#WE LIVE IN A FUCKING SOCIETY IS THE POINT OF THIS POST I GUESS

[imaveryevilenby]

alright hold on hold on hold on we're doing 3am gender thinking again

so the initial idea of my views on gender that occurred to me at 5am last time in what was probably a manic episode is fuck gender I can't fit the boxes expected of me so I'll dismantle the whole system and do my own thing

so problem is I can't do that, I can't dismantle the whole system and go my own way because I am entirely dependent on the sex and gender systems we have in place and how other people view sex and gender

additionally the idea that gender itself is the outdated stereotypical system is flawed, gender is the way a person feels and we've made categories and boxes to describe incredibly complex feelings

the problem is the more specific a gender gets, the smaller that box gets, the more people are excluded from that box so the solution is another box that fits better or make their own like with neogenders

the solution is a line of gender boxes like hermit crabs...

the fun part about thinking of gender and stuff is that I personally believe that every single person on earth experiences gender and life differently from every other person, even if only slightly

so theoretically if every person on earth were to describe their gender outlook and gender experiences and form a gender identity from that, then there could theoretically be 8 billion god damn genders

the solution is more genders

the solution is running Doom (1993) on my fucking gender

[arcaneyouth]

rapidly approaching my 21st birthday is hard and weird but not for any normal reasons thats for sure

[nopeferatu]

ik that art is subjective and there is not one "true" meaning that one is meant to derive from a work but honestly, some people's readings of media ARE wrong and dumb and bad, lol

[autolenaphilia]

Edit: as hoshi9zoe pointed out, the original version of this post needlessly berated other transfems like Jennifer Coates, for which I do apologize, and I have toned it down in this edited version. The original version survives in reblogs.

Some months ago, I was searching through this transandrobro blog to see if they posted a callout of me, and i found this reblog, which I couldn't really write about for months, because what do I even write. I recently wayback machined it for posterity, and I guess this is my attempt to write a post about it.

It's saint-dyke himself, the coiner of transandrophobia, saying that the infamous (at least for me) article "I am a transwoman. I'm in the closet. I'm not coming out" is what made him coin the fucking word. It's literally bolded and underlined: "Reading this article is what made me coin “transandrophobia”.

The reason I put off writing this post is that reading that article makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. And it is poison, make no mistake, it's internalized transmisogyny brainworms dripping out of the writer's brain and onto the page.

It's a justification for why the author, known by pseudonym Jennifer Coates, doesn't want to transition, despite knowing she is a trans woman. And it's the exact kind of internalized transmisogyny that keeps trans women in repression and not transitioning. "I'm not going to pass, i'm forever going to be an ugly freak who will at best be humored by other women, the closet is uncomfortable but at least it's safe"

It's the same exact bullshit a lot of represssed trans women tell themselves because it's what society tells us about trans women, that we are freakish parodies of women, that we will never pass, and if we don't pass we have failed and are ugly freaks. It's all to scare us into staying in the closet and make others hate and fear us. Transmisogyny permeates our society, and the majority, maybe all transfems will absorb and internalize some of it.

Coates says that it all is just applicable to her, but again so many transfems believe this shit before transitioning and realizing it's a pack of lies. If this bullshit was in any way valid, a lot of trans women shouldn't transition, because before we actually transition many of us believe it word for word. And "it's only true for me" is how we justify it to ourselves. We tend to be way harsher on ourselves than others. This kind of self-hating transfem tends to think: "Other trans women are beautiful graceful goddesses, earthly manifestations of the divine feminine, always destined to be women, while I'm an ugly forever male ogre who just has a fetish."

It's all bullshit, it's poison, it's internalized transmisogyny.

And the rest of the article is bullshit too. It is not some insightful mediation on gender as some people say, it's the author confusing and mixing up actual transmisogyny with an imagined problem of misandry. She does this because she has gone full repression mode, and decided she has no other choice to live as a man, so her dysphoria and experiences of transmisogyny are actually men's problems.

It's a bad article, excusable because as Coatas points out, it's "essentially a diary entry." that was meant to be a way to "vent frustration" and she "did not intend for anyone else to actually read it." It is clearly not the product of a healthy mind.

I hope the author sometime in the past seven years eventually did transition, and that for whatever reason she didn't want to publicly repudiate her own article. Maybe she lost access to the medium account so she can't delete it.

Far worse than the article itself is the response to it. I've seen it passed around as some insightful commentary on gender by the "feminists are too mean to men, misandry is real" crowd. I have argued against this before. And other people have made insightful comments about it.

And learning that saint-dyke claiming that he was inspired to coin the word "transandrophobia" because of this article is the cherry on top of this shitcake of transmisogyny. For my thoughts on "transandrophobia" theory and how transmisogynistic it is, see here.

Of course, Saint-dyke absolutely could be bullshitting here. Claiming that Coates's article is what inspired him to coin the word might be a lie to claim that transandrophobia theory is not transmisogynistic because it came from listening to trans women.

This is why "listen to trans women" doesn't work. Because TME people will always choose a trans woman who confirms their prejudices. Blair White has made an entire career out of this. And Coates article is popular because it says that misandry is real and trans women's issues are partly caused by it, misgendering herself and other trans women.

And it's popular for another reason. Coates has thoroughly internalized transmisogyny, and thus her article presents a trans woman that is exactly as transmisogynistic patriarchal society wants her to be. She is suffering, but ultimately accepts her assigned role. She truly believes that her biological sex dooms her to forever be male. She literally "manages her dysphoria by means other than transition" as conversion therapy advocates want us to do. She never makes an social claim on womanhood by actually transitioning, so she doesn't invade the sacred women's spaces. Yet she performs the role of woman perfectly by serving men, by defending them from supposed feminist misandry. And she fulfils the ritualistic role that the rhetorical figure of "trans women" sometimes serves in progressive spaces, of giving a blessing to TME people's pre-existing views and actions, all while actual flesh-and-blood trans women are destroyed by those same deeply transmisogynistic spaces. This time it's a blessing for the same "misandry is real" soft-MRA bullshit that has infested the online left and created the transandrophobia crowd.

That is why this article and the positive response makes me sick, makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. This is what its fans want trans women to be like. I'm acutely aware this kind of self-denial is exactly what transmisogyny wants from me and tried to indoctrinate me into doing it. And I want none of it. I want to live, I want to be a woman.

