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striving-artist · 14 hours

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Round Three

oh shit I forgot to post the next one. Take that as indication of the state of my life.

First went Palm Oil. Now Tuna is gone. Good news for rainforests and dolphins. Rough day for several industries.

Same caveat as before. This just means we stop eating it, not that we are removing the food from the planet.

#self reblog

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striving-artist · 1 day

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Speaking of unpopular opinions.

Anyone can ship anyone they want with anyone that want. End of sentence. There are no caveats, there are no, 'but what ifs'. There is no statement that needs to be placed after it, it is whole and intact.

"But I don't like when someone ships underage characters"

You don't like it, you don't need to go find it, or read it. And you especially do not need to read it to intentionally traumatize yourself and then take it out on the author. Those are characters, they are Not Real. The author however is, and deserves the basic civility of your minding your own business.

"but this character is a lesbian and shouldn't be shipped with men"

That is a character, a two dimensional scrap of paper and some words. They are not real, they are not human. Some garden variety author or shipper is not doing anything harmful by shipping them with a dude. No one is being hurt by this. Do not read it if it isn't your thing. A shipper is not going into someone's home and forcing a lesbian to sleep with a dude, that is not what is actually taking place here." But if you read something you didn't like and you go into someone's DMS and tell them to kill themselves for shipping a lesbian with a dude, you have a problem.

"do not ship ace/aro characters"

People can do whatever they want with characters. They are not real. They are not being harmed by being shipped with people. You do not need to read it. Is it perhaps upsetting to not see a lot of fic for aro/ace characters, perhaps. There is a fix for that, write some yourself. Taking it out on authors who have decided to write something isn't the correct course of action.

"don't make this character cis when they're trans."

Once again the character is not real. They are not being harmed by this kind of fic. It is impossible to hurt them, they do not exist beyond the paper they were written upon. Do not harrass folks who decide to write these stories. Just don't read them.

And in specific, for anyone who is claiming that writing these fics takes from the very little representation you already have. That is not what's taking place.

Fic writers are not going into your house and stealing your toys and then not letting you play with them. They also aren't the definitive answer on who this character is or how they should be portrayed. And neither are you.

The only one who has any 'authority" are the writers of the show in question. And no amount of fanfic is going to tip the scales in any one direction. Trying to claim that a few fic writers are going to ruin your blorbo because they gave him a girlfriend, or shipped them with someone you don't approve of, forgets the one major rule fandom; 'do whatever makes you happy, don't hurt the real people behind the screen, and fuck the haters.'

#reasons we are friends

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striving-artist · 1 day

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#i am curious #because I know this number in real life

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striving-artist · 3 days

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Last poll:

This poll, after an hour:

I'll report back on whether beef sees a disproportionate spike in votes bc of the comment.

Round Three

oh shit I forgot to post the next one. Take that as indication of the state of my life.

First went Palm Oil. Now Tuna is gone. Good news for rainforests and dolphins. Rough day for several industries.

Same caveat as before. This just means we stop eating it, not that we are removing the food from the planet.

#wtf #like: thanks for doing the thing #and getting it more eyes #but wtf #with great power comes having beef with beef #apparently

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striving-artist · 3 days

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Round Three

oh shit I forgot to post the next one. Take that as indication of the state of my life.

First went Palm Oil. Now Tuna is gone. Good news for rainforests and dolphins. Rough day for several industries.

Same caveat as before. This just means we stop eating it, not that we are removing the food from the planet.

#food poll #polls #sorry about my brain #work has been A Lot #Props to the person who reblogged round one #which reminded my brain of this

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striving-artist · 3 days

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I play with characters like I'm doing algebra rather than like I'm playing with dolls.

#when I write at all #that is

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striving-artist · 3 days

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Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I’ve been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping.

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don’t even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you’re somehow owed information about my sexual history. You’re not! No one—and I can’t reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don’t feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you’re traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can’t sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can’t talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that’s good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don’t have to justify yourself. You don’t have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don’t have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but—

You don’t owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They’re yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they’re probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There’s a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren’t failed lesbians. They’re not somehow less good or less valid because they’re attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I’ve checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who’ve had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I’m sorry to report that “I’m disgusted by a standard-issue human body part” is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I’m a dyke and I don’t especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don’t have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn’t make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There’s so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven’t noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there’s a whole pandemic thing that’s been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you’re worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people’s genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something.

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it’s always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to “solicit homosexual or lesbian activity”, which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn’t have to recognize them if they didn’t want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who’s older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers.

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn’t be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that’s worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You’ve capitalized it, like it’s Weighty and Important, but it’s not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don’t have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too.

#it’s suuuuper bi phobic #from my experience #to the level of #idk #wanting to be platinum?#so not wanting to date me because I have dated men #so it’s penis by proxy #and therefore they ended it #before it even started

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striving-artist · 5 days

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🔥 topic : shipping

I wish people would stop shipping actors. Not because I hate fun. But because I hate actors. I’m not here for their real life personality, and they are selling their visual appearance and performance for us to play with. Their real life and actual self is not part of a package deal. I work with actors. I was actors. I’m not here for it.

