THIS NEEDS ITS OWN POST LIKE WHAT THE FUUUUUUUU

WE’VE NEVER BEEN MORE BACK

I'm sorry but hear me out...

Y'know, some people do have a strong crying response to stress, and they might cry (even against their own will) when faced with an upsetting situation and that doesnt mean they are "gaslighting" or "manipulating" you.

There are people who use crying as a manipulation tactic? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that every person that cries during a heated argument is trying to get under your skin. They have their own emotions and issues, and frankly, not everything other people do is a personal attack on you.

Jfc I am not surprised OP got shitty responses, but like, if your reaction to this post is to immediately look for ways in which you can misinterpret and misapply it in order to be self-righteous on the internet, then I have some terrible news for you about who is actually engaging in incredibly manipulative and dishonest behaviour here. Hint: it’s not OP and it’s not people who cry easily.

it’s pride month babes reblog if you’re queer or if you like frogs

Next anon is going to tell fat people they aren't allowed to call themselves fat don't you know it's a slur that thin people use against fat people.

genuinely as a fat queer person this is a good example. do you know how many times fat ppl are told by thin ppl they can’t/shouldn’t call themselves fat, like, oh, no, you’re PLUS SIZED you’re CUDDLY you’re FLUFFY, like, fam, it’s fat. I’m fat. It’s not my body’s fault that you decided a perfectly normal word was an insult. Frankly the way queer ppl and fat ppl have mobilized around their words can be compared as well, as well as the way ppl try to disarm them by giving them more “harmless” or “pleasant” epithets. 

HOW TO WRITE 20 PAGES (from one girl w/mental illness 2 the rest of u, but please keep in mind all of this is just personal Stuff That Worked for me n u might be different):

Maybe it’s just because I’m Jewish but I do truly believe that life gets ten times better when you learn to complain cheerfully

I think a part of it is that it lets you acknowledge that something sucks, which is actually really good in a culture that wants us to pretend that everything is fine and we’re soldiering through all the time. Like, no, my grocery bag breaking and spilling all over the floor is not fine. I’ve had a long day and I’m really upset and on the verge of tears because I can’t handle one more thing and pretending like it’s fine only means breaking down later.

But if you let yourself complain, if you let yourself swear terribly and creatively, and you stare down at the bruised vegetables like they’ve personally disappointed you, and you make yourself smile because this is really just so, so stupid, you feel a little better. There’s a power to acknowledging that something sucks and making yourself feel better anyways. There’s a power to going “and THEN my bag broke, and it’s like—seriously? my day was bad enough” and doing it with a smile.

You shouldn’t have to pretend things are fine when they aren’t. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to smile through things that make you feel terrible. But if you can make yourself laugh by staring down at some strawberries that have decided to revolt, and give them a lecture on why they’re just terrible, really, and that makes you smile—then maybe that’s a good thing.

being fat isn’t a bad thing or a dirty word so don’t take this as me suggesting that it is, but it’s kind of insane how warped pop culture is about women’s bodies that everyone in 2014 was convinced meghan trainor was fat

like.. this is how she looked in all about that bass

and i remember so many people talking about how overweight she was and making fat jokes about her- and none of that would have been remotely okay if she actually was fat- that isn’t okay no matter what. the reason fatphobia is bad isn’t because she isn’t fat; it’s bad because fatphobia is always awful, and especially targets actually fat women. but it’s moreso just insane to me that people’s baseline for what a fat person looks like is just so exceptionally warped. like it sincerely floors me

i’m legitimately surprised that y’all are confused about this as if this hasn’t been a thing for decades, as if kate winslet wasn’t called “kate weighs-a-lot” during the filming and after the release of titanic

fatphobia has been around showbusiness for years. even now, the majority of the parts fat or midsize actors get are “comic relief whose only character trait is being fat”, “ugly main character who loses weight and suddenly is desired by everyone” or “the one who dies first in the horror movie”.

see also: the movie “the duff”, where the “designated ugly fat friend” is played by an actress who IS NOT FAT.

all of these are women who would statistically have below average weight, but showbiz goes hand in hand with diet culture so they call them fat because they know that that way they’ll make more people feel miserable about themselves and then those people will buy those teas that make you shit your pants or start diets or subscribe to exercise plans that don’t work.

and it’s not just the women either. hollywood wants you to think that this is what an ideal healthy man looks like:

when really, this is unsustainable and for a large part unobtainable physique. zac efron exercised for several hours a day every day and basically only ate protein to look like this, and is likely dehydrated as fuck in the shot for extra muscle definition. meanwhile this is zac actually being happy and healthy:

and i think we can all agree that he still looks fucking amazing. this is what a healthy strong guy looks like. you know what every tabloid called this when down to earth with zac efron came out? A DAD BOD.

tl;dr fatphobia is awful and showbusiness thrives on making people have body image issues.

please don't erase aro people's rightful criticism of the "love is love" slogan by claiming that love can be platonic or universal or whatever. "the use of 'love is love' as a unifying phrase for the entire queer community is harmful" and "we don't always mean romantic love when we discuss love" AND "it's okay if you don't want to describe your feelings, attachments, or interests in terms of love" are all opinions that can and should coexist

also, not to detract from OP’s point, because they are 100% right, but trans people like... exist? and for some trans people such as myself, my transess is much more important to me than my sexuality and i cannot emphasize enough how disheartening it is to see the lgbtq community represented as just “love is love”.

