#...because - surprise surprise- we are not a Monolithic Organization...

[uncanny-tranny]

The Trans Community is less an amalgamation of every trans person in existence and more of many trans communities with different needs, goals, aspirations, and experiences, so I'm always low-key suspicious every time I hear cis people act as though there is a Singular Hegemonic Trans Community.

When you notice and recognize that there are many trans communities with either similar or polar opposite goals, I think you can recognize commonalities between communities and are able to work with us instead of assuming, you know?

[meyerlansky]

gonna get REAL snippy about some disk horse tonight: i am real fuckin' fed up of seeing everyone who felt impacted by the idea that astarion might be asexual or aspec in some way feel like they have to qualify their interpretation of a canonically sex-repulsed character openly discussing that sex repulsion in a way that is very resonant for a lot of asexual people. i am really fucking tired of the fact that everyone talking about astarion maybe even possibly being some variety of aspec feels COWED into couching it in "it's just a headcanon, it's just something that felt important to me personally! i'm not saying anyone else has to agree, it's just that it resonated for me."

i get not wanting to impose your reading of the text on other people—there are a fuckton of posts floating around about how that's a shitty thing to do and how x read isn't any more canon than y read and people who insist x IS more canon than y are jerks. and i don't disagree! people who insist there's One Canon in a choice-centric RPG are fucking dicks.

but i was also here in 2014, at the peak of exclusionist discourse, when every single time someone said "it's not that i have a problem with asexual people, i just wish they weren't taking up the resources meant for [REAL gay people/rape survivors/people dealing with comphet/etc]." what they actually meant was "I will not be satisfied until you shut the fuck up and never talk about your experiences in a place where i have to hear about it again". and it fucking worked; people recloseted themselves, blogs centered on the aspec community deactivated, real life organizations stopped explicitly including asexuality in their documentation when they had the previous year. for a solid three years, the only time any "big name blogs" mentioned asexuality was to make a joke out of it. i watched this shit happen with my own two eyes.

i don't have a problem with people who disagree with my reading of a character as asexual. i don't have a problem with allosexual people who say "this same thing resonated with me too, just in a different way" and move the fuck on. what i do have a problem with is the implicit vibe that comes up any time asexual and aspec people decide to talk about their experiences and things that resonated with them that we shouldn't take up too much space when we talk about that, because there are other people who don't feel that way and their interpretations deserve to be heard too.

i have not seen a single person on the acestarion train saying "you HAVE to think of him as asexual." i have seen multiple comments saying people who do see him as asexual are delusional or reaching, or that it's insulting—to whatever other identity—to read asexuality into his sex-repulsion. and i am really fucking annoyed [not at all surprised, but annoyed nonetheless!] that not only does the compassion for different takes not go both ways, but that people discussing their resonance with astarion from an asexual/aspec perspective are instinctually or habitually ceding ground by couching it in "you don't have to agree!" kind of statements, when that should be the fucking baseline for every single conversation about any characterization choice in, AGAIN, AN RPG BASED ON INDIVIDUAL CHOICE.

and i don't have any way to express this to the people that i actually have an issue with, because, again: asexual people relating to a character that's not explicitly stated to be asexual is treated as a joke at best and an attack on other identities at worst. but at this point, to me, calling a reading of astarion as asexual/aspec a "headcanon" is minimizing what it actually is: an interpretation of the text, supported by both dialogue and action[s], that is not monolithic but is no less "canonical" and/or rooted-in-the-text-itself than many, many other readings of his characterization, intended by the character's creator[s] or no. you're not going to catch me apologizing for how i read the character and how his dialogue resonated with me. and i don't think anyone else should feel like they have to apologize for it either.

[lesbianhalflifeposting]

(Hello again sorry for coming by so much this literally came to me in a dream. Also to note Dr. Helen Hahn is the shadow that can be seen talking to the Combine Advisors in Half Life Alyx I just like. I have ideas and she fits the bill. This is also in fic form. I am also taking creative liberties because I am under the firm belief all characters voiced by Ellen McLain deserve toxic yuri.

Dr. Hahn rarely ever went this way, she had no need to. In fact, she thought the whole idea of having the Combine Overwatch stationed on Earth was a stupid idea, and she had said so. It didn't matter. All the mattered is that she was summoned. The door was unassuming, but the room itself…

A giant column of wires, crackling with energy and pulsing with some sort of unidentifiable organic matter. It was grey and breathing, looking half like canvas and half like a worm grub. Dr. Hahn felt the distinct urge to touch it, but she kept her hands behind her back. The room was also incredibly hot. She felt her clothes sticking to her, even though she hadn't been in the room for long. She tried to unstick her pantyhose, but was interrupted by the echoing voice of the Overwatch.

“Dr. Hahn.”

She looked up. “Hello. May I ask why I was told to come here? Do you need something from me?”

“I suppose. You have been loyal. We wish to reward your loyalty.”

“Why can't an advisor do that? Why you?”

The room crackled. “Dr. Hahn, you may be able to talk back to others, but not to me. I don't encourage insubordination.”

Helen found herself bowing her head. She didn't know why.

“Good.”

A long, thin appendage snaked out of the massive tangle. Helen recognized it immediately and her whole body tensed.

“Wait! No, I promise I will hold my tongue. You don't want to kill-”

“Stupid girl. I am not killing you. I can attach to you without killing you. Now stop moving.”

Hahn stood stock still as the appendage stuck into the back of her neck. She gasped, but it hurt much less than she thought it would. Something tingled right up her spine, and she immediately covered her mouth. As soon as she touched her mouth something shocked her.

“Keep your hands down. You don't get to keep your mouth shut now.”

The tremble sent down her spine again. She tried her best to keep herself together, to not give in, but the trembles were beginning to increase in intensity. Tears filled her eyes but she refused to give in.

“Can you stop being stubborn? I am trying to reward you. The units like this just fine, is there something wrong with you?”

Helen let out a gasp, then drew in a shaky breath. She tried to reply, but all she could do was let out tiny noises. Another shock wracked her body, and she wasn't able to take it anymore, sinking to her knees. She was trembling, mumbling incoherently.

“Are you broken? I thought you could take it. We all hoped you could take it.”

She forced a breath in and stood up, putting her hand on the wall.

“I can…take it…”

Another shock wracked her body, and she nearly collapsed again. That was the last one. She stood up, still shaking. She expected a sense of relief it was over, but she just felt a bit…upset. She wanted more.

“I do have to apologize. I may have put too much into that. I wanted to test you. Also you get more than a little annoying, but that's beside the point.”

“Was that all of my reward?”

The air crackled again. “You want more of that? Genuinely?”

“I can handle it. You just surprised me.”

“I thought you were in pain.”

She stares up at her monolith structure. It didn't have a face, so she directed her glare generally at it. “Yes. Pain.”

“Please be less sarcastic.”

Her wiped the sweat off her brow. The room didn't feel any colder, and her head was starting to hurt.

“Do it again.”

“I don't do anything on command, especially from you.”

“Is there any way I can make you?”

A long, loaded pause. “Come back soon. I would like to do a study on the human anatomy. It would be…educational.”

There was a suckering notice as the appendage removed itself from her neck. She immediately went to touch it. There were only two holes there, but she expected more bleeding. She opened her mouth to ask, but got cut off.

“I have thought of everything. You won't bleed out, I ensured the entrance points are fortified. I want to experiment with you, killing you isn't my goal. You're quite lucky in the regard.”

“I should say thank you.”

“You should.”

Instead of doing that, she turned on her heel and left. It's not like she wouldn't be back.

-G-man (I need to get better at writing these things jeez)

A+ No Notes, so hard right now I can't see straight.

