The switch from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time which will take away my glorious hour of daylight in the afternoon and give it to the early morning is just another example of how Morning People are an oppressive class in modern society

yr locked in a room alone with three adult men but you feel perfectly safe. who are they

I mean, I feel safe from them but I’m suddenly EXTREMELY worried about what shenanigans I’ve stumbled into

“These men mean me no harm”

“So you feel safe now?”

“Oh, absolutely not”

my unpopular opinion is that i hate tiktok because now people just publicly watch loud ass videos in public spaces with no regard for anyone else. 100% it was not this bad with youtube, it’s such a different thing with tiktok. put on headphones. you are grown.

Girl……

This is it! This is what social media/smart tech have done! They’ve rotted away any distinction between private and public.

Yes, we do have the right to make demands on public behavior. Of course we do. Have you never heard of laws and etiquette? I’m not allowed to grocery shop naked. You can’t rummage through my purse. I can’t have a work meeting in the middle of a movie theatre.

I remember when it was taboo simply to answer your cell phone in public. The person answering would apologize and try to go to a more private area. Then public calls were normalized. Then putting people on speaker. Then listening to music without headphones. Do you know how many times I have hiked up a mountain or driven to the beach, only to be met with someone blaring shitty top 40 music from their portable speaker, because Heaven forbid you go one hour without noise?

Old woman yells at cloud and all that, but I can’t believe someone is not only admitting this behavior, but saying it’s a good thing! No one likes you! You’re a menace!

BEING INCONSIDERATE OF OTHERS IS STILL BAD.

It was obnoxious when it was youtube.

It was obnoxious when it was music.

It was obnoxious when it was the radio. 

It was obnoxious when it was dudes wanting to talk to you instead of letting you just read your freaking book.

Do you want to be this guy? Because being obnoxious in shared spaces is how you become this guy. 

Wear your damn headphones like an adult participant in the social contract.

Best art history lesson ever, thank you

what the fuck makes phone apps so cocky as to send me notifications telling me to use it. my grocery list app straight up went "you havent made a list in a while! 🙂" are you out of your fucking mind. you are a program. why are you speaking to me like youre my equal. i could replace you with a pen and the back of a receipt. idiot. i kill you now

i genuinely think people harassing celebs is a labor rights issue as well as a conversation about boundaries. celebs make art for you and perform for you but they, like me performing my metaphorical song and dance for my customers, have off the clock time that needs to be recognized for what it is. celebs are artists making art for you, they, a person, are not a commodity. you are not entitled to them at any time day or night any more than my boss is entitled to ask me to work off the clock either.

"wanting your likes to be private means you have something to hide" actually some of us just like privacy why are you so obsessed with the social panopticon

Penetration is a gender-neutral act. Topping is gender-neutral. Bottoming is gender-neutral. You are not more or less of a man or a woman depending on how you fuck. You are not “fake trans” for having sex a certain way. You are not any less masculine for bottoming or any less feminine for topping.

Additionally, acting like being penetrated is an act of submission is deeply rooted in misogynistic, cisheteronormative ideas of sexual intercourse, as in "penetration is something that is done to women for the sexual gratification of the man, nothing more, therefore it is inherently degrading and feminine".

A cishet man getting pegged by his cishet girlfriend is not gay, he's not less of a man or submissive by default. A cishet man getting pegged by his cishet girlfriend can be sexually dominant and simply likes to be fucked in his ass - these two can co-exist. Yet, in the eyes of cishet society, a man that likes to have his ass played with, must enjoy it because it's "degrading" , not because it simply feels good.

That's why I so heavily preach about the difference between sub/dom/switch and bottom/top/vers. Penetration can be used to increase the feeling and severity of a power dynamic, but it doesn't create one. These two things are entirely separate from eachother, unless connected willingly.

you should reblog this version instead, actually

Certified Sex ED Post !

Because some of you are still confused

Hot tip for parents both present and future: When your kid tells you something is wrong, listen to them!

Sorry for not posting much lately, I’ve been busy with work and personal stuff, including an upcoming spinal x-ray I’ve been waiting over a decade for and the angriest doctor I’ve ever met in my life

The normal amount of back pain in a child is ZERO.

And if you think it’s because of too many books, ask the fucking school why the kids don’t have time to put them away or get them out.