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr

Tea and linguistics. My two faves.

Okay, this is all kinds of fascinating!

Quality linguistic research

It’s fascinating indeed. Also i would like to point to the fact that until just a few hundreds years ago the majority of humankind didn’t really have a reason to travel more than a few dozens of kilometers away from their homes so i highly doubt they ever walked from one desert to some other desert or from one giant mountainside to another so if you asked locals what the desert or mountains or the forest or the lake was called, the chances are they would just tell you the local word for the desert, mountains, the forest, or the lake. Because they had like never seen any other such thing in their life. Even as far as stories go, phrases “in a land far far away” or “behind seven mountains” is about as far as oral tradition of carography goes until like the Rome empire, at which point cartographers simply adopted local names for stuff.

And btw, the same thing goes for our planet. Didn’t you guys ever wondered why we call it Earth? In slovak we call it “Zem” which translates as land, country, kingdom, ground, or soil depending on the context. Because like it’s the only planet we have ever been walking on and we are walking on soil and dirt and mud thus when asked “how do you call this thing you are walking in?” ancient people simply blinked in confusion on whoever asked this stupidly obvious question and said “the ground”

this post has everything, tea, linguistics, history, sources, and a heavy implication that ancient people were visited by aliens asking dumb questions

i really don’t like the whole “tell your parents off and call them out when they’re being racist/homophobic/etc even if it gets you in trouble with them” argument especially when it pertains to minors and people who still rely on their parents financially. you can’t morally advocate for a minor to tell off their parents when it involves them risking their own safety and well-being. and you’d be surprised how many people i’ve seen on this godforsaken website doing just that.

Sometimes the safest thing you can do is bite your tongue. I’m not a minor, but my living situation does rely heavily on my homophobic parents. Sometimes they’ll discuss politics, religion, homosexuality, and no matter how much my blood boils, I can’t safely say a word.

It’s OKAY to not say something if it puts your safety at risk. We live in a culture that acts like it is our responsibility to correct problematic people, but sometimes it is our burden to live with it and make sure to do better for the future, to raise our kids better and to focus on who we CAN safely call out and change.

Never, ever feel badly for not calling someone out if it puts you at any kind of risk, even emotional danger.

Some POTO fans definitely need to be reminded of this lmao

Not to sound like a 90s shallow prep, but how you dress can affect your self esteem, and putting energy into wearing things you actively like and projecting an ideal of yourself through fashion instead of seeing clothes as things you have to put on out of obligation helps.

It also can give you a sense of control over your appearance that you otherwise wouldn’t have lmao

I bought a cape because of this

this post is written in a humorous tone but this is the realest shit.

two years ago i wore baggy sweatpants and flip flops every day because i was depressed but then decided eh to hell with it and bought some black edgy emo clothes bc thats how i always wanted to dress but never got a chance to and it was only then that i realized that the sweatpants flip flops look was just keeping me in my depression funk. i didnt like the way i looked and i didnt identify with the clothes i was wearing and it only made me feel worse.

i then went through my entire wardrobe and got rid of everything that made me feel that way.

now i have multiple outfit possibilities requiring different levels of effort but on days where putting on clothes just seems like a project i just have to put on black jeans and a band t-shirt and i can still feel good about the way i look which is a really good way to start off my day.

i can not recommend this approach to clothing enough.

Can I just say this is the healthiest mindset related post I have seen on this sight and I want every single person on here to read this

As someone with social anxiety, any kind of verbal presentation feels about 75% easier when I deliver it in a shirt and tie, not exaggerating. Something about it puts my mind in a different place. Maybe it’s the confidence of formal clothing, maybe it’s the power move of screwing gender roles, but there really is a quantifiable difference. I’d 100% recommend this kind of thing for anyone with social anxiety who has to present something for school, work, etc.

If you don’t support AO3′s policies, then don’t post your fic there.

Don’t read there, either.

..and don’t bitch about how you’re feeling excluded by the “cult of AO3” because hello, you’re against it, that’s what excluding yourself does….

None of this makes any sense…

>_> its tone deaf you’re right. Criticism isn’t bad. 

I think that’s what it is. Folks cant be sensitive to criticism but then act like critics are “too sensitive”, the whole “you cannot utilize this site unless you 100 support it and are its primary demographic” doesnt work in any real life capacity and is extremely dismissive (and hypocritical), like we all know we didnt “exclude ourselves”…

I would like to clarify that this post was not made in response to people who would like to see AO3 add certain features, fix bugs, etc. You are right, criticism isn’t bad, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I’m responding to people who fundamentally disagree with the the philosophy at the core of the OTW and the Archive Of Our Own.