[drill-teeth]

Not a fully organized bit of writing or completely in depth by any means, but here goes. My later in the night thoughts about transmasc struggles. Transmasc people are not a monolith, and I don’t speak for every one of them. These are my thoughts and feel free to expand or let me know if you resonate. If you try and start shit on my post though, you will be blocked. My posts are not a platform for harassment. And for clarifications sake this is not an invitation to ask about my personal life. Put on your critical thinking caps, drill teeth nation. We discuss transmasc struggles now.

Thoughts under the cut and apologies for typos or grammar errors. Content warnings for discussion of transphobia, ableism, and misogyny.

A quick bit of distinction in terminology for all readers. “Transmasc” does not equal “transman”. At least not on this post. I’m certain the experience varies. When I talk about transmasc people, that encompasses transmen and nonbinary identities that consider themselves masculine aligned. In particular, I am afab transitioned to transmasc, so that is the perspective I am speaking from.

My sense of time is super warped, so I don’t remember exactly how long ago this went down, but I recall this storm of frustration against transmasc people that was extremely uncomfortable. Again, my memory is bad, so the details escape me (feel free to help fill me in with sources if you feel so inclined), but I remember a push on Tumblr and Twitter by transmasc people for terminology to discuss transmasc specific struggles that was met with a ton of harassment.

Transmasc people do experience a different kind of transphobia in certain ways than transfem people. That’s okay that the struggles are different. I’m not saying the struggles don’t overlap. There is common ground. And there are differences. It’s okay for transmasc people to want to discuss the differences. Growing up afab, I am all too familiar with “you’re just doing (blank) to be dramatic”. I heard that nearly every day of my life, and I am certain that a large percent of afab people (trans and not) can resonate with the pain of that.

“You’re just doing (blank) for attention.”

The psychological damage from the amount of times I heard and still hear that will be something I will struggle to heal from for the rest of my life. It seeped into everything that was hard for me. My struggles in school due to my neurodivergent symptoms that were left largely untreated until I was in college. My struggle to socialize and connect with others because if I expressed being upset, I was choosing to be in others’ eyes. My gender identity that I had to affirm to others over and over and over until they finally accepted it wasn’t a stunt I was trying to pull. The frustration I felt to see the rhetoric that has scarred me for life being used against transmasc people was unbelievable.

Thankfully, at the time I saw that shit going down, my skin was already pretty thick about it. It didn’t obliterate my self esteem, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it annihilated the self esteem of younger transmascs.

Listen to me, transmascs. There is nothing wrong with you for wanting to be seen. There is nothing wrong with you for wanting representation in media that you relate to. There is nothing wrong with you for saying transmasc people experience differences in oppression and struggles that are unique. You can and should ask for representation and discussion of yourselves. You’re not asking too much. You experience oppression. You are allowed to talk about it.

And transfem squad. I appreciate you too. We should have each others’ backs and listen to each other. I wanna see more transfem representation too and more discussion of transfem struggles. I wanna learn from others willing to share their experience that I haven’t gone through. We should listen to each other.

[olderthannetfic]

1/4 🤷🏿‍♀️♠️ // > “TBH, I'm not at all surprised that queer spaces are often exclusionary. Growing up in the 90s, the queer spaces I saw around made no mention of asexuality at all ever.” (from your post 686699457608335360) // I’m not surprised they made no mention of it; until like 2017, basically none of the other asexual people I came across online would’ve considered us to be part of the LGBT+ community either. None of us were bothered by it, we just saw it as a given.

--

2/4 🤷🏿‍♀️♠️ // If anything, I saw asexual people make fun of ace rings and stuff like that as being our version of “straight pride” nonsense more than I saw them supporting it. // Online discussions about asexual identity are often dominated by AVEN voices on the asexual side. It’s understandable that that’s how it is – those of us who don’t care as much don’t organize and don’t find it all that interesting to talk about.

3/4 🤷🏿‍♀️♠️ // However, it is a bit of a shame because it does end up flattening asexual people into a monolith of sorts. // Besides asexuals, I fall under a bunch of other groups whose inclusion in the LGBT+ community people constantly argue over, and where I myself don’t have any investment in the result. Inclusion or exclusion, it doesn’t make a difference to me.

4/4 🤷🏿‍♀️♠️ // I don’t even understand what the point of it all is supposed to be, since the fights for all kinds of human rights are interconnected anyways, and even in the rare times that something won’t affect me or members of my in-group, I won’t suddenly care less about it. // I’m sorry for dragging this discussion out even further, but I thought maybe a voice from the “🤷🏿‍♀️” camp might add another perspective to the topic. // Have a nice day!

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #534

Top Ten Tom Cruise Films

So we return once again to the well of Listing an Actor’s Fillums. I quite like doing this, although I do wonder if it’s just going to show up glaring gaps in my film knowledge because I haven’t seen, say, Born on the Fourth of July. But anyway! Let’s plough on!

Tom Cruise, what a guy, eh? One of these genuinely larger-than-life actors, not just a movie star but a force of nature – the living manifestation of destiny, if you will. He’s legitimately good – Oscar-worthy – but he also has with him an aura of other-worldliness. Frankly, what he does seems not just impossible, but, like, implausible. He could make movies without jumping off things. He really could! It’s true! Adam Sandler manages it. But Cruise still does all these crazy things; he can’t fight like Iko Uwais or Donnie Yen – or even Keanu Reeves – but he still manages to pull off scenes that are just insane to behold. His films are events, and even if he’s making sequels to a beloved franchise, really the franchise is Tom Cruise Films.

So he’s a cool, charismatic leading man, with genuine acting chops, who somehow manages to always one-up himself in terms of a unwavering commitment to physically and mentally taxing stunt work (including, let’s not forget, flying jets for real in Top Gun: Maverick). But at the same time he tends to operate at this level of remove. We can’t fault him for his desire for privacy, but even setting aside specifics, he approaches everything with an almost messianic zeal and rictus grin that is, for some, off-putting. Whatever attributes he has – and to be clear, I like him a lot as an actor – he’s not really in that warm and fuzzy Tom Hanks zone, or even the nice-guy action hero mode of, say, Christ Hemsworth (I’m leaving that typo in because I have decided now that Jesus looks like this). He’s like this Hollywood monolith, immense and fascinating but also, in a funny way, alien and unrelatable. He does impossible things for odd reasons but they also, for the most part, turn out to be really, really great.

And here are my ten favourite films of his.

A Few Good Men (1992): oooh, an Aaron Sorkin film tops the list, big surprise David. But this really is an all-timer. A superb – superb – script, fantastically orchestrated by Rob Reiner at the height of his powers, a cast to die for, and Cruise at his best, channelling his two great attributes – cocky wankerism and earnest, soulful humanism – to weapons-grade effect.

The Mission: Impossible Franchise (1996-2024): gah, already I cheat. Yes, I don’t really see the point in splitting the franchise; there would probably be two or three separate films here otherwise. But Cruise’s performance as Ethan Hunt is probably the most iconic of his career, as he acts suave and cool whilst running up things or diving off them or clinging onto them. The variety of tones and styles and the increasingly bonkers stuntwork helps define a franchise that is going to be nearly thirty years old when Cruise finally bows out of it, and arguably has produced better films than Bond or Bourne. Oh, and for the record – with a re-watch sorely needed – I’d rank them Fallout, 1, Rogue, Ghost, 2, 3.  

Rain Man (1988): arguably the hardest and most successful performance of his career, opposite Dustin Hoffman’s attention-sucking turn. Hoffman got all the plaudits back in the day, but Cruise’s slow-burn shift from, basically, entitled shit to empathetic and melancholy carer is beautifully, organically, realistically played out – and, I’d argue, has aged better.

