fozmeadows

[fozmeadows]

obligatory post today

[fozmeadows]

i've been a fan of yours since the first time i read a strange and stubborn endurance 2 years ago! and then finding your blog on tumblr last year was like seeing you in the wild and finding out we live in the same city and occasionally seeing you in the distance

seeing you posting about hockey (an interest that developed independently some months after i read asase) is like finding you suddenly in the darkened corner of my hallway when i go to get water in the middle of the night. i didn't know hockey was something a person could have in common with one of their favorite fantasy writers.

i feel the only other scenario that would elicit bewilderment in the same vein is if my favorite goalie just posted a progress pic of his own epic pokemon cross stitch project.

I can't blame you for being surprised! But while I am no longer hyperfixated on the NHL to the same degree that I was a few years ago (that particular mental and emotional torch having since been passed to kpop), I do indeed follow and care about ice hockey. If it makes you feel any better, this is functionally @ngoziu's fault - I got sufficiently into Check, Please! that I wanted to write fanfic about it, which resulted in watching some games to get a sense for how everything worked on ice, and then it turned out that I actually really liked it? Absolutely baffling to suddenly care about a sport, and particularly a North American sport, but such is the power of homosexual literature and Tyler Seguin's 2015 ESPN Body Issue photoshoot.

[fozmeadows]

When Noem testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, ranking member Senator Chris Murphy gave such powerful, informative, and important opening remarks I have to share:

transcript:

"I say this with seriousness and respect, but your department is out of control.

"You’re spending like you don’t have a budget. You are running out of money for this fiscal year. You are illegally refusing to spend funds that have been authorized by this Congress and appropriated by this committee. You are ignoring the immigration laws of this nation, implementing a brand new immigration system that you have invented that has little relation to the statutes that you are required to follow as spelled out in your oath of office. You are routinely violating the rights of immigrants who may not be citizens, but whether you like it or not, they have constitutional and statutory rights when they reside in the United States.

"Your agency acts as if laws don’t matter, as if the election gave you some mandate to violate the Constitution and the laws passed by this Congress. It did not give you that mandate. You act as if your disagreement with the law, or even the public’s disagreement with the law, is relevant and gives you the ability to create your own law. It does not give you that ability.

"Let’s start with your spending. You are on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency act. That means you are on track to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence and it is wildly illegal.

"Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has allotted enough money to ICE, but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you have been given or to invent money.

"This obsession with spending at the border has left the country unprotected elsewhere. The security threats to national security are higher, not lower, since Trump came to office. To fund the border you have illegally gutted spending to cybersecurity.

"As we speak, Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day attacking our nation. You have withdrawn funds for disaster prevention. Storms are going to kill more people because of your illegal withholding of these funds. Your myopia about the border fueled by President Trump’s prejudice against people who speak a different language have shattered most of this country’s most important defenses.

"Now let’s talk about the impoundments. When Congress appropriates funds for a specific purpose the administration has no discretion whether or not to spend that money unless you go through a specific process with this committee.

"Let me give you two of many instances of this illegal impoundment. The first is a shelter and services program. Senator Britt may want to zero that account out, but that account is funded in a bipartisan way. You may not like the program. Your policy is to treat migrants badly. I think that’s abhorrent, but it doesn’t matter that you don’t like the program. You cannot cancel spending in this program, and you cannot use the funds, as you have, to fund other things, like ICE.

"You have also cancelled citizenship and integration grants, which help lawful permanent residents become citizens, helping them take the citizenship test. I know your goal is to try to make life as hard as possible for immigrants, but that goal is not broadly shared by the American public. That’s why Congress, in a bipartisan way, for decades has funded this program to help immigrants become citizens.

"Now let’s talk about why encounters at the southern border are down so much. This is clearly going to be your primary talking point today. You will tell us that it represents as success. But the prime reason why encounters are down is because you are brazenly violating the law every hour of every day.

"You are refusing to allow people showing up at the southern border to apply for asylum. I acknowledge that you don’t believe that people should be allowed to apply for asylum, but the White House doesn’t get to choose that. The law requires you to process people who are showing up at the border to apply for asylum.

"Why? Because our asylum law is a bipartisan commitment, an effort to correct for our nation’s unconscionable decision to deny entry to Jews to this country who were being hunted and killed by the Nazis. Our nation, Republicans and Democrats, decided, wrote it into law, that we would not repeat that horror ever again, and thus we would allow for people who were fleeing terror and torture to come here, arrive at the border, and make a case for asylum.

