rants

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ischadie:

In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system in which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—till Universe’s end.

The Wizard’s Oath, So You Want to Be a Wizard. Diane Duane.

I bet you every kid who’s ever read this book stood in the middle of their room, paused, took a breath, and then read this part out loud. Just in case. I vaguely remember what that moment felt like, feeling a little silly but a little apprehensive too. Probably similar to how kids in the late 90s and earlier 2000s felt when their 11th birthdays came and they secretly all waited for the letter from Hogwarts.

This post brought to you by my currently reading the New Millenium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard and enjoying myself immensely. I have the old edition open so I can go back and refer to it when I think I spot a change. I was a little sad to see that Kit’s first ever line of dialogue in the book is no longer “balls.” Balls are always funnier than not balls.

#i read the books when i was a lot older and i seriously thought about reading this part out loud #but i was too nervous to #not because of any feelings of silliness but because i was worried i couldn’t uphold it #and i make no oaths lightly (lizardywizard)

I, too, avoided reciting the Wizard’s Oath specifically because of “just in case”. I make no oaths lightly; I make no oaths I am unsure whether I would even want to uphold, let alone whether I could; I make no oaths that would be enforced by the same entities that enforced Nita’s oath regarding the Song of the Twelve, despite the fact that she did not give informed consent.

(The Sea fed the words of the oath into her mind. It could have fed her what they meant. But no, she recited the words in ignorance of the full nature of what they entailed, and everyone, including Nita herself, blamed her for not realising she needed to do more research.

(And since the Sea is an alternate form of the wizard’s manual, explicitly asking the Sea to feed her the meaning (or a manual-based equivalent action) would be the research she would do. Whenever conversations of the form “You didn’t tell me that!” “You didn’t ask.” happen, we generally conclude that the “You didn’t ask” person is a pedantic asshole trying to obey the letter of what is right while subverting the spirit. Yet this is pretty much what happens, and nobody seems to have any issue with it.))

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#also #*given* that Nita has ended up in this situation #going through with the Twelvesong is not a noble sacrifice #because you see #if she doesn’t do it they wipe large chunks of her memory #and if she does do it she goes to heaven #this is one of those edge cases #where *strictly in terms of maximising self-preservation* #it is actually better to commit suicide than to not commit suicide #(once your continued existence is assured the next thing on the self-preservation list is preserving your memories) #as you can see I have Issues with that book #Young Wizards #rants

Orgasmic design: how vibrators have become ambitious tech products

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{Title link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/09/vibrator-design-tech-product-orgasm }}

ellaenchanting:

sadydoyle:

This was a fun one! The concise history of vibrators; how they started as scary medical devices and shameful secrets, became a feminist statement, and are now a massively profitable industry that employs the same guys who used to design iPhones. 

I, for one, welcome our new tech overlords. Thank you, tech overlords, for helping me maintain my long distance relationship!

From a 1908 vibrator ad: “Bebout is ‘gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing. Invented by a woman who knows a woman’s needs. All nature pulsates and vibrates with life.’” It does indeed.

My reactions are torn between “ooh, knowledge! neat!” and “*fumes at normativity*”.

So, followers, here is some neat knowledge. Try to look past the bits like “women who used vibrators were actually more likely to take care of their sexual health by going to the gynecologist for regular exams”, as if there were no reasons other than “failure to take care of one’s sexual health” why one might avoid both vibrators and gynecologists.

(Hint: my GP told me that, as someone too young for disorders of age and too virginal for disorders of the sexually active (emphasis added), I should not have gynecological checkups because I wouldn’t get anything out of them.)

(Hint 2: some people just aren’t into genitals, sometimes including their own.)

Tags:

#I am not *failing* to take care of my sexual health #I am *recognising* that my sexual health doesn’t look like that #sexuality and lack thereof #the more you know #don’t mind me #it’s pretty much impossible for me to read educational things about sexuality *without* fuming at normativity #one time I was listening to a podcast about How Sexuality Works #and the interviewee denied my existence three times in the first five minutes #I gave up in disgust #(I don’t remember now specifically which denials they used) #(just that I kept a running tally in my head and incremented it #each time they said something the implication of which was that my existence was impossible) #anyway neat knowledge #…it occurs to me that this post has a single-digit number of notes #and the OP is the person who wrote the article #which means she’s almost certainly going to see this #okay look true inclusivity is impossible #and even acknowledgement of one’s inevitable exclusivity is pretty difficult #I have very high standards and I don’t want you to feel too bad about failing to meet them #I just get bitter sometimes about navigating life with an extremely unusual sexuality

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Voiceover on Doctor Who “next time on” preview: Don’t watch this. You can never un-see it.