And send them to a doctor anyway. Spinal misalignment is one of the easiest things to detect. Just fucking do it.

anyways reminder that scars of any kind are morally neutral and not bad or harmful to show. if that shit is healed and not a literal open wound it is not fucking bad. it is not okay to shame or trigger warning a normal fucking part of someone’s body, including and especially when it’s a sign of physical or mental illness.

look every single time I make posts like this someone comes on my post like “not self harm scars though! those are triggering!” and fucking. think about what you’re implying for just one second here. you’re saying that if anyone has ever even once hit a mental point where they harmed themself in a way that left a lasting mark they can never show their body uncensored again. this is okay to you? you think this is fucking okay?

also, to expand on this: do not assume you know what are and aren't self harm scars. i have 'traditional self harm scar' looking scars that are not self harm, just that i have a cat and scar easily. i have scars that do not look like self harm scars that very much are. you do not have the right to go up to someone and ask "hey, what are you scars from so i can decide if i can censor your body?", nor the right to assume the origin of someone's scars in order to censor their body. In general, no one's scars or any other part of their body is your business

i also want to interrogate the stigma against open/ongoing/unhealed wounds – in addition to self-injury, plenty of disabilities cause chronic wounds, impaired healing, etc (diabetes, other vascular conditions, hidradenitis suppurativa, just to name a few) & there’s nothing wrong with existing in public while visibly wounded / with a transparent dressing / etc

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

Because people confuse “critical as in critical thinking” with “critical as in criticizing something,” so they think that “look for something bad, no matter how far-fetched” is what “being critical” means.

They also don’t realize that “literary criticism” means…

Okay. What literary criticism IS, is like taking a mechanical clock apart to see all the gears and learn how it fits together and approach your next clock with more knowledge of what makes it tick.

What they THINK literary criticism means is, you take the clock apart and beat all the pieces with a hammer, then scream at it because it doesn’t tick for you the way it used to.

OMG SOMEBODY PUT IT IN WORDS

Yep, there it is: the scourge of workshopping all over the place. :/

Will never forget the first writers’ workshop I attended where a story was being “round-robined” (i.e., passed around a circle for critique) and the first person picked up the typed sheaf of paper and said, “Well, this was shit,” and just passed it on to the next person.

Speaking of shit, I kinda lost mine. “Excuse me, what?” I said. “You don’t get to do that!”

The person was astounded, as if I’d somehow just disallowed the law of gravity. “What?” they said, incredulous. And then, “Why not?”

“Because this is critique, not abuse.” (The person in question was fortunately familiar with the Monty Python skit in which this theme comes up. See below.) “You have to say why you think it was shit—meaning, why and how it didn’t work for you. And then you have to say how you would fix that.”

The person’s mouth was literally hanging open at the very idea. It had honestly never occurred to them that a workshop wasn’t just someplace to vent about their own preferences. They started to try to argue with me, and I just took the manuscript away from them and began a critique the way we do it in workshops I’m running. (The simplest form of this is the famous feedback sandwich, though there are many other potential ways to go.)

No work gets out of responsible workshopping/critiquing without having the hood carefully opened to see why the “engine”’s making whatever weird noises it’s making, having them and the machinery examined and diagnosed, and then politely closed up again. For irresponsible criticism—which we refer to around here as the “Rite of Spring” approach, in which abuse is somehow felt to make the writer or the work stronger—I have no damn time at all. Seriously, who made that shit up? Except somebody who doesn’t really care about either the writer or the work, and enjoys others’ suffering.

(mutter) (sigh) …Anyway, check this out. The abuse happens at 0:43. :)

ETA: The Monty Python sketch, which for some reason didn't come up for me in the version I reblogged:

This Twitter thread really spoke to me. I wanted to share it with anyone who hasn’t seen it. 

[ID: A twitter thread of 10 tweets by lhkuroda that read:

Tweet 1: I teach Japanese (language) and one thing I often hear students say is that they want to become “fluent” in Japanese. I don’t think this is a reasonable goal. Instead I ask: what do you want to talk about fluently? Who do you want to talk fluently with?

Tweet 2: No native speaker of any language is completely fluent in their language bc no language is singular. If I were hanging around a group of rocket scientists speaking in English I would have no idea what they were talking about.

Tweet 3: Any language is almost always fissured by class, race, region, profession, even time (!) and the illusion that it is a singular thing that can be mastered is a myth created by nationalism / nation states

Tweet 4: There’s also no reason why “native speakers” should be the only benchmark by which you measure your progress as a language learner. People who were born and raised in Tokyo speak a particular kind of Japanese bc that is what is useful for their life. Maybe it’s not for yours!