"Finally let’s talk about these disappearances. In an autocratic society, people who the regime does not like or who are protesting the regime are often picked up off the street, and spirited away, often to open-ended detention. Sometimes they’re never seen again.

"What you are doing, both to individuals who have legal rights to stay here, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or students who are just protesting Trump’s policies, is immoral and, to follow the theme, it is illegal. You have no right to deport a student visa holder with no due process simply because they have spoken in a way that offends the President. You can’t remove migrants whom a court has given humanitarian protection from removal.

"Now, reports suggest that you are planning to remove immigrants with no due process and send them to prisons in Libya. Libya is in the middle of a civil war. It is subject to a level 4 travel advisory, meaning we tell American citizens never to travel to Libya. We don’t have an embassy there because it is not safe for our diplomats. Sending migrants with pending asylum claims into a war zone, just because it’s cruel, is so deeply disturbing.

"Listen, I understand that my Republican colleagues on this committee don’t view the policy as I do, don’t share my level of concern for the way the government treats immigrants, but what I don’t understand is why we don’t have consensus in the Senate and on this committee on the decision by this administration to impound the spending that we have decided together to allocate in defense of this nation.

"We as an appropriations committee worked interminable hours to write and pass this budget, and so we make ourselves irrelevant when we allow the administration to ignore what we have decided. And then when we look the other way when the administration rounds up immigrants who are here illegally and have committed no offenses worthy of detainment, we also do potential irreversible damage to the Constitution.

"These should not be partisan concerns—destroying the power of Congress, eroding individuals’ Constitutional rights. This should matter to both parties."

_

I never knew that our asylum laws arise from when we didn’t take Jews escaping from the Nazis. Both parties said never again. Yet here we are.

Everything this "administration" is doing is impeachable, and this Congress has a responsibility to get these criminals out of office and keep them out.

Contact your representatives and demand that they hold Homeland Security to account if they want to keep holding their offices - if they in fact want those offices to still be a thing in the future.

[fozmeadows]

does anyone have that quote that goes something like 'white germans under the nazis lived just fine as long as they were loyal to the state, gave their children to the army, and paid their taxes, and in this sense many americans would be comfortable living under fascism' trying to find who said it but google is giving me jack shit

[fozmeadows]

truly wild that the bolts and panthers have won four of the last six stanley cups when you consider that the only ice native to florida is meth

[fozmeadows]

To answer your question @screaming-across-the-sky:

Human mortality is, for most people, an upsetting, even terrifying prospect. And this is understandable! The idea that we're alive today but eventually won't be is a confronting one, and all the more so for being inevitable. As a result, we have a tendency to believe in things that soften the blow: heaven, an afterlife of some sort, a higher realm, reincarnation. The particulars are different, but the common denominator is that death doesn't really mean dying; you just go somewhere, or become something, else. And by itself, I don't think it's wrong to believe in that sort of thing; nobody benefits from being paralyzed by existential terror, and if thinking of death as a transition rather than an ending helps you in life, then I'm not about to try and rip it out of your hands.

As an atheist, though, I've never believed in an afterlife of any sort. If I had to choose which belief I wished was true, I'd pick reincarnation - there's something deeply beautiful to me about the idea of souls learning and enriching themselves over different lifetimes, experiencing the world from countless new perspectives - but I don't actually have faith that this is true. Nonetheless, I think the idea is a useful philosophical jumping off point, because (in my opinion) far more than some walled-off heaven whose inhabitants are thereafter forever detached from the world and its living denizens, reincarnation invests you in the future - of caring about a world in which the you of the present moment no longer exists.

