i was not born. i slithered out of a hole in the ground one day because the people of earth had had it too good for too long.

Some of the best fiction and journalism both are pornography with a decent balance of non-sexual content.

The same lurid spirit prevails through everything else instead of clean guarded euphemism.

my first watercolor for this year's drawtober

seriously tho the most frustrating thing about the last few days is everyone acting like what happened to predstrogen was unique. trans women get nuked all the time.

my fiancée got nuked this morning. she hasnt made any death threats against the ceo. she hasnt posted pictures, much less sexually explicit ones. but there wont be a massive outpouring of support for her.

to most people, her blog being nuked will go entirely unnoticed by the wider site, just like the last two times it happened to her, just like the last 4 times it happened to me, just like its happened to many of my mutuals.

i need y'all to reckon with the fact that we are constantly disappearing. if predstrogen was the first time you noticed it, that's a problem you need to fix.

and predstrogen was lucky. she had people who noticed and cared and stood up for her, and from the sound of her last post thats been going around, getting off tumblr will be a good thing for her health

most of us arent that lucky. we're not popular, we dont have people who will stand up for us, and we dont have community anywhere else to turn to if this site becomes untenable.

think about that. sit with that. reckon with that. feel something

talking to a queer person you just met and slowly beginning to realize they're a category 10 normie is honestly horror movie material you're just saying your funny words seeing the recognition-as-human slowly drain from their eyes feeling the violins in the score swell as it dawns on you that this person has never even interacted with an armpit in a sexual context

they should make a soup that fixes everything. one sip and you are free. one slurp and it all makes sense

more people would exercise if this culture didn't make it absolute hell

My cats have this meow that means "please come with me to fix this" after which they'll lead me to the problem in question, usually a empty (or 'empty') food bowl or a closed door they want open. They look at the 'problem', they look back at me, clear message.

What fascinates me is how this illustrates what they percieve as being in the realm of my 'power.' I control the food, I control the door, sure, but my cats love to sit on the balcony in the sun, and it has happened plenty of times that on a rainy day they come get me, go to the balcony and show me... the rain. "Please fix this" they say. "Please get rid of the wet"

"Silly kitty," I say, "I can't control the rain." I then walk into the shower and turn on the rain.

Literature nerds: “Cosmic horror isn’t seeing an octopus and going crazy – it’s learning something about the nature of the universe that you can’t allow yourself to live with.”

Victor Hugo, learning about the octopus:

Say “Ah.”

source

it's kind of weird to look at how we went from "rival duels in mecha anime are homoerotic" to "mecha that sexually stimulate their pilots are very common trope" entirely because of a long series of yes-and telephoning

I'm doing the pepe silvia scene trying to figure out how exactly this got mixed up. there are so many factors at play here

Thinking about how when my oldest brother took Japanese classes his professor was like your pronunciation is really good 😊 but you need to watch movies that aren't about the Yakuza because you sound like a criminal

wordle and bts may seem like they have nothing in common but both have been cited by redditors as the reason why their elderly relative quit watching fox news and started acting normal again

I think the problem with a lot of people is that they make anti-bigoty a part of their identity and not a goal. So when they inevitably do something bigoted, it wounds their pride. And that matters more to them than any harm they may have caused.

Does not matter if it's, "How dare you call me racist, I am an ally!" or "How dare you call me ableist, I am gay!" or even "How dare you call me sexist, I am a woman!"

No matter what form it takes, it is wrongfully self-protective and hinders any personal growth.

can I have an explanation about why the Shimane prefecture is a radicalizing catalyst for the Japanese far right 👀

Okay so, let me put on my YouTube Video Essayist voice and say, we have to go back to the San Francisco treaty, wherein Japan and the USA renormalized their diplomatic relationship. Notably missing are the Koreans, the Chinese, and other victims of Japan's imperialism. While a lot of the territories to be given back are very cut-and-dry (like the Korean peninsula and islands that are between it and Jeju Island, all of Chinese mainland, for instance). Now, the USA, despite having ambitions of being East Asia's new imperial hegemon (literally was in a war to cement this idea at this time), does not make a concrete ruling on what to do with disputed territories, something that Japan, as its newly-occupied neocolony, has to follow. Remember this: it'll come up later. Also, I'm getting a lot of this from Alexander Bukh's These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia's chapter on the Liancourt Rocks. Go ahead and give the chapter a read and skip this post if you want.

Now, we must take a small detour before we get back to Japan. Are we all familiar with Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs)? One of the few UN rules-of-international-engagements that's still respected, it basically gives full control of economic activities in the ocean to the country that has a coastline around the marine zone. To the tune of 200 nautical miles of zone from the nearest continental/island coastline, this means that whoever controls the coastline controls fishing, deep sea mining, and all other activities you can think of that are economic in nature. You can read it in detail in this .htm web 1.0 site that the UN has put up like probably 30 years ago.

Enter, the Fishermen of Shimane Prefecture. Let's quickly take a look at the geography of the prefecture.

Located in the Southwest of Honshu, nearly bordering Kyushu, the prefecture is also one of the closest to the Korean peninsula. It is also one of the least populated prefectures in all of Japan. Remember these broadly. The fine details like its exact placement in Honshu aren't too crucial, but the greater details do matter.

The fisherman, right, let's get back on that. So, Shimane Prefecture's fishermen have to go north to fish, right, since that's the only coastline. This means that they constantly rub against Korean fishermen, especially around the Liancourt Rocks (there are Korean and Japanese names for this stupid piece of shit island but I'm not going to use either of them). Now, the ownership of these "islands" (this is being generous; these are rocks and only one of them is literally barely-habitable) have never been hashed out properly, and they won't ever be resolved, at this rate.

