wovenstardust - Tumblr blog

[wovenstardust]

Don't get involved with Wookieepedia

We all know Wookieepedia — it’s the Star Wars wiki, and an invaluable resource for fic writers everywhere. I’m not telling you not to look at Wookieepedia, but I do need to warn you not to get involved with the community. If you do want to edit it, then never join the discord or get involved with the forums (Senate Hall). It’s a cesspit of bigotry, and you cannot change it.

I tried. Along with a very well-known and vocal user named Immi Thrax, we tried to push back against misogyny and queerphobia. We thought we succeeded. You might have seen supposed “progress” on Wook: the addition of pronouns in the infobox, the addition of an anti-discrimination policy and an apology from the male wook admins for historical abuse towards marginalised editors. We did this. We, along with a small group of queer women and nonbinary editors, badgered the admins to write that apology for months, spoon-feeding them the things they needed to address and telling them that the early piss-weak drafts were unacceptable. We demanded infobox pronouns. We demanded an anti-discrimination policy and worked with them to add a glossary. 

And then they ran us off the website.

We had a side server specifically for women and nonbinary people, with a few channels that also contained men we trusted. A woman (who was voted in as an admin after Immi) took screenshots from this private server and then posted them publicly. The screenshots were taken completely out of context and misrepresented their contents. The woman who took the screenshots deleted messages in them to make us look worse. They slandered us and put us in danger, because Immi has been targeted by dangerous corners of the internet before (which they were well aware of), and we were terrified we would be doxxed. All of the men approved of this, forced Immi to resign, and spread blatant lies about us. Wook users attacked us, and it was deemed perfectly acceptable to do so.

When I wrote the initial forum post about sexism and misogyny on the website, Master Fredcerique, one of the admins, told me that he was in fear of losing his job during 2021 because of discord screenshot leaks, and that "Safety for everyone was of utmost importance" to him, hence requesting I not provide usernames for my examples of bigotry. It is clear that Immi, myself and others in those screenshots do not count in this 'everyone'. I wonder why he wanted to protect the perpetrators of misogyny but was happy to endanger women!

As a result of this horrific breach of trust and privacy, every single queer woman and almost every nonbinary wook editor has left the site. We were too radical, and they had to destroy us. Sure, a woman did this, but I don’t think it’s an accident that a cishet woman who self-describes as a Republican in Florida forced the two loud leftist lesbians off the site. And the men approved of everything she’s done and contributed to it. One (1) man (notably not an admin) stood up for us, and he was banned for doing it. 

So don’t join wook. If you do edit, don't trust anyone. Have every single conversation about wook in public, where people can never take your words out of context. Do not participate in DMs, group chats or any wook-related servers, including the official one. Marginalised editors' very existence is a disruption to the status quo of Wookieepedia, and there is every possibility you will be seen as a threat, even if you are not initially treated as one.

[wovenstardust]

Find it deep inside the house, where no one ever goes—down a lightless hallway, in the darker rooms below.

[wovenstardust]

tencent: yeah we’re developing faceID AI algorithms to identify people in protests and riots

everyone: jesus that sucks

tencent: also here’s an AI art generator that can turn your selfies into anime!

everyone, apparently: fuck yeah let me get in on that

[wovenstardust]

[wovenstardust]

“When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.“ 

[wovenstardust]

Hon if he hates OSHA you gotta run and run fast

[wovenstardust]

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

[wovenstardust]

these violent delights, micah nemerever

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[wovenstardust]

See here’s the thing. It’s not that Secret of NIMH is a bad movie. It’s not that themes about believing in yourself, or about The Power Of A Mother’s Love, are necessarily bad.

It’s that–

It’s that the book is so much bigger and so much smaller. So much more.

It’s that We All Help One Another Against The Cat. And that saves an entire civilization, in the end. And it saves the life of a single little boy. And those things are equally important in the end.

In Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, everything, the whole world, comes down to this in the end: No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

An elderly mouse sets up shop as a healer, charging nothing, asking nothing in return. The frightened single mother gets free medicine from him. Because she has a doctor to go to, she’s in the right place at the right time to see a very young crow tangled in string, and stops despite the danger to free him. Moved by her patience and courage, Jeremy refuses to abandon her and risk her being killed by the cat whose attention his struggle has caught. He is gracious and polite and humble as he flies her to her home, so she swallows her irritation at his youthful foolishness and speaks to him respectfully, so a friendship is forged between them that lasts longer than a single mutual rescue, so she tells him about the danger her son is in, so he vouches for her to an owl. The owl is interested enough by her nerve and the unlikely bond of friendship between them that he gives her his genuine time and attention and speaks to her for long enough that Jeremy calls out to her by name to see if she’s safe, which means the owl recognizes the name, which means he can send her to the rats–

Simple, understated, mundane, none of them coincidences. All of them a choice. To do what’s right and not what’s safest. To do the hard thing and not the comfortable one. To act with compassion even when you’re annoyed at the deviation from your plans.

