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Wait, Midnight Pals is real?

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seeing a mutual like one of your posts like, "i knew you'd like that, you slut"

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Please don't use 'gay panic' that way.

A timely reminder to all younger (and non American) writers out there who didn’t live through it that 'Gay Panic' does not mean your hapless gay/bi/pan blorbo is all a flustered and bad at flirting.

It was a legal defense for beating a gay person, sometimes to death, because the perpetrator thought they were being flirted with and that, somehow, sent them into a homicidal panic. It is a horrible horrible part of queer history. And it wasn't that long ago.

So when you tag your fic 'Gay Panic', it does not mean "here is my cute fandom child being a mess", it means this fic has homophobia and possibly someone dying from it. So if that's not what your fic contains, it's not the tag that should be used.

It's okay if you don't know the history! But here's your notice. I wish we could pretend that the phrase is something that could be reclaimed, but we can't. We especially can't with the current attacks on transpeople in the US and UK where we are seeing the term and ethos behind the term coming back.

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People describe shoebill storks as being scary or ugly birds and always use one image to make their point. When in every other photo they look like this

More like shoebill dork

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"You can say that [orangutans] are not dependent on social support and approval, and if you admire this in them, that an orang is irredeemably his own person, 'the most poetic of the apes', researcher Lynn Miles told me once in an unguarded moments. What she had in mind was the difference between orangs and chimps in the way they carry on their discourse with the world.

Chimps are much admired for their tool use and for their problem-solving relationship with things as they find them...the orang is, let us say, not so replete with enterprise. Give an orangutan the hexagonal peg and the several shapes of hole, and then hide behind the two-way mirror and watch how he engages with the problem.

And watch and watch and watch--because he does not engage with the problem. He uses the peg to scratch his back, has a look-see at his right wrist, makes a half-hearted and soon abandoned attempt to use his fur as a macramé project, stares dreamily out the window if there is one and at nothing in particular if not, and the sun begins to set. (The sun will also set if you are observing a chimp, but the chimp is more amusing, so you are less likely to mark the moment in your notes. An orang observer has plenty of time to be a student of the vanities of sunset.)

You watch, and the orang dreams...when casually and as if thinking of something else, the orang slips the hexagonal peg into the hexagonal hole. And continues staring off dreamily."

Vicki Hearne, "The Case of the Disobedient Orangutans"

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No I’m not attracted to you. Quit your evil putting your finger under my chin to make me look up at you. I know I’m your nemesis and all but we really need to set some boundaries when you’ve got me tied up like this.

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Hey, oomfies! This Eid, let’s spread some more love to Gaza. Grassroots orgs there are doing incredible work despite the many limitations...getting food, meds, and shelter to families who’ve lost everything. Even a few bucks can make a real difference. Donate the cost of a coffee!

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what did dads even do before wd-40

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No specific scene in mind, just had an idea in me noggin

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Hey, should we check in on that Target boycott? See how it is going?

Reminder that this is still going on (through April 17th) and that we, the consumers, have a lot of power

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Good lord. Well, here is further reason to please avoid subscribing to artist's patreon pages through the Apple store/iOS since the policy changes (subscriptions made prior to Feb 26th are fortunately unaffected by this).

I am incredibly fortunate in that these $100 that will apparently be held back for over two months do not spell a financial detriment to me at all - but If I were new to the platform, really needed that $100, or the majority of my supporters happened to be iOS users, that could have been a huge issue.

So please, and especially when you go to support small artists that you want to see thrive who opened their patreon accounts recently, go through desktop so that they won't be hit with apple's extra fees and actually receive the funds in a timely fashion!

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immortalizing the time my teen first time porn bore the mark of the beast

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I'm reading a Sociolinguistics textbook. It's talking about German adopting the French baguette but changing the gender from feminine to neuter. And it ends the example with, "However this may be, the gender change of baguette didn't happen naturally. Somebody performed the operation." I'm laughing so hard at the mental image of a trans baguette. I love it.

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Now I have to ask- WHY do you hate Pacific Rim?

Okay, fair warning, this is about as bitter and salty and small-minded as day-old caviar. But. My bitter, salty (probably fishy) opinion:

Pacific Rim is only a good movie because it's a well-written story about robots punching monsters.

That's it. That's all there is to the movie.

I started out merely disappointed by Pacific Rim. We went gaga for the preview materials that promised these unique well-rounded character pairs and trios with these idiosyncratic robots from all these different Pacific nations... And then the movie itself is about some bland white American guy who pilots a robot named a racial slur, the second most fleshed-out team is bland white Australian guys, and the Chinese team is there, kind of, in the background, but don't worry they're going to die first. The "character-driven story" turned out to be "various characters take turns punching aliens" but, sure, whatever, I love the MCU so why not.

The day I went from "Pacific Rim is overrated" to "Pacific Rim is the worst thing that has ever happened to human civilization, I'm extremely normal about this" was the day I saw a Tumblr post suggesting we replace the Bechdel test with the Mako Mori test. Because Mako Mori has her own plot and doesn't kiss North Carolina at the end, making her a whole new type of feminist icon.

To which I was like:

We are talking about the same movie here, right? The Pacific Rim that can't even pass the Bechdel test? The Pacific Rim that's all about might-makes-right, the Pacific Rim that has ONE speaking role for ONE female character in its (from IMDB) 50-person cast? The Pacific Rim that repeatedly puts its only female character in danger and has her rescued by first Idris Elba then North Carolina? THAT Pacific Rim?

Is there a different Mako Mori I haven't met? Because the one I've seen a) has a character arc driven by deciding whether to obey her father or follow her heart, which is as inoffensive and stale as an unblessed communion wafer, b) does nothing that Ellen Ripley didn't do 30 years earlier, but with about 5% of the character depth Ripley got, and c) stands there in silence looking sad as two men punch each other over the question of her virtue.

Any post assuming this movie invented the idea of "small Asian woman kicks monster ass" needs to learn its damn history. Especially the ones acting like her being physically small is somehow a feminist bonus. There's something embarrassingly ahistorical about the whole thing.

And look. I get how we got here. I know how easily Tumblr backs you into a rhetorical corner of "calling a story Good can never mean merely 'enjoyable'; calling a story Good must mean 'virtuous'". Until next thing you know you're arguing that actually, shipping Obi-Wan/Darth Vader is a net good for all of society, because gay divorced middle-aged tyrants who use supplemental oxygen and murdered their exes in a custody dispute over the one kid (out of two) they actually care about deserve to see themselves in sci fi too! You only end up in that corner because half the time you're arguing against someone who says that shipping Obi-Wan/Darth Vader is literally the same thing as supporting father-son incest, so your real reasons for shipping them (1. foe yay, 2. old man yaoi) seem wildly insufficient.

Much of what I see about Pacific Rim seems neck-deep in the "it's not allowed to be a Good Movie unless it single-handedly dismantles the patriarchy" fallacy. There's nothing progressive about shipping two dudes best known for chopping off each other's body parts with laser swords. And there's nothing progressive about a movie having its only female character hug the male protagonist at the end instead of kissing him. You're allowed to like a thing just because it's well-made, without acting like a bog-standard normatively-broey action flick somehow invented a new form of feminism. Anyway, "Pacific Rim is a perfectly fine movie" is the hill I will die upon, heretical though it may be.

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"I want old fandom culture back, but proshippers are disgusting, don't bring them into this" a real life TikTok post that I saw btw.

YOU CANNOT HAVE OLD FANDOM CULTURE BACK WITHOUT PROSHIPPING.