lyrics DO NOT 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️❌❌🚫🚫 have to be good 🙂‍↔️🙂‍↔️🙂‍↔️ for the song to be good 👍😎😎😎

sticker design for pride this year! 💞🏳️‍⚧️

This is an official anti-JKR post

Of course, many dragons choose to maintain a non-traditional hoard. The sophisticated dragon knows that a richly endowed orchard can induce as much envy and treasure-lust in the local populace as the largest piles of gold.

i started this when i was really really high the other day and never finished it

Yes!

Susie does this quite a lot. Some I remember are-

And obviously her letter to Alvin

An Undertale/Deltarune Theory Complaint:

Alright I wanna bitch about UT/DR fan interpretations again. Basically, I feel like the idea that Kris is being puppeteered by the player (and that they're aware of this to any degree), which I was already not a huge fan of, is now getting retroactively applied to the protagonist of Undertale.

That sucks guys. That sucks so fucking hard. And not only does it suck, but it actually helps illustrate just why it would suck in DR too:

It retroactively fucks up the tone of the entire game!

(This is much more just a rant I've been sitting on recently, as compared to some big detailed writeup. Also, y'know, spoiler warning for both games. Screen shots from LongplayArchive on YouTube)

Why is it that every time I google something like "Are olives poisonous to cats" the top results are always like "Fun fact: Cats are carnivores! This means that they eat meat. There is no reason to include olives in a cat's diet. You should feed your cat cat food, which is dry or wet food especially designed for cats. You can purchase this at a store." like is there a single person alive on the planet who's googled "Are blueberry muffins safe for cats" because they're planning on switching their cat to a muffin-only diet??? No, I'm asking because the little bastard somehow popped open the packet while I was putting away the groceries and dragged one under the couch before I could react and now I need to know if I should call the after-hours vet. "Cats should not eat spaghetti." NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!!!! "Try to keep human food away from cats." i live in a studio apartment with a completely silent and permanently hungry apex predator who has the intelligence of a toddler and the desperate Machiavellian cunning of a creature who spent his formative months on the streets. He can already open doors and he is this 👌 close to learning how to open the microwave. He is stronger than me and covered in knives. So im gonna do my best but for the moment i just need you to tell me whether this yoghurt is going to kill my son y/n

I've been using the pet poison hotline's poison list cause it has a search function. It also tells you whether something is mildly, moderately, or severely toxic which can be very handy! It doesn't contain like everything but it might be a good place to start, it also includes plants for fellow houseplant lovers <3

For plants specifically, there’s also a wildly detailed set of posts and listings about toxicity on the old, wonderful, Plants Are the Strangest People blog

˖ ݁𖥔. Inviting .𖥔 ݁ ˖

like in the last two-ish weeks, the Caleb Is Weird About Veth situation has gone from our base normal level to:

No, actually, I do want to talk about it.

I think there is a genuinely interesting conversation to be had about Bolaire, masculinity, neurodivergent coding, gender nonconformity, and the way that being perceived as “socially off-putting” can become moralised by an audience.

And before somebody gets mad at me for something I have not actually said: no, I am not saying that everybody who dislikes Bolaire is ableist. I am not diagnosing Bolaire with anything and I am DEFINITELY not diagnosing Taliesin Jaffe with anything. I am also not saying that you are morally obligated to like the fictional murder mask lest the fandom police arrive at your house.

You can dislike him! He is deliberately abrasive! He is a dickhead and an arsehole! He murders people!

We have all been over this.

However, what I am interested in is the language people use when explaining why they distrust him, particularly when that language stops being about anything Bolaire has actually done and starts becomes things like:

Because those are different kinds of statements. They may originate in the text, but they aren't arguments about particular actions so much as affective judgments which can very quickly become moral ones.

“I don't trust Bolaire because he lies” is a textual argument.

“I don't trust Bolaire because he kills people” is a textual argument.

“I think Bolaire is being unfair to Thjazi because X, Y and Z contradict his version of events” is a textual argument.

“He just gives me bad vibes” is something else.

And I think it is worth asking what, exactly, those vibes are.

Because Bolaire is profoundly socially strange.

