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decepti-geek · 10 hours ago

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decepti-geek · 10 hours ago

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housewives were not banging out spirk fanfiction in the 60s for you to be AI generating your fic

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decepti-geek · 10 hours ago

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i unironically love the muppets i think we all do tho

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decepti-geek · 10 hours ago

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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

#history

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decepti-geek · 10 hours ago

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POV: you coughed in the shelter

#mtmte #First Aid #Ratchet #Velocity #Ambulon

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decepti-geek · 24 hours ago

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IDW Transformers as Textposts

#mtmte

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decepti-geek · 24 hours ago

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~ The eyes and ears of the Decepticons ~

No matter where you go, no matter how quiet you are...

You will always be seen.

He will be there.

And he will be watching you.

~~~

Inspired by Guillaume Morellec's illustration based on the 1984 book

#Soundwave #Starscream

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decepti-geek · 24 hours ago

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Wiggle

#tumblr #long post

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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Investigating your suspiciously cat shaped coworker, or Shockwave covering the fact he was sketching Soundwave 🤨 ?? Some may say the answer is both… okay I just wanted to show how I see TfOne Sdw and that I like the idea that he’s a little weirdo that sometimes recharges in his alt mode for some reason 🙄

#soundwave #shockwave #starscream

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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I'm a Buddhist Inverse Solipsist. I believe that I am the only guy still in samsara, and all of reality is a truman-show-like act by billions of bodhisattvas who are just humoring me.

#this is just like watching someone fuck around with the custom faith tool in ck3

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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creepers are such a hilariously bad thing to put in a sandbox game

#games

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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"New Yorkers bite more people than sharks annually" is an excellent example of how statistics can be misleading. Like yeah no shit, do you have any idea how rare it is to even encounter a shark in the wild? They're not exactly urban animals. I'm pretty damn sure that if sharks were living in big cities like pigeons, just strolling down the streets looking for food scraps, you'd see a lot more news stories about New Yorkers biting them.

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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it's genuinely bullshit that you should be required to own a mobile phone for participation in literally any aspect of life

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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Respond positively to this pro-trans schools policy for Wales

From my local WhatsApp group:

The Welsh Government are doing a consultation on its pro-trans schools policy. UK Gender Critical activists are upset and are trying to brigade it to push it in an anti-trans direction. Please fill out the consultation to try to reinforce the pro-trans stance. https://www.gov.wales/rights-respect-equality-anti-bullying-guidance

The deadline is 31 July 2025.

NB: Please only respond if you live in Wales! If you don't but want to help, please boost this and share it on other social networks. Thank you. ✨

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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i was so good at this water sort mobile game and i’m stuck on level like 348 and i’m convinced this one is impossible. i was stuck on it for weeks like a year ago and then quit and came back to it recently with a new hunger and vengeance and it’s kicking my ass i swear

#stories

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decepti-geek · 1 day ago

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Trail cam catching a deer fawn with the zoomies

#animals

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decepti-geek · 2 days ago

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Saw this gif and thought about Megatron riding Starscream into battle

and in bed

#megastar

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