[saintjosie]

apologies if you’ve talked about something this before, but your post on experiencing exclusion in trans fem circles on account of being an east asian woman who speaks up came up on my dash and it reminded me of something that‘a been troublingme.

i’m also asian and trans, and i’m always really sent off-kilter when i see white trans people idealizing japanese aesthetics and asian people in general. so many white trans people use anime tropes and aesthetics while also othering real asian people, esp other asian trans people. does it feel appropriative/fetishistic to you?

i guess it’s just something that echoes general white-centric society but it feels like a lot of white trans people focus more on their transness and forget that their whiteness doesn’t just go away or get excused, if that makes sense

this is a great ask with no easy answer. the short answer is yes, you’re absolutely right, but there is also a lot of nuance that’s very important to address too.

white people in general have an enormous problem with misunderstanding the difference between appropriation and appreciation. and that applies to appropriating the culture of all people of color because appropriation is a symptom of colonization. part of that is because it’s very difficult to have a catch-all definition that clarifies the distinction between the two because each person approaches the things they consume in a different way, with varying levels of excitement. i simply cannot point a finger at all white people who enjoy anime and say, “this is bad”, because it simply is not true. it would be just as harmful if a white person were to say, “i would never watch anime because i think it’s weird”, because while appropriation is objectively a form of colonization, appreciation is a celebration of diversity. and celebration of diversity is good!

but i think you hit the nail on the head when you say that a lot of white queer and trans people forget that even though that they are oppressed by cis heterosexual patriarchy, the intersection of oppression that exists between oppressed identities and race means that as white people, they still have white privilege. full stop. and so we often have this issue, especially with young queer and trans people (young as in newly realized queerness and transness, not age) where there is a pause in deconstructing whiteness because they are too focused on deconstructing the privilege that they have suddenly lost by embracing their marginalized identities.

and the issue goes even deeper when you realize that people of color also struggle to realize that we often also perpetuate and contribute to oppression of other people of color as well. east asian people in particular forget that even though we are people of color, we do not face the same kind of oppression that black and brown people of color do, and often we perpetuate racism through appropriation of black culture and also just straight up racism. i think most asian people can attest to how often asian people can be racist as fuck. and i’ve definitely seen asian people who think it’s acceptable to make aave and using the n-slur a part of their personality. and at the same time there is an enormous problem with black people fetishizing asian people and latching on to anime and k-pop in ways that perpetuate the oppression of asian people, as well as just being racist towards asians in general.

and root of the issue is that white supremacy affects all of us. EVERYONE has whiteness to deconstruct because we all live in a system that was built on white supremecy, even if we do not have white privilege ourselves. the answer is that everyone period must bear the burden of constantly deconstructing whiteness, deconstructing our own privilege, and doing our part to lift each other up. and while it is true that white people often have the most work to do in deconstructing their own privilege, none of us are absolved.

[nyancrimew]

fucked up sorta intoxicated long vent

cw: uuh mental health, drugs, suicide mentions, very much is just an existential crisis put into post form

this is not a suicide note or anything, im about to go cuddle up with my wife and go to sleep i just had to get my fucked up thoughts out, i might delete this tomorrow

meaning

it's so hard to find meaning in life anymore. i live for those around me, for those i love, those who love me back. yet i keep hurting them, everything keeps falling apart. i live out of spite, i cant let authority win. yet im slowly giving up my cause. i live to prove a point. ive long forgotten what point it even is anymore.

there hasnt really been any new compelling reason to keep going in over 10 years now. i honestly wonder how much it even really takes anymore to drive me to suicide. it can't be that much, im already always living on edge.

i just barely know who i even am anymore, ive largely forgotten the first 20 years of my life, and the last 3 are mostly just fog as well. forced to live in the moment, carrying all the baggage of all the previous moments i dont even have memories of anymore.

how are people just like able to keep living, regularly finding joy. how are people able to deal with bad times without immediately pondering all the ways in which they could kill themselves in?

god i need therapy so fucking bad. i keep dragging down everyone around me. how can i fix all the damage ive done, a sorry won't do. how can i fix all the damage done to me, no sorry will ever do.

why are the only options to just keep going, ignoring all the pain, or ending it all forever. where is the restart button, where can i reset, rewind, apply what ive learned to the situations where i fucked up. how do i go back and undo all the trauma. the trauma i experienced myself and the trauma i put on others.

we're all just lost children in a world not made for us. where is our world. where is the place in which we can find solace. your arms make me feel safe, and at home. but i know you feel the same way i do.

it pains me to know we're in this together, god if only i could bear your pain, if only i could bear everyone elses pain. it hurts me to know you feel this way too. no one should have to know how this feels. i wanna take on all the pain in this world so i can leave and turn the world around.

am i just failing at being a part of this society or is society failing me. i am like one bureaucratic fuck up away from dying alone on the street with no roof over my head. i cannot be self dependent, why does this society fully expect such a thing of me.

is this all worth it for the few moments of bliss, for sparing the people around me from the pain of losing me. would the pain of losing me be greater than the pain i cause every day?

i am lost. i dont know anymore. fuck i need therapy. or just anything that can fix me. the drugs certainly haven't yet, but at least i also have dependency to fight with now i guess.

yea fuck man idk

[justjesse116]

Hullo, I'm currently sad as fuck and feel like elaborating on why I feel Dabi does what he does speaking from unfortunately personal experience.

TLDR Dabi is autistic af and his family failed him in even more ways than you can imagine.

First and fore-fucking-most, Dabi is driven by emotions, and if you disagree quite frankly we're not following the same story. So, with that in mind, and I need to keep this all brief lest I write a fucking dissertation on the Todoroki family, let me cook.

Between his 'mood swings', as in he's either emotionally detached or psychotic, his entire plan, which involves being, quite literally, 10 steps ahead of everyone else, and that's being conservative, and his thirst-for-justice attitude, Todoroki Touya is autistic. Which I'm sure endeared him to his own family about as much as it did me to mine.

ANYWAY. At this point, Dabi doesn't care what's 'right' or 'wrong'. He doesn't care what he has to do, or who he has to hurt, in order to feel like he's worth something. And even if he does know on some level what he's doing is 'wrong', he doesn't care anymore. The world has shown him that you do something bad, and if you have enough pull, if you lie enough, you scheme enough, it all goes away, and nobody cares, because at the end of the day people need something to cling to. And if that just so happens to be you, you can do no wrong, it's your golden ticket. Your family will defend you no matter what, so will most of your friends, and even strangers who you've never fucking met before.

