiful and worthy of experience. We cannot describe the indescribable, but we can trace its outline, give some idea of what we experienced.

official linguistics post

If I could add one thing to bg3, I would give tav a tent

Everyone else gets one while we just sleep in a bedroll by the fire. I want my own little space at camp to decorate with random shit

Give it some personality we could choose the colour of it and what type of tent it is. The chest at camp that we fill with random junk from our adventures would be right by our tent

Also, if you play as an origin character, your tent gets removed ??? Why are our tent privileges taken away 😭

you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

It's so incredibly frustrating to see non-black and indigenous leftists act like the level of police violence being exhibited towards the student protestors is unprecedented/has Never Ever been seen before

Tags: @thottybrucewayne

From water hoses to police dogs to tear gas to rubber bullets (to real bullets!). The LA/Rodney King/Latasha Harlins riots. May 15th, 1970- the black students protesting Vietnam at Jackson State whose violent murders were overshadowed by the rightful horror of the Kent State shootings. Hell, the time Trump had all those BLM protestors tear gassed so he could have his Bible photo op. That was just 2020! It really makes me feel like y'all were not really listening during that whole "2020 BLM summer".

I am begging everybody, fucking begging them, to slow the fuck down and fucking look things up. Right now, there are a lot of people who are making money off of creating headlines that are meant to make you mad, and it's going to get worse as we get closer to the election.

If someone tells you that there's a secret conspiracy to [do a thing you don't like] and that it's unique to Biden, you better fucking look that thing up, because chances are you're going to find that it's been happening under every administration for the last 50 years. Is that good? No! Should you want to change it? Probably! Is it a unique crime to Biden? Nope!

"Biden said [bad thing] [X] years ago." Well, this bad thing he said happens to be true, but it looks like it was 45 years ago, and he changed his stance 40 years ago. "Biden said [other bad thing] [Y] years ago." What's the source on that? So there's one person who says he said it? And nobody else who was there has corroborated that account? Who posted the story?

These are all random examples of things I've seen over the last couple of weeks, with the details slightly changed from the Tumblr posts and news articles I've seen, because the point isn't the details of the particular story, so I don't want to get bogged down in particulars that don't matter to the point I'm making.

The point of this post isn't the specific things I'm referencing but the fact that in each of these cases, the reality was not what was initially presented. Either the reality was wildly different, or this story can't be corroborated and was told by someone with a clear and very well-known agenda of their own, which means that at the very least, the story should be treated with extreme suspicion.

And on that note, please don't believe that because you're a leftist that you can't be radicalized in the same way that right-wingers are. You aren't immune to propaganda either. I'm not saying you have to like, or should like, any particular politician or political entity. I am saying, however, that you should view a lot of the news with a gimlet eye, and that goes double for anything that makes you real fucking mad.

You need - need - to stop and read the whole article and ask yourself if you can verify the claims and who benefits from this making you mad.

Please. For the sake of the people around you who have to patiently explain to you that you've gotten fucking bamboozled again by propaganda if for no other reason. We're all very tired of you thinking that leftists can't be propagandized.

As an example for that last point: a former beloved mutual of mine who was very active in trans spaces here (and probably followed or was followed by a lot of the people who will see this post from my blog!) began posting a lot of anti-public education a while back. The last I saw of them was a post reblogged from an extremely obvious & blatantly right-wing conservative blog railing against the "inherently abusive nature of schools", with multiple mentions of how CRT specifically was to blame.

I'm sure they weren't aware that CRT is short for Critical Race Theory, i.e., the idea that racism exists. But they didn't even look up this acronym that was cited at least three or four separate times as the titular reason schools are so evil; the post said a bunch of stuff they thought they agreed with, so they reblogged it.

I unfollowed them, I have no idea where they are now, but I think about this literally constantly. Your leftism does not protect you from radicalization. Mine doesn't, either. We have got to be fucking diligent.

Yeah.

And the other thing I need to be clear about is that there is shitty "leftist" propaganda and right wing propaganda, and you can be radicalized out of sense along any axis of political thought.

Leftists tend to think they're "too smart" to fall prey to cult-like thinking or radicalization. That is absolutely not true & there is plenty of weird fringe left, unfuckingfortunately. Thinking you couldn't possibly be radicalized makes you more vulnerable.

Stay incredulous. Stay suspicious. Check sources.

