caitlindjarin - Tumblr blog

[caitlindjarin]

[caitlindjarin]

i feel like all writers just need like....an oc story. and i dont mean like a story just with original characters. i mean like a piece of writing that simply makes your brain go wheeeeeeeeeee and its at the level of something your 13 year old self would write and post to deviantart. its liberating. its freeing. its comforting. my ocs are all gay and overpowered as fuck and there's really no plot to this but by god I'm having fun.

[caitlindjarin]

we should tell the red flags in our rooms again i have a lot more now.

[caitlindjarin]

reblog for something very lgbt to happen to you on nov 5th

[caitlindjarin]

"Not having a carrd is a red flag!" No a red flag is you thinking you're entitled to a little pamphlet full of someone else's information.

[caitlindjarin]

i saw the trailer for the new feel-good “anti-racist” US war movie about the carpet bombing of North Korea and started writing up something for this blog, partially inspired by the absolute shit storm i got for sharing that post i made with pictures of everyday life outside pyongyang

and then i gave up, because what’s the point? westerners can’t even handle a single picture of a north korean not looking miserable without screaming propaganda

meanwhile, there are no stories about the horrors of life in the ‘hermit kingdom’ that are deemed too outlandish to be believable. i can’t remember who said it, but it’s like the entire country has taken up permanent residence in the western imaginary as some silly little cartoon villain, where the leaders of the country does evil things for no discernible reason. they’re just silly and evil like that, and the citizens, of course, are silly, too. silly and brainwashed.

i watched a video recently of a tourists visiting an auto dealership in pyongyang, and the entire time he was just gawking at the employees and costumers, shoving his phone in their face, and confidently explaining to his youtube audience that everyone he’s interacting with are actually actors.

what level of dehumanization do you have to reach for that thought to even cross your mind? to think that the people you see before you are actors? that entire cities and shops are erected with to sole purpose that you, a western, will see them and be impressed?

what frustrates me the most is the casual cruelty that seeps into any mention of north korea, no matter how small. if north koreans are not being evil, they’re being silly.

a north korean newspaper reports that a group of archeologists in pyongyang have discovered an old rock carving with the words ‘unicorn lair’ (mistranslated), and the western press reports that north koreans now believe in unicorns.

a tourist at a hotel in hamhung is told by the receptionist to be careful at the beach: the waves can get high. that day the tourists goes to the beach, and there are no waves. she retells the story to her instagram followers, explaining that the poor woman at the hotel could never have seen real waves before because north koreans are probably never allowed to travel.

she adds a little teary-eyed emoji.

one of the cities i included in the post was sariwon, a densely populated city to the south of pyongyang. below are some pictures from its “folk customs street”, which was built to showcase old korean traditions and customs

here’s all wikipedia has to say about it

Built to display an ideal picture of ancient Korea, it includes buildings in the “historical style” and a collection of ancient Korean cannons. Although it is considered an inaccurate romanticized recreation of an ancient Korean street, it is frequently used as a destination for foreigners on official government tours. Many older style Korean buildings exist in the city.

it’s just north koreans being silly again. there’s no mention of what might motivate them to build a street like that — why the preservation of old customs, culture and architecture might somehow be important for the city

could it perhaps have something to do with how the U.S. air force dropped 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, over the korean peninsula during the war? the carpet bombings, which are now the topic of an upcoming hollywood movie about overcoming racism through warcrimes, destroyed an estimate of 85% of all buildings in north korea. some cities were entirely wiped off the map.

in sariwon they missed a few buildings, but not many — after an intense firebombing campaign the U.S. military estimated the destruction of sariwon to be at 95%.

none of this is mentioned on the wikipedia page for sariwon.

we destroyed entire cities. memory-holed the entire thing, called it the forgotten war. and now, 70 years later, we’re convincing ourselves that the people living in the ruins are actors.

and somehow the north koreans are the brainwashed ones

[caitlindjarin]

which one of you mfrs put that “taxes aren’t hard, actually” post on my dash, I want to die

[caitlindjarin]

Gonna eat my hands from how much tumblr is unaware of Bad Bunny

[caitlindjarin]

sometimes i'm like 'jesus christ tumblr is awful' but i remember that at least it can't come close to comparing to the sad bitterness of the people who live on twitter. checked in on the site and currently there are thousands of people losing their minds yelling at some random woman on there because she made a tweet about how she likes to sit in her garden in the mornings and have long conversations with her husband. so you have people replying with stuff like 'UMMMM some people don't have gardens OP, this is a really tone deaf thing to post :/' yeah tumblr wins every time

[caitlindjarin]

Hitting this post back and forth between my blogs like a tennis ball.

I know for a fact that certain factions of Star Wars fandom would have hated the sequel trilogy no matter what story it told or tone it took. I also know for a fact that part of the frankly extreme backlash to the sequels had to do with the politics of it. It came out when GamerGate was rising, when JKR was first sharing TERF propaganda, when the Proud Boys and Milo and Richard Spencer were all on the rise. These people are the people inundating YouTube with absolute fucking garbage takes about Star Wars, or The Rings of Power, or any movie/show that dares to cast Black people in sff genre things. TFA was warning us about them! About this! About letting people get away with this! How can I hate a trilogy of movies that is one of the best and most accessible thing in pop culture that demonstrates what happens when you try to act like nothing bad is happening??

Y’all I can never truly hate the sequel trilogy because it’s about fascism coming back with a vengeance after years of self-congratulatory complacency, it may not have been the Star Wars we wanted but it was the one we deserved

[caitlindjarin]

Y’all I can never truly hate the sequel trilogy because it’s about fascism coming back with a vengeance after years of self-congratulatory complacency, it may not have been the Star Wars we wanted but it was the one we deserved

[caitlindjarin]

I just wrote 600 words of Doctor Who fanfiction after not having written Doctor Who for nearly 10 years

[caitlindjarin]

If I ask nicely who will rb this telling me what is the last song u listened to 🥺

[caitlindjarin]

Bitches love to be like "science sucks where are the eldritch horrors where is the knowledge thats maddening to know" that's thermodynamics motherfucker. The first two world experts in thermodynamics (Ludwig Boltzmann and Paul Ehrenfest) both killed themselves because they had to do fucking thermodynamics

[caitlindjarin]

For future reference.

[caitlindjarin]

been seeing a lot more posts like “people need to stop pretending [thing] is difficult to do, it’s literally not” and the thing is something I’ve struggled to the point of meltdown with more than once in my life