#tangentially related the subject matter would be

[averlym]

(omg your hair looks great) "you turned out so well!"

[thatguywhofedme]

Bit of a change if pace since here comes a cow 🐄🐮

I've been into feedism for as long as I've had a sex drive so this kink is an absolutely massive turn on for me, arguably never had a fulfilling sexual interaction or m@sturbation without something at least tangentially related to fat.

Becoming a massive mattress of pudge and lard always sounded hot in theory but the reality of it seemed so scary. But nie I've been fantasizing more and more about my legs being too fat to lift, my boobs being so swollen and engorged they make breathing a workout, a double sweat wide dimpled butt that makes doors a hazard to get stuck on

I have no idea why now, but being fed to death started sounding, loving and comforting like any other bdsm activity.

Is there anything that makes death feedism specifically your thing or could you elaborate on what exactly you find hot? 😈🥰

Also P.S.

I'd really like to dm you and talk to you cause you legitimately seem like a good, loving and caring partner and person and not some run of the mill weirdo that I found on dating apps 💜💜💘

Omg thank you for the ask, it's nice to have a cow instead of a piggy 🐮

I understand what you mean, I also have a good sex drive which can really be put to good use when I got some fat to play with or at least some fat/feedism talk to put me in the mood 🔥❤️

I love the way you describe how fat you want to become, especially the words "massive mattress of pudge and lard" is such a turn on and I understand it would be scary in reality to become this obese, but with someone by your side who knows what they're doing and truly takes care of you, it can be a lot easier and enjoyable for you 😊

I understand how you feel, feeding someone to death can be scary, but also really intimate

To answer your question, what got me into death feedism are multiple aspects, for example, I've always been someone who loves to care for the people important in my life, caring for someone who has no limits and wants to grow as fat and obese as possible with no end in sight, no matter how massively obese they get fits right in with my personality, I want to make sure that my partner will always be loved and cared for no matter what, whether it's at 600lbs or completely immobile, I want their life to be as enjoyable for them as possible and to be happy until the end 🩷

Everything about death feedism turns me on, whether we're talking about the health issues (struggle to breath and waddle, equipment used to help make your life easier like oxygen cannulas and mobility scooters), the share size your body could become with all this fat and lard enveloping you and the gigantic portions I would have to feed you just to keep you satisfied are one of multiple turn ons when it comes to death feedism 😈💕

I would also love to dm you, your ask was such a delight and from what I've just read, you seem like a genuinely wonderful person and loving partner as well ❤️

And believe me, you're not the only one who's had bad experiences on dating apps, I got loads of stories to tell on the subject lol but please, feel free to dm me, I would love to get and know you 🥰

[deadpresidents]

In 1919, his work in Europe done, [Herbert] Hoover returned permanently to the United States. He had lived abroad for twenty years and was something of a stranger in his own land, yet he was so revered that he was courted as a potential Presidential candidate by both political parties. It has often been written that Hoover had been away so long that he didn't know whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That is not actually true. He had joined the Republican Party in 1909. But it is true that he wasn't terrifically political and had never voted in a Presidential election. In March 1921, he joined Warren G. Harding's Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. After Harding died suddenly in 1923, he continued in the same post under Calvin Coolidge.

Hoover was a diligent and industrious presence in both administrations, but he was dazzlingly short on endearing qualities. His manner was cold, vain, prickly, and snappish. He never thanked subordinates or inquired about their health or happiness. He had no visible capacity for friendliness or warmth. He did not even like shaking hands. Although Coolidge's sense of humor was that of a slightly backward schoolboy -- one of his favorite japes was to ring all the White House servant bells at once, then hide behind the drapes to savor the confusion that followed -- he did at least have one. Hoover had none. One of his closest associates remarked that in thirty years he had never heard Hoover laugh out loud.

Coolidge kept an exceedingly light hand on the tiller of state. He presided over an administration that was, in the words of one observer, "dedicated to inactivity."...By 1927, Coolidge worked no more than about four and a half hours a day -- "a far lighter schedule than most other Presidents, indeed most other people, have followed," as the political scientist Robert E. Gilbert once observed -- and napped much of the rest of the time. "No other President in my time," recalled the White House usher, "ever slept so much." When not napping, he often sat with his feet in an open desk drawer (a lifelong habit) and counted cars passing on Pennsylvania Avenue.

All this left Herbert Hoover in an ideal position to exert himself outside his areas of formal responsibility, and nothing pleased Herbert Hoover more than conquering new administrative territories. He took a hand in everything -- labor disputes, the regulation of radio, the fixing of airline routes, the supervision of foreign loans, the relief of traffic congestion, the distribution of water rights along major rivers, the price of rubber, the implementation of child hygiene regulations, and much else that often seemed only tangentially related to matters of domestic commerce. He became known to his colleagues as the Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary of Everything Else...