Now, let's go back to the problem of EEZs. The fishermen of either Shimane Prefecture or North Gyeongsang Province would love for this island's issue to be conclusive because, well, then they get to fish all they want. The Korean navy has harrassed the Japanese fishermen off the island, and if JSDF could, they I'm sure someone in the regional prefecture government would love to ask for JSDF to do the same to the Korean fishermen. The fishermen of Shimane Prefecture really, really, really, want the EEZ, and they're willing to be incredibly racist towards Koreans to achieve this goal, regularly hosting neoimperialists that would make Yukio Mishima blush at their regional governmental events.

A funny anecdote is that Park Chung-hee, the great betrayer of the Korean people, had a good idea floated to him about the island during the re-normalization treaty between South Korea-Japan, and it's that we should blow the fucking island up and move on with our lives, since Ulleungdo, the next island that's closest to Japan from Shimane prefecture, is sufficiently far enough that EEZ wouldn't matter. This was rejected because endangered seals mated there, but global warming has driven these seals away anyway. Still, the Japanese federal government's stance on the matter was more or less, "you folks can de facto have it because the movement to annex it barely matters in our country," at this point. So, the current situation is that Korean navy occupies the rock, even though it's politically disputed. The EEZ claim of either country is disrespected and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

"Okay, so we understand the regional politics. How does this become national?" We're getting there. So, this is the situation roughly around 1950s - 1980s for the Shimane Prefecture, right. They're a marignal, extreme right-wing presence in politics that the ruling right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) sort of just tolerates, with open contempt for rural hicks that barley matter electorally that is making their enlightened less obvious bigotry look bad. Then, we enter the era of Bubble Economy. Well, technically, by the 80s, we've been here a while. An unprecendented era of prosperity in Japanese 20th century economy, a lot of truly reckless economic decisions were made with the rallying cry of, "well, we can pay for it, can't we?"

Let's be fair to the Japanese politicians; it really did look like they could pay for it all. Now, no one thinks they're in a bubble until it pops, and when foreign investments started leaving in the early 1990s (the cascading effect will also cause the greater Asian Financial Crisis of 1997), Japanese economic bubble popped, hard. In what's now known as the Lost Decade, Japanese economy entered a downward spiral that they still have not recovered fully from (Abenomics could not do it).

So, what do you do? You have all these superfulous programs that still needs funding, but you have no money left anymore. if you're right-wing, of course, you privitize the government industries! The rail, as much of healthcare as possible, and the most crucially, the mail system. This is where the LDP overstepped their boundaries. Sure, you can privitize the rail. Sure, poor people can die of preventable diseases, but the mail system? Oh no no, you can't do that. The LDP was (and still so badly wants to be) a party of urbanite right-wingers and, well, even if the mail was privitized, they were probably already using faster privitized courier services.

What the LDP forgot was, however, this made the rural contingent of the LDP very, very upset. Remember, Japan is a series of islands. This is an asinine statement to make, yeah, we all know it. However, we must keep this in mind with the proposal to privitize the mail system in mind. The pritivitzed couriers could simply say, "well, that's not profitable to us," for many of the islands that constitute Japan's rural areas and refuse to deliver, or deprioritize delivery to the islands. This, of course, would mean that the already-depopulating rural areas will continue to depopulate (here, I must beg that you listen to this song while reading the rest of the post). They got so so upset that they threatened to mutiny and split the party in a mass-exodus.

Well, that's not how you keep your rule over the country going in a parliamentary system, is it? So, the LDP scrambled to show any solidarity that they could show to the rural folks without actually handing out any material concession to the rural folk, and they landed on Shimane Prefecture. It was a perfect storm of political opportunism: a prefecture that barely mattered in elections would get love-bombed by the federal propagandists, showing the rest of sparsely-populated rural area that they, too, can have their pain and voices heard! The prime minister started wholly embracing the cause of backwaters fishermen's quixotic quest to annex some fucking worthless rocks from their former colony in rhetoric, though only in rhetorics. Sure, prefectural politics were legitimitized, but federally? They knew not to push the matters with the Koreans too much, in a game of Colonial Restoration Chicken. Still, this seemed to appease the fishermen enough.

Meanwhile, in urban right-wing spaces, the fact that the heavily-impoverished Zainichi Koreans got financial assistance was starting to cause some rumblings, and although mainstream right-wing spaces were hesitant to embrace the conspiracism behind this, now, these urban right-wingers found a way to weaponize the 180-degrees turn by the Japanese government. Embracing the Liancourt Rocks as a dogwhistle, they not-so-subtly air out their grievances with politics of apology for previous colonial rule over Korea (which, once again 80% of Japanese people are in favor of doing so*), the state of Koreans in Japan, and much more, using these stupid goddamn rocks.

So here we are. The stupid fucking fishermen that can't share their catch with their former colonial subjects have given the Japanese far-right a convenient dog whistle that perfectly encapsulates all of their stupid grievances. That's why when we see creatives like Kumeta Kōji insisting on having the shitty idiotic rock in his manga panels' drawing of Japan's map, we all know exactly why he's doing it (because he's an ultra right-wing imperialism apologist).

I can also go into the Korean side of things (also from Bukh's book), if that's necessary, but this post is long enough so we'll end it here.

*for more on this, read Phillip Seaton's Japan's Contested War Memories: The 'Memory Rifts' in Historical Consciousness of World War II.