He isn't human. He isn't even a conventional living creature. He is a sentient object who has spent seventy years observing personhood from the outside and trying, with varying degrees of success, to participate in it. He frequently seems to understand human behaviour intellectually before he understands it intuitively. He can identify extraordinarily complicated emotional dynamics while completely failing to recognise the ordinary social expectation happening directly in front of him.

He is simultaneously hyper-perceptive and socially oblivious.

He can be incredibly articulate about somebody else's emotional state and then say something so catastrophically inappropriate that everyone at the table looks like they want to crawl under it.

And I, personally, love it a lot. To me, very good television.

There is something deeply compelling to me about a character who appears to have learned personhood almost anthropologically. Bolaire watches people. He studies them. He collects information about them. He understands patterns. He has developed an extraordinary appreciation for the ridiculous complexity of living creatures.

But knowing about people and knowing how to be a person are not the same skill.

And that distinction produces a character who is very easily read through the language of neurodivergent coding without requiring Bolaire to secretly possess a fantasy DSM diagnosis (and we're simply not going to get into the weedy can of worms the DSM is as a diagnostic tool just by itself).

He is frequently too intense, too direct, and too strange. He doesn't always perform the expected emotion at the expected moment. He fixates and intellectualises, and he sometimes seems to have trouble approaching interpersonal relationships as something that comes naturally, rather than a series of systems and static rules he can learn and execute (pun intended) with a predictable and guaranteed effect on the intendee. He can miss something everyone else considers obvious while noticing something nobody else has noticed at all. There is something particularly poignant about a constructed being apparently expecting personhood to operate like another function he can eventually learn to perform correctly, only to discover that people are inconsistent, contradictory, and constantly changing the rules.

And crucially, he knows that other people find him strange. Sometimes he weaponises it. At other times, he seems genuinely wounded by it. And much like the “regular people” he observes and admires, there can be very little rhyme or reason to which way that particular stale bread crumbles on any given day.

Sometimes he appears to have accepted that this is simply the price of being Bolaire, other days, he is infuriated that he is not granted the same space, grace, and personhood as the others around him.

This is where the discourse becomes interesting to me, because audiences are generally pretty comfortable with “weird” characters when their weirdness is reassuring rather than threatening or passes the point of no return in terms of social acceptability.

The awkward genius can be ultimately harmless. The quirky autistic-coded character's eccentricities are cute or infantilised. Their heart is pure. They're just a strange little guy who needs protecting.

Bolaire is not reassuring. He is not innocent.

He is socially strange AND dangerous.

He is vulnerable AND manipulative.

He misunderstands people AND sometimes understands them frighteningly well.

He has been used AND he uses people.

He can be profoundly loving AND profoundly cruel.

You cannot resolve your discomfort with him by discovering that underneath all the weirdness is a perfectly conventional Good Person, because there isn't one.

There is only Bolaire.

And this is also where we get into the gender of it all because another thing that sets Bolaire apart, is that he's not particularly interested in performing masculinity in a way designed to reassure anybody.

He is theatrical, decorative, and frequently quite camp in a way that he clearly enjoys performing and inflicting on people in turn. He is comfortable in femininity and beauty, and comfortable occupying positions that conventional masculinity often treats as humiliating or diminishing. His presentation is entirely uninterested in demonstrating that he is sufficiently masculine to other men.

And I think people underestimate how much social permission conventional masculinity provides.

A man can be aggressive, arrogant, emotionally withholding, domineering, even frightening, and those qualities remain culturally legible. We know what that kind of man is. Fiction has spent centuries teaching us how to read him.

The strange, feminine, theatrical man is often treated quite differently.

His masculinity itself becomes suspicious. His emotionality becomes manipulative. His theatricality becomes dishonesty. His intelligence becomes smugness. His attention to other people becomes invasive. His unconventional social behaviour becomes creepiness. His femininity becomes weakness right up until it becomes threatening, at which point it becomes perversity.

“This person makes me uncomfortable (they don't perform gender correctly)” can very quickly become “there is something morally wrong with this person” without consciously deciding to make that leap.

Again: THIS DOES NOT MEAN EVERYBODY WHO DISLIKES BOLAIRE SECRETLY HATES FEMININE MEN.

Please develop reading comprehension before sending that ask.

What it means is that fiction does not exist outside the culture reading it, and audiences bring cultural assumptions about what trustworthy people look and sound like into their interpretations.