They all have this idea of this person in their head who doesn't really exist, but it doesn't matter, because that fake person fits their criteria of what they need to feel okay on a daily basis.

So, what I'm trying to say is, as noble as Dabi's cause seems to be, he's never going to be able to overcome human nature. He claims it's 'Hero Society', but that's just a fancy name for human nature. That's not to say I don't think he should do it, every day of my life I wish I had anything as remotely convincing as blue flames to make people listen to me, but unfortunately in the world WE, THE AUDIENCE, lives in, it's never going to happen this way.

I guess this is just a post about me coming to terms with the fact that life in the real world fucking sucks and I can't do anything as impactful as I'd like it to be like it is in my favorite manga lmao.

I guess circling back to my main point, Todoroki Touya is autistic, and those aspects of his personality are what is driving him, that's making him do what he's doing, because even before I knew who he was, before I knew what he was really doing, I clung to him like a limpet because he acted like I do, seemed to think like I do, and I guessed who and what he was based on our (unfortunately) mutual childhoods and tendencies. And again, I'm not trying to seem like I know everything, I've just been around this miserable rock a few more times than I'd prefer, and I think that if he could, Dabi would agree.

But don't mind me, like I said, we're unfortunately, uncomfortably similar, and it's also just bad timing that I'm having a bad time family wise, so I'm probably projecting more than should be allowed.

[katarasmomsnecklace]

Someone was talking shit bout Katara again and I'm about to kill people

Warning LONG post sorry

EVERYONE always brings up the "then you didn't love her like I did" scene and you know what in Kataras angry vindicated righteous fury addled mind, that's how she feels

She heard Sokka say he can't remember their mom, that he can only see his YOUNGER sister when he tries to picture her

Katara is fucking fuming because she finally has a chance to hunt down the man that killed their mom and Sokka is trying to stop her and I'm sorry but Sokka CANT understand Kataras pain

While not outright stated, we know Katara knows why her mom died, she's known the whole time.

Her mom died in her place, that is something Sokka will never have to live with

Losing his mother obviously hurt him, duh I'm not going to devalue his trauma, but Sokkas trauma that gets explored in the show is not losing his mom, but his dad.

Another thing I hate is when people say, well Sokkas older so he spent more time with their mom, like way to fuck up your argument because you are saying their love of their mother can be objectively measured.

Also you're trying to tell me in a society dependent on gender roles Katara wasn't spending more time with their mother than Sokka yeah right.

Yall say she needed to apologize (which I completely agree with because at the end of the day it is an awful thing to say to your brother who while not impacted the same way was just as affected as you) but no one is saying Sokka needs apologize for making fun of Kataras waterbending (do yall not understand why she's so passionate about bending her mom DIED because Katara was a bender, Katara thinks she needs to prove that her mother's death wasn't in vain HER AND SOKKA ARE PARALLES Kataras trying to prove herself to their mom and Sokka their dad)

They are CHILDREN they deserve to talk about what they loved doing with their mom and how losing her hurt them differently.

Because they're kids, they can't grasp that grief is different for everyone. They were both so fucked up by her death but in almost opposite ways. Sokka represed that shit so hard it's insane please baby get therapy and Katara lives her life trying to ensure NO ONE forgets their mother's sacrifice.

Sokka forces himself to forget

Katara forces herself to remember

I wish Katara apologized because she was objectively wrong, Sokka did love their mom but he grieves differently. And once Katara returns she understands where Sokkas coming from. She was just angry he wasn't angry because she's a child and wanted to know her emotions and anger were valid but instead felt vilified by the person who was meant to understand.

I wanted to see Katara apologize to, because her and Sokka deserve to hug and cry and scream about how unfair the world is, they deserve to have a mother figure in each other (which they do, they basically raised each other) but I hate how yall say she's unforgivable for this.

Unforgivable really? Yall are too harsh on Katara, it was fucked up, like insanely fucked up but unforgivable?

I guess the point of this post was me asking yall to give Katara some slack especially yall Sokka stans cuz if you hate Katara for this I feel like you don't really get Sokka either.

Obviously they love each other and they love their mom they just have never had the incredibly difficult conversation about how her death still affects them.

Their relationship is everything to me, I just want Sokka and Katara to be happy 😭

[snipsnipsnippy]

Alright I’ve been pushed. Now I’m in a Satine Kryze mood. And BOY do I wanna have a chat some of y’all are not ready for.

Satine and the New Mandalorians are the true Mandalorians. Or at least, they were the popular representation of Mandalorians. First things first, I want to remind everyone that the Mandalorian history we have post Clone Wars-era is entirely told by the surviving Mandalorians, who are.. a fringe cult and a terrorist group (ie The Children of the Watch and Death Watch) and any other surviving exiles or enemies (eg Boba and you know, the Jedi). None of these people lived in mainstream Mandalorian society so how are we to believe them on what “true” mandalorian culture is when their beliefs or actions were deemed so radical they were exiled (or in the case of COTW, left on their own accord).

Now, yes, Satine’s position of pacifism is very extreme. No fighting at all ever is a pretty questionable long term survival strategy and an incredibly divisive one, but it’s literally one the mandalorian people defended and accepted and even tried to bring to the Republic. Because considering the historical and political position Mandalore has been in, it was only this extreme strategy that could save it. It literally ended generations of civil wars. It united the remaining mandalorians and built survivable, architecture for the barren world (which probably saved the planet, but that’s a different theory). But Death Watch, you know the party that meant to overthrow and kill her, will tell you that this was an erasure of mandalorian culture and ignorance of their warrior history, but that’s not the kind of warrior we ever see outside of Death Watch.

Everything in mandalorian culture points us to this much more protective survivor, rather than this vindictive sort of conqueror. Foundling culture in the Mandalorians is so profound because it’s something that is so unique to them. Other cultures do adopt nonfamilial members, yes, but Mandalorians do it so wholeheartedly and without question. There’s a baby alone in the woods? I don’t care if it’s 4,000 years old or its a race that hasn’t been discovered yet, that’s your child now. The way mandalorian clans are structured such that a foundling is immediately no different than a blood relative, whether they come from the same species or star system. Nephews or daughters or neighbors are all the same to a mandalorian (and a hot mention to mando’a for throwing out gender biases too). They are fiercely protected and fiercely loved too. Every excess that exists in mandalorian society goes to their children. To their education, their protection, the survival of the next generation was most important to a mandalorian society.

