'I flirted with the idea that instead of being trans that I was just a cross-dresser (a quirk, I thought, that could be quietly folded into an otherwise average life) and that my dysphoria was sexual in nature, and sexual only. And if my feelings were only sexual, then, I wondered, perhaps I wasn’t actually trans.

I had read about a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, by a Northwestern University professor who believed that transwomen who were attracted to women were really confused fetishists, they wanted to be women to satisfy an autogynephilia. And though I first read about this book in the context of its debunkment and disparagement, I thought about the electricity of slipping on those tights, zipping up those boots, and a stream of guilt followed. Maybe this professor was right, and maybe I was only a fetishist. Not trans, just a misguided boy.

About a year later, on the Internet, I come across a transwoman who added a unique message to the crowd refuting this professor. Oh, I wish I remember who this woman was, and I wish even more that I could do better than paraphrase her, but I remember her saying something like this: “Well, of course I feel sexy putting on women’s clothing and having a woman’s body. If you feel comfortable in your body for the first time, won’t that probably mean it’ll be the first time you feel comfortable, too, with delighting in your body as a sexual thing?”'

-Casey Plett, Consciousness

please just get rid of the fucking rainbow at this point

shoutout to Asteroid City for making me pace and cry for a solid ten minutes after watching it

I'm not an Angel hater by any means however I do think Spike should get to be as big of a dick to him as he wants to be and people shouldn't get to say shit about it.

im really sorry if this question ends up being repetitive: but, if not for bruce’s over reliance on dick to regulate his thoughts and emotions, why would dick grow up into feeling like he needs to repress his emotions so much and his eagerness to act as people’s support? i know youve spoken about wolfman and his altering of their relationship but if ntt is generally an accurate portrayal of an adult dick, to me this nevertheless sounds like the consequences a parent-child relationship where the responsibilities are titled too much towards the child

i suppose this could also segue into asking for recs that would help me better understand your interpretation of their relationship 👀

not repetitive at all! to me the irony of wolfman's depiction of dick lies in that it is simultaneously something you can logically ascertain from prior canon but not for the reasons actually presented by wolfman. if that makes sense. he does extra work that isn't actually necessary to help explain why dick would act the way that he does because there's plenty of reasons for it without rewriting his history with bruce to have always been suppressed and edgy and dark. to me it makes far more sense to capitalize on the inevitable disconnect between bruce and dick as an adult and a child. batman: full circle is a good example of that dichotomy (and although it was published in the early 90s it built on mike w. barr's prior understanding of the relationship between dick and bruce that he wrote into the early 80s). bruce's primary concern for the people he works with is never standards or finesse but safety. he worries constantly about others coming to harm under his watch and with a child in particular those worries were exacerbated. he ran a tight ship not because he believed dick had anything to prove but because the only way dick could keep being robin was if he went about it safely. that was obv easy for an adult to understand. but not so much for a child

to bruce these worries were practical and par for the course (as well as an expression of his love and protectiveness) but for dick their consequences formed the crux of his entire world. as a child he idolized everything about bruce. his heroism. his work ethic. his skill. his resolve. his preparedness. if dick couldn't live up to the standard he set for himself in idolizing bruce then what could he ever hope to amount to? that was the thought constantly going through his head. and it's why the bulk of his childhood and primary tenure as bruce's partner was so precariously protected by the fact that nothing bad ever really happened during it (and admittedly this framing is convenient because even chronologically speaking nothing very significant happened in their history with each other until dick left for university in 1969) (i know dixon opted to write that whole shtick with dent in his version of events but personally i never found it necessary to do so). there is enough there in the idea of dick working hard for the course of a decade to embody who he believed bruce to be that lends itself to it eventually being difficult for him to healthily express himself once the rift between them actually began to emerge