Tweet 5: This is especially relevant when it comes to heritage speakers who have grown up in countries other than Japan. Why would you expect your Japanese to be the same as someone who lived their whole life in Japan? That would not have been advantageous to you.

Tweet 6: When Japanese people migrated to other parts of the world in the early 20th century, the Japanese they spoke changed too. Language adapts to circumstance because it is a tool for doing something, and you will need to accomplish different things in different places.

Tweet 7: When we think critically about how a student will or wants to use Japanese, it often turns out they want to talk to their family, or talk about manga, or read the news. Those are attainable goals that allow us to spend our time and resources in better ways.

Tweet 8: Don’t have expectations for what you’ll be able to do in a language you’re learning that are higher than the expectations you have for the language you use most of the time!

Tweet 9: You’re also not going to progress if you live in a place where there’s no need for you to use the language you’re learning. You have to alter your environment by creating the need to use it.

Tweet 10: Anyway learning a heritage language or reconnecting with a heritage language is a daunting task but I love to help people with it. Always open to DMs from heritage learners of JP or if you have thoughts on heritage languages 💖

End ID]

I was literally just thinking about this thread the other day while thinking about my experience with Spanish. I took SIX continuous years of it before, and at this point, while I certainly could converse with a native speaker of my same age, it definitely wouldn’t be at the same level of skill. I’m familiar with all complex tenses and conjugation, but not off the top of my head. A vast majority of the vocab fell off as soon as lessons stopped. For a long while I largely considered all of that a failure.

But do you know who I recently could confidently speak with? The trilingual 3yo last school year who had spanish as her main home language. I knew and remembered a majority of the language equivalent to what we typically said to the children in english. What vocab i had forgotten was easily identified and studied (and it was way less than “every piece of Spanish ever spoken under the sun”). My spanish lessons were not a failure. They’re a perfect fit for me! I’m a preschool teacher!

I am actually begging some people to just let some spaces exist untouched by real-world issues and horrors.

Like I've lost count of the amount of times peaceful game or fandom servers have been ruined by people stampeding in with political rants, bitching about world issues, demanding internal activism, demanding vent channels so they can whine about their shitty parents, ect.

Like. Respectfully. Not every single space has to be inclusive of and welcoming of outside topics. The real world sucks. We don't needed to be reminded of that absolutely everywhere.

Psychologists have talked about this extensively. In order to repair the damage caused by the stressors of life, your brain needs to have down time in which it is not being stressed. It needs to be able to turn off sometimes and turn down during others. That's how your brain processes stress enough to regulate cortisol production and let you get through whatever it is without being on-edge the entire time, all of the time.

At some point we will, as a society, have to unlearn this idea that if you're ever caught not thinking about something serious, you must not give a shit about others. Your mind is not designed to constantly be stressed.

Your body also isn't, btw - prolonged stress without breaks is linked to all kinds of cardiac problems.

Not only will it not kill you to let the Pokemon Unite server or Naruto/Sasuke server just be about Pokemon Unite or NaruSasu, it would actually benefit you to do so.

If you won't let a place be peaceful for someone else's sake, at least do it for your own.

My "hot take" of the day is that "Don't you dare look away!" is the younger generation's version of "Finish your dinner, children are starving in (poor third-world country)."

I understand the sentiment, there are atrocities happening across the world, and it is horrible, and we all want to DO something about it. I don't think you are wrong to feel that way or to try to help however you can. But feeding yourself a constant diet of graphic images and descriptions of these atrocities and writhing around in agonized guilt and sadness and anger doesn't actually help the people who are suffering, any more than kids stuffing themselves to clean their plates puts food in the mouths of people who are starving. If you want to help then by all means find a some concrete way to do, but also step back. Making yourself miserable 24/7 because of the bad things happening in the world will not help anyone.

I felt differently about this at one point, then started having climate/world events-related panic attacks and realized that the constant barrage of doomsaying and hopelessness was actually TREMENDOUSLY harmful to me psychologically. I realized I could be informed but not overwhelmed, that I could care and act according to that caring without constantly being reminded of every bad thing happening in every corner of the globe. Filtering what I see and engage with has not made things worse for the world, it only means I have somewhat fewer panic attacks now.

Actually I love voting for the lesser evil. It's less evil. I support that whole heartedly.

Like. Less evil is clearly a better option that more evil. I don't get why this is even a question.