Collateral (2004): Cruise has rarely played proper baddies (I’d love to see him in a Tarantino film), but he’s cool as ice here, with his salt-and-pepper do, coercing Jamie Foxx into driving him round an ice-cold pitch-black LA as he goes from kill to kill. A tense, gorgeous film, but a great performance from Cruise as the slick assassin.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014): cruise has an ease with charm and/or smarm, and often subverts it in interesting ways; such as the opening of this film, when he’s the slippery coward getting by on his flash and pomp. This gives way to earnest, hard-won heroism as the film progresses, but it’s a bold move; as is the trippy time-loop plot. Thoroughly underrated, this is probably the closest a Cruise film comes to “cult classic”.

Minority Report (2002): there’s a cold, aloof slickness to Spielberg’s direction in this one – lots of glass and lens flare and a desaturated palette – as Cruise’s grieving cop goes on the run. Cruise is very good at running, one of cinema’s all-time great runners, and he deploys that skill to fantastic effect here, managing to feel like the endangered everyman resorting to all manner of freaky sci-fi trickery to clear his name. Feels a little undersung, this one, despite its pedigree; those funky stun-guns deserve a lot of praise.

Magnolia (1999): a dense and complex ensemble of mixed emotions and varying degrees of tragedy, Cruise is shocking as the utterly hateful self-help guru preaching misogynistic bollocks to his crowds of arsehole followers. Yes, yes, we all remember his dialogue and all the swears, but it’s how his layers are gradually unpeeled by the plot that really hits home.

Jerry Maguire (1996): another case of Cruise undermining his own cool image, here as an agent in the midst of an existential crisis. He owns this film, carries it entirely, with a performance that is almost all outward bluster and internal angst, frantically struggling to keep above water. He utterly sells it, makes Jerry a compelling and convincing character, and I don’t care how cheesy it is, “you had me at hello” always makes me cry.

Tropic Thunder (2008): another shocking and surprising supporting turn from Cruise, here displaying comic chops we rarely see. His performance as an utterly awful mogul might have dated a bit, post-Weinstein, but it’s so completely out-there it has to be seen to be believed. In a film full of out-there stuff, it fits right in, and serves as an indication that Cruise has more range than he’s often given credit for.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999): a very strange and divisive film, I really love how Cruise’s intense, internalised doctor carries the narrative just by wandering round strange places, meeting strange people, and seeing some very strange things. It’s an entirely reactive performance with no show or bluster, very languid, almost serene; the calm centre in a storm of batshit intensity and soft porn shenanigans.

[englishchinesetranslations]

Have you noticed how much hatred feminists direct at MGTOW guys? Is it just because they can’t be bothered to distinguish between PUAs, MRAs and MGTOW or is there more to it? I think there is. I think if we look at feminism’s record on gay men, the Ultimate MGTOW, we can see what’s really going on.

A while ago I found out about the Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in the late sixties. They had a nasty streak of man-hating gay-bashing and it wasn’t incidental, it flowed from their basic premises. So maybe all their good was really no good at all. And they were not some fringe group and they were not the only feminists of their period to use gay-bashing rhetoric and weave man-hating and gay-bashing principles into their work. It turns out all kinds of very prominent feminists in the late ’60s and early ’70s went in for this kind of bigotry.

John Lauritsen gave a talk back in 1976 that lays this all out in great detail. He cites a widespread pattern of vilification of gay men and gay organizations by feminists of that time. Feminists conducted a campaign of disrupting gay events and undermining gay organizations. As they say, read the whole thing. It is a very ugly history. If you have never heard about it in your courses in Women’s Studies, go back and ask why. Bring back the answers; I bet they will be hilarious.

Here he quotes Carol Hanisch where she explicitly enunciates the homophobic claim that male homosexuality and male separatism are misogynist. Oh that’s it! It’s all about the wimminz! “Men’s liberationists always bring up ‘confronting their own feelings about men’ by which they mean homosexuality. Male homosexuality is an extension of the reactionary club (meaning both group and weapon). The growth of gay liberation carries contempt for women to the ultimate: total segregation. The desire of men to ‘explore their homosexuality’ really means encouraging the possibility of homosexuality as a reaction against feminist demands. This is the reason the movement for “gay rights” received much more support only after women’s liberation became a mass movement.”

There it is: men ignoring women is contempt. Even when we do nothing we are guilty of harming women, because we owe them attention and it is violence when we “deprive” them of it. Talk about a rape culture – they are entitled to our sexual attention.

So men have a duty to have sex with women and not with men. That is rape culture and it is feminists demanding it. Oh, and forced heterosexuality for men. Can you see the difference between these people and Sarah Palin or Rick Santorum? Me neither.

Or maybe there’s no intention of there being any sex – men are just supposed to marry and support women – because they “deserve” it like all the advertising is constantly telling us. Female privilege much?

Lauritsen gives Kate Millett–author of “Sexual Politics” and, ironically, a lesbian separatist–special attention for her hatred of male relationships. She comes across as both stupid and dishonest. For instance she equates homosexuality and Nazism, which is an especially obscene piece of stupidity in view of the actual history, and a transparent piece of dishonesty in view of how well-known that history is.

He also details these feminists’ hatred of drag queens, too. That hatred came as no surprise either.This bigotry is not some little splinter thing in feminism. It is foundational. Millett’s Sexual Politics was seminal to the movement and Hanish was a founding member of the radical wing of the movement. She edited the Redstockings Collective’s book the Feminist Revolution and coined the phrase “the personal is political”. These were not marginal people or marginal views. It’s no good whining how feminism is not a monolith when every pebble of it shares this theoretical underpinning.

Speaking of the Redstockings, we are going to look at their manifesto in the next post on this subject. Even if you have never read it or even heard of it, none of it will be unfamiliar. You see it in every feminist space on the net and you hear it in every gender studies class.

Lauritsen says it best: “We must recognize our enemies wherever we find them. Nobody’s ideas and nobody’s actions should be exempted from criticism.”

Gay men in solidarity with feminists against hetero men? That may be attractive to someone coming out of high school and all that trauma, but alliances with people who despise you are just sick.

[pinoy-culture]

before I ask my question, I just wanted to say thank you so so so much for keeping up your blog and consistently giving out information where its readily accessible!!!

maybe this will make me sound like an idiot but to preface, I’m a mixed filipino american. My mom is filipino and some chinese and my dad is some sort of european and puerto rican. i was wondering, in your opinion, do you think it’d be okay for me (eventually) work with diwata and anitos? And how can I start? Ive been trying to communicate with my ancestors and I’ve been looking for books to one day buy (im extremely broke so your blog and any filipino witches i come across is all the info i can get) but i honestly have no clue where to start other than with my ancestors (weird dreams lately but nothing ancestor related i think). i took a DNA test as a gift and it pointed, predominantly, to the Western Visayas so im assuming i should study more on pre-colonial Bisayan culture (my lolas from iloilo so it makes sense i guess) but i also know that “blood quantum” is a colonizer concept so i dont wanna rely on it too much :/ sorry to ramble but pls help lol

First, I'd like to say thank you for following the blog! It really does mean a lot to me to hear from others over the years on how much my blogs have helped them learn about our history and culture.

Now as for working with our diwata and the anito, that is completely ok. The whole blood quantum thing among some Filipinos I honestly don't agree with. As long as you have a family member who is Filipino, you are Filipino regardless of your "percentage" and of how you look. If you have Filipino blood in you, the ancestors are there with you. Even if you weren't raised within Filipino culture or a Filipino household because your parents never brought you up in it, or you are an adoptee like some I've met over the years. Your ancestors are your ancestors regardless. They see you and know you and that is all that matters.

Now there really isn't any book focused specifically on reviving our precolonial beliefs and practices. Yes, some did survive and some even blended in with a form of Folk Christianity in the Philippines. You can see many of the older practices and beliefs still alive, but they have been replaced with Catholic imagery and Saints.

