our roads may be golden or broken or lost

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nonternary:

sinesalvatorem:

@ilzolende​ mentioned that people asked to pet their hair at the Solstice. I said there was a good chance that more people would have asked to touch mine, because of the uniqueness. They said that there was actually a good chance that fewer people would ask because of the cause of the uniqueness.

So, fwiw, I like having my hair touched, once I have warning that it’s about to happen and don’t reflexively duck and block anyone trying to touch me. So, if I meet you irl and you want to touch my hair, go ahead and ask. I won’t call you racist.

…Actually, now that I think about it, there is a reasonable chance I will call you racist for something. It’s a habit from back home. I’m from a majority-black country where no one really takes the idea of racism seriously. As such, jokes about people being racist for innocuous things are the norm.

I have called people racist for saying “all X look the same” when they were talking about oranges or action movies. I have asked “Is it because I’m black?” when people have asked if I’d prefer Coke to Pepsi. The thing is, these were all jokes aimed at other black people, in a mostly-black culture, where no one took the idea of racism seriously. The most common reaction to “Is it because I’m black?” was always “Yes”. The reaction to “all X look the same” comments was “Yes, they do, and black people too”.

I may have to change this habit if I’m going to stay in North America. In my first week here, I called a Canadian racist for saying that all apples look the same. This… Did not go as expected. At all. It ended with us apologising profusely to each other and feeling mutually guilty.

On the bright side, if I can apologise at someone while they’re apologising at me and end up in a spiral of “I’m sorry!” “No, I’m sorry!”, there may yet be hope for me becoming a True Canadian.

So, for future reference: If I actually think you did something that was racist and bad, expect me to say “What you did was harmful because…”. If I say “That was racist”, you may assume with 90% confidence that I’m joking. I just wasn’t raised to take anything that begins with “That’s racist” seriously.

“In my first week here, I called a Canadian racist for saying that all apples look the same. This… Did not go as expected. At all. It ended with us apologising profusely to each other and feeling mutually guilty.” Alison/Canada OTP

Canada<–Alison–>Sunlight love triangle

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#reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

theunitofcaring:

‘assimilationist’ seems to conflate a bunch of different complaints:

  • “This person/organization/movement priority seems to be trying to buy respectability for some members of our group at the expense of other members of our group!” 

Marching in Pride in stuffy grey suits might communicate ‘see? some gays are normal stuffy grey suit-wearing folks like yourself’ but also can lead to ‘I don’t mind gays, I just hate it when they’re really effeminate and act all gay and stuff’. I am not sure how the benefits of having some people realize “oh, some gay people are just like me” compares to the costs of having some people go “oh, I can still discriminate against gay people if I make it about how they act/dress while proclaiming my support for the good gay people”. And I don’t think it’s okay to say “don’t wear a stuffy grey suit to Pride, people might use you to justify their prejudice against other gay people” but maybe it’s good to say “if you’re feeling implicit social pressure to wear a stuffy grey suit to Pride, we have radically fucked up”. Relatedly…

  • the same things are becoming prized in LGBT+ spaces as are prized in mainstream spaces! this means that spaces which used to be safe and affirming for a certain kind of person have ceased to be that

This seems like it frequently happens and is bad. The problem is…mainstream society really honestly doesn’t prize those things in LGBT+ people, so “you have all of society, leave us out of it” leaves people alone and without support. Ideally we’d have spaces that are affirming of LGBT+ people who want to get a job, buy a house, and parent together and spaces that are affirming of LGBT+ people who want to live in a modified lighthouse with six of their best friends and host frequent kink parties and spaces that are affirming of LGBT+ people who want to live in a studio apartment, have lots of casual sex and plan the revolution against capitalism.

Those need to be different spaces. And I completely understand the pain and frustration that a person experiences when their space, the community where they felt supported and understood and at home, starts getting modified into a community supportive of a different sort of person. I think it’s fair to say “this community is for people who want to have lots of casual sex and plan the revolution, please make a different group to plan weddings and talk about how to get a mortgage”. But big community events, including Pride, should include all of those subgroups.

  • other LGBT+ people are wrong

I have seen people say that acknowledging the existence of Republican or Christian or Zionist or anti-feminist LGBT+ people is assimilationist, or that those people creating support groups for themselves is assimilationist. I think sometimes they mean by this that an influx of those people would bring about a painful version of the above “the community ceased to be what I needed from it” problem. But sometimes they seriously seem to just mean “those people are wrong and outgroup”, and in that case I think you should just make your criticisms of Republican or Christian etc etc people in general and not try to come up with an explanation of why it’s especially bad for LGBT+ people to be that way. I have yet to see such an explanation which wasn’t honestly pretty gross. 