Me: Okay. *closes eyes*

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#what kind of fool do you take me for #unlike those poor Zygons I have not had all relevant knowledge erased and I *can* learn from experience #and it has *never* been worthwhile to look at something I had been told to look away from #if you are very lucky looking is neither bad nor good #usually it is some level of psychologically damaging #also next week’s episode’s title is #Sleep No More #I do not like that title #that is a fucking ominous title #fuck you and your horror bullshit #(look) #(I fully believe that ‘Blink’ has a lot of objective merit) #(but I think I’m a worse person for having seen it) #(and I do not want to do that to myself again) #(horror is so utterly not for me) #(causing myself often-permanent psychological damage for fun is not something I can compute) #I *might* read Chakoteya’s transcript when it comes out #but I will try to learn from my past mistakes #and not watch it #Doctor Who #tag rambles #dw spoilers #infohazards #oh look an original post

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Fifteen attempted revolutions? In, what, a year? Two? Almost certainly not more than five.

Even if you manage to avert all of them, doesn’t the frequency itself tell you something is wrong and needs to be improved?

(Maybe if you didn’t keep wiping their memories, they could actually learn from their mistakes.)

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#from the moment they said they were going to the Black Archive I was waiting for the memory-erasure-device penny to drop #at first I thought that they had simply solved the what-if-a-Zygon-rebel-takes-Clara’s-form problem #(an obvious security hole if you know that Zygon rebels are the most likely intruder for your security to be facing) #by whittling down the minds of anyone with Clara’s memory-print until they *were* Clara and nothing more #but no #Doctor Who #The Zygon Inversion #dw spoilers #oh look an original post #rants #amnesia cw #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging

New law makes Canadian Jews second-class citizens | Toronto Star

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ilzolende:

nuclearspaceheater:

ayellowbirds:

quasi-normalcy:

So here’s a terrifying implication of Canada’s new citizenship law that I’ve not heard anyone mention before.

I expected this when I heard about the standards of the new law :

Can a Jew formally renounce their Right of Return in a way that Israel would consider binding?

IDK, maybe Israel would be willing to accept some conditional renunciation of the right? Probably not, though.

This seems like a mess.

to hell with Judaism I’m American

I thought I was safe the day I took the oath

“Welcome home,” they said

(we’ll see what “they will consider expanding“ means)

Tags:

#the people in this riding are ever so polite #they are kind and they do not insult you to your face #they may even believe on some level that they like me #but they’re going to elect *him* again #oh I’ll do my part to fight it #I’ll cast the vote he didn’t think I should have #and it’s not going to work #I see those blue signs all over town and I think of every proudly xenophobic message he’s had placed in our mailbox over the years #one time he talked about asylum seekers from the European Union #he said it was suspicious #as if anyone from such an advanced place could *possibly* need asylum #(I don’t think he used ‘advanced’ but that was basically the implication) #he said this a couple weeks after I saw news about a mob in Hungary trying to lynch a Romany family #to this day it is what I think of when I think of him #our home and cherished land #(it says it in every post I make about Canada) #(the elephant in the room) #(the unspoken word) #(*native*) #tag rambles

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

doctorwho:

Series 4 – Silence in the Library

Really? Really?

I’m not going to blame this Doctor for the travesty that was “The Bells of St. John” because it hasn’t happened to him yet, but this is after “Rise of the Cybermen”/“The Age of Steel”, which is basically composed entirely of pro-death propaganda.

If he really thinks it’s better to live in a machine than to die, what about Sally Phelan? He killed her because he couldn’t bear the thought of living in a robot body, without ever asking her what she thought. In that moment, among others, he accepted that everybody dies. Worse than accepted, he hastened her death, and arranged the other Cybermen’s mind-restorations to occur in a manner maximally likely to cause them to die from the shock. Heaven forbid that any of them even try to cope with what had been done to them. Heaven forbid that any of them even begin to accept that they don’t have to die.

Evil is sticking people into robot bodies without permission. Arrogance is thinking that if they had asked, nobody would have said “yes”.

(And frankly, I think a lot of the over-the-top evil* of Cybus was to tar the bits of good ideas buried in there by association, but that’s a more Doylistic concern than what I was going for above.)

*You’re going to mind-control people into not fighting back when you force surgery on them, but you’re not going to mind-control them into not feeling the pain of the surgery, nor are you going to anaesthetise them the mundane way?

