I may have a new favourite quote about Doctor Who and canon.

(Source)

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.

happy Thursday the 20th

I’d have to wait months or even years for another chance to reblog this, so why the fuck not?

next days you can reblog this on a Thursday the 20th

August 2015

October 2016

April 2017

July 2017

September 2018

December 2018

June 2019

February 2020

August 2020

You know, just in case you wanted to set your queue for the next 6 years

TODAY

Since it’s now August 20, 2020… The next days you can reblog this on a Thursday the 20th:

If you wanted to set your queue for the next six years.

I gotta take my chances

Powerpuff Girls was actually a show about a group of small children crushing the patriarchy and no one will convince me otherwise

Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise obviously wasn’t watching the same show.

reasons why i love this show so much 

I love that the most tiny feminine delicate sweetheart of the three does the traditionaly masculine chores. Kinda makes me wanna see a teen Bubbles change a tire in a pretty dress and hair bow.

honestly i think my fav part of this gifset is the fact that those last two are probably supposed to be Their Chores but only Bubbles is doing them like that is peak sibling energy, flawless execution

Didn’t PPG have a villain that was specifically meant to mock feminists as man haters that use feminism to harm others?

They did and if you watch the whole episode you see the PPG get tricked into letting the villain committ crime out of female solidarity.

Then several women step in to talk to the PPG about how the villain is using feminism as a scapegoat to get away with toxic and criminal behavior. And how what the villain is doing isnt actually feminist at all.

Like that episode was very good about addressing toxic behaivor from people who are supposedly woke or whatever.

An episode a lot of Tumblr should watch given the rampant radfem and terf ideology that gets spread on here.

in conclusion

stan powerpuff girls for clear skin

Additionally: look at Bubble’s smile and pure joy when her sisters bring up her role. That’s not a child who’s getting shunted with the sibling chores, that’s a child who decided one Sunday morning “I’m going to wash the car, it sounds fun!” and no one has stopped her since. 

this show is a gem <3

❌ “friends don’t look at friends like that” devalues friendship/platonic forms of love, pushes amatonormativity

❌ “historians will call them friends” devalues historians and forces complex relationships into modern simplicities, also devalues friendship/platonic forms of love

✅ “do they know its legal now” suggests the characters are stupid, poorly suggests that this is the only barrier to their relationship—both of which are funny as hell

Shout out to the doctor who responded with complete sincerity when I (on anesthesia) uttered the phrase “chat are we cooked” in her medical professional vicinity. You’re such a real one for that fr fr

wish there was a way to be like, hey I didn't want to pay for your streaming service subscription for this show so I watched it free on a shady pirate streaming site, I liked it so here's a one time payment of ten bucks, consider making a season two (which I'll also be watching free on a shady pirate site)

the people yearn for DVD releases

Up until last year I worked in public libraries (I'm at an academic library now), and I can't overstate how popular DVDs still are. People would come in and routinely check out 20-30 at a time, watch them all, and then check out more. TV shows, new releases, and non-fiction were obviously huge, but DVDs are also one of the only places you can get older movies that aren't on streaming, foreign films, or just something that recently moved from one service to another. In the children's section we had literally a couple of hundred Scooby Doo DVDs from various eras and they got checked out all the time.

DVDs can be watched whenever you want to and in whichever pieces you want. There are no ads that pop up at any point (except for the easily skippable trailers that might be at the beginning). Also, if you have no internet at your home you can still watch a DVD. It has started to become difficult in the past several years because a lot of patrons would come in asking for DVDs of recent tv shows they had heard about only for me to have to tell them that the company had no current plans to release those shows to DVD.

Anyways, if you have a public library go in sometime and just browse the DVD collection. It's the best modern approximation of what it used to be like to wander around a Blockbuster, and you may find something you love that streaming would never offer to you.

people got mad the last time i said this but you HAVE to stop pretending that people of the past were more intellectual and thoughtful and you need to model yourself after them because modernity pales in comparison. that's nazi shit

basically

maybe this is too woke but i really hate the trope of naked older women = scary or vomit inducing or gross or whatever. like you even see it used in horror on occasion like oooooo so scary theres a woman with saggy boobs and wrinkles. There is something to be said for unconsensual veiwing of nudity. sure. it’s uncomfortable and violating for someone to be nude in front of you that you don’t want to see. but rarely that’s seen as the issue and instead the real ‘horror’ or gross out joke is the very idea of a woman who does not have a body that is sexually desirable to men. The very idea of an older woman’s body is treated like it’s something that we should all know is gross, sick and wrong. It’s just something that really bothers me

