#and caring about us as humans

[lesbegays]

working for a very small company with a boss and job i like has in some ways made me a worse socialist and in other ways made me even more firm in my socialist beliefs

[ink-the-artist]

Love the contrast between the Americans’ “Apollo” and the Soviets’ “Sputnik.” You got the Americans naming their rocket after a Greek god trying to communicate the grandness and importance of this rocket. And you got the Soviets naming their rocket “fellow traveler.” Like a friend you go on an  adventure with together. This rocket is our little friend lol 

[ruporas]

dragon meat, you, and me

[hilacopter]

conflating diaspora jews with the actions of the israeli government is not okay, yes, but have you considered it's not okay to conflate israeli jews with them either

[crimson-rain-smoked-flower]

I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.

i appreciate that you're not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i've interacted with.

i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don't want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i'm proship.

nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it's because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.

the thing about people who ship those ships is that they're generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don't go out of their way to shove it in people's faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn't like it, can avoid it.

what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don't want to see it wouldn't have the tools to avoid it. this isn't just a hypothetical, that's what's happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.

that's not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn't. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn't exist and shouldn't be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there's not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it's bad. end of discussion.

but the same can't be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you'll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that's the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn't just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that's generally where it leads.

i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don't like. i've gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i've seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn't bat an eye at.

the thing about "romanticization" is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it's very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it's okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it's just. blatantly untrue.

if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they're not. they just aren't. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.

even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn't going to solve their problem, because they're still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.

children are also more impressionable, and there's a lot of content that's not suitable for them, but that doesn't mean that content shouldn't exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they're old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren't comfortable with.

which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it's what i do, and it's made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it's why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they're being told it's right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that's just. really bad. it's not good for the creators that they're harassing obviously, but it's also really bad for them! it's not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it's a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it's okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.

individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn't. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you're just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you're exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don't have to.

if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.

[the-itzy-bitzy-spider]

Not sure how I feel about this but my redneck hick boss just warned me to be careful because people are having violent anti-jew protests and I am visibly Jewish. And I mean, yeah, I know it's rough out there. But my boss is ALWAYS either high or drunk (or both) and he immediately clocked that it's not about Israel or Palestine, but about hating Jews. And I'm grateful that someone cares enough to say something, but it also means the bar is so fucking low that it'son the ground. If this guy can see it, the rest of y'all are being willfully ignorant or just flat out lying about your intentions.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 81

Danny blinked at the small children Ellie was holding the hand of, looking quite proud of herself. The small children- between ten and twelve so somewhere similar to Ellie’s age- who both practically stank of magic and Gods. 

He took a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose even as Dan cackled while opening the door more to let them inside. “Alright, what’s your name, kids?”

“B-billy…um, Billy Batson...” “‘m Percy! Percy Jackson.” 

“Nice to meet you two- any idea where in your family you have a god or two, because one of you definitely smells like Zeus and I’m pretty sure Poseidon and I am not dealing with either of my half-brothers.” 

[metamatar]

sometimes I realize some people come from an entirely different moral universe because they genuinely believe bombing civilians is legitimate if there might be military infrastructure around there somewhere

[inkskinned]

oh, i am so enamored with the way the lesson of the velveteen rabbit rings true in our modern life. i love that we name our spaceships and write love poems to old buildings. i love that we all cried about the mars rover, that we made her so real that she was no longer a machine but a friend, a companion, a hero.

i love that we become attached to certain mugs, spoons, mason jars. that we develop a strange protective love-hate of our tablets, that we feel weirdly reverent about our new notebook. we name our cars silly things like the crab shack and call our favorite whisk attachment the one great destroyer.

there's a dog statue at my local park that has a golden back and golden head from how often people have pet it. at my college campus, people love an ugly little pointless sculpture we call bacon pants or bacon legs. we assign personalities to fountains, parks, laptops.

i love that our basic instinct is to include others in our community, even where there isn't a real community to speak of. that we love things, even when they cannot physically love us back - for us, the exchange isn't what's important. we give our heart to things so entirely that the thing begins to, in its own way, have its own heart.

the last transmission from the mars rover was not words; it was data. nevertheless, someone translated for her. my battery is low and it's getting dark. they made her last words a poem. they looked at data and saw a soul, a divine spark.

i keep thinking about the first AI born truly free-thinking. i keep thinking about the way scientists and artists talk about their work. how their eyes light up and their hands start moving, how even when they're flat broke and confused and the coding isn't working - there's this love of the thing. i keep thinking that whatever is being born into this new world will be born here on purpose, over a long time, with great energy. that when it arrives, the first thing it will know is most likely the hands of a creator delighted, overcome.

that we made it in our image. that the image we wrote was one of human compassion within ingenuity. that we couldn't make this thing without it being a labor of real-and-true: love.