Even something like beskar, their very armor, was prized for protection, not for offensives. There’s a whole lecture on how beskar came to be metal of choice, but it boils down to being, guess what?, the best defense against lightsabers. And we see Mandalorians come out with the best armor design in like literally all of Star Wars armors ever. I’m not joking. It’s made for visibility, for protection, for comfort, and for not dying. Their identity is their armor. Its value and its design is sacred to each clan because it is forged from their history and painted with its battles.

So working back to Satine, who was raised learning all of this history, learning the ways of her warrior people and seeing the culture stray from what was once a people built for surviving and then watching it kill them, watching it tear apart her family and her home, and for a year, it even tore her away from her identity. She stands up to this massive swath of the deadliest fuckers in the galaxy, and she says “no.” She doesn’t raise a sword. She doesn’t point a blaster. She knows how. She was the fucking mandalorian princess. Clan Kryze was deeply respected. Her father died a hero to these people, and for her to stand up without using force or weapons takes a shit load of courage and some uniquely mandalorian stupidity. All to save their future, their culture, and their children. She said “kill me if you wish but spare the kids” and at the time, she can’t be any more than 20 because timelines are rough. She’s probably still just an orphaned teenager herself. This is the wake up call that broke the Mandalorian Civil Wars.

This is the Most Mandalorian stunt a mandalorian has ever mandalorian-ed since Tarre Vizsla himself told off the fucking Jedi.

She’s the savior of her culture, and Death Watch burned it all down because they wanted to kill, not protect. Satine was more a mandalorian than most of the Mandalorians we see. More mandalorian than her sister will ever be, and Bo won’t even speak her name.

[catbountry]

Does anybody else remember Pandora? Not the box, or the fictional planet where James Cameron's blue alien cat people live where there's a literal mineral called "unobtanium" that can only be harvested from that particular planet. My man literally called that shit "unobtanium," fucking portmanteau of "unobtainable" and the "-ium" suffix for newer elements. No. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything else I'm writing beyond this point. This is a post about music.

This is a post about the customizable internet radio station Pandora. And also it's going to briefly cover ClickRadio, it's going to talk about my experiences with YouTube Music, Spotify, my own iPod and how I find and listen to music, and how it's a core part of my creative process and I put a bunch of music references in pretty much all of my creative work. None of it being musical, by the way. I can barely carry a tune and I can't play any instruments more complicated than a kazoo.

It also got really long and rambly, look, I'm high, I'm sorry. You've been warned.

It's 2001. I'm in high school. My life looks like this drawing I made a few weeks ago.

Music is a big part of my life. The internet was a lot slower. It would take several minutes to download an .mp3 file of a song that was only about three and a half minutes long, so I would listen to the radio a lot. But the thing about listening tuning into radio is that it's not the internet. You can't pick which song to listen to whenever you want. If you want that, your best bet is to own the songs you want on their physical CD releases, or risk exposing your mom's computer to a million viruses. But in order to skip a song, you have to press a physical button to skip a song. And of course, if you're listening to the radio where you can discover new songs, you can't skip the latest Limp Bizkit or Disturbed track with the vain hope that maybe they'll play "One-Armed Scissor" by At The Drive-In or "Go With the Flow" by Queens of the Stone Age, or any single off of Kid A. Everything you hated the most, hated more than Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys, was all lumped together under the formless "alternative rock" label, which weirdly included hip-hop artists like Eminem, House of Pain, Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Gorillaz and Outkast; all stuff that I guess radio stations looked at and thought "yeah, this can appeal to white people."

You know I heard Dynamite Hack's version of "Boyz N The Hood" before I ever heard Eazy-E's? That should be a crime. That should be considered a human right's violation. Fuck you, Dynamite Hack for introducing the entire world to the concept of ironic hipster covers hip-hop songs which led to the fucking white people with ukeleles versions of Tupac songs. I am so glad that we, as a society, have all come together against these dynamite hacks and decided this was cringe and something that belongs in the past.

But this isn't an essay on awful YouTube music trends of the early 2010's, this is listening to music in the internet age in the early 2000's.

In 2001, ClickRadio launched. It was a desktop application that allowed you to listen to radio stations via the internet, but it had something real radio stations did not; if a song like, say, Dynamite Hack's cover of "Boys N The Hood" came on, you could click a thumbs down button and it would let out this cartoonishly loud "thud" and then that station would never play that song for you again. And if they played a song you really liked? You could click a thumb's up button and it would play that song more often.

I cannot understate how fucking mindblowing an idea this was in the early 2000's. Yes, ClickRadio would slow down your computer as the Neopets Flash games you would play gringing for Neopoints to get a Halloween brush for your Lupe that you named after a member of your favorite band. Anybody else do that?

No? Just me? Okay then.

ClickRadio would quickly get enshittificated, within only about a year or two being filled with more and more unskippable ads. I went back to just loading up MP3s in Winamp and playing music that way by the time I was in college, but it was a pain having to listen to whatever song I had physically on my hard drive, or a few years later, going to YouTube to see if somebody uploaded a crusty version of a NoMeansNo song with a Spanish-speaking DJ speaking in the opening bits of the video. Not ideal.

But then Pandora showed up.

I don't remember where I first heard about Pandora, but after Napster, there were a bunch of music start-ups hoping to be legitimate in the eyes of artists and record labels. Clickradio was just a radio station. But Pandora... was an experiment of The Algorithm.

You see, Pandora started what is known as the Music Genome Project, a way of organizing music into hundreds of different subgenres across five large umbrella genres; Pop/Rock, Hip Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music and Classical. What Pandora did was use this as a way to allow users to craft their own custom radio stations. And not only would it play the stuff you liked, but it would be tailored to a seed artist or song; you put in Nirvana, you get a lot of 90's alt rock radio faire, but then maybe it plays Mudhoney. Maybe it plays Sonic Youth. Maybe it plays Melvins, and you like it. And when you give a thumbs up, you hear more and more artists in similar subgenres. And let's say you've been looking into obscure or underground music for years before you start using Pandora, and suddenly you're introduced to artists you never would have come across more organically. And buddy, you'd bet my Pandora station was a fucking hodgepodge of hundreds of seeds, which allowed me to discover highly influential /mu/ core bands like Swans, Animal Collective and Neutral Milk Hotel, but also bands that are so obscure that their Spotify listens are in the lower four digits at maximum and maybe a couple tens of thousands of views on YouTube. So many songs I found through Pandora are from bands that I very rarely hear a lot of people talk about, but they've made songs that have just lived in my brain for decades.