(Heaven, by contrast - well. If heaven is better than, preferable to the world by virtue of being a perfect place to which we're all ultimately meant to return, then the future doesn't actually matter, so long as we and our loved ones have all punched our ticket to the correct afterlife. Framed thusly, I would argue, a belief in heaven very easily becomes the ultimate justification for extractivism, wherein the world exists, not to be preserved for future generations, but to be used up - to be eaten, one might say, like an appetizer before the main course. And if the future doesn't matter to you, spiritually - if you live in anticipation of some imagined end times, hoping that the world's death will absolve you of the terrible burden of living a flawed and mortal life, or if you simply think that the next world, which thus far exists only in your imagination, is more precious than the earth on which you tread - then you will be harder pressed, I think, to care about things outside yourself, like the environment, or social change, or how your political choices affect other people. Or the people themselves, frankly: because either they are like you and are already going to the same final destination, or they are not like you, and thus must either be discarded, as they will eventually be discarded, or converted for their own good, in which case your concern is not for their earthly life - their real, tangible, mortal, finite life, the thing they live and breathe every day - but for the postmortem life you've taken it upon yourself to imagine for them, which is not their life at all. But I digress.) Reincarnation, though. The premise here is simple: what if a future person, unknown to you in this moment, was actually you? What if there was no afterlife, only more of the world? With this belief, we are instantly more invested in the future, because we're planning to be part of it. But of course, this hypothetical future-us is not the same as us-now; they'll have an entirely different body, childhood, family, memories - everything. Like Theseus's ship, we'll remain ourselves only in essence; future-us will not remember us-now. With this being so, then: if, in the event that reincarnation was real, you could imagine yourself caring about - delighting in, being reassured by - the existence of a future person who is you-but-not-you, then why not take the thought experiment a step further? Consider: what if this imagined future-person is not you in any ineffable, spiritual sense, but is rather like you? Make it easy on yourself: imagine that they were, in all the relevant particulars, very nearly a clone of you, a separate being who is nonetheless deeply akin to your present self without actually being you. Imagine them thriving; imagine them inheriting the world you leave behind. In terms of you-now, what difference is there, really, between this imagined stranger and the thought of future-you? They are both hypothetical. They are both, in some significant way, like you. And they both deserve a gentler world to inhabit.

If you can care about this hypothetical person - and I find it is easy to do so - then progress the thought further still. Imagine caring about someone who is akin to you, but not quite like you. Do you want them to live well? Yes? Then stretch it further; what about someone not like you at all? Do you want them to be happy? Can you delight in the idea that one day, this entirely new person will exist? What about dozens of such people? What about millions?

And all at once, as much as I'm still afraid of death - or newly afraid, rather, as there was a long period of time, pre-transition, where I was either ambivalent to or welcomed the idea of dying - I am not existentially terrified by the idea of not existing, because I am not the only person on Earth who matters. My life matters because it is mine, singular and strange and unduplicable, but mine is not the only life that matters; there will be lives after me, and they do not have to be mine, or carry the specter of me, in order for me to care about them; and yet, inevitably, some who come after me will be like me, just as others will be like you, or like someone else entirely, and so on through the whole rich, rolling tapestry of humankind.

And so I conclude that an atheist's afterlife is the future they want for others: the state in which we leave the world, or the direction in which we attempt to see it steered. And it feels so simple to me, now. Of course we cling to life. Of course we want reassurance that neither we nor the ones we love will ever truly end. But for me, there's peace in knowing that strangers I'll never meet will walk on the earth long after I'm gone. And if the world does end some day? Then all that life still won't have been wasted: it mattered for its own sake, not because it was infinite. And that, for me, is enough.

A quiet personal consequence of the horrors of the present moment is that, in order to cope with the constant existential dread, I've developed an entire (atheist, collectivist) philosophy around death that I did not previously have, in the sense that I've now organised my previously nebulous thoughts on the matter into something coherent. Which is probably of zero interest or comfort to anyone other than myself, and it's not exactly casual chit-chat material, but given that it's now a loadbearing part of my personal emotional/ethical framework, it feels relevant to at least put down in writing somewhere that it exists, and tumblr is as good a place as any, so! At least I've got that going for me.

[fozmeadows]

The corollary to this is that I've also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tease out what it is, specifically, that I dislike about religion as a practice, as distinct from particular pieces of religious dogma. So there's that, too.

A quiet personal consequence of the horrors of the present moment is that, in order to cope with the constant existential dread, I've developed an entire (atheist, collectivist) philosophy around death that I did not previously have, in the sense that I've now organised my previously nebulous thoughts on the matter into something coherent. Which is probably of zero interest or comfort to anyone other than myself, and it's not exactly casual chit-chat material, but given that it's now a loadbearing part of my personal emotional/ethical framework, it feels relevant to at least put down in writing somewhere that it exists, and tumblr is as good a place as any, so! At least I've got that going for me.

[fozmeadows]

A quiet personal consequence of the horrors of the present moment is that, in order to cope with the constant existential dread, I've developed an entire (atheist, collectivist) philosophy around death that I did not previously have, in the sense that I've now organised my previously nebulous thoughts on the matter into something coherent. Which is probably of zero interest or comfort to anyone other than myself, and it's not exactly casual chit-chat material, but given that it's now a loadbearing part of my personal emotional/ethical framework, it feels relevant to at least put down in writing somewhere that it exists, and tumblr is as good a place as any, so! At least I've got that going for me.