Coolidge didn't like most people, but he seemed especially not to like Hoover. "That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad!" Coolidge once barked when the subject of Hoover came up. In April 1927, Coolidge puzzled the world by issuing a statement proclaiming that Hoover would never be appointed Secretary of State...Why Coolidge issued the statement at all, and why with such finality, was a matter that puzzled every political commentator in the country. As Hoover had indicated no desire for the role, and the incumbent, Frank B. Kellogg, no inclination to leave it, they were as bewildered as everyone else.

With withering disdain Coolidge referred to his tireless Commerce Secretary as Wonder Boy, but though he sneered, he was glad to have someone to do so much of his work for him....(W)hen the Mississippi flooded as it never had before, it was to Herbert Hoover that President Coolidge turned. One week after making his enigmatic promise not to promote Hoover to the role of Secretary of State, Coolidge appointed him to head the relief efforts to deal with the emergency. Apart from that one act, Coolidge did nothing. He declined to visit the flooded areas. He declined to make any federal funds available or to call a special session of Congress. He declined to make a national radio broadcast appealing for private donations. He declined to provide the humorist Will Rogers with a message of hope and goodwill that Rogers could read out as part of a national broadcast. He declined to supply twelve signed photographs to be auctioned off for the relief of flood victims.

-- The weird relationship between the equally weird Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, via One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), courtesy Anchor Books (2014).

[thorraborinn]

sonneve

How might you describe or define animism, or alternatively, do you have any recommendations for reading about it?

Graham Harvey defines it as understanding "that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others." This is definitely a better definition than "the belief that everything has a soul" but you might also notice that it's vague to the point of including practically everything that doesn't include Aristotle's rational soul as a distinctive feature of humans. Harvey is aware of this (he even includes things like yelling at your computer as an animistic behavior). As soon as you start to narrow the definition more than that, it starts to exclude peoples and customs that it's trying to include.

Nordic Animism has a good short video that does like a drive-by description of animism and history of its study that comes from the same sorts of books that I'm going to mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_j9oPCE-Ns

Harvey edited a book called The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. If you were going to pick a single book to start with, you could do much worse than this. Very many of the authors are ones that you'd see recur frequently if you were to go deeper into studying recent anthropology related to animism. If chapters stand out, it would be a good idea to find that author's other works.

My personal favorite single book on the subject is How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn. He has a lecture on YouTube that introduces some of the ideas in the book: https://youtu.be/mSdrdY6vmDo?t=102.

Kohn draws heavily on the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Viveiros de Castro is one of the most important recent anthropologists in terms of him being the guy that everyone writing after him has to have an opinion about, whether positive or negative. It's a good idea to read him because he's going to come up in others' works. I personally find his stuff on Amazonian "perspectivism" very good. There's a collection of his essays called The Relative Native.

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram is a good book about animism and phenomenology, kind of using ideas from Western philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to derive something compatible with non-western animistic ideas. He has another book called Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology that I wasn't into but might be a good intro for some people.

There's like this whole scene of books about "entanglements" and use words like "response-ability"; it's not a bad idea to read one of them but I don't think it's necessary to read all of them; my favorite was The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Donna Haraway has some books in this category that I know some people love but didn't do as much for me, admittedly possibly because of stuff I'd already read that was influenced by them. Here is also a good critique of these authors that I think preserves the positive while pointing out limitations: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10180270.

Though only tangentially related to animism, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is not only good on its own but I think is important to read if you're also reading stuff that focuses on distinction or non-distinction of human from non-human.

Pantheologies by Mary-Jane Rubenstein isn't specifically about animism but intersects with and includes it. I think just reading through the first chapter is worthwhile (the rest might be better for others but it drew heavily on stuff I'd already read). She also has a bunch of stuff on Youtube.

I dunno if she uses the word, but some of Gloria Anzaldúa's work intersects with it, e.g. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro.

I am a big fan of Katherine Swancutt, she has written a lot of articles and done a lot of book editing; her book Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination is not really about animism per se but is a very good read.

Also not about animism, but a good thing to read for anyone interested in it, is The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism by Tomoko Masuzawa.

This is probably getting overwhelming so I'm cutting myself off even though there's other stuff that I would list otherwise. This stuff is currently very popular and well-funded in academia which means they are actually fairly widely available, including as audiobooks, for those who prefer those.