And for a couple years, I'd be listening to Pandora radio while writing up new TF2 fanfiction to terrorize TF2chan with. Certain songs would come up so often because I specifically bookmarked them. I didn't really know a lot about shoegaze before Pandora, but now I own a physical copy of all three of Slowdive's albums, and you fucking bet "When the Sun Hits" was in heavy rotation while I was writing Respawn of the Dead.

Yes, this was playing while I was writing out Respawn of the Dead, chapter by chapter. And so was "Beautiful Plateau" by Sonic Youth, "The Sound" by Swans, "Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and "End of the Line" by Murder By Death. And also this song by a band called The Clock Work Army, which split up and reformed into another band called Calico Horses, and I know this because I found this out while trying to track down a song that would play constantly on my Pandora station and it has, as of writing this sentence, 2,588 listens. And it might have more by the time you read this because I might just put it on loop because oh my god, I love this song so much, it hits so perfect for me, why don't more people know about this song?

It's not on YouTube, where I usually tend to listen to music, since I'll go through a rotation of songs that I call "work songs." I put on music while I write, and some songs are just so perfect that I can listen to them on loop with a very select number of songs that just never, ever get old for me. My neurons in my brain light up as though I was hearing it again for the first time.

Swans, Sigur Ros and The Dillinger Escape Plan are all artists who I found through Pandora that I've had the privilege to see live. By the time I was just discovering bands because I had a bunch of friends and mutuals with similar taste in music to mine, Pandora was slowly getting more and more ads. It was getting to the point where the free service would, if you were lucky, play only three or four songs before playing an ad. And when the length of those songs can span anywhere from less than three minutes for much of my beloved 80's and early 90's punk, to up to a half an hour for post-rock, noise, or ambient music. And the number of ads that played between songs had increased. What was just one every half an hour or so was now two to three for what could potentially be only after seven minutes of music. Pandora really doesn't like it if the music you like includes a lot of songs that are longer than an episode of The Simpsons.

I never hear anybody talk about Pandora anymore. Spotify is THE name in internet music streaming, and it favors listens of entire albums and other people's playlists. I don't like Spotify; sometimes I just want a specific song from a specific album. I could make a playlist of these "work songs," but I like when YouTube notices that I'm listening to music, and in the recommendeds, there's another song that I've listened to on repeat. Why yes, I would like you to play "Classical Homicide" by Dälek for me again. What's that? An hour loop of Deadmau5's "Professional Griefers" featuring Gerard Way? Yes please. I apologize for nothing. That dude's way better than Skrillex.

God, do you guys remember the Deadmau5/Skrillex shipping that was all over Tumblr in the early 2010's. I remember it. I remember it so hard. Everybody shipping them and the members of Daft Punk, posting Steam Powered Giraffe (blech) and Die Antwoord (lol) on my dashboard. In Die Antwoord's defense, they had some pretty funny music videos.

I got AdBlocker for YouTube, so the ads aren't a problem there. I mean, I could make a playlist for Spotify of my go-to songs, but I'd have to deal with ads. And there's something nice about YouTube's robots that sell my precious data to faceless corporations at least having the courtesy to be like "You look like you could use another stream of 'Anything (Viva!)' by Foetus. Or Scraping Foetus off the Wheel. Or... whatever, fuck it, it's J.G. Thirwell's band, okay? It's the guy that does the music for Venture Brothers."

Foetus was introduced to me through a friend but it was Pandora serving me up more of their music that made their albums "nail" and "Flow" ones that got the honor of Being Downloaded onto my iPod so I can Listen to This in my Car. I still use my iPod and even if there's albums that I haven't gone back to in years on there, I like having them there. I haven't listened to the soundtrack for Panty and Stocking in ages but having access to it so that I can FLY AWAY NOW, FLY AWAY NOW, FLY AWAAAYYYY on a long drive? I like having that option.

I still buy CDs so I can burn albums onto my iPod. My iPod doesn't have ads and switching between artists doesn't mean I have to flip through a CD binder. I also try to buy albums off of Bandcamp. Especially for smaller artists, or artists whose work I love enough to want to give them my money. I don't want to listen to ads. It throws off my workflow, shakes me out of the trance-like state that is pure, focused creativity. Whether it's working on comics or thinking about things I want to do in those comics, I'm usually listening to music. Sometimes the same album, hundreds of times over. I admit I haven't listened to that much King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, but I've listened to Nonagon Infinity front to back more times than I can count.

Nowadays it feels like I don't have a lot of friends who share my taste in music. I've so fully entrenched myself in fandom circles that I've been exposed to the average person's taste in music and I'm like "oh yeah, most people aren't as big of a fucking nerd about this as you are." You know how hard it is to get people who aren't music nerds to get into The Residents? Everybody I know that likes them already knew about them before we met, and people who had never heard of them before they met me usually find them deeply weird and never get fucking obsessed with them like I have. I own a physical copy of, not their original version of their album The King and Eye, which is an entire album of them covering Elvis that sounds like this, but the fucking remix of that album that does shit like this to their covers of Elvis songs. And you know what? I love both versions, but that remix of their cover of "Surrender" is a work song.

Listening to music is the only way I can guarantee that I'm actually working on something and not playing with my phone. I guess what I'm saying is... it sure would be nice if Pandora existed like it did back then right now.

Especially because I stopped cleaning up a page of my horrible Deltarune fan comic (MASSIVE Dead Dove warning, not even kidding, the entire story hinges on some very upsetting topics) just to write all this down and make sure there were links to every song in this essay. And like... I've even used the comic as a not-so-clandestine way into tricking them into listening to my music before. Whether it be directly namedropping bands and songs, writing about a specific character's taste in music and using that in the story somehow, or literally just making the title of one of my comic installments... this.