Which becomes particularly interesting when Bolaire is placed against a male character who is easier to read through conventional masculine archetypes, such Thjazi, who exists within a fairly legible “lovable rogue, arsehole with a heart of gold, complicated man, veteran, and leader” combined archetype, who has the added bonus of being a very legibly handsome man in a traditionally masculine way.

The irony is that cultural legibility can make genuinely dangerous behaviour feel less alarming. We know the swaggering rogue. We know the gruff soldier. We know the emotionally constipated man with a heart of gold. Their roughness comes with a cultural instruction manual telling us where we're supposed to find the tenderness underneath it. The feminine, theatrical, socially peculiar man is not necessarily given that same grace.

That doesn't mean Thjazi actually is any safer, kinder, or more trustworthy than Bolaire. It means audiences already possess a well-developed cultural vocabulary for understanding a man like Thjazi. Simply put, that one masculinity may feel familiar. The other feels strange. And familiarity is very, very easy to mistake for safety.

This is also where I think there is a separate conversation worth having about Taliesin.

SEPARATE being the operative word.

Bolaire is a fictional character. Taliesin is an actual human being whom none of us know personally, and I am not interested in diagnosing him, psychoanalysing him, or pretending I possess secret information about his internal life because I have watched him play Dungeons & Dragons.

But Taliesin is, publicly and observably, an alternative man who has spent years being extremely comfortable with aesthetics and modes of presentation that also aren't particularly invested in conventional masculinity.

And the fandom has been very weird about that from the word jump! (I was there Gandalf, I was there 3,000 years ago ... )

I don't think we need to invent anything about his private identity to talk about the public response to his public presentation.

There has long been a particular flavour of criticism directed toward Taliesin that isn't simply “I don't enjoy his characters” or “I disagree with this choice.” It's the idea that he's pretentious. That he's trying too hard. That he thinks he's cleverer than everybody else. That he's deliberately being obscure. That he's performing.

And maybe sometimes you just find a performer annoying! God knows there are performers I cannot stand for reasons that would disintegrate under interrogation.

But when the same cluster of accusations follows both performer and characters despite enormous differences between those characters, I become interested in the pattern.

Especially because “pretentious” is so often an accusation levelled at people who are visibly trying something, whether that be trying aesthetically, intellectually, or artistically.

The conventional guy wearing a T-shirt is just wearing clothes. The alternative guy who has clearly thought about his clothes is “trying too hard.”

The conventionally masculine guy being confident is charismatic. The strange feminine guy being confident is smug.

The former is allowed to occupy space without explaining why he deserves it.

The latter's visibility itself can start feeling like arrogance.

And then Taliesin creates Bolaire, who is quite literally a performance mask.

This character, whose face and entire being is nothing but an artificial object that exists at the intersection of person and performance, who has spent decades negotiating whether he is a person or a thing, played by a performer whose characters and public aesthetic have repeatedly attracted accusations of artificiality, pretension and excessive theatricality?

I am going to chew on that!

This isn't even touching on how “masking” is a term frequently used within the neurodivergent community and the conscious or unconscious performance of socially expected behaviour in order to pass more comfortably through a world designed around different expectations. I don't need to claim Taliesin deliberately constructed that metaphor to notice how extraordinarily productive it becomes when applied to a character who is quite literally a mask trying to work out how to be a person.

And it does NOT mean I think Taliesin sat down and went, “Today I shall create an allegory for everyone who has ever been mean about my hair on Reddit.”

But artists inevitably return to questions that interest them, consciously and unconsciously, and audiences inevitably respond through the baggage they bring with them.

And THAT is where I think Bolaire becomes particularly fascinating.

Because so much of his story appears concerned with the difference between what something is and what other people decide it is.

Person or object. Weapon or victim. Monster or friend. Masculine or feminine. Sincere or performative. Loving or manipulative. Abuser or abused.

And the answer keeps being:

Yes.

Sometimes it is a horrible, impossible, and uncomfortable yes.

This is also why I am so completely uninterested in reducing the conversation to whether Bolaire Defenders™ or Thjazi Defenders™ have accumulated enough evidence to prove who is the more morally superior man.

That is a thoroughly uninteresting question and premise.

I see a seventy-year-old sentient murder mask who loves people without entirely knowing how to be one. I see a character who can understand someone's soul and completely misunderstand the conversation. I see someone capable of terrible cruelty who nevertheless experiences terrible hurt.

