We meet so seldom by stock or stone

Many lgbt teenagers and young adults growing up on the internet today have socially conservative beliefs that they voice at all times that they got from their conservative parents which they’ve never challenged because they think the life experience of being gay or trans makes them politically progressive

This is why I hate it when people say something homophobic and then go “so you’re really accusing me, a whole ass lesbian, of being homophobic 🙄” like yeah

There's a model of culture that I like to cite for this idea, called the Iceberg Model:

The LGBT youth (and young atheists, too) will cut off the stuff "above the water" but not really examine the stuff down below that line that they have as part of their upbringing.

So you get young LGBT people making comments like OP cited, or young atheists acting with an Evangelical persecution complex, and going, "Don't call me Culturally Christian!"

This is the sort of thing I keep talking about when I’m saying identity is not the same as ideology.

Who you identify as (who you are) says absolutely nothing about what you believe (your ideology). 

Same goes for any subcategory.

“I can’t be racist, I’m black.” If you're making “ching-chong” jokes about Asian people, you’re still racist.

“I’m can’t be misogynistic, I’m a trans woman.” If you’re slut-shaming sex workers, you’re misogynistic.

“I can’t be queerphobic, I’m non-binary.” If you’re saying bi/pan/trans people can’t bring their hetero partner to Pride, gueeeess what.

Punching down within your own culture is still punching down.

Also people disagreeing with you doesn’t mean they’re any kind of -phobic if the argument has nothing to do with your identity. You’d think this is obvious but some insecure/unhealed people really do use that attack against others as soon as they encounter any disagreement or conflict. And the tone of discourse these days encourages people to believe those accusations without questioning.

Lantau, Hong Kong 2024

Takeshi Kaneshiro as Zhuge Liang in Red Cliff

1 clove = garlic bulb people, please talk to me about this. I don’t have questions or criticisms, I just want to know more

Olympic National Park

courtneylwilson

i would rather have yellow teeth and be able to enjoy wine and coffee freely. This principle applies to most pleasures in this world …

Why is so much of the discourse on MENA erasure in the latest Dune movie….effectively erasing Amazigh people, when Amazigh culture is a major inspiration behind Dune?

Other cultural references in Dune (that I know of):

I’m sure there are other things that I’m not catching, and I really hope other folks will add to this list. If you research a non-English term from Dune, you’ll probably find an original term from another culture.

Herbert severed the connection between the terms he borrowed and their source cultures. I think the best thing that we can do as individuals is to learn more about the cultures and contexts these things were drawn from. Regardless of what the author did, we can choose to respect the sources.

ETA: I want to add one thought: Herbert didn’t change the original names beyond recognition. Lots of authors do (Patrick Rothfuss immediately springs to mind, with his ginger Rroma and blonde Shaolin monks). Herbert at least sort of cited his sources instead of committing outright obfuscatory plagiarism.

i understand the appeal of publishing "fic with the serial numbers filed off" as original work but i also feel like. what makes something a good fic is at odds with what makes something a good original story.

a good fic is in conversation with a source text, it may give a character an interesting role, it may reinterpret or subvert the rules established in the canon universe, whatever. but like. its transformative by nature. whereas original stories - good ones, anyway - have their own internal, non-referrential sense of logic and rules. it can be in conversation with the genre writ large but it has to have internal substance that can stand alone. which fic inherently cant do.

Watterson pulled no punches

every few months some annoying motherfucker makes a post asking why it's called 'spirk' instead of 'spork' or 'kock' and the short, easy answer is: spirk is already the silly ship name, the og ship name is 'k/s' and the og og ship name is 'the premise', because spirk is a ship so old that it was around before ship names were invented. now never come into my house again.

good sensations can sometimes be extreme, and i know i personally enjoy a good few of those, so i wanted to know which of these types of pain are the most commonly enjoyed :)

basically my question is. am i such a touch deprived weirdo that i'll enjoy fucked up sensations no one else likes or am i normal

Once again, the exact Discourse I grew up with in my weird "promise we're not really fundamentalist" "non-denominational" church, but with a Tumblr reskin.

What are these? They look delicious!

Rou Jia Mo or or rougamo, kind of like a chinese burger or loose meat sandwich thingie.

Yes, but not with the usual "bun" - instead they made Tongguan Roujiamo, here's a receipe for the dough.

This post is so fucking old–the old anon icon? Non-rebloggable asks? The gray bar at the bottom? Truly a relic

people are still reblogging it. incredible. love u all

There's a phase that small kids go through, when they've just learned how to talk enough to have something sembling an intelligent, intellectual argument. They like to practice this by wanting to disagree about anything - mainly general statements that were not 100% perfectly waterproof. If you tell a 4-year-old that bananas are green when they're raw, and they turn yellow when they're ripe, there's a good chance that they'll give you that "well that can't be right" frown, and start to argue. Surely not all bananas that are yellow are always ripe.

Unfortunately humouring them about these arguments is very important for their development and a great opportunity to teach them more about how the world works, so you'll sometimes end up arguing about things like these, and every single time when you explain that's not how something works, they'll come up with another argument starting with "but what if-", until you are forced to admit that yes, if someone did for some reason take one single green banana, spray-paint it yellow and then expertly textured it to look just like a ripe banana, and then break into a grocery store in the middle of the night to slip that one painted banana into the display of ripe, edible bananas, then that one specific yellow banana would not be ripe and ready to eat.

As far as the child is concerned, this means that your entire initial statement was false, and you were wrong and they were right. Their need to be correct about something has been satisfied. Fortunately, most children grow out of this phase eventually.

The ones that manage to survive into adulthood without growing out of it end up on Twitter.