Archive.org: "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" by Isabel Fall

were you aware that the short story that got Isabel Fall bullied all the way off the internet and into fucking inpatient was truly brilliant? I was too grossed out by the twitter shitshow to read it when it came out and thus managed to only read it now. it was a Hugo finalist for a reason. I hope she can find it in herself to write again bc she's got really interesting and creative stuff to say. would recommend it if you haven't read it yet. 7726 words.

while it would be a breach of confidence to say under what name, I think it's probably safe for me to say that yes, she is still writing. I wouldn't expect her to publish as Isabel Fall again any time soon though.

can confirm

It's honestly crazy that discussion around testosterone HRT skews so much towards the beginning stages of it (to the point that you have dozens of guys thinking their transition is "failed" if they don't pass by like a year in lol) and what the initial changes of the first couple of months to years look like, like the classic laundry list of those early basic changes like bottom growth, voice drop, etc, when IMO literally none of that compares remotely to the depth and intensity of the long term total masculinization you start to experience like 3-5+ years in.

doctors have fucked up incredibly badly with HRT timelines and advice to trans people. actual endogenous human puberty takes almost 20 years

reblogging this again actually to share some of my specific experiences on the transfem side:

doctors say body fat and boobs and stuff happen mostly within the first 3 years. but i got major spurts of breast development at 7 years and 11-12 years. my hips have become significantly wider in the past couple of years - at like 13-14 years HRT.

you will keep changing forever.

we absolutely do not expect you to share your name, age, mental illnesses or flashing weak points, that's a radical vulnerability psyop that a small minority of the site users fell for because they don't know any gay people in real life

Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.

And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.

this is such a beautiful post it doesn't need my dumb addition, but i can't fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I'm only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.

at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child

so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world's oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any "useful" items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios' grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we've all been the same for 30,000 years.

it's incredibly bizarre to grow up with a gas stove and use a gas stove basically your whole life then hear gas stove discourse. it's like when oregon residents freaked out about the law changing allowing anyone to pump their own gas at gas stations

i'm not gonna argue that gas stoves aren't bad for the environment because they use fossil fuels but like, i imagine that home gas stove use is a tiny fraction of gas usage compared to natural gas power plants. also induction/electric isn't necessarily a lesser impact if your power company runs on fossil fuels. on top of that you usually dont have a choice over if you have a gas or electric stove because you can't change it in most apartments (especially if there's no gas line) also it's expensive as fuck to replace it no matter which way you're going because you need a 240v circuit installed or gas pipe laid

however when you get to actually using a gas stove, the fear over gas leaks and burning your house down is incredibly irrational. like i get you might be a little nervous if you've never used a gas stove but like, it's not that scary. plus a gas cooktop is the best for cooking and temp control. just doesn't even come close

Is 240v not standard in the US? Weird.

The first time I used a gas stove I was terrified because all I really knew about gas was hearing about gas explosions. I agree that you get amazing control of temperature with gas, but the downside is that you need to actually buy the gas, and that's stupidly expensive lately in a lot of the world.

american house voltage is 120v, with special 240v circuits for special appliances or equipment (usually electric oven, washer/dryer equipment, or sometimes in a garage for, you know, garage things)

yeah gas is expensive but so's electricity now so we're all in the same boat there. in new york your gas bill is usually tiny because your apartment is centrally heated. most people only pay for the stove and that was like, $15? a month? meanwhile my electricity bill was $80-100. one bedroom

people have been misled about the actual problem with gas stoves. the actual problem is not that they're especially bad for the environment or prone to explosions, the issue is that they cause huge amounts of extremely serious health problems for people who live with them, particularly women and children: women because they are usually the ones doing the cooking, children because exposure during development is what fucks you up bigtime.

not only do the gasses themselves cause chronic and acute illness, they also make people sicker from every other pathology they come into contact with, including COVID.

there's no question a gas stove beats the shit out of cooking on anything else. that's inarguable. but the direct health effects are shocking. and weve known about this since the 1970s at least.

Gas Stoves are also just intensely inefficient as cookers. Here’s An Ep of Technology Connections about Electric Kettles which touches on this. He may have done one directly about gas ovens before, but it wasn’t on the first page of my youtube search and Im lazy so I didn’t bother digging around for it.

Also: it absolutely DOES matter if we switch from gas to electric appliances, even IF power-gen is still gas, because that will mean LESS PUMPING of gas, and that’s where most of the emissions come from with natural gas: leakage.