But, in regards actually believing in and worshiping our old deities, doing rituals dedicated to the deity, or even some rites of passage like the Tagalog first menstruation rite of passage, or making carved figures dedicated to the diwata and anito, or performing maganito/paganito or atang to the diwata and anito, majority of Filipinos don't do this, or even know it.

So for being an Anito Reconstructionist, which is a label I personally use for my spiritual beliefs and others have adopted, there really isn't a book for it. A Reconstructionist in other ethnic spiritual paths, such as the Celtic, Roman, Aztec, Kemetic, Greek, Norse, etc., are those who look at historical records to try and piece together what was once practiced and believed in prior to Christianity. Over many years, these different spiritual paths have eventually come together, formed a community, and have resources like books and teachers. They have had the time to do all the research and put together a more formal spirituality based on those Pre-Christian beliefs and bringing it to the modern day where they have hundreds to thousands of people who have gone back to those beliefs. With some, they have even created temples, shrines to their deities, and even have celebrations.

Unfortunately that is not the case for us. However, due to the growing interest in our precolonial beliefs and practices over the years, I can see Anito Reconstructionism growing within the next several years. It already has, with many people actually trying to learn more about these beliefs and our old deities. The amount of people of people I've seen and talked to who have expressed their interest to reclaim these precolonial beliefs and practices is nothing compared to 10 years ago when it was hard to even find one or two people who did.

It is why I've been writing this book for a few years now dedicated to helping others in wanting to reclaim our precolonial beliefs and practices as a starting point in their research. For now though, I always recommend those who are starting to simply just read the historical texts. Grab a notebook and write down notes. Organize your notes into deities, rituals, how to make an offering, any prayers to a specific deity, how to set up an altar, etc.

Seeing as your family is from the island of Panay in the Western Bisayas, like my moms side are from, I would start with looking at the Bisayan precolonial beliefs and practices. A really good reference is reading Francisco Alcina's History of the Bisayans (1668). Volume 3 is available online in English which you can find here. Volume 3 goes into a lot of detail in the beliefs and practices. The Boxer Codex, if you are able to get a copy of the English translation, is also really good reading material.

Getting Started:

In terms of getting started, keep in mind that there is no one monolithic belief system or practice in the Philippines. Before there ever was a Philippines, we were different nations with different beliefs and practices. It is important to know your ethnic groups beliefs and practices and know their history. For example, I am Bisaya (Akeanon specifically) and Tagalog and that is what I work with. Others who I know follow the Bikolano, Kapampangan, or Ilokano beliefs. Though there are some similarities, each ethnic group had their own set beliefs and practices.

I often tell people that you can't just mix and match between them. For example, though I work with both the Tagalog and Bisayan pantheons, I wouldn't dare do a ritual offering to both a Tagalog or Bisayan deity at the same time. It's always separate. You also can't combine 2 similar deities together from different ethnic groups just because they share similar attributes. It's just rude and disrespectful.

Start out small. Set up an altar dedicated to your ancestors. If you have any family members who have passed, put a photo of them on the altar. Leave offerings of rice cakes such as suman, food like chicken adobo, or even a cup of drink such as tuba, lambanog, or even Red Horse beer. But if you can't get access to an alcoholic drink either because one you are a minor or 2 it's not available where you live, you can simply replace it with a non-alcoholic drinks like coconut juice. Get a coconut shell or a seashell to either place these offerings as bowls/plates or even use them to put your kamangyan or incense.

Then start researching how our Bisayan ancestors worshiped and practiced. Study the history and read historical accounts, books, and articles about them. Write down what you have learned on these precolonial beliefs and practices and reconstruct or revive them. This is what Polytheistic Recinstructionists do. I have listed links to these texts here.

Ask questions to your family, particularly your elders. See if they know of anything or if they can share some traditional practices and beliefs they know of have heard of. You would be surprised how, despite some families being really religious, many still believe in the spirits, do some form of ancestor veneration, believe in omens that are being told to you by the ancestors or spirits, etc.

If you can, try to go back to the Philippines and see your family's ancestral home, see where they grew up, etc. Ask about family stories and folk stories. For example, my mom grew up in Aklan and has always told me stories of the aswang and certain omens. She also constantly talks about the mischievous "little people" who play tricks on you (for example putting something down like your keys and then it goes missing, until you find it again somewhere else). In the Western Bisayas, they are known as kama-kama. There is also a story of how her grandmother's cat visited her during her wake. The cat was missing for years, but it came back and stayed sleeping on top of the casket for days before it left. My mom told me that it was the cat paying their respects to her grandmother.

Keep in mind also and acknowledge our indigenous communities who have kept their beliefs and practices. Don't try to take them into your own. I have seen people cherry pick things from the Manobo of Mindanao or the Kalinga in the Cordillera, which is just disrespectful. Many of the IP, though some still have kept their beliefs, it isn't the most important aspect to them. What they are most concerned about are other issues such as losing their homes due to occupation by oil or logging companies, other settlers such as the Tagalog and Bisayans (especially in Mindanao), getting targeted as "rebels" by the Philippine military and often getting killed. But, by cherry picking beliefs especially of the IP groups, it's just disrespectful.

I will be teaching classes on Anito Reconstructionism soon and will have my first class possibly at the end of the month or next month. I decided to do these classes seeing as there is a growing community who are interested, but don't know where to start. I'll be doing a proper announcement on these classes real soon so look out for the announcement and hopefully you will be able to join!

[colorisbyshe]

I’m so pissed at whoever came up with “nblm/nblw” like they couldn’t even be bothered to look up what wlw means before aping it lmfao

What’s interesting is it seems (though i cannot conclusively say) that WLW and MLM are both derived from “SGL” or “same gender loving,” a term created to describe and unite Black gay and bisexual people. It was created as an alternative to whiter understandings of same gender attraction.

Completely divorced from its (POTENTIAL, I do need to emphasize this, as I have never seen a direct link between SGL and WLW/MLM, though it’s… quite curious and I’ve admittedly never done a deep dive to confirm or deny) origins, as what happens with AAVE by white internet users and academics alike, people have warped it and completely forgotten what the acronyms mean and are meant to do as shorthand.

I’m gonna be honest… even when done properly (ie MLNB and WLNB as opposed to NBLM and NBLW), it really just doesn’t work within the framework of SGL OR WLW/MLM.

There is no unified experience of nonbinary people loving men or women. I, a nonbinary woman, have little in common with a “man loving” nonbinary man or even a man loving nonbinary woman who does not also love women.

WLW and MLM (and SGL) are unified by same gender attraction. That’s the fucjing point. Because nonbinary covers infinite iterations of gender and thus attraction “MLNB” covers both same and other gender attraction. There is no unification.

Loving men, loving women on their own aren’t really concrete enough to organize around or do anything with. They are so nebulous it makes little point to even separate the ML/WL aspect of it. By that I mean… it’d be more productive to focus on the nonbinary part and organize things like making sure we can marry our partners, have gender taken off government ID forms, etc, than it is to focus on loving men or women.

Instead of aping the POLITICAL reasons for SGL, MLM, and WLW to exist (and as separate things!), “NBLM/NBLW” or their more correct “MLNB/WLNB”, it just seems interested in making it nominally “more inclusive.” In a way that somehow totally leaves out bisexual people who suddenly have to use WLNB AND MLNB to describe their experiences 😭😭😭 Like suddenly bisexuality is left at the door even though SGL, MLM, and WLW were created TO BE INCLUSIVE OF US.