I see someone who is strange and unsettling without the story needing to reassure me that underneath it all, he's actually a perfectly wholesome little guy.

I want to ask why some audiences find certain kinds of masculine danger exciting and charismatic while experiencing other kinds of masculine difference as inherently suspicious.

And not because I think the answer is automatically ‘prejudice,’ either.

Sometimes “bad vibes” really do mean “the text is deliberately telling me something is wrong.” Other times, “bad vibes” mean “this person is violating a social expectation I didn't realise I had.” Sometimes it's both. Or neither. Regardless, I think we could all benefit from approaching that discomfort with a little more curiosity.

Why does he make me uncomfortable? What expectation is he violating? Is the story asking me to distrust him, or am I bringing that distrust with me?

what happened to old youtubers you watched as a kid

good endings:

bad endings:

neutral endings:

I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?

If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.

In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.

They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.

And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.

It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.

Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.

And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.

Young Justice

Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences

#WhereIsRey (initial)

#WhereIsRey (ongoing)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was designed to be the opposite of The Last Jedi

You’re all sitting on the hot take of the decade tbh

And yet when they fond out that boys were watching MLP:FIM in droves, they had NO PROBLEM with it.

#SONS OF ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!#LITERALLY SONS OF ANARCHY IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF THIS LIKE EVER#kurt sutter wrote that show for MEN and ended up with an overwhelmingly female audience#because he’s actually a good writer and knows how to develop characters well and wrote excellent female characters#but once he realized that his audience was almost entirely women he literally took it out on tara and gemma in the show#but like tara specifically#he resented her character for being a huge draw for female viewers so he tore her development to shreds and killed her#in the most brutal gut wrenching way possible#kurt sutter you will pay for your crimes#i actually wrote a manifesto about this on one of my old blogs i should try to find it sldkjsldfjsdljf#long post (via@m-oonknight)

OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.

The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.

Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”

I think it would be harder for us to find examples of when this DIDNT happen than when it did. It happens all the time.

Doesn’t stop it from boggling the mind

(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)

Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.

Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.

(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)

I think a lot about an interview I heard with Bo Burnham a few years ago, where he talks about this phenomenon with his own work. He gained a large audience of teenage girls, and people in comedy spaces would look down on him for that or say what a shame it was, but he responded differently:

“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”

Instead of trying to change his comedy, he decided to lean into and celebrate the audience that he actually had by making a movie specifically about the experiences of a teenage girl. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how he got there, but also to acknowledge how rare that reaction is.

This is all true but help-help-i-need-an-adult asked if there are any examples where this didn’t happen. And I literally only know of ONE.

Behold! The ONE thing that bothered to relate its female audience with positivity:

Source: June 1998 issue of Newtype, in a special supplement/booklet titled 「まるごと富野」 (“Marugoto Tomino” / “All About Tomino”)

Clip from the NHK documentary where Tomino says this AGAIN and continues on to say that if they wanted a movie he knew they had to hold on to this part of the fandom. https://x.com/tayuta0079/status/1577387893135384577

Shout out to Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino for being a real one.

[ID: Text reading: Discipline as Pleasure in Creative Practice

Yumi Sakugawa

End ID.]

Favorite scenes Thjazi was forced to experience trapped as Julien's shadow:

Basically:

Give Lilly Wachowski Her 10 Fucking Million Dollars To Make A Movie What The Fuck Is Wrong With You You Stupid Cunts Like Hello She Made The Matrix Are You Dumb? Do You Not Like Good Shit?

When people bitch and moan that conservative comedians are getting “cancelled” I want to grab them by the throat and scream at them that the Director of The Matrix One of The Most Successful Action Movies Of All Time can’t get funds for another movie because she’s transgender.

Unpopular opinion: DEI is meritocracy. DEI is a corrective on the natural tendency to nepotism and racial and gender bias, and I don't understand why non-conservatives are so afraid of just saying so

Like why did we ever accept this framing of "affirmative action" as being for redress of historical injustices, rather than as a corrective for present injustices? It is an empirically demonstrable fact that racial bias in hiring exists; why do we have to pretend that this is about compensation for slavery or whatever? Are we just afraid of hurting people's feelings by suggesting that they might be racist?

please, carol