[unforestalledreturn]

// short headcanon and a placeholder for expansion later, but I forgot how displeased I was with the whole execution of Genesis's weird theme with 'SOLDIER honor'. Apparently this is cited as the reason why he doesn't participate in the rebellion at Deepground.

This is just one of many places the narrative for Genesis fails to make cohesive sense. How is it even tangentially related?

No matter, I can see Genesis declining to participate in the liberation of Deepground, but his reasons for doing so I am taking the creative liberty in saying he was either a) emotionally exhausted and unable to work himself up to immediately thrust himself into a whole new conflict, b) was not physically able at the time, but that proud motherfucker would give some snarky bullshit reason or c) perhaps the conversation got interrupted by conflict with the restrictiors.

I have a cute other hc that details Genesis spending time as a prisoner whose body and cells were used for further modification on subjects in Deepground. At some point, verse dependent, he is able to escape at which that point seals himself to recover.

[vicekillx]

24 and 25 for the ask meme? 👀

24. How do you deal with art block?

Either take a break or try something new. Sometimes if art just isn't cooperating no matter what, I take a day or a week off and do something else. If it's more persistent than that, sometimes I just have to change it up. Try a new subject matter, revisit a medium or program I haven't used in a while, do some experimental styles, etc. Mental health issues mean it doesn't always work, but it has a better success rate than most other things I've tried.

Tangentially related: If I really, really don't want to draw but I know I have things I need to work on, I commit to spending x amount (small, usually ~5 min) of time on that thing. If after that 5 min I'm still really not feeling it, I can put it down to do something else and come back to it later. A lot of the time it's just starting that's the hard part, and by the time I'm 5 min in, I can kind of trick myself into going "okay well I'm here now, let me just go until I do this part" or whatever

25. Based on your recent reference searches, what would the FBI assume about you?

That I'm a very horny cis gay male zoologist

[we-are-ashes]

I've been doing this course on the state and for the final we have a question where we get to talk about what we wish to study further that's even tangentially related to the course matter and class discussions. one of the things I said I'd wanna learn about was contemporary anarchy and its aestheticization/strong relationship with aesthetic movements. so I looked up a few sources that I could use, as was the assignment. i realised afterwards though that these were mostly written by old white men (which like, huge surprise, ikr?? /s).

so now I'm here to ask tumblr: any academic sources you know of related to the subject matter that's written by... not old-white-men? especially because, with a topic like this, I think insight and perspectives from poc, queer people, etc would be much more helpful

[weirdmageddon]

There’s something I’ve been struggling with for a while and I was hoping to get some insight from someone in a similar situation: I’ve been feeling kind of insecure about being Jewish lately because I feel like so much of the religion/culture is tied to Israel which is, as is pretty well known at this point, a military state with a stranglehold on its original Palestinian natives. How much of Judaism is intertwined with Zionism? Is it okay to identify with a culture that’s associated with a state that’s so cruel to a culture they think don’t belong there? Please don’t take this as some sort of interrogation or attack, it’s just been nagging at me for a while now.

dont worry i feel the exact same way. i think the bottom line about it is having a sense of fairness, justice, and peace as an individual. an ethnostate violates each one of those. it’s not that i don’t support a safe place for jews i just don’t support ethnostates, regardless of who it’s for, even if i would benefit. i would not feel comfortable moving to israel knowing the policies they have in place for the people living there.

palestinians created this website and they address this. anti-zionism is NOT antisemitism!

The recent rise to prominence of a distorted and shallow understanding of identity politics has been a boon to this kind of conflation. Suddenly we see Zionism being detached from its material history and presented as an integral part of Jewish identity. This is especially popular in the West, where young Zionists who are raised on propaganda and myths of this “amazing” Zionist project come to treat it as inseparable from themselves. Here, we see the cynical twisting of social justice language to declare that only Zionists may define what Zionism is — as if it was a subjective phenomenon, with no material reality, founders, history, effects or victims — and that it was an attack on the Jewish people to oppose it or describe it as colonial.

Criticism of Israel and its founding ideology cannot be conflated with the hatred of the Jewish people. When Palestinians resist Israeli colonialism, it is not due to the religion or ethnicity of Israelis. Resistance to foreign domination has been a staple of oppressed and colonized people all across the globe. From the very beginning, the Zionist movement had the goal of establishing an exclusivist ethnic state at the expense of the natives already living there, Palestinians objecting to and resisting this endeavor cannot be compared to the odious, murderous antisemitism that plagued Europe throughout history. This is not even to mention that most Zionists today aren’t even Jewish, and many anti-Zionists are.

as a jewish person myself, zionism very much is colonial. the words zionists use to talk about it is colonialist language, including the terra nullius argument. religious text is never a good excuse to nullify the reality that is right in front of you, which in this case is living breathing people occupying that space in the present just living their lives.

