— Unknown

I wish this was my job.

I mean, “Emily” is a nice enough name for a girl.

There, I just earned $1000.

I've read about her! She mostly works with Chinese parents to pick appropriate sounding English names for their children to use later in life. See, Chinese names do not tend to work well outside of China because of how tonal and unique the phonetics can be and how few international documents allow the symbols. Rather than sign their kids up for either never working or traveling abroad or constantly being disrespected on accident, many parents give them backup English first names in addition to their Chinese first names.

However, the problem arises that Chinese parents do not always know English naming connotations any more than I would know Chinese ones, and there’s a LOT of very deep cultural traditions involved in naming your kids, so they can't just grab a popular baby names list and call it good. So some poor kids get names that were direct English translations of those Chinese naming sensibilities that didn't translate well (a friend of mine in College had to help a tutoring student with name change paperwork so she wouldn't have to go by Lush. My dad knew a guy who narrowly dodged the first name Rolex, but his name ended up Cash, thankfully. That sort of thing) or names that ARE English name's but have... unfortunate connotations (think Karen or Hannibal), or names that are just very outdated (Bertha, Ethyl, Quintin, Norbert, etc.). And without becoming world travellers or investing a shitton of time in learning way more about other cultures than they really need to for daily lifw, your average lower to middle class parents couldn't really guarantee that the names they gave their kids would actually help them, thereby risking continuing the cycle of social stratification and limiting upward mobility.

So this woman learns this, and goes "Oh, I know how to fix this!" And she starts a business where Chinese parents can email her with a list of things that they want their children's names to mean or reflect, auspicious elements they want, etc, and she pools her knowledge of English speaking cultural norms and a bunch of baby name guides to email them a short list of names that meet their needs with little descriptions of each one explaining what it means and how people will think of it, and they can pick a meaningful name in accordance with their cultural traditions that won't screw their kids over later.

These are comments on a post about "immoral porn" and it made me so fucking angry I had to rant here. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Consuming "fuckdd up" content, including sexual content, does NOT corrupt you or numb you to the point you'll seek out worse and worse stuff or suddenly be okay with doing it IRL.

Do you know why people say this? Where it comes from? FUCKING TED BUNDY saying that "hardcore pornography" was the reason he killed women. SERIOUSLY. Obviously HE WAS LYING!!! He was a lying ass bitch who wanted to kill people, then once he was caught he invented an excuse that would make him look more sympathetic!!

Porn is not actually a slippery slope into serial killing. People choose to do awful things because of their underlying value system, not because of the art they engage with.

@teefiesworld - Agreed. There is a LOT of bullshit surrounding the concept of porn addiction. I believe compulsive sexual behaviour is a real struggle for people sometimes, and can include porn consumption, but that is just not what 90% of content about 'porn addiction' is talking about at all. They're just talking about absolutely normal healthy behaviour they want to suppress and stigmatise.

'Porn addiction' is also too often a vector for men to get straight up abused.

I really recommend "What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research?" and specifically chapters 4 and 8 for information about the research that's been done in this general topic. And specifically how it is misrepresented.

One key detail they bring up there is that much of the research done into porn is normative ("assume[s] that the only healthy form of sexuality is vanilla sex (that is, not kinky) between monogamous couple-based partners for reasons beyond simply pleasure.") Stemming from that, researchers looking into associations with sexual violence do not all use the same definition:

Additionally, there's problems with conclusions of causality:

And the research we have right now is certainly not conclusive:

They also brings up the concept of "porn addiction", saying that while people's suffering is real, the current answers are unsatisfactory:

This is an excellent addition, and illustrates a lot of what's wrong with the current research in this area. Thank you!

this is a RACK household, I do not play with SSC folks! My play is risk-aware and takes effective steps to minimize unwanted harms, not to meet arbitrary definitions of safety or "sanity." (Plus, goddamn that is such an ableist label, in addition to being unhelpful!)

preaching to the choir obviously but to rob people of a personal choice out of the ostensible fear they might come to regret said choice is a thousand times crueler than allowing them the freedom to do things they might ultimately regret

if a person regrets their choices in life then that is on them. it is not your business to be everyone's hero.