Reminder:

This is a beautiful addition thank you @curseoftheseahag

the fertility collapse is because people think you only become an adult at 30. the loneliness crisis is because governments have adopted the policy position that it's a problem when people have friends. and because everyone who matters moves all the time (like how nobles had to spend half the year in versailles to stop them from building regional power bases that would be inconvenient for the king) and diversity erodes social trust (like how whole foods is aware of which properties to optimize for in its workforce to minimize the risk of unionization). why else would governments take it as a problem when people have friends? well, a friend is someone you can break the law with

notable how many words the english language contains which mean both 'group of friends' and 'criminal organization'

Okay, let's talk about kids and needles.

Because under the post about giving minors the right to medically consent, people are spreading a ton of misinformation on this - largely because they just do not question the stuff they just assume are "normal". Which here is: "kids are all afraid of needles and therefore if we let them consent or not to medical proceedures, they would just not consent and not get vaccinations, because needles hurt".

And, look. Here is the thing: no, needles do not actually hurt a whole lot. And while, yes, certain procedures that involve being stabbed by a needle hurt more if you are younger for a bunch of reasons... that is actually not the main reason children fear needles. Because, again: the pain is not that bad. And most kids, especially young kids, whose motor skills are still developing, usually will have a bunch more hurting scratches, bruises and the like at any given moment than there will be pain from the needle.

No, from what research can tell, the main reason kids are afraid of needles, is more that for many of them needle procedures are very traumatizing. And that is largely because of the consent issue.

Imagine you are a person who is still pretty darn new to that whole human thing. So for one, yes, your brain is actually not that great in understanding what pain is dangerous and what pain is a safe limit of pain. So yes, someone intentionally hurting you (like with a needle) is really kinda scary. But then there is also the thing where this person hurting you is not telling you why they are doing. The people who you normally trust with keeping you safe (your family) is betraying you, by just holding you down and scolding you for crying over it. Or maybe it is not your family, but some strange nurse who is holding you. And while you are scared, because someone is intentionally hurting you, while someone else is restricting you, the adults around you are telling you, that your emotional reaction to this is actually bad and you are wrong for reacting that way. They might in fact lie to you and tell you that something that is insanely scary to you is "not that bad", instead of just understanding that it is super scary to you. And that is then what you start to expect whenever you see a doctor prepare a needle: people holding you down, hurting you without reason, and telling you that you are wrong for being upset, actively gaslighting you.

We have research on this. And this research is pretty clear: most kids are actually somewhat okay with needles, if you inform them why you are doing it, allow for them to have their emotions, talk to them about their emotions, and allow for them to set at least some conditions.

And frankly, I hate how many people just accept the framing of "kids are naturally afraid of this because it hurts". Like, folks, I know y'all are fucking Americans and that in your culture it is kinda normalized to like put kids into like some sort of fortified hamsterball to stop them from like doing typical kids stuff. But... let me tell you: if you do not do that, kids will actually very regularly engage in dangerous play that they know will often end up in injuries that are going to hurt. And, no, they are not to dumb to understand that. The kids know that this is what might happen because of their play. They actually just take the risk. Yes, they will cry if they get hurt, because - again - their nervous system is still calibrating how it relates to pain. But they will likely do that thing again and again. I can tell you: I fell down a tree so often during my childhood, and I still climbed it. Again and again. So did most kids I knew. Like, fuck, we lived next to a forest. We played "Tarzan", and tried to go along paths without touching the ground. And we fell. A lot. And we still did it.

It is not the fear of pain that makes kids afraid of doctors. It is the fear of the associated force, and gaslighting.

The thing is, if you don't explain it, how are kids meant to give informed consent? That's why a woman named Mary Jenner created The Butterfly Pig, which sells medical play toys to families with medically sensitive kids and children's hospitals, so kids can play about the stuff that's going to happen or watch their caregivers show them. For this reason in particular, there's a syringe toy to simulate injections, and it includes a Buzzy toy, which imitates a real Buzzy that vibrates and is cold so injections don't hurt as much, and the real Buzzy is used in over 5,000 hospitals and clinics globally.