in an ideal world, territorial bastards wouldn’t desire to play king of the hill on small piece of land in the middle east because an ancient text took place there. “back then” is completely irrelevant. what matters is now. things have changed. other people occupy that territory now. it’s like…girl move on. earth has been following this pattern forever: populations changing and migrating over time. religion doesn’t make anyone’s case special. settler colonialism is settler colonialism regardless of the “justification”.

this is more of a personal opinion and is only tangentially related but i’m honestly not a fan of religion in general since it creates an arbitrary distance and “us-vs-them” mentality where there otherwise wouldn’t be any. it creates a barrier to cooperation and harmony because one group has to assert their belief system over the other group as “right” when we can never really know the truth so who gives a shit. we need to look at what actually matters immediately which is resources (food, shelter, supplies) and how we can cooperate to survive. the stories of religion and whose religion is right has no bearing on that and is basically setting us up for unnecessary self-destruction instead of grounded concerns. i understand the important role religion can play for the individual but in all honesty it becomes a problem on a larger scale when people form in-group out-group based on theistic beliefs that can’t be proven or disproven. i don’t like to talk about religion much because it does not hold importance to me and having genuine discussions like this are like stepping on eggshells around many people

anyway lets get you some latkes and maybe youll feel better

[dwaginfodder]

Let's talk about Kykar.

Specifically, this Kykar:

Gorgeous art by April Prime aside, the object of interest to me here is the flavor text.

In their original printing in Core Set 2020, Kykar had no published lore. At the time, "Legends of" articles weren't being made, so there wasn't even hard confirmation of Kykar's pronouns. This wasn't unique; while Core 2020 had a loose connection to Chandra and her backstory, it introduced several legendary creatures who lacked context for their appearances (Vilis, Drakuseth, the now-famous Golos, among others). No story was published for the set, and even now Kykar is a character with no flavor text reference on other cards.

Their original flavor text is somewhat of a nothing burger:

"The raging gale fans the flames of righteous wrath."

While presenting some level of religious fervor to my eyes (that being the most common use of "righteous" ime), the only other thing this serves as is a description of the card's color identity. Mechanically, a trigger condition most commonly used in blue (casting a noncreature spell, a "raging gale") provides white ("righteous" 1/1 white Spirits with flying) and red (the "wrath" of sacrificing Spirits for mana) resource angles. It's a vague way to emphasize the WUR colors of the card, while sounding combative and somewhat holier-than-thou.

"A life is meaningless until put to use."

On the surface, Kykar's new flavor text may appear to be somewhat similar, a rewording of the sentiment that people should be judged by their actions, not their words. However, with the specific phrasing, combined with the context of the card's abilities, it gets a bit more fucked up.

Kykar is arguing that life has no intrinsic value (something I take personal issue with to begin with). However, they take this one step further by qualifying this through some subjective measure of "utility" - life only matters if it produces useful work, in their words. Kykar's apparent willingness to sacrifice souls for mana exacerbates the kind of stance they're taking, and it's one that feels distressingly familiar in the current capitalist hellscape.

That being said, there are interesting ways to use a character like this. Kykar still lacks a plane of origin (or indeed any flavor at all other than their own text), and thus is flexible in their own utility for the purpose of storytelling.

Magic currently has a bit of a problem with equating human beauty to goodness in its visual design. It's likely a mix of Christian pop culture influence and "safe" design for the current market. (Tangentially, Ikoria's story is the biggest outlier to this in recent memory, and I love it for that.) (Liliana Vess's relation to this is up for a wide variety of debate.) This has come up most glaringly with fan disquiet over the story's handling of Phyrexia, especially on this site, with many people finding kinship with the bodily-autonomous biomechanical horrors (who I also love dearly). Kykar and their painfully pragmatic view on life would make an excellent villain, were Wizard of the Coast willing to use them as such. Not only would they serve as the opposite of the ugly inside/ugly outside trope the game's lore has leaned on a little lately, but it'd be an apt metaphor for current events (though, unfortunately, not one I'm sure I trust them to execute well.)

[wjbs-aus]

Tumblr "for you" page bingo or checklist I guess?

Post about a fandom you're not in, but you reblogged a post that was tangentially related and/or tagged with it.

Post from a fandom you're not in, which you have never interacted with and most likely haven't heard of.

Introduction post from a blog you don't care about.

Poll from an artblog asking who to draw, where literally one of the options is related to a fandom you're in.

Fetish stuff that you're not into.

A blog posting stolen trans porn.

A blog posting stolen cis porn.