Beyond that I think all you folks currently posting about how “bad” non-carbon options for various appliances are need to stop for a second and consider that you’re responding uncritically to a recent wave of pro-carbon papers that has just MYSTERIOUSLY APPEARED right when ppl are starting to srsl consider non-gas options which is simply to say:

You are Not Immune to Propaganda

in my many years of running online communities i have dealt with many near-identical representatives from respective species of idiot, loser and asshole and by far the worst person to have on your server is the primordially clueless unfunny guy who Means Well to the extent that you would feel bad for just banning them because they genuinely have something wrong with them that makes them insanely annoying. not a cognitive disability i mean just terminally unsophisticated. in all cases it is better to just have the forums-hardened shit-stirrer who can be banned unceremoniously. the meek and infuriating Naif is subject to months of discussion in the mod chat as we all try to weigh our sense of social responsibility against everyone being sick of this fucking guy

it's been said but there is something magical about the writing ability of the tumblr userbase. it's monkeys with typewriters of course but with the wisdom-of-crowds weight-guessing phenomenon on top. the pure synaptic delight of a phrase like "this idiot hasn't seen Goncharov" or "girl what kind of interview is this". "his wife has filled his house with chintz" probably has a thesis written on it in a linguistics program somewhere by now. blöro, blorbo, horse plinko, bode. that's pussy babe! put the pussy in a scarmophagus. suck a blood clot out them mfs like los feratu. lots of O and R sounds. oughh. we are in a low and gutteral era of memes, totally appropriate for the universal fatigue, the lowness of daily existence. every day on this website i read some effortless sentence that triggers the neuroverbal part of my brain with something like ASMR and in seven years i will spontaneously remember the phrase "nosferatu pussy indulgence" and start laughing so hard i hurt myself

(via @roach-works​)

every time i rediscover a Life Hack from like 30,000 years ago i feel so stupid i want to kill myself. ive recently started using a normal reed basket i just found by a dumpster to carry shit around my house. i need to bring 8 things from the kitchen cabinet to the stove to bake some cookies. ok i put them in the basket, i carry them to the stove. when im done with each ingredient i place it in the basket. at the end i take the basket back to the cabinet. i do this instead of making 4-5 trips because it's too many items to hold at once. i feel like a genius. i feel like a moron. i love my simple reed basket

"how do i know a woman wants me to talk to her in the grocery store" are you an elderly woman with valuable information about cooking, cleaning, or saving money? if you answered no, then women do not want to talk to you in the grocery store.

These tags needed to be shared with the class.

@captainclickycat exactly. Like why these guys think the gas station or the grocery store or the goddamn parking lot of a grocery store is the place ANYONE wants to be approached for Romance is beyond me. Like: my guy, there are SO many options besides "I have to shoot my shot literally any place I happen to see a woman within 200 yards" or "I can never speak to a woman anywhere ever. Guess I'll die alone".

But the thing a significant chunk of these guys SUPER do not want to hear is that last thing you said, because desperation isn't their only issue, but entitlement. And it's pretty easy to tell who those ones are just by the way they react when someone, however gently, dares to suggest that women's existence in public is maybe not For men at all times to try and be flirted with (if they're not Taken). The idea "hey maybe women want to be left in peace generally when going about shopping or walking on a road or whatever just the way you wouldn't want to get someone trying to make an increasingly aggressive or desperate sales pitch as you're trying to run errands" genuinely seems to enrage them, or sends them into whining fits of b-but how will I EVER get a girlfriend It's Not Faiiiir.

one of the most enlightening realizations ive had was finding out that non-24 hour circadian rhythm people were a pretty large group and most of us have oddly similar cycles of usually around 28hr internal “days” and this masquerades as “insomnia” but if allowed to sleep and wake naturally we will just advance forward through time an extra 2-4 hours a day at a relatively stable pace. we can’t go to school or jobs or even run errands on normal schedules without massive pharmacological and behavioral intervention. most of the people who have been diagnosed or figured it out themselves will report horrific, life-ruining disruption in their professional lives and terrible health from accrued lack of sleep. this disorder is most common in vision-impaired people which seems to suggest it’s related to light cues. anyway just thinking about this as extremely loud yard work woke me up at 8am for the second day in a row

lot of people reblogging this identifying themselves in it so i wanted to give you a link to a more detailed desription of Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder, and mention theres a similar disorder called Delayed Sleep Phase disorder where you are on a regular 24 hour cycle but you naturally get sleepy around 3-4am every day and wake up around 10am-12pm (roughly). as far as i can tell, despite the widespread nature of both these disorders, its basically impossible to get diagnosed bvecause sleep medicine is probably the single most useless specialty and if you dont have sleep apnea they dont want to hear about it.