Tags:

#Doctor Who #transhumanism #rants #this is a written form of the yelling-at-the-screen I did when Mom’s New Who rewatch reached the Cybermen

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

theunitofcaring:

cyborgbutterflies:

slashmarks:

thessalies:

thessalies:

so much fiction about the angst of immortality and just fuck that i want to live forever i want to build a house on mars and have sex in space and watch first contact on the news and i want to see how much better we can get as a species and i want to learn how to play every instrument and speak every language and i want to learn how hardcore cosplayers make those impressive sets of armor and i want to watch all the tv that will ever be made and i want to learn every weird science fact and i want to get married 50 times and i want to survive into an age where science will finally figure out how to fix my sensory issues and cure all mental illness and even if eventually all the suns die and i’m left immortally alone in a dark cold void for all eternity that would be fine i would just write fanfic in my head i could keep myself amused, it would be worth it

mostly though i want to know what happens

incidentally, none of this would be impeded by vampirism, so, stop whining lestat

I was always so frustrated as a kid by how vampires in fiction never did anything cool with immortality and I kind of made up a whole fiction world based around them actually doing shit

If I could, I would definitely become a vampire and start (consensually) spreading vampirism to others.

cyborgbutterflies you have read Luminosity and Radiance, right? Because everyone should but especially anyone interested in a book in which Bella Swan decides it’s a moral obligation to overthrow the Volturi so she can vampirize anyone who is interested, and then does it.

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#transhumanism #vampires #recs #I’ve read Luminosity #it was very well-written and engaging #and I found it very refreshing to see a narrative that viewed immortality as a valid goal #after growing up on Harry Potter’s bullshit #(they *tell* you all this crap about how ‘death is just the next step’ and Flamel still chose to die) #(and yet they *show* you that Flamel chose to die after over *six hundred years*) #(given the opportunity to set his own lifespan he made it several times longer than what he would have had otherwise) #(but I don’t get the impression we were supposed to read between those lines) #(the lines we’re *supposed* to read between are more the timelines of Voldemort’s life) #(he died his final death less than halfway through the life expectancy of a wizard) #(chasing immortality made him die *sooner*) #anyway enough ranting #I need to finish Radiance someday #death tw

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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.)

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#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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autumnone:

Now that I look at it, it seems such a tiny thing. Without the broader context, the other straws on the camel’s back, it wouldn’t even be noticeable. It almost still wasn’t noticeable.

And yet…and yet there’s that word. “Stimulating”. Sex ought to be stimulating.

It’s a reminder of everything I hate about the kind of sex-positive sex-ed that’s standard in this subculture. I feel bad about hating it. I shouldn’t hate it. It’s the greatest good for the greatest number.

And yet.

And yet I’m sick of being excluded at every turn. I resent the way the kind of sex-ed epitomised by (though by no means exclusive to) Scarleteen stunted my sexual self-understanding, fed me information and advice consisting mostly of stuff that didn’t apply to me (sometimes the exact opposite of which applied to me) and told me it applied to everyone. I hate knowing that they didn’t even do anything wrong, because I’m such a fucking snowflake that I don’t deserve to expect anyone to ever acknowledge my existence.

(It isn’t my sexuality itself that I have a problem with. I like who I am. It’s the way it interacts with who everyone else is that gets to me.)

(Sexual pleasure is not a stimulant. It is a sedative. If I find a sexual act stimulating, that’s a sure sign that something has gone wrong and I need to change course.)

(addendum here)

Tags:

#sexuality and lack thereof #rants #TMI

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

par-la-fenetre:

par-la-fenetre:

Neuro-atypical Weather Forecast

Read my other webcomics here.

Shamelessly reblogging myself and putting this little comics into the series “Ma République”.

Tags:

#not sure why they expect me to be able to focus on the crawl and the speech at the same time #I suppose that’s part of what the subtitles are for #abandon the audio in favour of devoting all primary sensory processing to visuals #(recently I was watching one of those how-to-adult videos) #(and there was a bunch of text on the screen that was *different* from what they were saying) #(I had to go through it twice) #(once listening and ignoring the video) #(once watching and ignoring the audio) #(and then the following video basically said) #(that if somebody else asks me out on an ambiguously-romantic date) #(it is *my* responsibility to make it clear if it is platonic) #(otherwise it will be and *should* be assumed romantic) #(like dude) #(if you’re going to suggest an outing it’s *your* job to state what you mean by that) #(if you rely on societal narratives to determine whether we’re dating) #(we’re *both* going to feel betrayed by the other) #(you’re going to feel strung along) #(and I’m going to feel you tricked me into dating you) #(it should not be possible to *accidentally* date someone) #(I didn’t go back to those videos after that) #tag rambles #lots of tag rambles