Posts glamourising self-harm in a way that makes you feel horrible for the rest of the day.

TERF shit that's being recommended to you for some reason (this is thankfully rare).

A post that someone you're following posted but you didn't reblog because you weren't interested.

A post that someone you're following posted, and you *did* reblog it, but didn't press the like button because the post's subject matter would have made that seem tasteless.

A post that is tagged with something you have blacklisted (again, this is rare, but it still happens occasionally).

Poorly-tagged fanart for a fandom you're not in, but which is technically a subcommunity of one you're in. Looking at you, MCYT fanartists who don't use the MCYT tag.

Sans Undertale AU stuff based on AUs that you thought would have lost relevance 7 years ago.

Someone you follow reblogging a post that you posted on one of your sideblogs I actually love when this happens :D

Posts about disorders you don't have and that are specifically intended for people who do.

Cool bug pictures!

Really cool artwork that is actually fanart for a thing you don't care about.

A really cool piece of fanart for a thing you like but you accidentally refresh the page and it's gone (this happened to me with a piece of really cool Cruelty Squad fanart)

A post from 8 months ago that was only relevant 8 months ago and 8 months later isn't relevant anymore.

Posts from a recent Tumblr holiday that you somehow missed.

A post that should be tagged with a thing you have blacklisted but isn't for some reason.

Random photos of a celebrity you've barely heard of.

Screenshots and/or gifs of a film or TV show you haven't watched.

Textposts written in a language you can't read.

A post you liked and reblogged, but this time it's a version without the addition the version you reblogged had.

And finally, a post about a fandom you are currently in.

Edit: OH ALSO random unattributed quote that just comes off as kinda pretentious.

[starlitsilver]

i was watching a let’s play of kingdom hearts a couple days ago (only tangentially related i promise). and in one of the sections the let’s players were just talking about Stuff, and they got onto the topic of art since they’re both artists. talking about how to motivate yourself as a beginner and that kind of thing, how to not get discouraged when you feel like art isn’t going your way, and one of them said something i thought was interesting. [paraphrased] “remember, art is fun!” and like usually i see that sentiment phrased as “art *should be* fun” or “being creative *should be* fun” but like no. the gamers were right. art just *is* fun!! i dont think there are very many concrete laws of the universe but i do think that being creative is inherently a fun thing! writing is just an extended, complicated game of make believe. painting is a form of play. etc etc, regardless of the medium.  

and that’s not to be dismissive of getting frustrated with your creative endeavors, i think that’s part of the process too, but i guess...idk i feel like creative people (which, in a better world, i really think would be most people!) owe it to themselves to do what they can to make creating stuff more enjoy for them. working in the way that you enjoy the most, seeking out the subject matter that most endears itself to you, making it easier on yourself in whatever ways you need to (accommodating your own needs is important!!)

idk i dont really have a point here, i just feel like it’s really easy to get lost in thinking that you Need to make art in a certain way, or make a certain type of art (you don’t! you can do whatever you want! the rules of Art are your bitch). Or that you can punish yourself into being a better artist if you just hate your work enough. ive been there. turns out hate isn’t actually a great motivator and also it feels bad. the process of artistic improvement does not actually need to involve any amount of self-flagellation for not already being better. 

conclusion: remember to relax and enjoy yourself! any kind of creative endeavor is inherently a cool thing and i mean that from the bottom of my heart. putting lil sounds together to make a song is cool!! putting a bunch of colors on a canvas to make a painting is sick as hell!! putting words together to make a story is fucking rad! making sculptures out of clay or wood or stone is goddamn awesome! i love art!!! :D

[soracities]

i love the unbearable lightness of being so dearly. could you recommend books similar to it? in any aspect? thank you! love your blog

it's a lovely book and I've yet to find one quite like it, but some tangentially related ones (maybe? I’m going almost entirely by mood here so):

A Moth to a Flame by Stig Dagerman (for its examinations of desire and psychological insight; for Dagerman's prose, too, which is some of the most stunningly cool and lucid I've ever come across--I don't quite know what the similarity is between him and Kundera's writing in Being but he was the first I thought of and I think it may have something to do with that clarity)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel by Ocean Vuong (for its exploration of identity in relation to various aspects, but particularly desire and history; for the notion of the body as text and text as body and the question of how these two palimpsests make and unmake us; for the writing which is just beautiful; a little more philosophical, too, I think, than Dagerman, or at least closer to the way Kundera uses it)

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (it’s been a while since I read this, but from what I recall I think the themes in regards to relationships & its pitfalls -- struggles of working through love, infidelity, heartbreak and all the grief tied up in it -- are somewhat similar, while being explored from a more personal & intimate angle (in terms of narrative feel, at least) than Being. The writing is beautiful, too, with a similar balance of clarity and meanderings to other topics)

Open Water: A Novel by Caleb Azumah Nelson (for its head-on collision with the mortifying ordeal of being known etc; for the question: what does love and vulnerability look like, when the world has constantly denied you a right to it? if you were drawn most to the issue of conflict within relationships, or felt more for Tereza then I think this moves in a similar vein, albeit from a different direction.)