It is really good. 686 listens on YouTube. Absolutely criminal. And the example above? That's me not putting in hundreds of references into the comic and wondering if anybody else has noticed them.

I guess what I'm saying is that I am a huge music nerd, even though I always feel like I'm getting into artists super late (unless they're like Death Grips, but that was only after The Money Store had come out), but I fucking hate Spotify. I want more physical releases that can be preserved digitally, and I don't have the money to get into collecting vinyls as a hobby. All the vinyl I own is toys, and uh... I own a lot of those.

Thank you for reading through pure, uncut music autism mixed in with nostalgia and griping about capitalism because that's apparently where my head is at all the time when I'm not daydreaming my little stories or making up video essays in my head that will never be made. That's why I do stream of consciousness Tumblr essays full of minute details that absolutely are not necessary, but this is how my goddamn ADHD brain works. Now you know what it's like to be in my Discord server.

That post is, of course, pinned in the music channel.

As it should be.

... Fuck Pandora, I don't even fuck with it no more, I miss Grooveshark, weh, my playlist on that site was eight hours long before they shut it down in 2014. Devastated. I was in the middle of using it when it went offline.

Okay now I'm done for real, sorry.

[keshetchai]

Thank you for your deconstruction of that post about Jewish ethnicity and your detailed explanation of why it was a terrible take! I saw that post earlier and it got my hackles up but I didn't even know where to start when they're starting from such a flawed understanding of Jewish identity and ethnicity in general.

Yeah idk the most generous conclusions I have were those last two points — the argument either starts from assuming ethnonationalists have always been the ones defining ethnicity/they are the main arbiters of defining it (which I just reject categorically), or they have misunderstood or don't actually know what ethnicity means (outside of understanding ethnonationalism is bad).

And I never want to come out the gate with like "I think you just don't know what that word means," because that feels extremely condescending and combative. At the same time we're clearly facing some kind of vast language gap if the concept of "Jews are an ethnic group" is considered absurd or laughable. So working backwards those are my guesses for how someone got themselves to that conclusion which bizarrely had a lot of reblogs and i didn't look at the notes but like.

Please tell me I wasn't the only one baffled by this?? Anti-/non-zionist Jewish movements have typically still explicitly emphasized ethnicity, like...sometimes even moreso because "shared cultural identity here-ness" HAS to care more about group belonging in culture rather than in place or nation.

Either way: We can just reject ethnonationalism without erasing the concept of people having ethnicities! That's totally an option. Israel and Palestine both have histories of nationalist movements AND both can and should reject ethnonationalism because the levant itself is a place full of a variety of ethnicities. No matter what the future of the levant and any states within it look, ethnonationalism should be rejected.

Like yeah I can fully climb on board the whole "the modern nation state itself is bad, borders are violence enacted upon people, nation-states foment nationalism, colonialism, and so on, let's move forwards towards stateless society." Ethnonationalism is bad.

But simultaneously I live in like...a reality where something has to float us all until we can get there and I don't believe in a leftist rapture of "bloody revolution will overthrow all of current society."

spoilers: ethnic self-determination and governance doesn't mean you can avoid ethnonationalism strains cropping up!

Also just because this has been getting to me recently, here's a big tangent not part of the OP but something else I've been seeing: Indigeneity to a place doesn't actually elevate you to this morally pure and uncorrupt self, and it doesn't mean you're going to be a better society than anyone else trying to govern there or avoid ethnonationalism or nationalism.

That's...I mean that's not how it fucking works. I keep seeing like "these Israelis are destroying olive trees, an indigenous people wouldn't do that!" And it's like...such a kindergarten way of treating the status of being "native" as morally and ethically untainted by bad ideologies. To me it absolutely reeks of "noble savage" fantasies wherein like: nobleness of character, innocent benevolence to foreigners, and perfect stewardship of land is somehow the hallmarks of "true" Indigeneity.

I regret to inform everyone but if you only ever get the highlights reel history of Spanish colonialism in Mexico: the Spaniards were able to conquer Mexico the way they did for a variety of reasons (smallpox devastating the native populace is one of them), but one of those big key ways is the fact that various native groups hated the aztec triumvirate (the Mexica) so much that they actively helped the Spanish overthrow them.

The Spanish didn't conquer the Aztecs by themselves. The Spanish had maybe an army of 3,100 or so. The Aztecs had a fighting force of 200,000+, not including other allied forces. The spanish were able to conquer the Aztec empire because a whole lot of other indigenous forces were assisting them.

Being indigenous to somewhere absolutely doesn't mean you won't burn or destroy farms, or murder your also indigenous neighbors, or commit terrible atrocities, or even become an imperial force who enslaves people or enforces a caste system or anything else. It's not a guarantee that your society won't be shitty somehow. The Aztecs were comprised of native people, and they still cracked open rib cages of other human beings to extract their hearts in ritual sacrifice so like. It's not a strong argument to say "they definitely aren't from here because they destroy tree groves or murder Innocents."

If you wanna talk about settlers being settlers there's other ways to do it.

[windvexer]

A) your "the gods fucking suck sometimes" post came across my dash at a really good time in my own practice, which I feel like so many of your posts do, Chicken, and thank you for that.

B) i don't really engage with the witchcraft community except for lurking, so I guess who am I to talk, but i'm really becoming frustrated with the amount of beginner-friendly stuff on this website that tells people that 'everything they've heard about witchcraft is wrong so don't worry.' I wonder whether it comes from a place of fear deep-set within witches from a, well, Christian society of being seen as something they're not - and I don't imagine it's necessarily malicious, rather it comes from a place of comfort within their craft (ah, well I haven't suffered for years, so nobody else possibly could!) and a personal effort to distance themselves from an ingrained stereotype of witchcraft, which results in downplaying a lot of the things that align with that........

Regardless of intention people learn from that, become more experienced themselves, and when that leads to dismissing the experience of your fellow practitioners/assuming your craft and aspects of it are universal that's going well overboard

A) I am glad to hear it was helpful :)

B) At this point in time I'm not even talking about like, tricksters (and when people say that, I think they just mean "liars," the trickster archetype really needs a new PR team), demonolatry, or evil gods. I'm talking about regular, normal witchcraft!

People can have beautiful, fulfilling paths that are never dangerous, and then decide to deepen their connection by entering into intense ritual work with a local spirit for a year. And that work becomes demanding, and exhausting, and they have to make sacrifices to maintain it. And sometimes they ask if it was really the right choice.