It is in fact statistically more likely you would be vulnerable to cult or cult-like ideology the “smarter” you are—evidence for many decades suggest the more educated people are often the ones that fall the hardest for cults, to be clear. No human is infallible no matter how more or less educated you are and feeling righteous does not mean you are acting righteous. People need to remember that “question everything” means most importantly questioning even YOURSELF.

Yes, thank you! That's the point I was trying to make, but I was not clear enough. I appreciate your words.

#for real#been seeing a huge influx of right wing esque propaganda being parroted but wrapped in liberal wording lately#really echoing 2016#and some of this is such obvious stuff like just slow down and use an ounce of critical thinking please….#politics#important

Okay, so, I'm not picking on you, and I'm not yelling at you, but there's something in this line of thinking that it's really important that we stop, just as much as we need to stop just mindlessly reblogging stuff without checking it:

All of the examples that I anonymized above? Those were things which were posted by long-time known leftists, and I came to know about how the stories are circulating because I heard the stories repeated by an extremely left-wing family member of mine as absolute fact.

When I say 'you are not immune to propaganda,' yes, I mean that we do have an issue with actual Russian disinformation bloggers on Tumblr -- like, that's a thing that happened in 2016, we know it -- and there are people who sneak their regressive politics into progressive spaces -- again, we know it happens & TERFs who wrap their bioessentialism in progressive language have been caught out time and time again...

... but I also absolutely mean well-intentioned leftists fucking flying off half-cocked after they read a newspaper article which has been tweaked in its headline and its lede to piss people off, because people are hungry for attention, for clicks, and for ad revenue. I absolutely mean people who don't check what it is that the Houthis are yelling or have on signs and forward on as praiseworthy messaging that includes the words "curse the Jews." I absolutely mean people taking the word of a politician from another country who has his own agenda as iron-clad proof of what Biden said decades ago without even so much as asking, "What does this person stand to gain from framing things that way? Was there anybody else there? Can someone corroborate what was or was not said?"

Part of not getting led down the garden path by people requires you to realize that your side has an agenda too, and that because of that, people will frame things to benefit their agenda, regardless of whether or not they're perfectly true. A lot of the time, people don't even do it on purpose. We just ... do that. We frame things to fit the narrative we desire.

It is poisonous to think that '"our side" has a Good agenda' means '"our side" is presenting things from a totally objective position and any bad information must be coming from Outside.' Not only does that make it easier for you to incorporate incorrect information into your worldview, because you won't be looking as closely at information coming from an established left-wing blogger, but it's a sort of abdication of responsibility. "Well, if there's any bad information, it's coming from Them, not Us." (And no, person whose tags I am not saying you are directly saying this -- I'm saying that this is the end point of that line of thinking, and that's really really dangerous.)

I have seen people presenting as unique evils to Biden things which have been part of regular US government function for longer than I've been alive, and doing so because they read an article on a well-regarded newspaper which presents those actions as though they are illegal or as though Biden is doing them differently from other presidents before him. I have seen people saying 'Biden can just -- ' about things that are absolutely not within the President's remit, things he can't just do on his own, and saying that because a popular left-wing blogger or YouTuber said that the president can absolutely just... I don't know... set a maximum house price per city, or allocate money in the federal budget, or whatever. I don't know if they say these things because they just want them to be true, or because someone else told them and they believed it, or... I don't know, maybe what the YouTuber said was something like 'the President should put political pressure on Congress until they reallocate this money, because it's the job of Congress to blah blah blah."

Whatever the case, this bad information gets out there, and it stays out there, and it continues to bounce around the internet. Whether or not it's malicious -- and some of it surely is, and some of it surely isn't -- doesn't really matter. What matters is that in this environment, you owe it to yourself if to no one else to slow the fuck down and ask yourself, among other things:

Yes, it is absolutely crucial to be wary of right-wingers trying to propagandize in progressive spaces. As Patton Oswalt points out really clearly in Talking For Clapping, it's very easy to dress up regressive talking points if you know the right words to use, and the words to not use. It's also crucial to realize that even the best, most progressive person you know has unexamined biases, has agendas, and when they talk to you, when they convey things to you, they want you to come away with a particular thought in your mind. They wouldn't be talking to you about what the fuck is going on in the world if they didn't want to convince you of something. Speech is for communication. That is its sole purpose. Even the babbling of an infant is an attempt at communication. We don't talk unless we're trying to say something to someone about something.