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger (this may be hit or miss, but if you like the philosophical aspect then this may be worth a read--I think it might be the most abstract of Berger’s work but there are a lot of things he examines here that I think echo Being a little: sexuality and desire, love, death, responsibility and ethics, the simultaneous magnitude and transience of our lives and what, in light of this, we are to do with them--how we are to approach them in relation to the world, and the brutal history of it, that we inherit)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories by Raymond Carver (for explorations on the fallibility of humans in love and all the limitations, hurt, and aftershocks therein; style is very different to Kundera but the subject matter is quite close)

The Carpenter’s Pencil by Manuel Rivas (much, much more light-hearted than Being in case you want to try something smaller and less sombre; like Berger it may be hit or miss, but it is a more hopeful examination of love through the impossibilities of war and the inescapable brunt of history)

Additionally, you may also want to try Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino, or Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar if you’re feeling incredibly ambitious and don’t mind dedicating the God-only-knows-how-many hours to reading and possibly rereading it. You can also delve into some of Kundera’s other novels; I’ve only read Slowness, Life is Elsewhere and The Joke and am not sure how closely I would place them with Being, but I have heard The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is supposed to be his best and better than Being itself so it’s the one that’s next on my list. Hope some of these provide at least something for you, anon x

[motsimages]

A bit about non-binary Spanish and thoughts on mistranslations and grammar

This will be long

(@thebusylilbee @spanishskulduggery may also like it)

I'm writing this post partially to inform people of how we do non-binary Spanish, and also to invite non-English speakers to think about their own languages. I will include thoughts on other languages I know and certain difficulties they face. Native English speakers are also welcome to reflect on the way it works in their language and on the influence their language has in the world.

First of all, I do not think English or the Internet as we know it is the creator of non-binary language, in any language. The first records of non-binary Spanish we have are from the 1970s, according to non binary linguist Ártemis López, so it is probably a solution found by the local community. For context, the Franco dictatorship finished in 1975, so writing down non-binary Spanish in the 70s was a bold move. Gay and trans people had been sent to labour camps during the dictatorship. I guess it also means that if there is written record from that time, it was orally used before.

As an aside, and only tangentially related, inclusive language (using "men and women" instead of "men", for instance) was widely used in Spanish legal (and other) documents in the middle ages and up to the 17th Century, so "new" solutions are actually something people had done before.

And that is for historical context on the matter.

Now, generally speaking, how does Spanish grammar work?

Spanish is a gendered language. Nouns and adjectives tend to mark the gender of the subjects and objects almost constantly. There are some nouns and adjective that never change and are the same regardless of gender, but the tendency of the language is to show, to mention the difference. This applies to people, animals and things, even abstract concepts have grammatical gender.

La casa es grande, bonita y amplia. - The house is big, pretty and large.

El coche es grande, bonito y amplio. - The car is big, pretty and large.

La tristeza - The sadness. El amor - The love.

Notice that "grande" doesn't change, but the other adjectives do change. That is generally how this works. There are lots of other examples for either, but it would make a super long post, so just a glimpse.

Also, Spanish has a lot of verbal conjugations and they all show the subject (who does what), so very often we don't need pronouns at all. Personal pronouns can be used or not in many occasions, so it is relatively easy to avoid using one. Possessive pronouns do not refer to the person, but to the object and often have no marker either (mi vs mío, for instance, where "mi" has no gender marker but "mío" does, and still is a reference to the owned object).

"This is her brother" in Spanish would be "Este es su hermano". Notice that in bold is what marks gender in English, and in italics what marks gender in Spanish. They do not relate to the same things, so each has its own problems and solutions.

This happens with many other languages in many interesting ways. In Russian, for instance, also a very gendered language where personal pronouns can drop in sentences, has declensions (so extra gender markers), but also the verbs in the past form have a gender marker so "He studied a lot" could be "[On] Mnogo utchil", where [On] can be dropped, but the gender is still there.

Why do we ask for pronouns then if they can disappear?