me, patiently: the Tumblr porn ban was not a voluntary choice by the company itself because they hate sex workers and gays, it was a gun-to-their-head response to FOSTA-SESTA and the alternative was shutting down operations or getting sued/fined into oblivion. twitter and reddit can afford the lawyers and moderation and other nonsense required to operate under FOSTA-SESTA with porn on the table. Tumblr doesn't have that kind of operating budget. all the other sites that don't have that kind of money had to make the same changes. Craigslist personals and most of the Gigs and Community sections are almost impossible to post on now because of the same changes and lack of budget. i don't care about defending individual companies against accusations of wrongdoing, im saying you need to understand why these things happen and who the real enemy is if you're ever going to get anything done

a 20 year old who has never been tear gassed: why do you, personally, eliza, hate gay people

This isn’t actually why Tumblr banned porn, though. It was because of Apple and their god-awful app review process, according to a former Tumblr iOS engineer, along with advertisers not liking porn.

FOSTA-SESTA was disastrous in its own way, but powerful private companies - Apple, payment providers, and advertisers - are responsible for as much or more of the puritanism that reigns on the modern web.

Yes, but Apple only started cracking down after the passage of FOSTA-SESTA. It's hard to draw clean cause-and-effect lines on opaque corporate policy shifts, but I don't think op is wrong to identify the passage of both laws as a turning point.

i cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have gossipy bitchy littl pirvate group chats or discord servers with like 4 people in them whose stated purpose is posting "new kind of guy" or "this reddit post is so fuckin dumb" or "i got into a fight on twitter today look at this idiot's reply" so your homies can still see it and laugh and back you up but more importantly, so you are not tempted to post these kinds of things on main

zoomers i am going to give you some fathrly advice: really plucked brows are coming back. dont do it. you cn permanently fuck them up and in 5 yrs when its not on trend you will look like shit. a groomed natural brow works in every era of fashion theres lots of ways to comb and style brows to trend without mangling them. im just saying this as someone who saw what happened to 80s moms who went crazy wth the tweezers

the unbroken continuity of western culture from the classical era is jarring every time i read reference text from ancient Rome and to a certain extent classical Greece, the complaints various roman orators made specifically about women and queers are identical to shit you read on Reddit and in YouTube comments now. women are shrill, immodest, wear too much makeup, dress inappropriately outside, talk too much, etc. queers (sex workers, actors, followers of Cybele etc) are too loud, take up too much public space, why do they constantly make us look at them, they dye their hair weird colors, and so on

bring the Cybele float back to gay pride

i might be about to go hardcore no retouching no filter. im getting like radically alarmed about what real time video filtering and just basic digital retouching is doing to peoples brains. not just kids either but adults who were around before it was a thing

Tiktok has been applying a face shrinking beauty filter even if you turn filters off, it’s fucked

this is absolutely terrifying. this is an actual cognitohazard. this should literally be illegal

my “compulsory retouching is causing body dysmorphia on an unprecedented scale and should be treated as a public health crisis” post is raising a lot of questions already answered by the post

Back when I was a teenager, I very quickly decided to not wear makeup every day because the people I knew who did got so used to seeing themselves with makeup, their brain couldn't handle them without it anymore. They hated mirrors because they didn't look like themselves without makeup, they'd apologise for not wearing makeup even if you visited them when they were sick at home, and at one point I even remember my mum being terrified of leaving the house because she'd ran out of eyeliner. And I mean proper "I can't drive my child to school like this, what if someone sees me, also my car has mirrors" terrified. And I'm not saying everyone who wears makeup on a daily basis is like this, but it sure was a noticeable trend.

This was way before every phone was a portable camera because I'm old as balls in Tumblr Time, so if you wanted a selfie, you either used an old school camera and had the pictures developed, or you saved up for one of the first digital models which you probably shared with the entire family and which had the same amount of pixels as a a goddamn potato. So, home-made pictures made you look either bad, or just like yourself.

(And sure, magazines were already edited to hell and back, they have been since their conception in the 18th century, but the average person didn't have access to Photoshop and such yet unless you were a professional photographer venturing into digital photography.)

So yeah, be terrified of this compulsory editing, because it's exactly the same thing except it's digital instead of physical, and no amount of contouring will achieve that face slimming thing TikTok does.

Y'all look normal, trust me. No, I don't care who you are and what features you hate about yourself, this goes for all of you. You've just been conditioned to believe you don't by digital editing the same way my mum was conditioned to believe so by eye liner, foundation, facial razors, and concealer.

It is much cheaper and easier to simply have a face