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Turquoise-browed Motmots (Eumomota superciliosa), family Momotidae, order Coraciiformes, México

photograph by Jadwiga Dabrowski‎

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Ya'll tumblr activists really need to drop the word "misdirected" from your vocabulary, I am so serious. Oppression is not something done to you based solely on your internal identity and everything else you experience is just you being hit by a stray bullet. Bigots aren't going to stop harassing cisgender drag queens if trans women stopped existing. TERFs aren't going to stop harassing Black and GNC cis women. Racists aren't going to stop telling tanned white people to go back to Mexico or whatever country they hate the most that week. Homophobes aren't going to stop beating up a GNC or autistic or high-voiced or long-haired man just because he swears he's straight. The point is to get everyone to conform to a narrow, white and americentric idea of conformity with no wiggle room whatsoever. To say that the people harmed by bigotry were just in the wrong place at the wrong time is victim-blaming and a complete denial of reality. Fucking knock it off.

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I know it's a decently well-known fact nowadays that pretty much every foundational aspect of metal aesthetics was introduced by Rob Halford, whose outfits were explicitly inspired by the leather scene of the gay bars he used to frequent, but still. Sometimes I have to stop and think about how funny it is. Like. This one gay guy got entire generations of straight metalheads to start dressing up like gay sex perverts.

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today's bug thing is the bug carousel at the Bronx Zoo!

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big fan of The Dictionary, the mythical entity that prescriptivists believe exists. I am always learning more about the beliefs surrounding it

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…feEL THE RAIN ON YOUR SKIN NO ONE ELSE CAN FEEL FOR YOU ONLY YOU CAN LET IT IN

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I need everyone to watch this tiktok NBC Olympics posted on their official page

I. AM. SCREAMING. 😂

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weighted blanket isn’t enough today, I need to be compressed into a .zip file

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A lot of people firmly believe in the idea that being smart makes you a mean person, therefore, hatred must be the same thing as intelligent, nuanced and thoughtful critique.

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

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Me: "Fiction depicts a thing people did not do in the real, physical world around you. For instance, the bunny from Zootopia people are hot for is not real." People on tumblr, who are old enough to own a home, vote, serve in the military, etc.: "I beg to differ!"

You know how you can tell fiction apart from reality? It makes more sense than whatever the fuck this is.

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I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.

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Now what? What the fuck do you mean, now what?

Cartoons are not real people.

If a real person voices them, they do not become a person. They are not real. If I do a funny voice and say, "Whee, I'm Jiffjeffjoff the Giraffe", Jiffjeffjoff is not a person. He has no rights. He is not a registered a citizen of the US. He does not have thoughts or feelings or a Social Security Number.

If voice determined personhood, mute people would not be people. Thankfully, no one else but you uses that as a metric of realness or personhood.

Porn actors are human beings. Not make-believe, I mean real people, really here, in the real, physical world. You can make up creepy headcanons that the dude jerking off for a camera is being human trafficked or the couple who make amateur porn in their own house is being held at gunpoint and forced to, but that's in your head, not a proven fact you have evidence for and also, they are still people. They are still different from fiction.

Sex workers are people. Cartoons are not.

"But if voice, then real???" is the most media illiterate take I've seen in my entire life and that is genuinely impressive considering it's tumblr.

And no, you can't "beg to differ" on if porn actors having sex is doing a real thing. It is a real person sexually interacting with another person. That is real. You can dislike it, you can say you don't want to view it as The One True Sex Between Man And Woman In Holy Matrimony or whatever, but it's still sex. Sex is not only two people you approve of having it in the right context under the right circumstances. Sex is people having sex, even if you don't approve of the circumstances that led there - otherwise we wouldn't have sex crime laws, or have a word for the concept of rape.

"What if fiction could be about things real people do? What then?" IT STILL WOULDN'T MAKE FICTION REAL OR REAL ACTS FICTIONAL!

I cannot state this clearly enough: something happening in both fiction and reality doesn't make it more fictional or more real. Make believe play pretend not real non-existent imaginary scenarios and the world around you are different!

The fact that people genuinely cannot understand that fiction and reality are different realms is baffling. "What then?" is being asked as if there is some powerful statement being made but there just isn't. "What if fiction reflected a lived experience? What if it had voices?" It wouldn't be real. No matter how much realism fiction aims for, it is fake.

A real genital really being touched by a real person is not fake.

The person who has that genitalia is a real person.