But if they go to their grave feeling they have never truly lived, all because of your paternalistic, condescending fears, that is all on you.

someone send this post to the christians

also: using the threat of their hypothetical future regret to force people into an alternate option that they regret right fucking now is fundamentally dishonest in a way that beggars comprehension

I fucking love fronting and posting on my silly little blog and wearing the clothes I made for me and listening to my edgy playlists and bickering with my headmates over who has to do the dishes and working on both personal and systemwide projects and going on discord and talking to the friends we're out to I FUCKING LOVE EXISTING

*jigsaw voice* singlet. you are listening to a system describe an inner relationship. you must explain your view of why it is morally wrong without using the word “narcissistic”. if you fail, the snare around your neck will snap and it will be game over. you have one hour.

edit: ENDOGENIC SYSTEMS ARE MY SIBLINGS

Being fictive-heavy plural is like "I have this headcanon about this character" *describes the fictive of said character who lives in my head*

i ❤ endo systems

I personally believe making memes with fascist language is bad not because I genuinely assume the op to be a fascist, but because it creates some diluted, gradient atmosphere, where you (general you) start struggling to tell apart ironic and genuine statements.

Obviously, nobody thinks emo haircuts are "tradition". But I've seen the same meme format with a modern Steam game versus a retro console game, and that's already a step in the diluted area.

Fascists make memes too, they're not always extra serious about their verbal cliches. And a place that accepts fascist verbal cliches is bound to attract first people who drag in genuinely fascist-made memes due to naivety and second actual fascists.

A little less than a year ago I saw an admin of a fediverse instance overlook genuine fascist gathering on her site till they started making suicide baiting posts targeting trans people, because she was sure they were ironic. The atmosphere she herself cultivated, the language she used, was massively identical to theirs with some words swapped.

I had to take this stuff into account as an admin myself, and since I got more strict on this type of humor, harassment somewhat went down too.

"transandrophobia isn't real/a good term, what you are ACTUALLY experiencing are these seven other words that all of you already know about and use when describing transandrophobia. I just think you should exclusively use a bunch of miscellaneous other terms instead of every having one word you can use to talk about transmasculine oppression as a unified experience."

"transandrophobia is bad theory because it all exists online and mostly on Tumblr. you guys need to read some real theory, in Books™, which largely do not discuss transmasculinity and when they do, do so in ways which do not align with your collective lived experiences as trans men. I do not know that the man who coined this term, as well as others, have actively been in the process of writing books on transandrophobia. I also do not know that it is very common for theories (such as misogynoir) to come from casual community discussions that then get solidified in academic work, rather than having the Gods of Sociology come down and give us peasants the correct way to analyze our lives."

sorry I can't get over this. "It's not transandrophobia, they don't know it's actually misogyny and gender essentialism and oppositional sexism–" those are all terms we use all. the fucking. time. There are people who learned about oppositional sexism by seeing it discussed by "transandrophobia truthers" talking about Serano's work coining it. We literally talk about gender essentialism all the goddamn time. Clearly you HAVEN'T been paying that much attention to our conversations if you think we aren't extremely aware of these words and their meanings.

My body does not have identities - I do.

My body does not have feelings - I do.

My body does not have opinions - I do.

My body does not have independent value - I do.

My body is not its own creature - I am.

My body is not entitled to protection - I am.

My body is a way for me to interact with the world, not the other way around. You do not evaluate me through my body. You do not put my body above me. I own it entirely, and you don't get to have a say in this.

If you think I look 20, but I tell you I'm 40, you believe me instead of your interpretation of my body.

If I want cookies, it's me who wants cookies, not my body, even if I think wanting cookies right then is inconvenient - I'm allowed to have inner contradictions.

If I want to remove my tits, bleach my hair, get my legs broken so they grow longer, this is just as real as if I always was this way, because my body is a changeable expression of my self, not an autonomous entity that can appear "true" or "false".

I DO NOT HAVE A "TRANS BODY", I AM TRANS AND I HAVE A BODY.

One would think "you can't transition into X identity, you don't have the lived experiences" wouldn't be such a popular position in a largely queer community. And yet.

I made an acespec bingo!

*Mentioned in the bingo is the term “m-spec” - it stands for “multiple attraction spectrum” and is a spectrum of orientations defined by attraction to multiple genders.

A common aspec (asexual and aromantic spectrum) experience is thinking you’re m-spec before figuring out you are actually aspec.

You can support me by following me on my socials (link in bio) and engaging with my posts, thank you 🧡

Sparkles are collective, cockroaches are me specifically.

I also posted the emojis alone on our art blog @hydor-graphics if anyone wants them.