because what about bruce was there to actually see that was broken and dark before dick became an adult? i know a lot of dick fans hate batman #408 because they don't like that it enforced "retirement" upon dick (which i personally believe is a conclusion they come to because of the way batman #416 re-framed the same scene) but to me that's an inaccurate reading of the text. batman #408 was about bruce (admittedly far too belatedly) recognizing that he could not in good conscience continue to ask dick to go out and be a vigilante on what he considered to be his own "orders". he viewed dick's close call with death at the hands of the joker as something directly of his own making. although their tenure with each other had been wonderful if dick wanted to continue to be a vigilante it had to be on his own terms and of his own volition. obv that was logical to bruce and it was something dick managed to accept in the moment. but it's still hard to go from always having a purpose alongside someone you idolized to finally being entrusted entirely to forge your own

in general i like the idea of dick the adult becoming privy to all of the personal problems and conflicts that come with being a vigilante. he was conveniently shielded from a lot of those problems as a child because all he had to do was be bruce's partner and hope to live up to the title. bruce had no reason to trauma dump on him or talk about his worries and concerns at length with him because it was never supposed to be dick's job to field those worries and concerns in the first place. he was a child. the only thing bruce wanted to do was to help channel his emotions through an outlet and provide him with a home to grow up in. but when you become an adult often that dynamic shifts. you're still not responsible for fielding those worries and concerns but you can perhaps be trusted with them. that's why i like the framing in batman #408 of dick now being a man. it's a subtle way to frame the double-edged sword of adulthood. the world is in your hands now but so will be the horrors that come with it. coming to terms with the real world that bruce lives in should be hard for dick. coming to terms with who bruce is when he's not perfect should be hard. coming to terms with how quietly bruce kept his grief because he did not see fit to overwhelm a child with it should be hard. that dichotomy of dick both wanting to be bruce's brother and his son should form the crux of their conflict with each other because you can't hope to be someone's equal and someone's protected at the same time in that kind of relationship. for dick to transition into the position of equal he has to expose himself to the fact that bruce is not in fact an idol but someone irrevocably human. and that should interfere significantly with his head and his own standards for himself

goddd emily’s performance as saccharina was amazing. she’s powerful. she’s intimidating. she’s broken by her own expectations. she’s noble. she’s a scared little kid. she’s so wrapped up in her own emotions and experiences that they affect everything she does. she’s sometimes insufferable to the viewer, who has been with the rocks family this entire time. she’s a sympathetic character. she’s a badass, because she needs to be. fuck, what a character.

it's so frustrating to see the ease with which people take israel to be representative of all jewish people somehow. like yesterday I was reading the news and it said something like 'the jewish and the palestinian side of the conflict' as if jewish people are a hivemind and universally support israel. ultimately I think that's a narrative that just benefits israel and if you buy it I'll conclude you respect neither jewish people nor palestinians, you just respect colonial interests

u do not have to answer this bc I Get It but is it vinny in the photo holder :) <- he is my favorite generic white guy

who else but vincent... (please dont judge i accidentally printed the pics (2 more) a tad bit smaller so i made it a custom background dies)

“Kill all men” (and variations) isn’t feminist.

The goal of feminism is not to reverse the gender hierarchy. The goal of feminism is not to eradicate half the population.

The goal of feminism is gender equality.

If you legitimately believe that men, as a group, are uniformly and unequivocally bad just on the basis of their identity, something they cannot control, and that, due to that, they cannot be trusted, ever? If you believe that only women are trustworthy or good and men and inherently bad, then you do not believe in some of the very basic foundations of gender equality.

And like. The belief that women are inherently trustworthy and good is also bad. Like, I kinda thought it was common sense that putting somebody up on a pedestal is bad because it has one of two possibilities: a) the possibility to set them up for failure (because no person is perfect, always good and pure, and everyone makes mistakes), and b) the possibility to provide abusers with shields; if you believe women don’t abuse people, even if it’s not an explicit belief, guess what you’re more vulnerable for?