Justin opens a cage door for eight little mice who mean nothing to him, who he’s never met before. Nicodemus sees the smaller, lighter mice in mortal peril and reaches out instinctively to grab one, two, and the rest are gone before anyone even has time to react. The entirety of A Group having seen what comes of carelessness grimly throws themselves into keeping these two vulnerable mice alive, bracing them with their bodies, holding them close, anchoring them to safe points. Mr. Ages, not Nicodemus, proposes using a screwdriver as a pry-bar. Jonathan crawls through a hole too small for rats and frees them all. Justin burns hours they cannot spare to venture back into the tunnels–

(Having escaped, having reached freedom and safety against all odds but knowing others were left behind, he turns back–)

–Calling, hoping, and they find no one and it was still worth the risk, even if no one was saved, because they might have been. The care he shows for the mice means Jonathan and Mr Ages stay with them past the escape, form a friendship that lasts years. That gives his name such respect among them that when they hear it, they drop everything to care for his wife and son.

Dragon cannot be drugged because they have no mice to run the risk anymore. The rats decide there’s nothing for it–they will work in the open. Risk not only their lives but the discovery of their entire civilization if caught, in order to move a cinder block eight inches to the right, to save the life of a single tiny child, their dead friend’s son. The child’s mother volunteers to run the risk for them. A human boy says wait, don’t let the cat in yet, I’ve caught a mouse because human boys are loud and big and clumsy and it’s traumatizing and she’s hurt but Billy Fitzgibbon saw a tiny vulnerable thing and wanted to keep it safe. And so she remains in the kitchen, and hears about the death of Jenner’s team, and is able to warn the rats just barely, barely in time.

Because Jenner was not a villain, because he was never cruel. Because he disagreed with his oldest friend but Jenner and Nicodemus never hated one another, so they never wanted anything but the best for each other. So Jenner and his supporters defected peacefully. So their terrible, fatal mistake happened in the public eye, not too far away, because there was no hostility between them. Because they only ever wanted one another to be safe and happy, in the end.

And the surviving rats escape, save for one who stumbled and fell as he ran from the gas, and one unnamed who might have been Justin, who might not, and does it matter whether it was someone we knew, does it matter, should we mourn him less if he wasn’t, does his name matter more than that he was kind and brave and died for it? That after being kinder and braver than anyone had any right to ask, he dragged one last brother out of a cloud of cyanide and then went back?

They escape, they survive, just as surely as Timothy will grow up strong and healthy and the Frisbys can now return every year to a safe, warm home and never have to leave it. A civilization deep in the forest, safe and secure and entirely their own, because Mrs. Jonathan Frisby was in the right place at the right time to tell them to hide their machines and run–

Because she was kind to a crow. 

Because she had a neighbor who dedicated his life to helping others.

Because her husband died helping the rats build a home that was their own, that he would never share in. 

Because they were his friends, because he opened a grate for them once, because they held him close and shielded him with their bodies when he was too small. 

Because a rat named Justin opened a door.

Because kindness is hard and scary and hurts sometimes, but it’s always worth it, it’s never wasted, compassion finds its way back to you in the most unlikely ways and even when it doesn’t, when you get nothing in return, it was still worth it to try.

Because we all help one another against the cat.

And how dare Don Bluth look me in the eye and try to say that isn’t good enough.

How dare you try to tell me that isn’t magic.

[wovenstardust]

[wovenstardust]

every western movie ever made: The wild west is dying. theres no more room left for cowboys anymore…

me everytime: :(

[wovenstardust]

do not separate them

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when they tease your otp but it doesn't go canon

[image of a headline above a picture of a container ship. The headline reads, "The Ever Given just successfully passed through the Suez Canal, ruining the internet's chance for a good time. The article is dated Aug 20, 21 - four months after the same ship was stuck in the same canal for days and interrupted global trade]

[wovenstardust]

anyways, japanese imperialism is not a thing of the past and still exists today. japanese propaganda is in the little things, and to end it you have to recognize them. stop glorifying the rising sun flag. pay attention to how japanese media treats its korean characters as opposed to the white ones. be on your guard when anyone or anything implies that japan is in any way superior to other asian countries. above all, listen to and support any poc who has been affected by japanese imperialism.

[wovenstardust]

Despite the enormous affection I feel for the Untamed, I always struggled to think of a painting idea for it. The big, giant, lush, complex world would seem to offer so much to draw from, but it maybe only paralyzed me. And in the opulent abundance of art surrounding the story, so often in the style of classical Chinese paintings, I didn’t think my style would fit in… But when my sister sprang it on me recently she’d started watching, the u-turn I pulled broke the sound barrier. Rewatching, my feelings finally came together into this <3