tlbodine - Tumblr blog

[tlbodine]

what's the most cancelable shit y'all do when ur not online

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"is sex with angels monsterfucking" forum thread shut down by moderators after 300 pages of fierce debate, 26 banned accounts and 8 doxxed members

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the spirit is not willing and the flesh it is not so into the idea either

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Reviews

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this tiktok screenshot ruined my life i need to see the serbian pigeon movie so so badly but it doesn't exist it's so foul to make this bad of a point with something so cool and then take it away from me.

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Bringing back ask culture: if you could only cook with garlic OR onions for the next month (other ingredients allowed, but pick one of the two, other one is off limits), which one would you pick?

Ohhh, tough choice. I guess I'd go with onion. I've scraped by without garlic in the past but I'm so accustomed to starting most recipes with onions that I'd be lost without them. Also I can try to bank on the presence of garlic powder in canned sauces and such.

[tlbodine]

I'm very scared to ask. But what racefaking scandal has happened now?

Scroll down a little and I reblogged something else that will fill you in - but tl;dr Freydis Moon / Taylor Barton / several other aliases. The news broke on Twitter yesterday, hit my Bluesky feed shortly after, and now is all over my Tumblr. I'm kind of amazed I've managed to know nothing about this person this whole time considering how many of my mutuals apparently were affected :/

[tlbodine]

I'm sorry for this essay, but I keep seeing "how does this keep happening that the industry boosts a race-faker more than the actual racially-ethnically marginalized people?" It's because the industry (I'm including the wider white book community here) only want the aesthetic of diversity. They want a white experience and white understanding in a racialized trenchcoat and that's exactly what a racefaker is.

Bolding this because this, right here, is something more people need to hear.

This is the same underlying problem as the whole Isabel Falls shit. It's American Dirt 2.0. It's the industry paying lip service to diversity without wanting to deal with or acknowledge any of the complexity and human messiness that comes with it. It's wanting to say you read #DiverseLit, but somehow mysteriously not being able to "connect" with protagonists written by actual POC or neurodivergent or LGBTQ or whatever. It's clamoring for #OwnVoices and then throwing authors of various identities under the bus for not writing Perfect Socially Correct Representation.

I'll go out on a limb and say that as long as #Diversity is a marketing tactic, outsiders co-opting identities and cheating will always be more successful than authentic voices because

1 - they're willing to cheat

2 - publishing is still overwhelmingly run by cishet white women with liberal arts degrees who live in NYC and, as it turns out, that colors their perspective

and those standards trickle down into the indies too because even if you're self-publishing, you're still going to contend with a reviewer culture, and a bookstore culture, and reader culture, and everything else, built on this core of respectability politics.

aaaaargh.

Anyway. Sorry to co-opt this. I hope you and others caught up in this see no further fall-out and, maybe, even something good.

i’m sorry that because of one person’s horrible actions you (and others in the space) feel they have to justify themselves and who they are. it’s grossly unfair and i can’t imagine how it must feel for you. i hope it’s a reassurance that we trust you and believe in you and support you. sendings hugs your way, i know this must be such a difficult day 🫂

Thank you.You know, when this came out, I didn't even think that someone would accuse me of lying, and it was actually a friend who warned it might happen. I said I wasn't worried; the idea sounded nonsensical to me.

I don't use Mexicanness as a marketing tactic in either myself or my books particularly. I'm actually pretty critical of "Mexico" in my fiction; my short story Midnight Invitation is about a mestizo guy sleeping with a white settler, and The River Boy is a pre-Colombian story. I have a lot of love for my culture, but I also critique it. I was actually interviewed last year on "latin fantasy" but I refused to shared the completed article because they cut out what I insisted they keep in: I think most of the popular "Latine fantasy" books have an huge indigenous appropriation problem.

I have a small suspicion that the main person who attacked me was Taylor trying to "take me down with them" because they know I don't want to show my face, but I've shown my face to other author colleagues and more importantly I think I have ways to "prove" I'm Mexican that aren't my actual body or skin-deep (ha) references to Dia de Muertos or Chocolate abuelita, how Taylor/Freydis attempted to do on their old race-faking account:

I have a tie to a specific place in Mexico with a specific culture within a specific time, with a specific language even. And culture isn't that vague aesthetic anglo-white people believe you partake in sometimes, it tends to come with real, constant material conditions.

And I can talk about those conditions just fine; I can talk about what Felipe Calderon's failure of militarization in Mexico, and I can talk about the issue of Mexican-American ICE recruitment in Mex-Am enclaves along the southern border. I can talk about very specific experiences of being told "Ta-ta-ta-tamaulipas!" by the border patrol. So on and so on.

I'm sorry for this essay, but I keep seeing "how does this keep happening that the industry boosts a race-faker more than the actual racially-ethnically marginalized people?" It's because the industry (I'm including the wider white book community here) only want the aesthetic of diversity. They want a white experience and white understanding in a racialized trenchcoat and that's exactly what a racefaker is.

It's been difficult to learn that a friend turned out to be a complete monster and liar, but I'll survive this and laugh about it in time as long as Taylor doesn't bother me again. And if Taylor is reading this, I don't hate you. I just feel very sorry that you're spending your life doing this. Please don't bother me or anyone else again

[tlbodine]

Wait what did Freydis Moon do? :( I've read their books and really liked them, but I don't follow them anywhere online, so that last ask you got worried me

Freydis Moon has been exposed to be Taylor Barton, a white person from the state of Oregon, someone who had a history of faking their race, being racist, and general abusive behavior. You can read more here about this Taylor person here, and you can find an incredibly long thread here.