Effect of toys made from medical materials on anxiety among hospitalized children: A randomized controlled trial

YES YES YES YES

look up “child life specialists”

— the profession is fully dedicated to supporting kids and families in the health care setting, and a significant portion of that is educating kids (in a way they can understand, developmentally) and making plans With them to make the experience easier!

And there is SO MUCH research out there! If you explain to kids what’s going on, they need less anesthesia, get better quicker, and have less medical trauma— which leads to a willingness to accept preventative care in the future!

Child Life has been leading the charge in this area for decades, and it’s so awesome to see it becoming more mainstream knowledge!

#prev#something something the way western terfs talk about sk feminism feels very. noble savage to me#THIS THO#it does feel very noble savage and I was trying to put that to words earlier#very “oh the [noble savage] Koreans couldn't being Doing A Transphobia - you are applying western logic onto a eastern movement 🤓☝️”#as if there are no Korean queer people or trans people#as if Korea isnt “”developed“” enough to have intersectional feminism or to know transphobia is bad#like pleeeeeeease#It's the orientalism again of course

old post & tags but i just was talking about this with someone & then this post came up in my notes again, & i wanted to highlight these because this is so true.

its very orientalist & reminiscent of the "noble savage" and so much western radical feminism engages in this. they love the idea that South Korean feminists are all into 4B and female separatism, and more broadly all feminists from the Global South, because then they can fetishize the real and imagined suffering of women in these countries.

i think there's this need for the symbol of The Eternally Suffering Silent Black/Brown/Asian Woman, who of course agrees with everything white radical feminists from Euro-colonial countries believe. it very much is the "noble savage" idea. like how during America's "First Feminist War," there was so much emphasis on how Muslim countries were in the "dark ages" and "practically medieval."

so feminists from these countries are perceived as like, primitive feminists, pure of the petty bourgeois corruption of western feminists (aka intersectionality & being pro-sex). they are the Ur-feminists from the radfem Garden of Eden, and thus also fundamentally two-dimensional. we have to ignore the existence of trans people in these countries, act as if the same feminist discussions and conflicts that happen in Western feminism aren't happening in feminism in the Global South. we have to play up how violent, savage, animalistic the men of their countries are, have to deny these women's husbands and brothers and sons and friends humanity and complexity. and we also have to pretend they exist somewhere out of time, untouched by modern degradation.

that's why i find it amusing how a lot of people acted like the 4B movement was something that came purely out of the unique situation of Korean women, when in fact the movement traces its roots to translations of Western radical feminist texts. we literally already did the whole female separatism thing and it didn't work out. but if the 4B movement is imagined as this mass movement of Eternally Suffering Silent Asian Women reacting to the unique savagery of Asian men (white males are bad but Black/brown/Asian men are worse, less control over that innate male violence), then it lends female separatism more legitimacy. that South Korean feminists have a lot more diversity of perspectives, that South Korean feminism also discusses intersectionality and trans inclusion and seeking solidarity with men and all of those petty bourgeois distractions, ruins that fantasy.

this isn't to say, of course, that admiring and supporting feminists or any activists in the Global South inherently does this, or that transfeminists are immune from engaging in this same behavior. but i've noticed it a lot from radical feminists, and it felt very on display in this situation.

Endou Yuu versus the cosmic unknown 

have some more 

ok have one more before I go to bed 

Ren is also an eldritch being

I don’t think I ever posted this here

If it’s a subcritical mass of Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239, then absolutely Simon. U-235 and Pu-239 have half lives measured in tens of thousands of years whereas Radium-225 has a half life of about two weeks and not only does its decay release ionizing radiation but its immediate decay products have even shorter half lives and also release ionizing radiation. I wonder how Simon acquired that much of a rare isotope of Radium though, Ra-226 is much more common.

Back in 2020 when JKR wrote her TERF Wars essay, I remember people reacted with surprise that she would hold reactionary views, but at the time I was surprised that they were surprised because she had held reactionary views for quite a while at that point. And while the problems with Harry Potter are quite well-known now, I realise that there are many other things that people simply aren't aware of, even many years later, either because they weren't around then or because they weren't paying close attention to her output at the time.

Her 2020 detective book Troubled Blood famously features a serial kidnapper/torturer/murderer who lures women into a van by wearing a wig and women's clothing, but that was hardly her first foray into transmisogynistic caricatures. In Harry Potter there was of course Rita Skeeter with her "large mannish hands" and Madame Maxine who is said to be "part-giant", but she got rather more explicit in her early detective novels.