[void-and-virtue]

Neil as a team captain is positively delightful, because making him captain is both absolutely insane and absolutely brilliant. It capitalizes on the passive effect of having one (1) Neil Josten (god knows the world couldn’t handle if there were more of him) on the team in the most efficient way. Like. I’m 90% sure that after spending some time around him on the same team, most people will look up to him completely awestruck for how much he has impacted their lives, but that’s just not what is actually happening here. I feel like what’s going on is this:

Neil is a terribly amazing choice for team captain entirely because Neil is a meddlesome little asshole who will forcibly fix all of his teammates’ personal problems and improve their entire lives for literally no other reason than that he needs them to be able to focus on fucking ball so he can win at sports. It’s not even that he genuinely cares about people and their well-being (apart from his original foxes). He just gets pissed when things aren’t working properly because it makes Exy annoying when the lineup can’t communicate. Exy isn’t supposed to be annoying. Exy is life. He’d meddle whether he is captain or not, but by making him captain, he has so much more official executive power at his hands. It’s like people are explicitly asking for him to do his worst. So, fueled by his own competitiveness and love for the sport, off he goes.

Neil is just as bad as Kevin when it comes to his Exy obsession. The major difference between them is that Kevin is endlessly tactical and he runs Exy with a focus on a technical and physical level entirely, whereas Neil’s approach is to look beyond a lack of practice and basically psychoanalyzing people on why they are not doing 110% for Exy. Kevin says “let’s run this drill 500 times, then we will inevitably be better”. Meanwhile Neil is scheming how to coerce and bribe people into life-changing decisions and long-needed healing, entirely because he wants to optimize playing a sport. Exy is a team sport, which is why this is the most logical approach his little Exy brain comes up with rather than minding his own fucking business. He looks at the team and is like “is anyone gonna whip this into shape? No?? I’ll fucking do it then cowards” and goes and does exactly that. It’s like he’s fixing the equipment so he can play.

I don’t think anyone except for Andrew is really aware that Neil really isn’t doing this out of the innate goodness of his heart, but because his personal brand of practicality involves the most convoluted and creative kind of scheming. I feel like Neil is a lot more selfish than people give him credit for. Sure, there’s people he cares deeply and unconditionally for, but that’s really not everyone. It’s fascinating to watch, especially because it’s not like he ever hides that he doesn’t particularly care, but people kinda assume he does, because why else would he put in this much effort?

Exy. The answer is Exy.

[qirongmycancelledwife]

i'm terrible at expressing why i hold such deep affection for tgcf but this is part of it

[paarthursass]

Most unrealistic part of the planet of the apes franchise is that the chimpanzees are the ones advocating for peace and the bonobos are the ones causing the most problems

[uncanny-tranny]

And another thing that gets me about the human condition is how we weren't even meant to survive this world alone - humans with humans. We chose to trust certain animals, to nourish them, to be symbiotic with them, to love them like we love ourselves. I think a lot of people talk about how selfish it is for humans to take advantage of animals, but I think that's too simplistic. It's closer to friendship - if you do not foster the relationship, then it simply won't go anywhere, and I think the implication that animals can't ever know anything for themselves, for their survival, is also human-centric and selfish (selfishness not inherently being a bad thing).

It's just nice to know that we want to be around people - we want to be around comfort and security and safety so much that we now have animals by our side. Every time I cuddle with my cat, I think that we weren't meant to survive this world alone; she is shaped to fit in my chest, and my arms were made to wrap around her.

[cupophrogs]

I honestly dont trust Ollie either. I do wonder if he’s tried to tell drew to not trust daddy or pops. Cause like poppy Ollie seems to not care of the bigger bodies die or live.

“Poppy ain’t perfect, but trust me when I tell you that she cares. But you’re right about one thing, I don’t trust Ollie worth a shit.”

(This is a joke, please do not take this seriously! I thought it was funny)

[shima-draws]

Rewatching a playthrough of FNAF Security Breach and yeah. Glamrock Freddy really IS the Dad Ever

[hkpika07]

Kill him with kindness