Likewise, not sure why critiques of monogamy and amatonormativity need to start by yelling at two men who are getting married instead of yelling at, like, society.

  • a way of expressing general disagreement with a person whose opinions are more mainstream than you

This is why I have mostly given up on the concept of ‘assimilationist’. Lots of people seem to use it to mean “I disagree with you, and your opinion is more socially acceptable than mine, so I will accuse you of being an assimilationist”. Saying “you’re throwing some people under the bus” or “you’re modifying the community norms” seems to make the discussion more tractable and productive, so let’s cut to the chase and do that instead. 

OK, but now I actually do want to live in a queer lighthouse. Are there queer lighthouses, or spaces which support queer-lighthouse-building? Are any of my followers interested in joining my cult sea-stead phallus-shaped-lesbian-domicile perfectly-ordinary-home?

*cough* @nenya-kanadka *cough*

Tags:

#reply via reblog #queer lighthouses

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

copperbadge:

yamneko:

bogleech:

Here’s the thing about Halloween: all year long if you live in America you’re under a steady assault by this right-wing traditional faux-wholesome pseudo-Christian nuclear patriot family atmosphere, and then all the sudden as the weather cools and the days shorten the country loses its marbles decking everything out in bloody corpses, demon faces, witchcraft and giant rubber bugs. Half the country thinks they’re the Addams Family for 1-3 months while a small chunk of weiners get angry that it’s “pagan” or something.

I don’t know if anyone in any other cultural environment can really understand how that feels. It’s the antithesis of the “love jesus and eagles or GIT OUT” under(over)tone American culture is usually about.

And even though it generates billions of dollars, there’s no pressure, shaming or guilting to spend money on it like there is for certain other holidays. We spend that much on Halloween just because it’s fun and we want to, rather than some unspoken (usually unspoken) rule that you must buy extravagant gifts or you’re a heathen scrooge and you don’t love your family.

and it’s when everything is themed with black and it’s totally acceptable 

This is actually one of the original purposes of Halloween.

Halloween, like Mardi Gras, descends from the inversion festival. Inversion festivals were a necessary part of most highly regimented and class-divided ancient cultures, such as Rome. You spent all year keeping rigidly to your class and policing others to do the same, living a life of very public behaviors, worshipping very specifically and obeying societal laws you may not agree with and which may not be to your benefit.

But ah, then the festival time came. The rules were thrown out. Sometimes the classes were literally inverted and the nobility were forced to serve. Nothing was taboo. The macabre, the ugly, the things that violated all laws of polite society were glorified. For a period of time – often longer in proportion to how regimented your society was – you were free to do and be exactly what you wanted. You could wear a costume. You could hide from the world behind a mask. You could make all the noise you wanted and nobody would stop you because it was driving out the evil in the community (the evil often being the stress of living in a very outward-facing, regimented society). 

And America, whatever anyone says, is an incredibly regimented and class-oriented society. So our lead-in to Halloween is two months long. 

Halloween is one of America’s only true inversion festivals. Christmas has terribly rigid expectations and heaps of stress, Thanksgiving makes you want to kill your whole family, the fourth of July it’s too fuckin’ hot, St. Patrick’s Day is too short and it’s filled with douchebags. Memorial Day is for mourning, Labor Day you’re about to start school again. Mardi Gras is a great, very historic inversion festival, but it’s also fairly localized. Pride comes close, and is a very badly needed form of inversion festival for its participants, but it’s not universal and it also involves aspects of activism and protest which use inversion but are not part of inversion. 

Halloween is it. It’s our national cut-loose party. And that’s not accidental. Halloween has been an inversion festival since before it had that name, since ancient people realized the harvest was over, the dark short days were coming, and everyone was gonna have to spend the next four months indoors trying not to murder one another. 

Tags:

#Halloween #’whatever anyone says’ #I’ve been increasingly wishing lately that I lived in an explicitly hierarchical society #because as it is I get paranoid and start reading orders into everything #and I’ll never know for sure they weren’t lying when they inevitably insist they didn’t mean those orders #and I’ll never know for sure they weren’t telling the truth #tangents #(I mean don’t get me wrong the post is good too) #(I’m just having Issues about authority) #(and they couldn’t even be *normal* authority issues)

Weird Sun Twitter

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

responsible-reanimation:

Sometimes, you find one of those things that’s so singularly weird and amazing that you kick yourself for not knowing about it earlier.

Weird Sun Twitter is one of those things for me.

