A bizarre little man, from nowhere, belonging to nothing

I do think with news of the ceasefire, everyone should read up on what the ceasefire actually means and what the different phases of the ceasefire are. here's a good source for what we know as of now:

Some of my initial takeaways are:

i don't really want to see this retconning of neil gaiman's writing where people are re-analyzing stories like "look...you can see the message under the surface...showing how he was actually abusive IRL...it's all there..."

idk maybe we should just listen to people when they speak up and say they were abused and try to foster a culture of respecting victims and actually enforcing justice against perpetrators instead of doing this weird fucking da vinci code-esque picking apart of his stories. stories which everyone was fine with for decades!! because we understand that the content that people write and produce does not have a 1 to 1 correlation with their real world actions!!!

i fully support people who cannot engage with his work anymore and i do think that because he's a still-living person it's imperative to not give this guy another cent, but we cannot pretend that everyone was just "too dumb" to see the secret clues and turn this into another case of "what you write is what you endorse." plenty of dogshit people write good stories. plenty of good people write dark stories. that's all.

This keeps him busy for the rest of the night.

Oh no

give it up for girls with vaginas and boys with penises

pause i forgot cis people exist this was intended as a celebration of bottom surgery

A copper retriever with her unoxidised puppies

President Biden... I've just learned that Microsoft Outlook is also being used by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on taxpaying American citizens please pass legislation to ban this dangerous software also while you still can

the fact that we are firmly in a time where conservatives are like "the actual founding fathers, who were slaveowners, were not racist enough for my taste" is wild

quite possibly the funniest outcome for the tiktok ban

american politicians: we will ban tiktok because of "chinese propaganda"

americans: ok [downloads chinese tiktok]

A footjob is not enough, I need a footcareer

stop reblogging this

I’m the weirdest kind of extremely online because I would be severely offline if it wasn’t for tumblr. you genuinely can’t reach me anywhere else other than tumblr I simply don’t use other social media. I don’t even like texting or calling people. I only like hanging out with people irl and being on tumblr and reading the weather forecast

Important conversations happening over here.

pregnancy during apocalypse trope is CRAZYYY to me like why are you letting him come inside you girl???? now is NOT the time.

“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.

If you want to write a non-capitalist society, you should be curious: how have people tried to do so in the past, and what pitfalls did they run into? If you want to write someone fishing for subsistence, you should be curious: what do people who fish actually do? If you want to write a character who embodies all the opposite traits of your protag for the sake of being a narrative foil, you should be curious: why are they like that, and what impact does that have on their life? If you want to write a story set in a place you’ve visited once for a week or only seen on tv, you should be curious: what is it like to live there? If you want to write a scene where one character explains asexuality to another character, you should be curious: how would this individual approach this conversation, and why are they doing it now, and is this in keeping with how they’ve acted and spoken before, and would the other one listen to them? (If this is a fantasy or sci-fi or historical setting, do they have the same concept of identity and attraction as you do? How would they conceptualize and express it?) If you want to write a character of a different race, religion, nationality, etc. from you, you should be curious: what is life like for people of that experience? How do they experience the world?

When the author has not actually asked themself these questions, either because they think they already know or can already deduce everything there is to know about it or it didn’t occur to them that this was something worth being curious about at all… you can very, very often tell.

chinese internet slang learning (cr 帅山姆先生)

Is he "female socialized" or is he just a standard flamboyant sensitive artsy gay dude who would honestly be indiscernible from any other fem gay guy if you didn't see him as a walking vagina first and foremost.

Is she "male socialized" or is she just a tomboy with a fucking spine who doesn't let anyone talk to her any old kind of way who would honestly be indiscernible from any feminist cis woman y'all gas up on here if you didn't see her as a walking penis first and foremost.

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.