anupalya - Tumblr blog

[anupalya]

Oh this hit all my red flags, I've torn down 3 already just walking Malaya to the park

[anupalya]

Warrior's Lullaby

Din sings to Grogu while trapped in a cave.  Luke is entranced.

Vocal performance by anupalya (me!).  Mando’a translation of original lyrics and dinluke-ification by @snaurus / snarechan on ao3.  Melody and original lyrics from Rider’s Lullaby as heard in Centaurworld, written by Megan Nicole Dong and performed by Jessie Mueller.  Instrumental (karaoke version of the original song) used for this recording from here. Big, BIG thanks to my friends who helped with the editing (you know who you are <3).

This is a musical illustration of/Mando'a cover inspired by a scene from Chapter 5 of The Start, by @snaurus, in which Din sings the Mando'a version of Rider's Lullaby (although he doesn't have the soundtrack accompaniment in the cave with them, of course. At least, not literally).

I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend The Timeline (the series to which The Start belongs).  It’s so fun and interesting and full of adventure and shy idiots and chaotic dumbassery, and is just absolutely delightful.  I cheer every time a new chapter comes out.  This is my fanart of and tribute to their work, and I hope you enjoy.

AO3 version here

Mando’a Lyrics (translated by @snaurus):

Gar're jat, gar're an staabi.

Ni'll draar, vurel ba'slanar gar eso.

Ni kelir motir, bal Ni kelir akaanir, ti gar.

...

Gar're jat, gar're an staabi.

Ni'll motir olar, adol te dha ca.

An te ara, Ni kelir akaanir, ti gar.

English/Original (from Centaurworld):

You're okay, you're all right.

I'll never, ever leave your side.

I will stand, and I will fight, with you.

...

You're okay, you're all right.

I'll stand here, through the dark night.

All the way, I will fight, with you.

[anupalya]

Voting for Democrats improves your life. More people than you think have problems with hearing. This is great news.

[anupalya]

[anupalya]

[anupalya]

“It’s a bird feeder, not a dragon feeder!!!”

[anupalya]

there’s nothing purer or better than how much kids enjoy being picked up and then hurled at soft surfaces

[anupalya]

Poem: I lik the form

My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail I am my best / when formats are not mix’d Wen poits play / subversions often fail

Stik out their toung / to rebel with no cause At ruls and norms / In ignorance they call: My words are free / Defying lit'rate laws To lik the forms / brings ruin on us all

A sonnet I / the noblest lit'rate verse And ruls me bind / to paths that Shakespeare paved Iambic fot / allusions well dispersed On my behind / I stately sit and wave

You think me tame /   Fenced-in and penned / bespelled I bide my time /   I twist the end / like hell

* “lik” should be read as “lick”, not “like”. In general, the initial section on each line should be read sort of phonetically.

Written for World Poetry Day, March 21, 2018. When I had this idea earlier today, I thought it was the worst, most faux hip pretentious idea for a shallow demonstration of empty wordsmithing skill in poetry ever. So I had to try to write it. I mean, how often do you get to fuse the iambic dimeter of bredlik - one of the newest and most exciting verse forms - with the stately iambic pentameter of the classic sonnet?

[anupalya]

i swear to god i do not understand why the younger trans ppl are so fucking hostile to the terms “transexual” or “mtf/ftm”. I really don’t. Are they maybe a bit out of date? I mean yeah, but… there are still ppl alive who came into themselves with those terms. Who still feel most comfortable with those terms. And yet I see younger trans ppl act as tho anyone using those terms are somehow using UNFORGIVABLE TERMINOLOGY like fuck off bitch, when I was first starting to think about my gender, the elders I looked to used “transsexual” and I still feel like that’s a fair summation of my identity.

It just irritates me, ‘cause like. Declaring those terms anathema alienates older queer folks and isolates y’all from your history. You don’t have to use it for yourself, but when ppl use it for themselves you fuckin IMPLODE and I just…. WHY??? Fuck right off.