That is a mistranslation from English. People in English started using "my pronouns are she/her", the Internet is English, people saw it and liked it and copied it. There is a switch happening in many languages (including English) where "pronoun" is starting to mean "grammatical gender" and even "personal gender". In itself, it is not necessarily bad but it may make things unclear. This is a solution, but it has certain limitations.

First of all, real-life gender and grammatical gender may not match. In Russian, the word for "man" is grammatically feminine. As a noun, it has a feminine ending, but the adjectives attached to it will be masculine. In German, "young girl" is grammatically neutral.

In English, who prides itself in being "not very gendered", people mark gender for objects and people in creative ways. Most machines and vehicles are feminine and not "it" but a "she". And then men don't make buns or use eyeliner, do they?

As a matter of fact, "gender" itself started being used for people after being a technical term for speaking about grammar. But that is completely irrelevant now as its meaning has evolved and most people don't know this.

So "pronoun" which originally is a word used instead of a noun (to avoid repetition and help clarify meaning) is now becoming "grammatical and personal gender" in a very interesting turn of phrase. "My pronouns are _third person pronouns_" is interesting because I would never use third person pronouns for myself, to begin with. Other people use them about me. Again, irrelevant as nobody thinks about this or uses it this way and it has found a way to convey meaning and solve a problem.

In languages other than English, they translated (so to say, this is not translating) the sentence like that and became even more interesting. "Mis pronombres son ella" making one pronoun plural, because we only mark one pronoun in Spanish.

Now, here is the really interesting part of this: pronouns are the least of our problems in Spanish. Knowing someone's pronouns may not help at all. I once saw someone creating a character with the pronoun "ello" and it does not help me (or anyone) figure out what nouns and adjectives go with it. In English you mark two, sometimes three options and you're done (ze/zir, for neopronouns), but if I made up the pronoun "eller", you could only go so far as to deducing what is the ending for nouns and adjectives. And "Ello", that already exists as a word, btw, would create superconfusing endings as it will assimilate with the masculine ones.

In Spanish, it works as well to say "I'm a woman" or just list some adjectives. The pronoun is just the tip of the iceberg.

As @thebusylilbee asked "what do you do with nouns and adjectives?"

What do we do, indeed. We created the morpheme -e for the oral version. The written version sometimes uses -x too (I personally don't like it because it can't be read out loud, it is a symbolic activism that is not accessible so I find it not very useful). In English you may have seen the "latine/latinx" debate, well, there you have it, that is what we do, and we do it with everything.

It works well, it sounds natural (we already had many nouns and adjectives ending in -e for non-gendered words and for some gendered words too). Some people have trouble using it, sometimes it is confusing with unfrequent idioms but it works.

Some examples (notice some words do not change ever):

El chico es alto y trabajador. Quería ser tenista, pero al final se ha hecho cantante.

La chica es alta y trabajadora. Quería ser tenista, pero al final se ha hecho cantante.

Le chique es alte y trabajadore. Quería ser tenista, pero al final se ha hecho cantante.

Now, the problem with this is that it is relatively new and it is also seen as informal language, so to say. So organisms, institutions, or anything considered formal or serious does not use it. What they do then is either double all the language (men and women, using masculine and feminine all over the text with makes it long and hard to follow, and also, leaves out non binary people) or avoid gender markers altogether.

This second option requires a lot of creativity and an excellent knowledge of your native language, but it is very inclusive and actually quite used.

For instance, if in an English movie, there is a non binary character going by "they/them", the translator may choose to use non binary endings in -e, but maybe the producer and the distributor in Spain won't allow it because it is too new or something. So the translator may find a way around that avoiding gendered nouns and adjectives, saying things like "Qué cansancio tengo" instead of "Estoy muy cansad_".

(This, btw, is something some trans people do in Spain before coming out of the closet, they get used to making turns of phrases that avoid making gender explicit).

In other languages all this may be easier or harder, depending on how does the grammar itself works. In turn, this may make coming out of the closer or expressing oneself easier or harder.

In French, for instance, it is a mess. The language itself makes it very hard to find a unifying strategy that works everywhere. They found some very creative solutions (possessive pronouns like maon), but other problems remain unsolved, like what do you do with things that sound the same but are written differently and you cannot really change? Like professeur/e/_??? or préféré/e/_???? I've seen writing like professeur.e. to force a reflection about it and seems to be the accepted standard but orally, it all sounds the same regardless.

You can find more examples on how other languages solve these problems in this twitter thread.

I think all this is worth thinking about because, specially here on tumblr or the internet, everything is in English and comes mainly from the US, so we tend to think that what they do or what they say is what works. And it probably doesn't work, linguistically, culturally or personally anyways.