I’m responding to people who want AO3 to ban certain subject matter and certain ships. I’m responding to people who believe it is the job of the archive they utilize for free to curate content according to their tastes, preferences, and objections. I’m responding to people who are angry that AO3 does not act according to their desires.

And to those people, I say: you don’t have to use AO3, and if you feel strongly about it, perhaps you shouldn’t. 

Keep reading

AO3′s software is completely open source. The code is here. You can set up your own site with all of its tools, but with your own rules. You can make it an entirely private site if you want. You don’t even have to be capable of continuing development on it, you can just keep updating with the things the OTW does. You just have to be capable of either maintaining it and editing the HTML, or paying someone to.

Nobody fucking does. Nobody wants to do the fucking work. People want AO3 volunteers to put in even more work than they already do to allow the objectors the power to control it. The objectors themselves don’t want to do the fucking work; they want other people to do the work while they make the rules. And that is some bull. shit.

I was there, Gandalf, three thousand years ago, when the OTW was just getting off the ground. And everyone involved in starting the AO3 just assumed that fandom would take the code and build a bunch of single-fandom / character / pairing / trope archives with it. Because that’s what fandom was. That’s what it did with Astolat’s Automated Archive software, which ran the original Yuletide exchange and the big archives for Sentinel and Smallville and Due South and a couple dozen other fandoms at the time.

The AO3 was primarily meant to be a repository–one big backup for all of fandom. It was designed with the assumption that most of its content wouldn’t even be uploaded directly to AO3, but automatically cross-posted or imported from other, smaller archives. Or mailing lists. Or individual author websites. Or other parts of the fannish environment that just…don’t exist anymore.

When fandom olds say the AO3 changed fandom, we mean, it was fandom’s oxygenation crisis: such an immense, runaway success that it wiped out almost every vestige of the previous world. And enabled all sorts of new and more complex things to grow and evolve–but they’re growing in the archive’s world and breathing its air.

Okay, I love the metaphor of AO3 as the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, because that’s hilarious and yet so apt. AO3 really did change the entire fandom ecosystem, and it’s hard to remember what we did in fandom before it.

Which is why Fanlore exists and you should read some entries when you have a moment.

ACE AWARNESS WEEK STARTS TODAY MOTHERCLUCKERS!!!

Flags in order: Asexual, Aromantic, Aroace, Alloaro, Alloace

Note: Feel free to use the above background!

Note 2: Yeah, I know it’s ace awareness week, I just found this that I made a while ago on my computer. New one soon, I promise!

Quick PSA bc I just saw some really fucked up shit:

AFAB SHE/THEYS AND AMAB HE/THEYS ARE FUCKING VALID

AFAB HE/THEYS AND AMAB SHE/THEYS ARE FUCKING VALID

YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE A WHITE ANDROGYNOUS SKINNY BITCH TO BE A DEMIGIRL/BOY- god fucking knows I’m not and it hurts to see that’s all people accept

Repeat after me: EVERYONE PERCEIVES GENDER DIFFERENTLY

Stop being ANNOYING ABOUT IT

ok but legitimately i think the reason why kids aren’t taking internet safety seriously is because the people who are telling us not to put our personal information out seem so out of touch. no one acknowledges the possibility of meeting very real teenaged friends online, they always say that everyone you meet is a 40 year old white man in disguise. because they aren’t acknowledging things we know are true, it becomes a lot easier to dismiss the rest of what they’re saying as well. internet safety lessons absolutely must keep up with the times and acknowledge the internet’s capacity for good if you want kids to take to heart warnings about its capacity for bad.

Some actual safety tips for teenagers:

1. Have proof they're a teenager first. More than just a picture, have a video call with them.

2. If you want to meet up with them, have your parents or a trusted adult come with you. Even if they are a proven teenager, its still good to have supervision in case any issues happen.

3. If you are talking to an adult, and they start being sexual in any way, you run the fuck away. It doesn't matter if they're 40 or 20. An adult inherently has a power dynamic that teenagers do not. And its up to the adult to act responsible about it. There's exceptions of course, if you're 16 and dating an 18 year old, that's not a problem, we're not talking about that.

4. Being in a server with adults or ran by adults is not inherently bad. Talking to adults is not inherently a problem, and will likely happen in any number of Discord servers. It is only an issue when they are acting sexual and show predatory behavior.

5. Look out for grooming behavior. It can be difficult, because at first it seems like innocuous behavior, like complimenting or giving gifts. Especially if you feel lonely and have low self esteem. And groomers actively target people like that.

If they start trying to isolate you, talk sexual with you, state they depend on you for emotional needs, blame you for their own actions, try to be secretive about the relationship- Then you need to talk to people you trust, block the perpetrator, and call the police on them.

6. If this does happen to you, remember this: It is not your fault. Even if you didn't listen to a single thing listed here, it is not your fault. It is the fault of the adults who knew better, and didn't care. It's not your fault.

To my followers: if any of you guys are underaged, please be very VERY careful on here, and don’t fall for any of the tricks the groomer would use on you, just block them and report them.

Stranger Danger is still very real.

BE SAFE