The Silkworm was published in 2014, and it features a young, tall, trans woman called Pippa whose first appearance is an attempted stabbing of the detective, who warns her to be careful because she won't have a good time in jail since she's "pre-op". Pippa is upset because she has read a manuscript in which she is caricatured as a [H-slur] who believes she has a beautiful voice but actually barks like a seal, which she (accurately) interprets as mockery of her vocal feminisation exercises.

Her next detective novel, Career of Evil (2015) features a subplot around the "transabled" community (a group of people with what the ICD-11 would describe as Body Integrity Dysphoria). The detective, a war veteran amputee, gets very frustrated when he has a meeting over lunch with a rude and self-obsessed "transabled" character called Tempest. Tempest assumes him to be rich, orders expensive food and wine, and keeps interrupting everyone to focus the conversation back on herself. She is described as "able-bodied" but uses a wheelchair and disabled facilities and hopes to one day get her spinal cord surgically severed so her physical body can match her disabled identity. I don't know if she still does this, but JKR used to do quite detailed research for her detective novels, and I think it's not that far-fetched to speculate that this might be a twisted parody of a meeting she had with a trans woman when researching the character of Pippa for the previous book, certainly the "transabled" subplot seems a thinly-veiled reference.

It's not just her books though, her political attitudes more generally were always quite suspect. I lived in Scotland during the independence referendum in 2014, as JKR did, and while I supported independence, she was a very vocal anti-independence campaigner who also donated £1 million to the anti-independence campaign. It's worth remembering that JKR is an English woman who lived (and still does) in a mansion on a 12 acre country estate at the southern edge of the Highlands, something that has historical significance for reasons that I'll now go on a little side-track to explain.

England had been trying to annexe Scotland for essentially as long as the two countries have existed, and they were finally united in 1707. However, there is a separate-but-related dispute that ran in parallel to this one. Scotland was historically divided between Highland and Lowland, where Highlanders were mainly Gaelic-speaking (a Celtic language), often Catholic, and had a clan-based political system; while Lowlanders were Scots-speaking (a Germanic language), mainly Protestant, and had a political system much more similar to the English one. The Highlands were a major headache to the newly-unified British government in the 18th Century as a heartland of Jacobite rebellions (supporters of the descendants of deposed Catholic King James VII/II), which were a complicated series of wars partly about religion, partly about culture, partly about Scottish self-determination, and partly a vehicle through which Catholic countries like France could destabilise one of their colonial rivals.

After victory at the Battle of Culloden, the British government instituted policies that would destroy the Highland clan system once and for all. New laws were passed that made it straightforward for clan chiefs to retcon themselves as "landlords", an upending of a traditional clan system in which the hierarchical structure of land management had been not nearly so clear-cut, and where land had been considered a community asset administered by the chief rather than personally owned. Some chiefs were forced by debts to sell the land that they were suddenly legal owners of to wealthy English or Lowland Scottish landowners, who became the new landlords. In a genocidal process known as the Highland Clearances, these former clan chiefs or their English/Lowland replacements kicked their clanspeople (now considered "tenants") off their land, burnt their houses to prevent their return, and turned the land over to a profitable sheep-farming monoculture. British laws banned Highland cultural artifacts like tartan and bagpipes, and the use of the Gaelic language was discouraged. The extent to which is this is direct English colonisation is debatable, it is certainly a case of the English government empowering Scottish aristocrats to do their dirty work for them, the main English priority was preventing further uprisings. But colonisation-without-much-settlement via enforcing cultural alignment with England through bribery of local leaders was a classic method of the British Empire, and I think it makes sense to view this as one more example of it, with the Highlanders specifically as the victims.

It's worth noting that the viewpoint of Scots in general as net victims of colonialism is not accurate. My own ancestors were forcibly dispossessed of their land in the Plantation of Ulster by mainly Lowland Scottish settlers who were empowered to do this by the legal backing of the (English) government, instituting a major wealth gap between the Irish and settler populations in this area that still exists today. Many of these Scottish people soon moved on to refine their settlement skills in North America: they are the ancestors of the Americans who today refer to themselves (with pride, for some reason, that they are descended from people who were settler-colonists twice over) as "Scots-Irish".