These terms mean nothing. And it makes those “MLM/NBLM” signs even more embarrassing because NBLM includes nonbinary women 😭😭😭

Like what does any of this accomplish. I know there is a slice of nonbinary people who do not fall under MLM/WLW because their gender can’t correlate to M or W at all, even tangentially, but I do not know what these new terms are doing for them besides making it a bit easier to say “I like men,” although it’s not even that much easier because you still have to clarify if you ONLY like men or also like other genders

Fucking embarrassingly tomfoolery all around. From the erasure of black origins (not surprising, considering how often white “NB” people don’t realize NB also means non-black), the complete lack of knowledge around how these acronyms mean Gender-loving as a descriptor of what type of man/woman you are), to the uselessness of the terms in general, even when done correctly

Also “Some people are using nblm/w to mean they’re nonbinary-loving men/women!” okay then they’re weird fetishizers cause EVERY orientation already includes attraction to nonbinary people and we’re not some monolith. There’s no good usage here.

And no one @ me. I’m nonbinary. I can bitch about this.

[dwellordream]

“…Militarism is closely associated with the social legitimization of hegemonic masculinity —a dominant form of masculinity that many individuals strive toward but only a few attain. While hegemonic masculinity nominally places men in a social position superior to women, it also serves to create socially exclusive hierarchies among men through the marginalization and subordination of both femininity and nonconformist forms of masculinity (Connell 2000, 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Hooper 2001). Hegemonic masculinity, by its nature, forces all other men to position themselves in relation to the form of masculinity that is being promoted or honored at any given time.

Traditional traits of hegemonic masculinity might include risk-taking, the enforcement of command structures and disciplinary hierarchies, physicality, aggression, violence, and overt expressions of heterosexuality (Hinojosa 2010). Lower-status men who conform to this status quo can receive benefits from those men who occupy the top of social hierarchies, thereby legitimizing and reinforcing the hegemonic status of the latter (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Today, hierarchies of hegemonic masculinity can be easily identified in numerous contexts, such as militaries, militia organizations, and professional sports teams (Bickerton 2015; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Higate and Hopton 2005; Hinojosa 2010; Hooper 2001).

There is good evidence for a culture of hegemonic masculinity among Viking Age societies. While perceptions of masculinity were undoubtedly imbued with their own shades of nuance across space and time, cultural similarities in the material record speak to broadly homogenous attitudes toward masculinity and its associations with militarism (Hadley 2016:262). Political power lay in the hands of war leaders and their retainers, who were most able to exploit and perpetuate hierarchies of masculinity to reinforce their influence. Expressions of masculinity may also have been closely associated with religious ideologies that reflected the sacral power and status of the elite. It has been suggested, for example, that the mediating role that Germanic kings held between the gods and populations before the Christianization process was expressed sexually through demonstrations of masculinity and virility (Clunies Ross 1985).

…When considered within a wider context, the perpetuation of hegemonic models of masculinity may have legitimized and fueled expressions of power and competitive behavior (Connell 2000), with significant implications for sociopolitical hierarchies and perceptions of gendered power. There has been some debate as to how gender was conceptualized and expressed among Scandinavian societies (Back Danielsson 2007; Clover 1993; Norrman 2000). Carol Clover (1993) has argued that Viking Age societies possessed a “one sex” perspective of gender that, instead of polarizing femininity and masculinity, equated masculinity with power. As a result, expressions of masculinity were celebrated and emphasized. Clover’s hypothesis is borne out in saga narratives that contrast the Old Norse term hvatr (vigorous or manly), used most often in reference to men, with the term blauðr (weak or cowardly), which often refers to women.

This implies that an individual’s status could have been positively or negatively influenced by words or actions considered hvatr or blauðr (see Clover 1993 and discussion below). This portrayal of gendered power aligns well with the concept of hegemonic masculinity because the competitive nature of masculine hierarchies would have encouraged individuals to constantly seek to enhance their status by discrediting others. The intense rivalries that could emerge as a result can be seen in the culture of insult, hypermasculinity, and feuding that abounded among Scandinavian societies. Eddic poems and the sagas are replete with examples of male antagonists exchanging insults (Old Norse flyting), which usually involved boasts of masculinity and the humiliation of one’s opponent, as in Örvar-Odds saga, Hárbarðsljóð, and Helgakviða Hundingsbana I (Orchard 2011; Pálsson and Edwards 1985). Some insults, such as nið, which was associated with accusations of breaking taboos, cowardice, and/or sexual deviance, were so powerful that their use was mitigated by law (Almqvist 1965, 1974; Clover 1993; Meulengracht Sørensen 1980).

The influence of hegemonic masculinity is further illustrated when we consider gendered norms among Scandinavian societies. The roles of men and women were nominally well defined by legal codes and social conventions (Jochens 1995), and acting in a way deemed inappropriate to one’s sex resulted in significant social disapproval (although in certain cases this may have imbued some individuals with a strange type of power; see Price [2002] on men who practiced sorcery). In a society that promoted hegemonic cultures of masculinity, it should not be surprising to find evidence for the nominal regulation of gender roles or the subordination of both women and marginalized men who failed to live up to masculine ideals (Connell 2005). For men, acting in a way that was considered blauðr brought shame and disgrace. In Kormáks saga (chap. 13; Hollander 1949), for example, Bersi’s wife is able to legitimately divorce him after he receives a wound to the buttocks during combat. Other incidents in the sagas indicate that the charge of “unmanliness” and the threat of divorce were frequently used by women to incite men to undertake acts of violence (Anderson and Swenson 2002; Clover 1993; Jochens 1995).

In Grænlendinga saga (chap. 7), Freydís threatens her husband with divorce if he does not avenge a fictitious assault against her (Kunz 2000a), while in Laxdæla saga (chap. 53), Þorgerðr tells her sons that they would have been better born as daughters in order to shame them into avenging the killing of their brother (Kunz 2000b). The fear of judgment for failing to act in an appropriately masculine manner can even be seen among Guðrún’s adolescent sons in Laxdæla saga (chap. 60; Kunz 2000b). Having been shamed by their mother for indulging too long in children’s pursuits, the youths acknowledge that they are at an age where they will be judged if they were to fail to avenge their father’s death. This suggests that children and adolescents were aware of the need to cultivate and preserve one’s status within hegemonic hierarchies of masculinity from an early age.

For women, acting outside of nominal gendered roles also carried social and legal repercussions. The Icelandic Grágás laws, for example, prescribed that a woman who wore a man’s clothes, cut her hair short, or carried weapons should be sentenced to outlawry (Dennis, Foote, and Perkins 2000:219). Hegemonic hierarchies, however, are not static or monolithic (Connell 2005), and the perpetuation of a “one sex” model of gendered power might have cultivated a peculiar form of social fluidity that allowed some individuals to traverse gender boundaries (Back Danielsson 2007; Clover 1993; Norrman 2000). Just as it was possible for men to increase or lose their status through their words and actions, so too might some women have attempted to achieve social ascendancy by behaving in a way considered hvatr.

The sagas indicate that some women who openly defied social conventions by wearing men’s clothing and carrying weapons, such as “Breeches Auðr” in Laxdæla saga (Kunz 2000b), were not only tolerated but also admired (Bagerius 2001). Other textual sources indicate that women participated in warfare as combatants, and in one case a woman is noted as commanding a viking fleet in Ireland (Bekker 1838–1839; Todd 1867). While such women might well have been a minority within Scandinavian society, these depictions are now potentially supported by a recent study of the human remains from grave 581 at Birka, Sweden. This burial, containing an individual accompanied by a sword, an axe, two spears, archery equipment, a knife, two shields, and two sacrificed horses, was long considered to be an archetypal burial of a male viking warrior. Recently, however, genomic analysis by Hedenstierna-Jonson et al. (2017a) has found that the individual interred within the grave was in fact female.

