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there's a post where someone said "can you respect trans women who look like men" and someone responded something like "hell yeah I love people who fuck with gender!" and like... yeah that's cool, but in a lot of spaces "trans woman who looks like a man" is a lot less likely to be someone who is intentionally comfortably presenting masculine, and a lot more likely to be a girl who hasn't started transition, or can't safely, or just didn't or couldn't put in the effort to pass as fem today, and a lot of them will just look like schlubby dudes and not a radically presenting queer person. and you should be able to respect that.

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remember, kids: "i don't really want to watch rocky horror" is a valid and complete opinion that doesn't need any further explanation, "it's unfunny and problematic" is probably a good thing for a 50yo movie, but "we should let this tradition die" is beyond my and your power and kind of a weird thing to say. like okay go ahead, senor quixote. tilt at a cult classic

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Love that they've preserved this vibe for the TV adaptation. <3

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We have an actual word for what's going on with Trump and Mask

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So there you are, number one employee at your company, team lead, bringing in more profit by yourself than the rest of the employees combined and everyone knows it. And then one day, against the advice of all the other team leads, the CEO violates a safety measure, and yeah, people start dying.

Everyone knows it's the CEO's fault. Everyone knows how to fix it. But the CEO does nothing, digs his head in the sand, and pretends like shit is normal. And people are dying.

So you, young hotshot that you are, call an all hands meeting and get a specialist to explain what the problem is. It's easily solved, but it will cost money, and that money is going to have to come from the CEO.

The CEO throws a shitfit. He doesn't want to solve the problem. He doesn't want to admit under overwhelming evidence that it's his fault. But he agrees to do so under one condition--he's not paying to fix it--you are. He's taking your bonus and you can get fucked. As it turns out, the CEO thinks you fucking suck.

Not a single one of your colleagues protests on your behalf, probably because they know that if they speak up, he'll just take their bonuses, too.

So what do you do? Do you continue working for Mr. "idc if my employees die as long as I get mine?" Do you quit? Do you take the wealth you've accumulated working for this guy and go home? Do you stab the worst boss you've ever had in front of every other employee at the company?

Anyway that's book 1 of the Iliad

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Me 5 seconds after my corpo mandated password change: Hey did you know mandated periodic password changes aren't considered good cybersecurity practice and in fact actually weaken password security? Just a funny little fact I thought you should know.

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you cannot talk about the homophobic murder of jonathan joss without including in the conversation that he is indigenous.

american indian men are at the 2nd highest risk of death by murder compared to all other ethnic groups. in their lifetimes, 82% of native men report having experienced domestic violence. yet the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are non-natives (88% of native men and 92% of native women who reported violence said their attacker was non-native). what’s more, tribal governments are often stymied in their attempts to bring justice against non-natives, meaning that many of these cases go unresolved.

this was an intersectional attack. the fact that he is indigenous matters, even if the motivation was homophobic, because it made him even more vulnerable and disposable in the eyes of his killer.

as always, look into MMIWP to learn more, and speak up for us. miigwetch, take care

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that's me in the corner

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Mulla ei oo Riihimäestä muuten mitään moitittavaa mutta se on tosiaan ainoo paikka missä oon nähny ruokakaupassa kyltin joka kieltää ottamasta irtokarkkeja paljain käsin.

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i know that like if we want the rewards of being loved we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known but like what are the rewards of being loved? are they really worth all that? you talk of love and loving often and sometimes im so in your corner but other times it just makes me angry. is it really all that great?

This ask has been in my inbox for a number of days now, and honestly, every time I try and contemplate what it’s asking my mind stalls. “What are the rewards of being loved?” reads like like asking what kind of cheese the moon is made of, or how much dark there is before the dawn. It’s definitely a question! Theoretically it has an answer! But what kind of answer can I give that will make sense, since apparently....the reward of being loved isn’t being loved.

I mean, in the original essay, the one that gave birth to the meme, the trigger for “being known” is not really all that mortifying. Timothy Kreider emailed his friends about a herd of goats he was renting. Someone accidentally replied-all “oof,” which inspired the reflection about the gap between how we imagine people see us (charmingly off-beat renter of goats, perfect) and how we are actually known by the people in our lives (someone who fritters away their income renting a herd of goats for no discernible reason.)  Kreider concludes that this actually isn’t a gap at all---we are all fully capable of loving people profoundly while still seeing their faults, finding things they do annoying, and commiserating with mutual friends about that person’s quirks. 

I as an individual might like to think I am exempt from this, that I am dazzling and charming and the people who like me don’t even notice my foibles, but the truth is they do, it just doesn’t effect their love for me. 

Hence the “mortifying ordeal”---not only do I have to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s gaze, but I then have to accept that the people who like me do it in full knowledge of who I am. At any given moment, people are walking around fully aware of the fact that I’m a know-it-all and a bad loser, that I am not always emotionally available; my first instinct is to argue and my taste in music is somehow pedestrian and pretentious at once, that I am mostly trying, and a lot of times I fail. All the less-than-perfect things inside me are not secreted out of view; they are very obvious to anyone who has spent enough time with me, who has chosen to be around me for more than a half hour.

And that’s the people who like me!

So if we didn’t want to be known, deep down under all the squirming icky, insecure mess that makes being known such a terrifying prospect, then you’re right. The ordeal isn’t worth it, we should all pack up and go home, because people are always going to fucking see us. The random coworker who watches your face during a meeting knows you; the cousin who listened to your snarky comment knows you. You stumble through the world being known, inevitably, inexorably.

But being seen is necessary to be truly loved---and when it comes down to it, to be loved is to be real. Kreider references The Velveteen Rabbit in his follow-up article, appropriately titled “I Am a Meme Now.” I don’t think he’s wrong to draw on the idea that people observing our secret places, our weird faces, our strange comments and experience of the world makes them ultimate more real. Our experience lives inside us, in our head and impulse and feeling, so we are not objective in this---but we can’t escape all that leak out of us into the sight of others either. We can’t escape being known by someone who isn’t us, and rendered more than just our subjective selves through them. (In some ways, being known by someone else can be even truer than what we know about ourselves.)

The reward of all this---the only one that counts---is that sometimes, someone looks into your bloody beating insides and stays. They see your ugly expressions and listen to your nasty comments and peel back the heavy, wet layers of your intestines to see the guts beneath and still, they love you anyway. 

It is the closest thing to a miracle most of us will experience.

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Realized I have free will

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you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that's like "was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?" the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn't even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it's harmful, beyond simply "these guys are bad news because they're who my country is at war with right now") but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it's kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because...yeah, no shit, of course he didn't. tolkien didn't have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien's ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn't want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren't a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt's fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby "solving" the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.

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CBC made a good documentary on adult ADHD and part of it really caught me off guard because i swear they repeated verbatim my life story for the past 3 years

full programme here:

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/adhd-not-just-for-kids