Pikachu is not.

I can't tell if "you, not the person comparing porn to fiction, are bringing real people into this" is a joke or if you genuinely cannot understand that porn actors are human beings who live in the real world.

I'm disturbed by this either way.

I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:

Fictional characters are objects.

They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.

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Currently getting my socks clean blown off by Rethinking Narcissism, by Dr. Craig Malkin. Which I found, in a roundabout way, from this video on Midsommar, grief, and narcissism.

Tonight I woke up from a nap and accidentally took my morning meds, so I'm going to be up for a few hours because of the meth. In place of sleep, I'll try to roughly sum up some basic ideas proposed by the research the book is based on:

That traits of "narcissism" like entitlement, grandiosity, and feeling special are not inherently toxic. There are times and places they are appropriate and beneficial. If you show up at a hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest, you should not sit and wait to be seen after people with earaches and coughs. (Actually, medical systems are designed to prioritize people with more urgent needs, and you qualify under that system. You are special and are deserving of different treatment than those others, which is why making your needs known, even insisting on it if you're not listened to appropriately the first time, is an extremely good idea. It keeps you from bleeding to death on the floor, and keeps the hospital from getting its pants sued off by your heirs.)

It is more useful to view "narcissism" not as an inherent immutable personality trait, but as a cluster of coping mechanisms. As previously stated, there are times they are exactly the right coping mechanism for the job. However, people we call "narcissists" tend to cling to these ones even when they become detrimental to themselves and others, often because they lack other ways of regulating their emotions and getting their needs met. And that is something they can change, if a person is willing to put in sincere and difficult work. It is not usually fast change; it's a matter of years, not weeks. But a skillbuilding approach turned Borderline Personality Disorder from an immutable curse to a fully treatable (though not quickly treatable) condition, and there's a lot of hope that it can do the same for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Meanwhile, there's an opposite end to the narcissism spectrum, and it is also pathological and destructive to hang out there all the time. It's an aversion, or even a resistance, to expecting yourself or other people to treat your own feelings, thoughts, ideas, needs, or preferences as important. For Greek mythology reasons, its proposed name is Echoism.

Unfortunately, because most of the damage echoism does is, by its very nature, localized to its sufferer and their own personal relationships, its downsides aren't often talked about. In fact, it's often seen as an ideal moral state, a kind of altruism or saintliness everyone should strive for. As a pathological coping mechanism a person is trapped in, though, it's often more a fear-based reflex than a conscious and deliberate attempt to achieve some real and specific good. It's not actually as beneficial as being able to recognize your needs, desires, positive aspects, and areas of competence or excellence, and bring them forward in your relationships with other people and yourself.

To me this has all been a cross between a gut-punch and a cool, sweet drink of water. There have been other ways to describe echoism over the years, but this feels like the most concise and useful one I've seen in ages.

It specifically puts its pin down in the middle of the moral debate a lot of people struggle with—"What right do I have to put myself forward? What hope do I have of being seen and accepted? Isn't it better not to burden anybody else?"—and says that the problem is not feeling in touch with either side of the equation, but specifically, the inability to move from one part of the spectrum to another when it's merited by circumstances.

When I was a child, I thought Echoism was the answer. It was my ideal. I thought it was what would get me the love and acceptance I wanted, and would keep me safe from the pain of rejection or not being understood. I had no idea it would actually, in fact, be the primary cause of alienation and loneliness for the rest of my life.

Now I'm so deeply thankful I couldn't fully achieve it, in practical terms. As hard as I tried to erase myself, there were always things I loved too much to suppress. I still found ways to express and discover myself in the books I read, the stories I wrote, the intellectual work of school and the experience of pursuing hobbies I loved, my ambitions to be helpful even when they demanded I stop being selfless, and the relationships where I felt safe enough to experience love and acceptance even if I didn't think I deserved them.

There's this question I found a while back that echoed in my bones: Who am I allowed to be around you? Because that's what I felt like, as a child. If I wanted to engage with other people and minimize my risk of harm, it was my job to bend into a pretzel and fit the shape they wanted. And thank god, thank god, thank god, I couldn't fully do it. Despite everything, there were parts of me too strong and bright to lop off completely to get my arms and legs inside the carriage. I was able to take care of myself and let them grow in secret until I found social places I could let them out again. Despite myself, I found ways to grow and thrive, well beyond the trauma that said I shouldn't have.

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We just knew.