Until now, the only archaeological evidence for armed women was a corpus of so-called Valkyrie brooches and pendants, known from across the viking world, and these findings therefore provide new impetus for the targeted reanalysis of other purported burials of women accompanied by weapons (see Gardeła 2013b; Pedersen 2014). These include two individuals, both of whom have been osteologically sexed as females, who were buried with weapons and other martial equipment in Hedmark and Nord-Trøndelag, Norway (Hedenstierna-Jonson et al. 2017b). While these burials must be interpreted cautiously, the obvious corollary of these findings is that some women were active participants in the martial cultures of the Viking Age. At present, we can only speculate as to whether these individuals were perceived as “women” or as “men” or whether they perhaps occupied (either permanently or temporarily) some kind of third gender (see Back Danielsson 2007; Norrman 2000), but they nonetheless indicate that gendered boundaries were permeable. While we should not suppose that participation in martial society ubiquitously demanded active involvement in combat, these burials remind us that at least some girls may have been conditioned to adopt the persona or roles of the warrior.”

- Ben Raffield, “Playing Vikings: Militarism, Hegemonic Masculinities, and Childhood Enculturation in Viking Age Scandinavia.”

[reversecrystal]

As it turns out, shifts in feminism explain much of bisexual history, which will turn out for the most part to be bisexual women's history. It is an often remarked upon fact among bisexual activists that many bisexual activists are women who formerly identified as lesbian feminists, that bisexual women's groups often have mailing lists ten times the size of bisexual men's groups, and that tensions between lesbian and bisexual women are understood as much more problematic than tensions between gay and bisexual men. To a large extent, these differences reflect the way lesbianism was politicized within feminism, such that a culture arose with clearly delineated norms of acceptability, norms which bisexual women--by definition--broke. Gay male culture did not become nationally politicized until the advent of AIDS, and life before AIDS in the baths and discos, at the bar or the opera, did not exclude bisexual men in the same way that lesbian space came to exclude bisexual women.

[...] Lesbians critical of bisexual demands have framed the problem as the bisexual desire to invade or infiltrate lesbian space, but hopefully it's now clear that for many bisexual women, there was no question of invasion; we had been a genuine part of lesbian feminism, and our call for explicit inclusion as bisexuals was meant to rectify what we perceived as an injustice of silencing. That this form of silencing was defined as so problematic indicated the effect that identity politics was having on these women, who had come to understand their situation as a political injustice, and the naming and claiming of their bisexual identity as a political act. And, in a way, this is not surprising: having focused for years on creating a political lesbian identity that played a crucial role in self-understanding, these women had in effect been resocialized to understand their sexual identity as core and as inherently political. 

[...] Put simply, the unified identity required (or thought to be required) by the [lesbian] monoculture was too monolithic, too uniform, to be tenable for a number of women. The exodus and fragmenting of the monoculture, with the extraordinary amount of betrayal involved, caused incredible pain for women who remained within lesbian feminism, pain that was dealt with in part through anger at the growing bisexual movement and its intrusion into lesbian cultural space. If most gay men have not been troubled by bisexuality because they didn't understand how it could pose a political threat to them (with the significant exception of some men deeply invested in gay culture), lesbians have been troubled precisely because they have understood the political threat involved. Nor have the lesbians been wrong in this instance; the bisexual movement really has represented a recasting of priorities in politicizing sexuality, and more importantly, in organizing community.

from “Identity/Politics: A History of the Bisexual Movement” by Amanda Udis-Kessler, in Bisexual Politics: Theories, queries, and visions (1995)

[moontheoretist]

Snezhnayan people, Fatui and the Cryo Goddess Tsaritsa

Snezhnaya is based on Russia and I really hope it won’t end as this weird meta message such as “russians are just plain evil” in Genshin Impact, due to the fact that Fatui aren’t actually good organization, because it would be so friggin sad to not see a deeper look at the country of Snezhnaya due to stereotypes.

Happily, despite the initial “Fatui are evil” and Jean’s constant “Fatui are bad people” preaches, we technically can see that even Fatui aren’t exactly all that bad, some of them are just not even cut out to be Fatui in the first place and can be easily scared or intimidated, while others are through and through evil people, who may or may not have a good cause in mind, but go at it in all the wrong ways. Even though they aren’t the only ones with questionable morals *side-eyes Kaeya and Diluc and their gathering information tactics, which probably include beating it out* they are still kind of seen as evil all together and the reason for that are mostly Jean’s speeches and her attitude towards them (justified, mind you, if someone wanted to kill my holy dragon I also would be pissed) and the fact that Mondstadt evokes Germany, as well as Netherlands to some people, I am not really surprised that she doesn’t like them. I mean I wondered if current political situation affected it somehow, but you could as well say that Germany and Russia never were exactly all buddy, buddy etc.

When it comes to other countries though they also see Fatui as bad people, and they have a good reason for that. Fatui after all do not care what means they have to use to achieve their goals, they will just do it to get results and tbh I cannot say that it isn’t correct for their theme if we remember that they aren’t just a shady organization, but also a group of delegates, which means that they are political group led by a god and the people the god chose as their lieutenants.

When we look at it like that and remember the introduction to Snezhnaya from one of the trailers (namely the fact that Tsaritsa lost love for her people and vice versa) meta message becomes significantly better, because we can see a ripple between Tsaritsa as a god, her followers Fatui and actual people of Snezhnaya. I could even say that it evokes the fact that Russian government is shady and will do whatever it takes to achieve their goal, while regular people technically do not even have to support that and are unrelated to whatever their government decides to do in this or that matter. So when I think about it like that I cannot really say that Genshin Impact is trying to demonize Russians or slavic people in general, just because Fatui aren’t generally nice and have shady morals.

The only thing I can hope for is for the game to delve deeper into that fracture and not try to make people of Sneznaya into a monolith which agrees with what Tsaritsa and Fatui do, but just do not participate. I would rather see them being against what they do, to strengthen the theme of fracture between the goddess and her people. Some could be of course neutral, and some could probably even agree but generally I would wanna see the dissonance, the fracture, the very big and visible sign that Tsaritsa and Fatui are separate from the people.

The fact that Fatui basically means “fools” is a little mean, especially because I cannot see them naming themselves like that on purpose and know that this name was given to them by developers to give us more clues about what is going on in the world around us. And even though we don’t know yet what the hell Abyss Order tries to do and what Tsaritsa and Fatui try to do, and if they actually work together or are two separate entities, which may even be at odds with each other, the one is clear - the name given to the Fatui is supposed to evoke that whatever they believe and do is wrong, no matter if their cause is noble (like, maybe they collect Gnosis to give Tsaritsa enough power to stop something bad from happening? who knows?) or it is just a simple conquest. They are supposed to be wrong and try to achieve thins by wrong means. Who knows, maybe if they have a noble cause, they are doing the opposite of helping and aren’t even aware of it, hence the name given by the developers?

There is so many good stuff we do not know yet, so many interesting things, hinted here and there. The story about the Queen of Kingdom of Darkness, Abyss Order being led by one of the twins and trying to achieve something which endangers people of Teyvat for a cause which sounds strangely as getting back your own home, whether sibling is possessed, manipulated or controlled by Unknown God and was dispatched to destroy the world to “bring balance” to heavenly principles, as well as missing God of Time and finally what Tsaritsa is trying to achieve with her Gnosis collection and for what reason she isolated herself from the other gods, but then started collecting their power. This all is very interesting, it intrigues me and I already have some basic ideas of what may be going on in Teyvat. But I don’t wanna spoil even further so now I will just share with you a small piece of translated knowledge and I am off to go and rest.

Tsaritsa just like polish caryca is a feminine version of the word tsar/car which is a title of a ruler of Russia during their monarchy era. Tsaritsa (possibly a title of Cryo god, instead of a name, just like in the case of Geo god) means “wife or a widow of a tsar”, because that title is given to a spouse of a tsar.