[fozmeadows]

"No one remembers the singer. The song remains." - Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero

The Dabous Giraffes - neolithic petroglyphs found in Saharan Niger estimated to be 6,000 to 8,000 years old. The bigger of the two giraffes is 5.4 meters long and is the largest known petroglyph in the world.

[fozmeadows]

Man so I'd heard SoCal people joke about Shen Yun being a cult - had even seen some articles in passing about the use of child labor and unfair treatment of the performers - but wasn't really sure where it sat on the continuum between Shitty But Legitimate Business and Actual Fucking Cult until this past weekend, when my family and I ended up in a rideshare driven by a Shen Yun zealot. We were going out for a Father's Day dinner to a place about a 5 minute drive away, and as we set off, I thought, "huh, the music the driver is playing sounds vaguely familiar - I wonder what it is?" And from where I was sitting, I could see the name of the track on the screen of his iPhone, so I discreetly googled it and, lo and behold, it was a Shen Yun song, which I'd probably heard in an ad at some point. And in the next breath, I realised that the blue lotus tchotchke hanging from the sun visor was also a Shen Yun thing.

I didn't verbalise this realisation at all, but about ten seconds later, the driver asks my husband and I, "Have you gentlemen heard of Shen Yun?" To which we say, yes, we've heard of it, in response to which the guy starts telling us about the music, the dance, how it's meant to encourage and reflect "traditional virtues" - a dogwhistle if ever I've heard one - and how wonderful it all is. And after about a minute of this, he finally draws breath, which allows us to say, "Oh, that's nice," in a polite, we-are-a-captive-audience-in-this-rideshare-and-you-seem-to-feel-strongly-about-this way - and if the guy had left it at that, we'd have had no problem.

But then. Then.

He launches into a new spiel, completely unprompted, not talking to us, but talking at us, a literal uninterrupted stream of information about how the group practises ancient Chinese meditation that some publication or other has proved can cure stage four cancer, and how the Chinese communist party is an evil persecuting force against multiple religious groups and is committing genocide,* and he has some literature he can give us, and really the dance troupe is amazing because the modern world has forgotten its values and society needs to go back to traditional virtues and that's why everything sucks - just this constant, breathless delivery with zero pauses for interjection, like he's just desperate to tell us everything about this group in the space of a five minute drive, and let me tell you, he made four straight minutes feel like fucking eternity.

Finally, I can't take it any more. The entire experience is upsetting, not least because this dude keeps dogwhistling about "traditional virtues," and so I, in my firmest yet politest voice, say, "Excuse me, sorry, but would you mind not talking about this? You're stressing me out." And he just kind of. Blinks. Like it hadn't ever occurred to him that randomly launching into a non-stop tirade about cancer and genocide to strangers could possibly elicit a negative reaction, and says, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stress you," followed swiftly by something like, "But I just wanted to say -"

And then he keeps going, or tries to; I cut him off again saying, "Please, you don't need to give us the hard sell." To which he replies, "Oh, it doesn't cost anything -", forcing me to say, a third fucking time, "Please, just. Stop."

Which, finally, he does, leaving the entire car in a tense, awkward silence for the final minute it takes to reach our destination. And still - still! - when we pull up, he feels compelled to add, "I'll just give you some information about it," and pushes some brochures about Shen Yun and Falun Gong over the fucking center console towards us. (We did not take them.)

On the positive side, this did lead to a fairly lively conversation over dinner, where my husband and I explained what a cult is to our twelve-year-old, who was suitably baffled by the entire experience. But I also felt compelled to look up Falun Gong, the organisation behind Shen Yun, and learned that they're vehemently opposed to both homosexuality and feminism, which certainly explained all the "traditional virtues" talk, but also made it retroactively hilarious that this guy had tried to pitch us at all, on account of how I am queer and transmasc - I would've assumed he'd misread me as female, if not for the fact that he'd addressed my husband and I as gentlemen, which. Like. My guy! You saw two men and a kid get into your car from a suburban house and were driving them to a restaurant on Father's Day weekend and the possibility that we were a gay family somehow didn't occur to you?