It's not just about danger! It just sucks sometimes!

I had a tumultuous few early years of witchcraft, but even now when my path is feeling so much more comfortable and fulfilling and really like my true home, I still have responsibilities. Do I want to go to sabbat every 28 days? No! I'm lazy! I want to play Sims 4!

But I can't stop going, because I need to go. Because I love my spirit family. Because it's a part of me finding my true home in this world. I need those things.

It's just also sometimes a chore. You know?

I have spells I need to upkeep for my life to go how I want it to go. I have to take care of them. It can be tedious. Sims 4 has horses now. You know? It's 110 degrees outside. I don't want to walk around the property giving myself a sinus headache from the dust, checking on wards. But what else am I gunna do?

I'm not saying that the two modes are "safe" and "dangerous." I'm just saying, witchcraft can be burdensome. And not everyone is in a position where they can "just change it."

So yeah. I'm not trying to be on a "witchcraft is hella dangerous for real" rant. My rant is more like...

If this is a genuine faith that can carry people through decades of life, and we believe we are truly interacting with entities that have their own personhood and agendas, then from time to time things are going to get hard for some people.

That from time to time, developing those relationships will be difficult and require sacrifice. If we believe this is a faith that can allow people to work to modify their lives, then at times it will be work and feel like hard work and be something that a practitioner can't wait to be done with, because not only does Sims 4 have horses, it also has llamas that you can pet.

And pretending that can't happen, or always blaming the witch when things go badly ("just change! if you don't like your path, modify it! it's anything you want it to be! such-and-such spirits are always benevolent/will never hurt you/will never mislead you!"), isn't a service to anyone.

Idk. The more I talk about this the more I feel like my entire point is "witchcraft is just kinda like real life, it has its ups and downs." Which I could have just said that one sentence this morning and not have had to type all this lmao.

[sarilolla]

Now I'm thinking about Pop Trolls and what happened with them... I love making it clear in my fic that what happened with the Bergens affected them, to various degrees.

Small ramble? I guess? It's not completely cohesive

In Hanahaki, they make peace with the Bergens, but most older Trolls are still anxious around them, and only Bridget and Gristle actually know where the village is and they never go in.

In Different Beat I'm at a bit of limbo, I can see them helping Bridget which would help King Gristle and it dominos into the Bergens being happy, but there won't be a positive relationship between the two species.

In Experiment Pop... well, Bergens are genuinely huge bad guys there, and there's no way the Pop Trolls would ever willingly interact with a Bergen. There's more trauma than just Trollstice, and it affects the newer generations too meaning they can't fully get away from what happened.

I have more aus that I haven't posted but Bergen relations are spotty or bad there too, so... I guess I just think they should have been affected more

So it's all different, which is the joy of aus, but something I don't like is how glossed over the trauma of Trollstice is in the movies and the series. How long were the Pop Trolls captured and eaten? The franchise doesn't give us a definitive answer, but from context clues I would say a decade or two at the bare minimum. The first movie starts with the story where it's shown the city is built around the Troll Tree. They wouldn't get such an established city in so little time, I refuse to believe that. Trollstice was so integral to them, that the adult Bergens in the beginning of the first movie seemed like they had had a Troll their entire lives. I refuse to believe the Bergens showed up between BroZone breaking up and Rosiepuff being eaten

I want to say that realistically, the Pop Trolls were captured for 80-130 years. It may seem like a lot, but it is what makes most sense to me (feel free to debate me on that and provide your own speculated timeline). The timeline just... doesn't work properly? We don't have any set points to look at, except that in the first movie the escape was 20 years ago, and between World Tour and Band Together a month has passed. This makes it so I can fuck around with the timeline as needed, but they could have given me more to work with. So the only timeline I am working with is that at the escape, the Pop Trolls had been stuck with the Bergens for nearly 130 years, the whole Music schism happened almost 200 years ago (and while they were with the Bergens there was a generation or two who didn't even know other Trolls existed), and the Strings were made around 250 years ago? But that also doesn't fully fit with how a society evolves, so might have been even longer between all of this?

Anyway... Back to the Pop Trolls and how the Bergens and Trollstice affected them

I love making jokes in my stories about how desensitized the Pop Trolls are to death and destruction of their home. I love writing other Trolls' reactions to that. It's fun and morbid at the same time. Like the other genres can be as pissy as they want about Pop's attempted takeover so many years ago, but in a cynical way, they got their karma... Other genres had places to be safe, evolve in their own time, no huge threats, but the Pop Trolls lost that, and you can't tell me that wasn't lost for a long time

I firmly believe the Pop Trolls don't have an actual cemetery, but rather a field of flowers planted in remembrance, a Memorial. Flowers planted for the ones lost, but no bodies buried with them. Just a flower representing who they were and what they meant to their loved ones (which brings in my headcanon that flowers and flower language is a big part of Pop Troll culture). It's just in the past 20 years they actually have had bodies to bury, and those are few and far between

...I had a point to this ramble, I think. I think Trollstice and Pop Troll history is my fictional roman empire, it has genuinely gone in and out of my head since the first movie. It just hits hard

[dukeofankh]

Any time you build a social media bubble that pretty much just consists of one binaric gender you see these like...thinkpieces about how the other one thinks. And it always reminds me of how Aristotle believed women had fewer teeth than men. Nobody...asked? To check?

Like, I picture a bunch of stodgy women in togas and sandals hanging out in the Forum waving their arms round stoically yet dramatically and making a big hubbub, and someone with a name like thedoctorsolvedmywaywardson will loudly announce "cishet men do not feel love like women do. This is because of society." And everyone will nod and chatter animatedly, except expectopavulva, who will point dramatically from across the marble floor and yell "no! It's biological! Testosterone is a hate demon who lives in the blood!" And then the two groups will start squabbling.

And then you look out the window at the other building the next hill over and there's a crowd of men gathered around one at a podium named u/snarkwolf or something and you can hear his grumbly, droning voice saying "females, despite claiming to value sensitivity snd emotional intelligence, yearn for the domineering hand of the Chad." And everyone will nod sagely. One raises a hand and asks whether it might not be possible to simply kill them.