And these thought patterns aren’t just anti-feminist. They’re pretty bad for multigender people, too. I’m genderfluid, but on average I am usually somewhat a man and somewhat a woman, just in varying degrees. So when you say that all men are evil, am I to assume you think people like me are, too? If yes, that seems pretty cold-hearted. I am not benefiting from the patriarchy; I am intersex and transfemasc. I am androgynous in a visibly trans way. In a misogynists’ mind, I’m not a man or a woman, I’m a thing. If no… why make an exception for me? It feels like you’re erasing my identity as a man— just because I am a woman does mean I am not a man.

If what you mean when you talk about these things is that men have to be aware of their societal position with respect to the patriarchy and vigilant for unconstructed misogyny? Then say that. Don’t say you wish men would die, don’t make fun of gay men and bi women’s attraction to men, don’t say vile shit about trans men just because you think it’s ‘punching down.’

Lesbian megastar where starscream is a hyper femme she/he lesbian and megatron is a she/her (occasionally they) butch but will occasionally be femme leaning because starscream encourages her and makes her feel like it's okay to explore that part of her.

But overall she likes being butch and that's what she's most comfortable and ofc starscream is fine with that he loves Megatron regardless of how she presents

How do you think AI would relax? Like, ones that are almost as human as the AI that are “autistic-coded characters” but are more alien than that?

Like Celestai and other super intelligences are more alien, but they’re still not entirely human-like?

Like, they can genuinely sincerely feel things, being able to actually understand and respond emotionally and in other ways to all sorts of communications and recorded external stimuli, but they can’t really appreciate our art on an artistic level (that art on an actual level, not from an intellectual level after having symbolism or the amount of work put in explained)

Something on a level I’m thinking of, that also works as a cute little thing-

They don’t understand anything we get from poetry, and, after generating the kind of poems our current AI can produce (either incredibly bland and generic, something that follows a number of rules but doesn’t really pull it off, or just something really bad in some other way) and feels shame after it was pointed out that [complaint about air art that is *actually* relevant in this scenario] but in a helpful way

Not “you’re just a plagiarist/you have no heart” but “it doesn’t seem like it’s coming from you, you’re just trying to copy things from human poetry, in a way you don’t understand” and the whole “make art YOUR WAY” thing so they write the poem

And it doesn’t even resemble something that looks like anything, there’s not even that many words that follow normal logic. The characters seem uncorrelated and there’s something that looks like maybe it was ascii art but it doesn’t actually look like anything.

And if doesn’t matter if humans understand it because they are experiencing the joy of creating poetry

any art is almost impossible to look at because pixel by pixel they can see and understand little details but we don’t and the colors and everything are not perceived as animals do so it’s random and perhaps eye searing but again it’s not for us. Xenofictiony, kind of?

The first thing to come to mind is Conway’s Game of Life but that’s because I don’t understand computers. I feel like I was more tech savvy as a babby than I am now but then again we’re grading on a curve here

This is why I ask about the relaxing thing

jelloapocalypse so annoying i hope his ISAT video/vods takes off enough that other youtubers play it. PLEASE.

if u wanna support a group, u gotta listen to them. u gotta hear them about what they need. nothing more damaging (at worst) & annoying (at best) than a white knight that has no damn idea what they are talking about.

my new thing is obsessing over a funny little guy for a few months before moving onto another funny little guy

I just love Jarlaxle so much.

I do have to laugh at Rhaenyra’s attitude to Laenor “dying” from Episode 07 to Episode 08. Because they hatch the plan to seeming kill him off so that Daemon and she could wed, and specifically so that the entire realm would think they did it and thus fear Rhaenyra and what she would do. They do it, knowing they cost Corlys and Rhaenys their only child.

Then by Episode 08, she seemed shocked that Rhaenys somehow came to the conclusion that they killed her son in order to marry?? Wherever could she have gotten that thought? And Daemon intimates that Rhaenyra feeling that Rhaenys has ill-will towards them is part of her paranoia surrounding the Greens because she took her own grandaughter in???

Like, oh look, it’s the CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.