For instance, there is this Spanish person I follow in twitter who says her gender is "butch", so she goes by lesbian and uses feminine nouns and adjectives because that's what "lesbiana" is in Spanish. She is non binary and has spoken about her personal choice on this, on why her gender is "lesbian butch" and on why the grammatical gender she uses with herself follows that lead.

Interestingly too, often in tumblr I read advice like "ask your friends to use x pronoun in front of you to see how it feels" and in Spanish you don't necessarily need other people to speak about you to test the waters. You can just speak about yourself, describe yourself to you and see the feel of it. Of course it helps to hear it from other people too, but it is almost impossible in Spanish to describe yourself in one sentence and not use a gender marker, so you can explore this on your own. This would happen in many many other languages too.

So yeah, basically some thoughts on gender grammatical expression coming from Spanish. I can detail some strategies if someone wants. If you have doubts, let me know, I like speaking about these things.

[ot3]

I think you're completely right, i think about 6/7 zines i've been in over the past few years have been done in complete and utter silence, with any of the creators very rarely speaking to each other or asking for advice/help, etc. It definitely felt like a homework assignment, as you said. Its weird to see people with a desire to essentially create a small community of like-minded people and then have none of them interact at all.

it's SUPER bizarre. i've been in a few projects like that too where the only mod input was just "oh looks great!" and there was no real feedback and almost no one sent any wips or talked to each other. i didnt see what i would say the majority of pieces until the PDF was released to contributors.

and at that point it's like... what's the point? if i wanted to just do a drawing of whatever subject matter this zine is about with no feedback or critique or iterative process i could just go do that on my own time and not have to worry about bleed specs and deadlines or whatever

i think everyone who acts like super polished and high budget fanzines are the death of Zines because they're stealing the spotlight from the indie DIY zine scene are ridiculous, i've made my stance on that clear. but i think there is something to be said for the bad taste i get from zines that are run like Freelance Projects rather than community events. i think the thing that makes a Zine a Zine is the element of community necessary for such a thing to exist in a first place. when the entire act of making the zine just feels like the means to an end of a final project where you get some new merch of your fave anime characters.... that's whats soulless to me.

like i don't think you have to be FRIENDS with everyone or even anyone in a zine server. i even get it if you're shy and don't want to talk at all. but i think a zine server should at least feel like a place that's open and inviting to discussions of art and tangentially related topics so people can pick up tips for each other or make some new connections or get some really good feedback they couldn't get anywhere else. otherwise why even be there

[noknowshame]

What is solipsistic nihilism and how does it differ from subjective relativism?

It's very funny to me that you think I'm an authority on this but you know what "solipsistic nihilism" does sound like some word salad bullshit I'd put in a post about fictional pirates

solipsism = the philosophical principle that the only thing you can really prove exists is yourself; or, the wholesale belief that the only thing that exists is you

nihilism = the belief that life is inherently meaningless (in either a good or bad way)

so "solipsistic nihilism" is "nothing matters because nothing is real except for me"

this would be tangentially related to subjective relativism, which by my understanding is the philosophy that each person creates their own moral reality, rather than there being a "correct" form of morality

[happiestplacehq]

Hey everyone !!

I’m popping in here just to address a few things that I feel need to be highlighted in order for happiestplacehq to continue to be the happy and safe place that it has been since opening day.

It is very important to me that everyone in Happiest Place feels included and valued, and is given a fair shot, no matter what. While I don’t think anyone is sitting here with malicious intent, or that these things are being done on purpose, I would please just ask that everyone be mindful of how we treat each other in this group, whether that is on the dash, or in the Discord chat.

I really just want to stress that every single member in this group should feel like they are being involved, replied to, and most importantly heard.

It has not gone unnoticed, in the Discord in particular, that some members are often ignored, or have their conversations derailed by random out of the blue subject changes, and speaking from personal experience, that is not a great feeling. I know it is not an intentional act, but please just read the room and wait until a more appropriate time in the conversation to say what you have to say.

Tangentially related, I please urge members to respond to starter and plotting calls, in both the Discord and in the Sideblog. Discord users should still be using the sideblog so that our non-discorders get a slice of the pie too. Non-discorders, I fully encourage you to message and plot with the discorders through the DM system as well.

I would also like to remind everyone that there is a starter rule; if you are making a starter, reply to two first. Check the notes, and if you see starters that have less replies than others, reply to them. It also wouldn’t go amiss to give likes to things that other players have created, such as moodboards, drabbles, graphics, headcanons and task replies etc. because they have clearly worked hard to bring something to the dash, and that should be given the acknowledgement it deserves.

We all have to play our part in making each other feel included. Let’s lift each other up.

Please like this post to acknowledge that you have read it. Thank you ✌️