And the issue (aside from the murder) is not just that people believe incorrect things about the inner lives of people whose lived experience they don't share. The issue is also that if you isolate yourself from that other group, you create an environment where nobody who actually has the mentality being discussed can point out when an idea is absurd and wrong. It might be because they aren't around, or possibly because their perspective on their own motivations is seen as less trustworthy than an intuitive guess from people who are part of the more familiar group.

The result of that environment is naturally and always going to be people saying and believing fucking hilariously wrong things.

I would say "hey, so everyone just talk to each other and that'll fix it" but, you know. The "can we kill them" guy kinda...makes that tough to recommend as a realistic catchall fix. As a good stopgap, try this cool trick where if you, a person that doesn't actually have the lived experience of a gender, start writing something about how that gender thinks or feels internally? Their motivations and stuff like that? If you start writing a post about that then you can just delete it actually.

[ronanceautistic]

maybe it’s because i’m just no longer a baby gay really but last year i just wasn’t all that vibing with pride month the way i used to and figured it was because of general life shit making me unhappy but this year i have essentially the exact same feeling but stronger and i can barely put my finger on why. but anyways here’s some possibly hot takes on why i think it is

1. i think we genuinely, seriously need to start phasing out the acronym. like, everytime someone mentions it while missing one of those letters im like okay are you exclusionary or is this just a long ass stupid acronym that will literally never be inclusive enough. i’m pitching the term “pride community” because some people are sensitive about the term queer.

2. capitalism. we live in a society

3. like most of the human interaction i’ve had these past few months have been on tumblr and everyone loves to infight on here in a really pointless fucking way.

4. i would say this is the biggest factor. lack of accessibility lol. i saw someone point out that pride month just sort of emphasises how ableist and inaccessible even inclusive spaces are and. yah. it’s not exactly the fault of a pride parade but it definitely does sort of give that feeling of “everyone in my community can do this except me, and this month i feel less a part of the community than any other time of year”.

5. ace discourse woohoo!

anyways there’s no point to this post. this isn’t even really a rant per say bc i’m not angry im just. idk. tired and rambling i guess.

[the-path-to-redemption]

There need to be some clarification regarding Blake speech. In True Colors this is what she actually said after deaft of Iliad and the twins

"Humans didn't do this. We did this. Faunus. We did this to ourselves. We're just as capable of hate and violence as the humans but I don't think any of us would jump at the chance to point that out. So why are we letting Adam do it for us? By doing nothing and staying silent, we let others speak and act in our place. And if we're not proud of the choices they make, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

This is the message Adam Taurus will bring to the world if no one stops him. But we can stop him! You have to understand that all of you are looking for simple answers to a very complicated problem, and I can't give that to you. I don't know how to make hate go away, I don't. But I know that this kind of violence is not the solution.

I understand that to ask you to leave your homes and protect Haven Academy is asking you to put your lives at risk, but that's what's at stake. So I'm going, and I'll stand by myself if I have to."

I do find that last section really ironic because in the next episode the people of Menagerie armed themselves with orange version of WF logos and somehow convinced convinced the second most racist nation against Faunus to stop Adam group. Instead of just striaght up arresting all of them.

Another thing to critique is that we haven't actually seen WF attacking other faunus both before or even during the series. Other than Blake family and I guess the faunus protest but that's more disrupting than physical harming faunus do their peacful ideologies.

I applaud you for going back to that tone-deaf ass speech, anon.

Let's just dissect this shit yeah? Because wow, this is a speech that is for sure written by writers who do not understand how systematic racial oppression works.

Long Post Ahead

"Humans didn't do this. We did this. Faunus. We did this to ourselves. We're just as capable of hate and violence as the humans but I don't think any of us would jump at the chance to point that out. So why are we letting Adam do it for us? By doing nothing and staying silent, we let others speak and act in our place. And if we're not proud of the choices they make, then we have no one to blame but ourselves."

Blake. B L A K E. You do know that the primary reason that the Faunus even respond to their oppressors or humans in general with scorn is because they've been OPPRESSED, right? We're talking about generations of people who were enslaved, abused, isolated, murdered, and so much more still having to live in a society that can legally deny them entry to establishment based on their race, and somehow it's THEIR fault that humans don't like them?

Of course they would be capable of hate and violence, those ideas were put upon them through hate and violence from humans. The Faunus is doing it out of a reaction because the governments that should have protected them willingly look away while slavery is happening right under their noses. Accusing the Faunus, especially the ones of Menagerie who migrated there to escape racial conflict, for not saying anything while human communities continues to treat Faunus like shit is fucking vile. Of course they wouldn't. Why would they say anything about their people reacting to violence with violence when the systems put that hatred against them there in the first place? Asinine shit.

"This is the message Adam Taurus will bring to the world if no one stops him. But we can stop him! You have to understand that all of you are looking for simple answers to a very complicated problem, and I can't give that to you. I don't know how to make hate go away, I don't. But I know that this kind of violence is not the solution."

See, this part right here could have worked. Blake understand that there is no simple solution to solving racism, and she does admit that she doesn't know how to make that hate go away. That's good character! They could've taken this to her not wanting her friends, the people she cares about in the WF, to be remembered as faceless masses of violence and hate in the conflict, but to be remembered as the people they are as well. But to say that violence isn't the way to do it at all like her and her limp-dick father has been preaching to oppressed people is straight-up fucking ignorant, especially after V2 where Blake herself admitted that being peaceful protesters didn't help them and her father had to be replace by Sienna, whose methods did bring results.

Even real-life revolutionists who conduct peaceful protests carried firearms or a defensive weapons because they knew that being pacifistic all the time is naive and could very much get them murdered by anti-protesters or worse, the government. Stop fucking expecting marginalized communities to beg for their safety and livelihood from bigots, separating us into "good ones" and "bad ones" when those people want ALL of us dead.

"I understand that to ask you to leave your homes and protect Haven Academy is asking you to put your lives at risk, but that's what's at stake. So I'm going, and I'll stand by myself if I have to."

Girl, you are part of the problem. You are guilt-tripping marginalized people who just wants to be left alone after lifetimes worth of systematic abuse to risk their lives defending a kingdom that wouldn't even spit on them if they were on fire. You're right, anon, it's a fucking miracle that the Mistrali legal forces didn't fucking apprehend all of them when they stormed over Mistral with torches and weapons.

This whole plot line is fucked and so tone-deaf that I vomit every damn time.