Freydis was a colleague of mine, and they took me under their wing when I entered the indie book scene. They presented themselves as a Latine, mystic, queer trans author — who was older than me, I should add — so I deeply admired them and confided in them. I don't think ABM would have ever gotten much attention if I hadn't received their guidance.

There had been some whispers that Freydis was really Taylor, but I'd seen Frey's seemingly darker-skinned hands and heard their real name, which was supposedly Daniela.

Two things I should say before the big reveal: Freydis briefly hired a publicist named Cordi, who was also an agent with their own agency, named The Lynne Agency. Cordi, very randomly, decided to leave the industry and left their clients, and Freydis, hanging. Someone else to mention is Saint Harlow, an author of gay, cannibal erotica. On twitter, Saint was known for peddling a lot of drama — sometimes, he was on the good side of things and sometimes the bad, but he tended to be a massive bully. Freydis allegedly comforted some of Saint's victims.

And the reveal:

Freydis is the race faker Taylor Barton. The evidence is substantial, but most notably, some of the files they shared with other authors, including me, had metadata with the names of Taylor Barton's other identities. I was able to check the files myself to confirm.

They were also Saint Harlow. Meaning Freydis was bullying people secretly on one account and comforting them on another. And the bullying was a lot more disgusting than you might think, but for the sake of the victim, I won't share details.

They were also the publicist/agent Cordi. Why did they pretend to be an agent at all? I'm not sure but they wasted a lot of authors' times, that's for sure. Were they just looking to plagiarize off manuscripts sent to them? Who knows. (A friend of mine who sent their manuscript to them fears so).

There were a lot of interactions between Taylor and I that are much much weirder in retrospect. They critiqued the industry use of #ownvoices, which I agreed about, but blew the issue out of proportion, like thinking #ownvoices gay-trans author book lists shouldn't exist because of potential outing, mlm books by mlm authors lists shouldn't exist because of potential outing, and that lists of books by people of color about people of color also shouldn't exist because... potential outing? Taylor was, to me, oddly sympathetic toward certain authors accused of racism and shot down my concerns of a certain book with what I felt to be pro-colonizer themes inconsistently — their response to racism seemed to depend on whether they already disliked a person or not.

I could say a lot more but as someone who spoke to Taylor in private at times, there were a lot of things I was unsure about even when I was on their side of things. To some people, apparently, Freydis had said they were part Mexican, but only ever told me they were Peruvian (they might've known I'd clock them as a faker). Regardless, when this all came to light, their response was shockingly dismissive.

This may be more info than you asked for but TLDR:

Freydis Moon faked their race and ethnicity, bullied and manipulated many readers and authors using various fake identities, took advantage of latine author resources, and so on.

[tlbodine]

Suzanne collins wrote a trilogy where a main media propaganda strategy was to market a horrific act of violence as a love story to distract ppl and then it got adapted into a box office breaking movie and ppl made it all about the love triangle. so then since they didn’t get the point the first time Suzanne collins wrote a prequel story about the main dictator and she makes it so that you as a reader want it to be a genuine love story so badly even tho it’s so very clearly not and instead feels extremely unsettling to make her point even more meta which then gets adapted into another box office breaking film and now ppl are making romantic snowbaird tik toks. do u think she’s gonna write another book that’s somehow even more blatant or just give up and start executing ppl? hard to say but I wouldn’t blame her for the second one

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Marketing may require some statistics classes. There’s an analytics component related to marketing, especially digital marketing, that requires a very basic concept of how to analyze percentages and visualize information in different ways (graphs and charts etc) so I wouldn’t be surprised if the degree required that.

guys, I need help. maybe it's a stupid question but do you know if subjects like marketing and social media marketing involve, even remotely, math?

as subjects in an interpretor/translator degree, not a marketing degree!

[tlbodine]

creemore, ontario david herzog + should have known better, sufjan stevens

[tlbodine]

I think you’re spot on about the fantasy aspect.

I think in reality most of the time it’s less about desire and more about control and access. It’s something they can get away with. Proximity makes it easier to abuse your own child than anybody else, so if you want to abuse someone…

As to *why* someone would want to abuse someone, idk. Maybe they’re perpetuating their own cycle of abuse - they want to see what it’s like to have power. Maybe something is just really broken in their head.

I don’t know if it’s been studied the way serial killers have been studied, or pedophiles (generally, offending or non offending - there are folks with urges who don’t act on them, and folks who act without the attraction component). But I imagine a lot of the reasons could be the same.

What in the hell is incest even about? I mean the real thing, not the fanfic about an older person teaching a young person fun stuff. (It's not my fantasy, but I figure it's just that--"I'm going to imagine a scenario where giving/getting sex lessons to/as a youth is not an actual bad idea, it sounds like it could be fun if it didn't mess people up.")

Was listening to a woman the other day relate that her father made her milkshakes with sedatives in them and abused her while she was asleep from it.

And I just. I mean, revulsion of course. And deep sadness for her, when someone whose task it was to keep her safe... did that kind of thing instead. Just.

Why.

Maybe this is my own failure of imagination but why would you desire your child? Like if I try really hard I can vaguely imagine someone responding to un(der)developed bodies the way I do to developed ones, but... your own kid? How would that not be weird?

And the sedation thing, too. I mean I know it's a thing some predators do, just look at Cosby. But again, like... probably a failure of imagination on my part but half the fun of sex is the responses. I can imagine a nonconsensual sadist wanting upset responses rather than happy ones but wanting none?

I don't get it.

Maybe I shouldn't want to get it, but I don't know. For me understanding why people do bad things makes them... a little less scary, somehow, even if the reason why is complete nonsense.

so ???? Anyone know what the hell is up with dudes (and non-dudes; there are plenty of creepy ass women out there too) like this?

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one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method