Snezhnaya in the meantime means snowy, which evokes both Russia and thanks to the Cryo focus of the country it also evokes Siberia. And kind of technically explains why Snezhnaya has superior military power. They probably aren’t small country (probably proportional to or bigger than Liyue Harbor) and I bet they cannot be easily conquered just like Russia. The fact that Mondstadt is supposed to be germanic also reminds me that Hitler tried and failed to do that.

[saotome-michi]

A very good article. Some excerpts: 

“The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.

(...) The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.”  

and: 

“The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

(...) Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

(...) America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

Also, this description of the Republican party and how Trump figures into it, which I think is spot on: 

“The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

 In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.”

[minervacasterly]

"The word "geisha" conjures up a mythically exotic creature in the Western imagination. Fantasy, wishful thinking, and plain misconceptions have been bound together with threads of fact, so that in English to say "geisha" summons a vision of a servile beauty who dotes upon her master's whim, satisfying every desire. Her personality he need not bother about, and she will obligingly melt away like Madame Butterfly rather than disturb him. This fantasy is hard to project on a real woman, but settles quite easily on a mythic one. Geisha have the odd distinction of being both legendary and real .. Myth by nature is monolithic, transcending history and individuals, whereas the reality is a variety of geisha communities in different areas of Japan, status hierarchies among communities in the same city, and of course differences among individual geisha. This is not to say that geisha are not exotic. These women are more mysterious than they themselves imagine-in Japan as well as outside it, albeit for different reasons. Westerners have a notion that geisha must be experts in the art of subservience in a country like Japan where even ordinary women are supposed to put men first. We infer that the art of pleasing men would mean being even more servile. I myself accepted this myth before I learned better as Ichigiku. To my surprise, I found that the social give and take between geisha and customers in the teahouses of Kyoto was quite comfortable to an American-bred geisha. One must not confuse the general cultural norms of Japanese politeness with subservience. Geisha are among the most outspoken Japanese women I know. Of course they are socially skillful-like a good hostess in America they don't say things that would embarrass a guest. But it became clear to me that Japanese men do not consort with geisha because they crave more subservience. They crave interesting conversation and lively personalities. We do not have an institution comparable to geisha in modern Western societies. Geisha do not marry, but they often have children. They live in organized professional communities of women. They have affairs with married men, and can form other liaisons at their own discretion. They derive their livelihood from singing, dancing, and chatting with men at banquets. They devote their time to learning and performing traditional forms of music and dance. And they always dress in kimono, but not always the formal costume. In various ways, then, geisha may be like mistresses, waitresses, hostesses, dancers, or performers. If she's not in full dress, can you tell she's a geisha? If you know what to look for, yes." ~ Liza Dalby's Foreword from "Life of a Geisha" by Eleanor Underwood

[noredinktech]

☄️ Pufferfish, please scale the site!

We created Team Pufferfish about a year ago with a specific goal: to avert the MySQL apocalypse! The MySQL apocalypse would occur when so many students would work on quizzes simultaneously that even the largest MySQL database AWS has on offer would not be able to cope with the load, bringing the site to a halt.

A little over a year ago, we forecasted our growth and load-tested MySQL to find out how much wiggle room we had. In the worst case (because we dislike apocalypses), or in the best case (because we like growing), we would have about a year’s time. This meant we needed to get going!

Looking back on our work now, the most important lesson we learned was the importance of timely and precise feedback at every step of the way. At times we built short-lived tooling and process to support a particular step forward. This made us so much faster in the long run.

🏔 Climbing the Legacy Code Mountain

Clear from the start, Team Pufferfish would need to make some pretty fundamental changes to the Quiz Engine, the component responsible for most of the MySQL load. Somehow the Quiz Engine would need to significantly reduce its load on MySQL.

Most of NoRedInk runs on a Rails monolith, including the Quiz Engine. The Quiz Engine is big! It’s got lots of features! It supports our teachers & students to do lots of great work together! Yay!

But the Quiz Engine has some problems, too. A mix of complexity and performance-sensitivity has made engineers afraid to touch it. Previous attempts at big structural change in the Quiz Engine failed and had to be rolled back. If Pufferfish was going make significant structural changes, we would need to ensure our ability to be productive in the Quiz Engine codebase. Thinking we could just do it without a new approach would be foolhardy.

⚡ The Vengeful God of Tests

We have mixed feelings about our test suite. It’s nice that it covers a lot of code. Less nice is that we don’t really know what each test is intended to check. These tests have evolved into complex bits of code by themselves with a lot of supporting logic, and in many cases, tight coupling to the implementation. Diving deep into some of these tests has uncovered tests no longer covering any production logic at all. The test suite is large and we didn’t have time to dive deep into each test, but we were also reluctant to delete test cases without being sure they weren’t adding value.

Our relationship with the Quiz Engine test suite was and still is a bit like one might have with an angry Greek god. We’re continuously investing effort to keep it happy (i.e. green), but we don’t always understand what we’re doing or why. Please don’t spoil our harvest and protect us from (production) fires, oh mighty RSpec!

The ultimate goal wasn’t to change Quiz Engine functionality, but rather to reduce its load on MySQL. This is the perfect scenario for tests to help us! The test suite we want is:

fast

comprehensive, and

not dependent on implementation

includes performance testing

Unfortunately, that’s not the hand we were given:

The suite takes about 30 minutes to run in CI and even longer locally.

Our QA team finds bugs that sneaked past CI in PRs with Quiz Engine changes relatively frequently.

Many tests ensure that specific queries are performed in a specific order. Considering we might replace MySQL wholesale, these tests provide little value.

And because a lot of Quiz Engine code is extremely performance-sensitive, there’s an increased risk of performance regressions only surfacing with real production load.

Fighting with our tests meant that even small changes would take hours to verify in tests, and then, because of unforeseen regressions not covered by the tests, take multiple attempts to fix, resulting in multiple-day roll-outs for small changes.

Our clock is ticking! We needed to iterate faster than that if we were going to avert the apocalypse.

🐶 I have no idea what I’m doing 🧪

Reading complicated legacy Rails code often raises questions that take surprising amounts of effort to answer.

Is this method dead code? If not, who is calling this?

Are we ever entering this conditional? When?

Is this function talking to the database?

Is this function intentionally talking to the database?

Is this function only reading from the database or also writing to it?

It isn’t even clear what code was running. There are a few features of Ruby (and Rails) which optimize for writing code over reading it. We did our best to unwrap this type of code:

Rails provides devs the ability to wrap functionality in hooks. before_ and after_ hooks let devs write setup and tear-down code once, then forget it. However, the existence of these hooks means calling a method might also evaluate code defined in a different file, and you won’t know about it unless you explicitly look for it. Hard to read!

Complicating things further is Ruby’s dynamic dispatch based on subclassing and polymorphic associations. Which load_students am I calling? The one for Quiz or the one for Practice? They each implement the Assignment interface but have pretty different behavior! And: they each have their own set of hooks🤦. Maybe it’s something completely different!

And then there’s ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord makes it easy to write queries — a little too easy. It doesn’t make it easy to know where queries are happening. It’s ergonomic that we can tell ActiveRecord what we need, and let it figure how to fetch the data. It’s less nice when you’re trying to find out where in the code your queries are happening and the answer to that question is, “absolutely anywhere”. We want to know exactly what queries are happening on these code paths. ActiveRecord doesn’t help.

🧵 A rich history

A final factor that makes working in Quiz Engine code daunting is the sheer size of the beast. The Quiz Engine has grown organically over many years, so there’s a lot of functionality to be aware of.

Because the Quiz Engine itself has been hard to change for a while, APIs defined between bits of Quiz Engine code often haven’t evolved to match our latest understanding. This means understanding the Quiz Engine code requires not just understanding what it does today, but also how we thought about it in the past, and what (partial) attempts were made to change it. This increases the sum of Quiz Engine knowledge even further.