I’m a nonbinary former ftm transsexual in many ways, and y’all can’t take that shit from me. :|

[anupalya]

more examples of the intersection of ableism and queerphobia

JK Rowling’s essay about trans men specifically talked about how autistic girls are being lead astray by the trans movement

in some jurisdictions, people with cognitive and/or intellectual disabilities are not allowed to medically transition at all

again, psychotic people constantly being questioned about whether their identity is a delusion/hallucination or not

queer spaces not being accessible for those who use mobility aids (particularly wheelchairs)

disabled people not having access to sex education that specifically educates them on having sex whilst disabled — and abled people not bothering to learn the same

the concept that having someone who is both disabled and queer is “bad representation” somehow. constant messaging that you’re either one or the other and can’t be both

ideas in the queer community about what the queer lifestyle looks like often does not consider that the lifestyle is impossible for people who use mobility aids and/or have a carer

I could go on and on. disabled people are constantly excluded from queer movements and queer people are often excluded from disability movements. we’re ignored. we’re pushed aside. our needs are put in the “too hard” basket, and we’re not given necessary supports to live a happy life as a queer disabled person

do not tag this “q slur” or similar

[anupalya]

Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years

[anupalya]

Shoutout to fat trans people who have to deal with the fatphobia towards their agab, the fatphobia towards gender they actually identify with, the fatphobia within the queer community itself, AND sometimes dysphoria on top of all that. I see you, you're doing amazing, and I'm so proud of you.

[anupalya]

The Medical Industry in the US needs a dispensary for prescribed diets.

I’m talking about prepackaged and preprepared or easy-to-prepare meals, snacks and fluids as a part of outpatient care.

You can’t just give a patient a list of dietary restrictions and a 30 minute appointment with some vague guidance and then send them on their way. I’ve been watching a family member the last three weeks be miserable on a liquid diet for pre-surgery and the biggest struggle isn’t the diet itself, it’s that the list the doctor and dietitian gave her is only some suggested guidelines and half of the recommended things she can have on the list aren’t available anywhere. Also, when I say the guidelines are vague - her doctor during the pre surgical meeting yesterday chastised her for buying low-sodium broth, when the reason she bought low-sodium is because in her last meeting with the dietitian, low-sodium was verbalized as a positive. Also the low-sodium broth met all the other requirements on the list?

1) dietitians and nutritionists should be responsible for putting together a comprehensive meal plan with specifics and instructions - it should be a perfectly reasonable expectation that a person who’s job is to understand how our bodies are affected by what we eat, and what effects the things we eat have on our bodies, be able to provide comprehensive recipes that are tailored to patients diets. Cause guess what - people expect chefs to be able to do it on the fly in professional kitchens. You think working with and around dietary constraints hasn’t become one of the hottest selling skills the last 8 years?

You can’t tell me that it’s reasonable to expect an overworked line cook to do that and not a dietitian or a nutritionist.

2) There are too many patients who, once they are sent home, go off whatever necessary food restrictions they’re meant to be on because they don’t have the proper support or knowledge or experience to maintain their nutritional health. If we want health care to be wholistic, we need to make medically required diets and food restrictions more accessible for outpatient care.

Like - imagine being able to pop over to the pharmacy (or have a delivery!! We can do that, think about all the meal kit deliveries traveling around right now) or some kitchen dispensary near a hospital complex, turning in a script and getting one or two weeks worth of portioned meals, everything is measured out with easy use instructions and dates/times, because you just had surgery and can’t do certain strenuous activities, but popping a frozen meal to heat up in the microwave or the oven isn’t too strenuous - or maybe you’re on your chemo cycle, and those are so fucking miserable already but at least you don’t have to worry about figuring out what to put in a calorie-dense smoothie because it’s already thrown together in a sealed cup (nice fat straw included) you can dump in a blender tomorrow and right back into the disposable cup to drink - or maybe you’re on a liquid diet for five weeks and then on limited soft foods for four weeks after that, but at least you don’t have to worry about hunting down the only things you can have in four different grocery stores.

And maybe doctors will have less recurring patients when, if sending them home, they know that the patient will have more of a chance staying on their medical diet during recovery because they have more accessible options, rather than a vague list of instructions.

[anupalya]

Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

[anupalya]

Nichelle Nichols by Robin Damore

Rest in peace beautiful Nichelle.   

Born: December 28, 1932, Robbins, IL

Died: July 30, 2022

[anupalya]

To the woman that inspired countless girls and people of color, we will never forget you.

You will always be in our hearts.

Thank you for going where no woman had gone before.

Nichelle Nichols 1932- 2022