It’s a network of Twitter accounts who all share the following qualities:

     Using some discolored/weird sun as a profile picture.

     Having a name in the format [X] of [Y].

     Tweeting puns, smartass wordplay, surreal humor, and noun phrases.

     Referencing/mocking This is Just to Say, this Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweet, and Ozymandias among a lot of other things.

The overall effect is this beautiful hybrid of dril, Welcome to Night Vale, and the Oracle at Delphi.

My personal favorites:

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link

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link

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link

Clone of Snow has a neat premise: combining every single meme with every single other meme. It’s a really neat mechanized form of ‘humor.’

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Link

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Link

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

Fun parts of English: A bunch of lectures and videos about how we shouldn’t conform to society but should instead find our passion and not care about external approval. Given by an authority figure, to students, along with instructions to take notes.

Talk about mixed messages.

original post

Tags:

#did you mean my *life* #people order me not to follow orders *all the fucking time* #they never do seem to notice the problem #or maybe they do and consider the logic bomb a fitting punishment #for anyone naturally rule-abiding enough to bother thinking that one through #though the OP is talking about school I’m going to tag this #my issues with sj let me show you them #as that’s where I receive most of my paradoxical orders these days #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

I have frequently seen LGBT Americans make jokes about getting copies of a gay agenda and I’m 95% sure that these are completely non-serious.

But

I think I should *check* because if there *is* a gay agenda, I totally want one. I mean, I’m p gay, but not always an agenty protagonisty one. I could use an agenda.

This post is about 20% serious. if this is a legit thing you Americans have been holding out on, I want to know where to sign up for a copy Right Now.

If you don’t know where I can get one, would you be kind enough to reblog until this post finds someone who *does*? KTHXBIA!

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#there’s a blog called The Asexual Agenda #but that’s not quite the same thing

Reblog with what you would tell your 13-year-old self in the tags.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{OP by thursday}}

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#so you know how you don’t quite trust devout Jews? #(if you haven’t decided you distrust them yet please forgive me) #(you know how terrible we are at remembering *when* things happened) #(and having a functional ultra-long-term memory compiler–while totally awesome and highly recommended–does not make that easier) #(it just gives you an even *wider* span of time in which the thing may have happened) #(anyway) #it doesn’t quite seem *right* that they’re so enthusiastic about Heritage #and you kind of suspect that given half the chance they would force you into their mould #heedless of what bits they would have to carve off of you to make your proverbial peg fit in that hole? #(and denying all the while that they’re carving you) #(because you have the same Heritage so of course you must already fit) #(they’re only making you see it) #well you had the right idea #but the first time around you didn’t apply it broadly enough #you were born to and raised by feminists #and that makes feminism part of your Heritage too #I’m not saying don’t be friends with enthusiastic feminists #the same way you shouldn’t avoid being friends with enthusiastic Jews #but keep them just a little bit distant #just distant enough that they can’t take a whittling knife to your soul #(and hope like hell that the divergent-timeline butterfly doesn’t have you fall in with a *worse* crowd) #so that’s the bad news #here’s some good news #depending on how far you are into 13 you may have heard of asexuality #and you thought it was great and wished you could be like that #well you *wanted* to be like that because you *are* like that #also: there’s this thing called hypno-fetishism #it’s possible for hypnosis to be *sexual* for some people #no don’t worry I’ll wait here while you re-evaluate your entire life #…

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

This is my home! This is my home! How can you sit here within it and tell me that nobody lives here?!

(and say it like it’s obvious, say it with condescension, I am so fucking sick of my lived experience being met with condescension and casual declaration of impossibility, or at best saying that it may well have happened but I should still shut up and just let the first-generations speak, their problems their experiences are more numerous more important the only ones worth public acknowledgement)

(You say you want a world like mine, a world with people like me in it. You say you work to achieve it, to achieve us. Decide now how you will react to us when we come to be, for we are already here. You cannot afford to wait until you deem the tide to be turning in your favour, for the world is vast and contains multitudes and the tide is always in your favour somewhere, even if those places are small. Even if those places are small, they may still be big enough to raise a child.

Decide now. Decide wisely.)