Also why would I care about Standard Human when I could have one wearing the same face, but that fights monsters.

#ask meme

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striving-artist · 5 days

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🔥 dealers choice

American Evangelicals are extremely skilled at storytelling and influencing emotions and progressives should learn from them

#ask meme

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striving-artist · 5 days

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🔥

Pandas are an evolutionary dead end and we should stop senselessly encouraging them to breed.

#ask meme

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striving-artist · 5 days

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Send me a “ 🔥 “ for an unpopular opinion.

Bonus points if you include a topic. ( IE. shipping, roleplaying, ect. )

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striving-artist · 6 days

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#incredible.

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striving-artist · 6 days

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places made by @mephestopheles

probably shitty worldbuilding idea: fantasy world that keeps going

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striving-artist · 7 days

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The correlation between being asexual and loving puns is so high that earlier someone used a terrible pun, and my brain tried to stick an ace flag next to their name in my head.

#love y’all #but Lordy

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striving-artist · 7 days

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your perception of tragedy is distorted by how much attention you pay. The more you watch, the more you find, the more horrible it becomes to you. That doesn't make it the superlative tragedy by default. Tragedy is constant, large scale and small, distant and right nearby. The one you're focused on seems worse than all the others because you're focused on it. You see the details, and you see how awful it is. The idea that there can be no beauty, no happiness, no decadence or pleasure simply because there are tragedies unfolding is horrifying. Even when I was deep in my personal tragedy, I didn't want everyone to be as miserable as me. I get where the instinct comes from, to boycott and stop things while people are suffering, but it isn't a real option. It just seems that way because the tragedy you're watching seems like it could be solved if only the right people spoke up. Their voices are rarely the ones that can stop it, and even if they were, there is always another tragedy. Life for everyone can't be stripped of pleasure because there is tragedy for some. Tragedy is endless. Pleasure has to be too.

#principles - strife

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striving-artist · 14 days

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Propaganda

Jane Fonda (Barbarella, Sunday in New York, Barefoot in the Park)—Feminist icon, LGBTQ+ rights activist since the 70s, Civil Rights and Native American rights advocate, environmentalist… she really is THE woman ever

Rita Hayworth (Gilda, Cover Girl)—Absolutely, drop-dead gorgeous. She steals every movie she’s in; she was Fred Astaire’s favorite dance partner, as you can see in clips from their movies [link][link]. Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, Rita's story had its tragedies—her father was awful and had her performing in nightclubs way, way too young; the studio totally remade her look because they were afraid of her hispanic image, putting her through painful treatments and diets; she had a string of failed marriages. But beside all that, I think there's something about Rita that still glows through—an inner beauty that has nothing to do with the studio, or the men who pinned their dreams on her. Rita brings an incandescence to roles that's impossible to replicate, and was truly a great actress in that she could switch from herself—shy Margarita—into a bold and glamorous femme fatale so convincingly everyone fell in love with her as Gilda. She's my favorite movie star, and I think she was a beautiful human through and through—Rita, gorgeous and real and shining bright.

This is round 5 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Jane Fonda:

" I assume she's already been submitted but I gotta make sure. I think there's an element to movies like Barbarella or her segment of Spirit of the Dead of those having been directed by her husband, who famously made movies about her being hot, and the incredible costume design also helped, but good lord. Look at her"

"She was so pretty, dear lord! She was and still us stunning. She’s great at comedy and drama."

"Shes so hot im so gay for me i will let her hit me with hers car"

"Gorgeous and also still getting arrested at climate protests, which is sexy behavior"

"Watching her in Barefoot in the Park seriously made me, a straight woman, question things"

"PLEASE I LOVE HER SO MUCH"

"Her vibes in these movies are so interesting because she, the daughter of an Old Hollywood star, went on to make both poignant dramatic movies and the some of the silliest things you've ever seen but even in the silly space adventures and sexploitations there's always this undeniable gravitas to her. It's like she's able not to take herself very seriously but at the same time never stops having this grace and elegance and makes it all work together. And she's always been very politically active which is also sexy. Her famous mugshot is from 1970 so right at the cutoff mark but come on"

Rita Hayworth:

Do you need any other propaganda? Here’s the video.

youtube

She was not called "the love goddess" for nothing: beautiful, glamorous, despite playing sexy and provocative roles her inherent shyness somehow also would shine through sometimes, creating this contradictory and incredibly attractive image

Often played "the bad girl" who tempted the male hero away from "the good girl"; but did have roles that broke her out of that mold. She was also the inspiration for Jessica Rabbit. THE pinup girlie.

HELP

youtube

She was soo beautiful when she was young and she MAINTAINED that beauty into her later years and I think that old lady glamour is hot. bombastic sex appeal

every line she delivers in gilda is so flirty and passionate or absolutely desolate and it's so good

I just have a lot of feelings about her

#y’all get IN here #my queen needs you

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striving-artist · 17 days

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#some of you may be interested

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