But on the other hand, maybe I should be grateful that he got it wrong. If he'd thought we were degenerates, perhaps he might've kept quiet, but perhaps not. Hence the anxiety and unpleasantness of the experience! Either way, though: man, Shen Yun is a fucking cult. *Let the record state that, under normal circumstances, I actually enjoy talking politics with rideshare drivers! I'm extroverted, I like people, and as we don't have a car and live in a place with negligible public transport, I get a lot of Ubers. You meet a really fascinating cross-section of people this way, but even when I encounter someone with different views to me, I'm usually still able to have a decent conversation, because I take care to read the vibe. So the objection here was not to the choice topic: it was to the fact that this guy launched into it with zero warning, full tilt, without checking or caring how his captive audience was reacting or whether we were comfortable, and was not in any meaningful way interested in hearing a reply. Ordinarily, I give all rideshare drivers 5 stars and a tip: this was only the fourth time I've ever not done that. (The other three were, in order: a guy who took off while I was still getting in and half ran over my foot; a condescending asshole who kept trying to pitch me on bitcoin and called me sweetheart (derogatory); and a full MAGA Trumpist who feigned politeness for the first half of the drive, then abruptly switch-flipped on me and started shouting.)

[fozmeadows]

[fozmeadows]

I spent way too long making this extremely shitty graphic, so I might as well post it here: the Trump regime as Captain Planet villains, with the text descriptions of each taken from the Captain Planet wiki.

[fozmeadows]

Israel cuts Gaza's final internet line, plunging it into total communication blackout.

Israel bombed the last main fibre route in Gaza, which means that as of June 12, all internet and fixed-line communication services are now completely cut off, further isolating Gaza amidst an ongoing genocide.

I am seeing more and more calls from inside of Gaza for help with eSims as that is currently the only way they can connect internally and with the outside world.

- Buy eSIMs here.

- If you can't afford it, you can donate any amount to this eSIM fund.

- Instructions on how to buy and share eSIMs.

[fozmeadows]

great news team today my 12yo learned that I'm on tumblr and immediately called me a geezer. he did however allow that the site has its uses, namely: showing me a post about the banded linsang, which enabled me to show him the banded linsang, which is an extremely good Creature; nonetheless, my geezerness remains

[fozmeadows]

Hi! I just finished reading the Tithenai Chronicles, and I love Velasine and Cae so much! They are so fun and adorable! I was curious to ask, do you imagine that Velasine would ever end up meeting his family again? I love the idea of his and Cae's happy marriage getting rubbed in their faces after all they did to him.

Thank you so much! I do have periodic thoughts about a married Vel seeing his Ralian family again; I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to write that particular story, but I have multiple versions in my head of how it might play out. All of them, though, are extremely bittersweet and complicated: even if certain hurts might conceivably be worked past, they cannot be fully undone, and as cathartic as it could be to show his new success to the people who cast him aside, until or unless they value Vel's new life the same way he does, he can't impress them with it. But at the same time, family is a curious and complex thing, and where some have turned away, others will step forwards :)

[fozmeadows]

I physically cannot process the level of puritan brainrot necessary to declare it weird and wrong for two fully adult, fully consenting, genetically unrelated actors to play a couple in a movie because they also played fictional half-siblings in a TV show that finished airing [checks notes] six fucking years ago. Like I'm just. Fictional siblinghood is not a transitive property! I genuinely didn't think it was possible for the puriteen defauxnition of incest to cast a broader, stupider net than "the characters grew up together and are therefore basically siblings which makes it Wrong," but I stand corrected: being mad that the actors played siblings in a totally different media property is worse. Christ on a fucking bicycle.

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Sophie Turner:

In an interview with The Times, Turner opened up about her upcoming projects Joan and The Dreadful. Explaining that she would be starring alongside Game of Thrones costar Kit Harington in the latter, the actress revealed that she was the one who suggested him for the part.

“They were trying to find someone for that role, and I was like, ‘You can’t not have Kit,’” she said. “It’s set around the time of the Wars of the Roses, so we’ll probably be floating about in robes on clifftops again.”

Kit Harington:

When it’s something like that, where you end up reuniting with a co-star like that, was that intentional? Were you trying to find a project to do together? Was it just a coincidence that you both ended up being cast?

“This one, Sophie sent to me. She was like, “Would you like to do this? I really think you’d be right for it.” And I read it very quickly, which is always a good sign. I always find, if you’re trying to get to the end quickly because you wanna send the email saying, “Yes,” that’s a good sign.”

-They both knew what they were doing when they got in bed together-

[fozmeadows]

Listen, objectifying and mistreating real human beings due to fetishization is obviously bad, but the problem with fetishization discourse is that a lot of you are using the term "fetishization" to mean Being Horny In A Way I Personally Dislike, such that what you're functionally objecting to is Being Horny At All, because you're nakedly uncomfortable with sexual desire being discussed openly, communally, joyfully, without shame or whispering, and are thus conflating shit like loving size kink in fiction with a secret desire to say slurs in real life.