Tags:

#my issues with sj let me show you them #in which Brin hails from a subculture in deep denial about its own subcultural status #did you know? #in the particular SJ sub-subculture where I was raised ‘queer’ *had been* reclaimed #past tense #it was just what you said when you wanted an umbrella term for people who weren’t straight #(sometimes also people who weren’t cis) #you didn’t have to be queer to use it #connotations of the word were neutral-to-positive #I didn’t even know for seventeen years that it had *ever* been negative #that’s how thoroughly it had lost that negativity #I’m probably the only person reading this who actually knows what a successfully reclaimed word looks like in practice #everyone else I’ve met on the Internet comes from places where it hasn’t been done and thinks those places are the only places #I’ve watched that ignorance hinder their own attempts at reclamation #rants #oh look an original post #(I’m not even thinking of a particular person right now this just happens to me a lot) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

screenshotsofdespair:

Tags:

#the inside of my head on a bad brain day #the really nasty part is that thinking in terms of ‘mandatory’ and ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ #rather than ‘right’ and ‘okay’ and ‘wrong’ #is itself forbidden #sometimes I think my home culture could stand to be a bit more *overtly* authoritarian #because supposed anti-authoritarianism #tends to be a euphemism for ‘one of our rules is to never admit that we have rules’ #’even to yourself’ #and that’s just cruel #(I suspect this post ties into the recent Sorting Hat post in some way) #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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justice-turtle:

nuclearspaceheater:

tharook:

northcentralpositronics:

tattoo artist who can encode magic into tattoos but doesn’t want people to know she can so she just puts low-level luck spells on her clients’ bodies without telling them

jeweller who makes body jewellery and pendants which have amulet properties and draw love and luck and happiness to their wearers without them realising it

piercing artist who keeps the remnants from her piercings and puts them all in little jars in the back of her shop to work sympathetic luck spells on all her clients

and then all three of them slowly realise what the others are doing and end up in a poly relationship living in a little shop in the shitty end of town, which gets curiously less shitty the longer they stay, and people think it’s just the development of the area but the three artists know

and they’re never rich and they’re never famous but they’re always happy because they have everything they need

they have the shop and they have their customers and they have each other

and when their customers are happy and content, they pack up and move on, all together now, to find another space with skin to be coloured and jewellery to be made and magic to be done.

this is beautiful

DETROIT – The three body modification artists were arrested today on charges of voluntary manslaughter after a past client suffered a fatal stroke, allegedly due to thaumo-alchemical interactions between her prescribed potions and a luck charm that had been placed on one of her tattoos without her knowledge.

…

“Some potions and drugs are known to react with common charms, which is why it is absolutely essential that your doctor and pharmacist have a complete and accurate list of your active enchantments,” says pharmacist Patricia Patil. “Putting an enchantment of any kind, no matter how minor, on someone without their knowledge or permission is playing Russian Roulette with someone else’s life.”

…

The victim, Carmen Jackson, was 36 at the time of her death and is survived by a husband and 4 children.

“#death tw #yes this #I did not think this *exact* thing #but I did wonder why we were assumed to sympathise with people tricking others into taking spells”

Because consent isn’t part of our cultural narrative. Patriarchalism is – people assumed to be “wiser” doing what’s Best for other people without needing input from those stupid lower-class people who would reject the help out of fear and superstition and who never know what’s Actually Good for them.

Us, the lower classes and poors in this country, we know we’re shat on, but it’s still a long row to hoe challenging this internalized narrative, that if somebody who Knows Better than you (upperclass, educated, ~the Wise~) is doing what’s Good for you, they don’t need your consent or even to tell you what’s going on.

In skiffy, there’s a trope of the person who has to Decide The Fate Of Others angsting about it, feeling unworthy, actually addressing the fact that they’re making big honkin’ decisions about people’s lives without their consent… but the angst isn’t about whether the decisions should be made (and in skiffy there generally isn’t time or any achievable way to get everybody’s input), but over whether THE PERSON ANGSTING is “worthy”, is Wise enough, because they weren’t brought up to feel that deciding the fate of others is their job, they feel it’s the job of those higher up the totem pole who’ve done the deciding on the person’s own fate. If they had more time, the ability to consult, it’s not suggested that they should take the opinions of the people whose lives will be affected, but of their superiors who have more of a “right” to fuck with people’s situations.

Perhaps so, although I distrust anything involving the word “internalised” for actually pretty much the same reason: it tends to carry a very similar note of “we know you better than you know yourself, if you disagree with us on what’s Actually Good for you it’s only because you lack insight* into your problems”. There’s no defence against a charge like that. (You’d think “I’m second-generation social justice; sure, I had some contact with other, patriarchal subcultures, but I’m not a proverbial fish and my native tongue does have a word for water (you should know, it’s the tongue you’re speaking now)” would have at least some effect, but nobody ever really seems to notice when I say that. Besides, we born-and-raised types are rare enough that everyone else routinely forgets we exist, and other people deserve not to have that pulled on them too.)

*Here used in the psych jargon sense of “awareness that something is wrong with your mind”.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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