For example, we might try to refactor a bit of code, leading to tests failing. But is this conditional branch ever reached in production? 🤷

Enough complaining. What did we do about it?

We knew this was going to be a huge project, and huge projects, in the best case, are shipped late, and in the average case don’t ever ship. The only way we were going to have confidence that our work would ever see the light of day was by doing the riskiest, hardest, scariest stuff first. That way, if one approach wasn’t going to work, we would find out about it sooner and could try something new before we’d over-invested in a direction.

So: where is the risk? What’s the scariest problem we have to solve? History dictates: The more we change the legacy system, the more likely we’re going to cause regressions.

So our first task: cut away the part of the Quiz Engine that performs database queries and port this logic to a separate service. Henceforth when Rails needs to read or change Quiz Engine data, it will talk to the new service instead of going to the database directly.

Once the legacy-code risk has been minimized, we would be able to focus on the (still challenging) task of changing where we store Quiz Engine data from single-database MySQL to something horizontally scalable.

⛏️ Phase 1: Extracting queries from Rails

🔪 Finding out where to cut

Before extracting Quiz Engine MySQL queries from our Rails service, we first needed to know where those queries were being made. As we discussed above this wasn’t obvious from reading the code.

To find the MySQL queries themself, we built some tooling: we monkey-patched ActiveRecord to warn whenever an unknown read or write was made against one of the tables containing Quiz Engine data. We ran our monkey-patched code first in CI and later in production, letting the warnings tell us where those queries were happening. Using this information we decorated our code by marking all the reads and writes. Once code was decorated, it would no longer emit warnings. As soon as all the writes & reads were decorated, we changed our monkey-patch to not just warn but fail when making a query against one of those tables, to ensure we wouldn’t accidentally introduce new queries touching Quiz Engine data.

🚛 Offloading logic: Our first approach

Now we knew where to cut, we decided our place of greatest risk was moving a single MySQL query out of our rails app. If we could move a single query, we could move all of them. There was one rub: if we did move all queries to our new app, we would add a lot of network latency. because of the number of round trips needed for a single request. Now we have a constraint: Move a single query into a new service, but with very little latency.

How did we reduce latency?

Get rid of network latency by getting rid of the network — we hosted the service in the same hardware as our Rails app.

Get rid of protocol latency by using a dead-simple protocol: socket communication.

We ended up building a socket server in Haskell that took data requests from Rails, and transformed them into a series of MySQL queries, which rails would use to fetch the data itself.

🛸 Leaving the Mothership: Fewer Round Trips

Although co-locating our service with rails got us off the ground, it required significant duct tape. We had invested a lot of work building nice deployment systems for HTTP services and we didn’t want to re-invent that tooling for socket-based side-car apps. The thing that was preventing the migration was having too many round-trip requests to the Rails app. How could we reduce the number of round trips?

As we moved MySQL query generation to our new service, we started to see this pattern in our routes:

MySQL Read some data ┐ Ruby Do some processing │ candidate 1 for MySQL Read some more data ┘ extraction Ruby More processing MySQL Write some data ┐ Ruby Processing again! │ candidate 2 for MySQL Write more data ┘ extraction

To reduce latency, we’d have to bundle reads and writes: In addition to porting reads & writes to the new service, we’d have to port the ruby logic between reads and writes, which would be a lot of work.

What if instead, we could change the order of operations and make it look like this?

MySQL Read some data ┐ candidate 1 for MySQL Read some more data ┘ extraction Ruby Do some processing Ruby More processing Ruby Processing again! MySQL Write some data ┐ candidate 2 for MySQL Write more data ┘ extraction

Then we’d be able to extract batches of queries to Haskell and leave the logic behind in Rails.

One concern we had with changing the order of operations like this was the possibility of a request handler first writing some data to the database, then reading it back again later. Changing the order of read and write queries would result in such code failing. However, since we now had a complete and accurate picture of all the queries the Rails code was making, we knew (luckily!) we didn’t need to worry about this.

Another concern was the risk of a large refactor like this resulting in regressions causing long feedback cycles and breaking the Quiz Engine. To avoid this we tried to keep our refactors as dumb as possible: Specifically: we mostly did a lot of inlining. We would start with something like this

class QuizzesControllller 9000 :super_saiyan else load_sub_syan_fun_type # TODO: inline me end end end end

These are refactors with a relatively small chance of changing behavior or causing regressions.

Once the query was at the top level of the code it became clear when we needed data, and that understanding allowed us to push those queries to happen first.

e.g. from above, we could easily push the previously obscured QuizForFun query to the beginning:

class QuizzesControllller 9000 :super_saiyan else load_sub_syan_fun_type # TODO: inline me end end end

You might expect our bout of inlining to introduce a ton of duplication in our code, but in practice, it surfaced a lot of dead code and made it clearer what the functions we left behind were doing. That wasn’t what we set out to do, but still, nice!

👛 Phase 2: Changing the Quiz Engine datastore

At this point all interactions with the Quiz Engine datastore were going through this new Quiz Engine service. Excellent! This means for the second part of this project, the part where we were actually going to avert the MySQL apocalypse, we wouldn’t need to worry about our legacy Rails code.

To facilitate easy refactoring, we built this new service in Haskell. The effect was immediately noticeable. Like an embargo had been lifted, from this point forward we saw a constant trickle of small productive refactors get mixed in the work we were doing, slowly reshaping types to reflect our latest understanding. Changes we wouldn’t have made on the Rails side unless we’d have set aside months of dedicated time. Haskell is a great tool to use to manage complexity!

The centerpiece of this phase was the architectural change we were planning to make: switching from MySQL to a horizontally scalable storage solution. But honestly, figuring the architecture details here wasn’t the most interesting or challenging portion of the work, so we’re just putting that aside for now. Maybe we’ll return to it in a future blog post (sneak peek: we ended up using Redis and Kafka). Like in step 1, the biggest question we had to solve was “how are we going to make it safe to move forward quickly?”

One challenge was that we had left most of our test suite behind in Rails in phase one, so we were not doing too well on that front. We added Haskell test coverage of course, including many golden result tests which are worth a post on their own. Together with our QA team we also invested in our Cypress integration test suite which runs tests from the browser, thus integration-testing the combination of our Rails and Haskell code.

Our most useful tool in making safe changes in this phase however was our production traffic. We started building up what was effectively a parallel Haskell service talking to Redis next to the existing one talking to MySQL. Both received production load from the start, but until the very end of the project only the MySQL code paths’ response values were used. When the Redis code path didn’t match the MySQL, we’d log a bug. Using these bug reports, we slowly massaged the Redis code path to return identical data to MySQL.

Because we weren’t relying on the output of the Redis code path in production, we could deploy changes to it many times a day, without fear of breaking the site for students or teachers. These deploys provided frequent and fast feedback. Deploying frequently was made possible by the Haskell Quiz Engine code living in its own service, which meant deploys contained only changes by our team, without work from other teams with a different risk profile.

🥁 So, did it work?

It’s been about a month since we’ve switched entirely to the new architecture and it’s been humming along happily. By the time we did the official switch-over to the new datastore it had been running at full-load (but with bugs) for a couple of months already. Still, we were standing ready with buckets of water in case we overlooked something. Our anxiety was in vain: the roll-out was a non-event.

Architecture, plans, goals, were all important to making this a success. Still, we think the thing most crucial to our success was continuously improving our feedback loops. Fast feedback (lots of deploys), accurate feedback (knowing all the MySQL queries Rails is making), detailed feedback (lots of context in error reports), high signal/noise ratio (removing errors we were not planning to act on), lots of coverage (many students doing quizzes). Getting this feedback required us to constantly tweak and create tooling and new processes. But even if these processes were sometimes short-lived, they've never been an overhead, allowing us to move so much faster.

[johnrossbowie]

LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat.  Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.