And it's crucial to realize and admit that someone can be not-right-wing and have shitty opinions. It's crucial to realize and admit that not all shitty opinions are right-wing opinions. Not all theory is good theory, not all praxis is good praxis. I sure as fuck am not right all the time, and I sure as fuck have my weak points and my biases. I have not always been the kind of progressive that I want to be, and I know in the future I'm going to disappoint myself again, because I am a human being.

Regardless of whether or not I'm correct, the things I say contain my point of view. They cannot do otherwise. I cannot communicate with you in a perfectly objective way. That is completely impossible, and to believe that a human being can communicate any complex concept in a totally objective way is the absolute height of hubris. The minute you believe that anything about current events or politics can ever even be communicated fully objectively, you open yourself up to someone taking advantage of that and pushing their agenda on you.

Also, before someone jumps in and says that saying this is irresponsible because people can spiral about it, or whatever -- look. This is the truth: nobody ever communicates fully objectively. It's impossible. I'm sorry if that is scary, upsetting or triggering to worry about. That doesn't make it untrue.

Be reasonable amounts of suspicious, and if you have trouble determining what a 'reasonable amount' is or find yourself repeatedly spiraling over fears that people are trying to overtly manipulate you in everything they say to you? Please address that with a mental health care professional so that you can build up a toolkit of coping strategies and create a network of supports for yourself, including, perhaps, someone you can check in with if you're worried that your thoughts are becoming unreasonable.

Can't afford art school?

After seeing post like this 👇

And this gem 👇

As well as countless of others from the AI generator community. Just talking about how "inaccessible art" is, I decided why not show how wrong these guys are while also helping anyone who actually wants to learn.

Here is the first one ART TEACHERS! There are plenty online and in places like youtube.

📺Here is my list:

Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.

📚Here is my list:

As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are more expensive.

For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ to the thousands.

💻As for art programs here is a list of Free to pay.

Those are the ones I can recall.

So do with this information as you will but as you can tell there are ways to learn how to become an artist, without breaking the bank. The only thing that might be stopping YOU from using any of these things, is YOU.

I have made time to learn to draw and many artist have too. Either in-between working two jobs or taking care of your family and a job or regular school and chores. YOU just have to take the time or use some time management, it really doesn't take long to practice for like an hour or less. YOU also don't have to do it every day, just once or three times a week is fine.

Hope this was helpful and have a great day.

Incase people missed this.

Just adding this. The drawing program I personally use is Medibang Paint, which wasn't mentioned here but is also free.

You need a subscription to use some of the exclusive brushes but it's not that big a deal since it's mostly just specific texture brushes. Everything else is completely free.

Also, you can make your own brushes as well, which is pretty easy and free.

Popping in again to add.

If you can't find a reference you like, you can use Design Doll if you have a PC. It lets you pose and move human models that are customizable. It has some paid features, but the core program is completely free.

I found Marco Bucci's art videos, especially his 'ten minutes to better painting' series, to be incredibly helpful. His explanations of shapes and edges in particular helped me grasp the concepts better than any I had watched before.

Reblogging to add, the program I use, Krita, is free!

Some of you don't have firm principles that transcend ideology, and it shows.

"Spreading blatant misinformation is okay when it supports a cause I care about, and if anybody corrects me, it means they do not share my values." 🤡

"Police brutality is okay if it's being carried out by a government ascribing to my preferred political philosophy." 🤡

"If this person has harmful views, then my criticism of them can't be [racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/antisemitic/Islamophobic/classist/ableist/etc]." 🤡

Like, please, I'm begging you guys to invest in some basic standards.

-- Against the Logic of the Guillotine

When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

Oh my god

A couple of mutuals got unwillingly dragged onto an unreasonably long post where some fundie argues that *checks notes* Steven Universe is a direct attack on the Christian God's Love because it promotes the LGBTQ+ Worldview and has a message that child abuse is bad and that parents should accept their children as they are and not torture them for not living up to impossible standards

I heard that Steven Universe discourse gets wild, but I wasn't expecting "the satanic faggots are trying to make you hate God by convincing you that child abuse is bad"

when i forget to log into ao3 and i have to click proceed to see an adult fic, i actually get a kick out of it. like i am an old timey queen and my bard is apologetic: “gentle lady, dicks doth touch in this next ballad. would you prefer another?” and i give him a gesture of command like, “nay, you may proceed, minstrel. bring forth the tale of dicks”