Furthermore, one of the principal reasons for the 1707 union of England and Scotland was a failed attempt to establish a Scottish colony in the famously-hard-to-traverse Darién Gap (at the modern-day border between Panama and Colombia), an early version of the Panama railroad/canal projects, in which it was planned for the settlers to administer the overland transport of goods between ports on the Pacific and Caribbean. There was also a plan to bring slaves (presumably from West Africa) and work them to death in gold mines in the area. The scheme was a complete disaster, in part because the English government refused to provide any assistance, including denying Scottish ships the right to dock in Jamaican ports for resupply. The majority of settlers died and the scheme bankrupted a huge number of Lowland Scottish families who had invested in it. The 1707 union with England was partly motivated by a desire for England to help refund these losses. This is often talked of from the point-of-view of English harshness towards to Scots, but that really elides the context that the Scots in this case were literal colonists of stolen American land and only their own failure prevented them from directly partaking in the trafficking, torture, and murder of Black people from West Africa.

So that's the context of Scotland as both perpetrator of colonial crimes (on the Lowland side primarily) and also victim of them (on the Highland side primarily). The English are not generally regarded with particular positivity in the Highlands, although mostly this takes the form of light-hearted ribbing with an undertone of genuine frustration. JKR's country estate is right on the boundary between two historic Highland regions, Breadalbane and Atholl, both of which have their own grim tales of Highland Clearances resulting in mass depopulation of their respective areas. The fact that her house, Killiechassie, has a Gaelic name tells the tale of a culture that was once present, but finding a Gaelic speaker in that area today would be very difficult. To be clear, I don't think it's immoral for an English person to live in the Highlands, but I think there is a duty to be aware of the history of how your country caused what was effectively a genocide of a local culture that is now seriously endangered and whose historic land you now live on (in spite of the essentially Orientalist attitude to the Highlands in English society today, that is at once fetishistic, paternalistic, and ultimately hateful). For such a person to not only vote to deny Scottish people their independence, but also to fund the campaign to prevent that independence with an amount of money that would be totally life changing for anyone else in her local area, seems like the epitome of a settler-colonial mindset, even if framing it that way sounds odd at first.

It wasn't just her funding of the anti-independence campaign in 2014, which was bad enough, but I remember actually being more surprised by her Twitter posting. There was a pretty regular cycle where an anti-independence rally on a Glasgow shopping street would attract maybe 20 people, and they would then get heckled by loads of pro-independence passers-by, predictably portrayed in the mainstream press as "violent pro-independence mob harasses poor innocent elderly people just going about their day in peace". JKR was a keen spreader of this propoganda, and would decry the mob from the safety of her country estate. She would say stuff about feeling unsafe as someone with an English accent with this kind of mob violence going on, that English people were now oppressed for being English, that she had thought Scotland was supposed to be welcoming to immigrants but given how they treat English people she is concerned etc etc. It was essentially the cardboard monsters meme, but it really set the tone for a future of self-victimisation-as-politics, where someone near the top of the social hierarchy feigned that she was at the bottom of it in order to prevent the liberation of those actually below her.

In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the UK Labour Party. I think its fair to say that, for all his flaws, he was the most leftwing leader of any major party in UK political history. And JKR really didn't like him at all, which is not surprising since he was a socialist in favour of intense wealth-redistribution and she was a billionaire. Her propogandising really took off from this point, and she would retweet anything, no matter how vague and unsourced, about his supporters' violence, just as she does today with any pro-trans figure she encounters. Self-victimisation really became her watchword, and she would position herself as a poor harmless liberal centrist being hammered by fascists of the right and left. Any hatemail she got would be shared as representative of the unhinged violence that would be let loose on everyone if we let the radical left win.

Which is to say, the JKR of today is pretty much exactly the same person she was in 2014-2015. She was an English settler in the Highlands who used her vast wealth to keep Scotland perpetually tied to England, and she framed the frustrations of Scottish people towards her as the victimisation of a poor innocent baby hated by an unthinking mob. She had clearly made up her mind about trans women many years before TERF Wars, and her attitude on that issue, casting herself as a perpetual victim incapable of actually doing harm in order to get away with the material harm she does, is exactly what you would expect given her attitude to everything else. I think some people are radicalised into transphobia, but others are already there, and they just need to be told about the existence of transness for their pre-existing political views to expand and fill the new gap.