(via Measuring Culture Change in Organizations)

Please stop seeing politics as an identity and start seeing it as a collective means for change

I think respecting trans people comes with a territory of like... just because many people will pass as cis doesn't mean that it's a great idea to use their passing as a way of legitimizing how absurd transphobia is

Transphobia isn't absurd because I "look like a [cis] man," it's because transphobia is fucking ridiculous. It would be ridiculous whether or not I passed or whether I look like a "conventional man." I use myself as an example, but ultimately, passing or appearing normative should never play into whether or not transphobia is bad.

maybe consider violence.

NPMD Tarot - The Star

Others from the series: The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Devil

A bit of symbolism under the cut, but I'm curious of other interpretations 👀✨

I matched The Star with Ruth based mostly on visuals and the reverse meaning (which among other things mentions feeling like everything is against you, which I thought fit her well).

Elements that represent hope, opportunities and shining bright from the original card are turned into foreshadowing of her death here.

Light - Her Moment, chance, ambitions and wants. The second she enters it, she's dead.

Background - theater seats, empty.

I’ve been thinking today about off ramps in long running stories, especially book series.

By that I mean like, places where a person could stop reading and have a satisfying ending even if they’re not yet at the actual ending. (Someone tell me if there’s an established Tvtropes name for this I’m missing.)

Now, a lot of book series will have an off ramp at the end of book 1, because many first books are written without promise of a sequel. Like sure, there might be a sequel hook, but the actual second book is still up to publisher whims in most cases. So you can read All Systems Red or The Thief or A Madness of Angels and have a perfectly satisfying ambiguous-end sci-fi story or middle grade fantasy romp or inverted murder mystery revenge quest without ever picking up book 2. This is definitely an off ramp but it’s not necessarily the interesting or revealing kind because again. Whims of the publisher.

There’s also stories that have an off ramp after every installment. Leverage is famous for this—they had a philosophy of having every season be a satisfying ending, which says a lot both about the writers and about the story they were trying to tell.

But I think the most interesting ramps are the ones where by design or by circumstance, there’s a single off-ramp somewhere in the middle. One spot where unless someone tells you there’s more, you’d never be unsatisfied with leaving halfway through.

Sometimes these will be signaled in some way, where there’s a big timeskip after the off-ramp, or the series changes names or has a spin-off, or the POV changes, or after book 3 the author publishes a short story collection before hopping back in to novels, or the series suddenly jumps from being only novellas to a chunky 120k novel. (The Raksura books, Percy Jackson/HoE, Matthew Swift/Magicals Anonymous, and Murderbot all do one or more of these)

But sometimes off ramps aren’t visible in series order or marketing. Sometimes they’re organic to where a story happens to leave off at the end of an installment.

The queen’s thief has one of these after King Of Attolia. I know this was a satisfying ending because for seven years I thought it was the end. My local library didn’t have A Conspiracy of Kings, so I thought it was a trilogy. And you really can leave it there! KoA ends with Gen back in his element and recognized as king, the main internal threat to Irene neutralized, and peace on the peninsula. The Mede aren’t yet the immediate threat they are in the back half of the series, since up through KoA they’re mainly represented by the magus’s vague warnings and Nahuseresh, whom Irene thinks circles around. There’s no real reason to assume the Mede are a threat within the scope of the series. Now I absolutely prefer getting the whole story, but KoA is a damn solid off-ramp for anyone who feels like exiting there.

And that’s one kind of off ramp where the end you get is pretty similar in tone (mostly happy) to the one you get if you go on to the rest of the series. I’ve also read books where you can off ramp successfully right at the lowest point in the series and get a tragedy out of a series that ultimately ends happy, or leave at a high point and get a happier end than the main one, or exit at an ambiguous point and continue on with ambiguity. The Giver sequels make it pretty clear what happened to Jonas and Gabe at the end of the book. but you don’t have to read them or have that question answered if you want to.

I don’t have a really solid conclusion to draw here except that I think the positioning of off ramps says a lot about authors and stories, and choosing whether or not to take an off ramp says a lot about readers.

In the same bed, but not on the same page

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hey apparently there are haters following me and i just want to say i fully support mspec lesbians, mspec gays, lesboys, gaygirls, gaybians, etc etc and any queer good faith identities that are contradictory or confusing or """"wrong""". my own identity and some of my friends' identities fit this definition completely. if you don't like this you can unfollow me 👍

Cant sleep so im thinking about ayhalo

I think its like. one sided. qaypierre WOULD smooch that demon and take him on dates. qbad would not recognize anything as a romantic gesture. aypierre could throw a bouquet of chocolate roses at him and bad would just be like ! thank you :}

like they love each other, absolutely. they TRUST each other, to the point where i’d even say it gets in the way of bad seeing aypierre as anything more than a good friend. that’s his guy. The dude always in his corner. Friend resource label: team mate (coparent) (down to help kidnap people). bad doesnt do classic romantic relationships- all of his relationships are INCREDIBLY queer, but the closest he usually gets to what others read as romance is a classic chewtoy4chewtoy dynamic. He LOVES to fuck with people and he loves to get fucked with and if there’s a nice jawline or pretty muscles included?? huge bonus !!

he’s got something- not kinder, with aypierre? not calmer, either, but stable, maybe. pierre has proven, over and over again, that he’s on bad’s side. Spying on tubbo, encouraging bad’s pranks, the kidnapping- i can’t call it a reliable dynamic, not with how paranoid bad is, even when he trusts, but there is still a feeling of understanding that, wherever pierre’s limits are for when he cant support bad (or genuinely turn against him), it hasnt been reached yet

aypierre, on the other hand, i dont know enough about to be absolutely sure but there are some Vibes. ironically, i think hes feeling like his relationships are unreliable. max was going to have their baby, and then he wasnt, and then he left him, then max fucking died. plus whatever is happening with him and ayrobot, which probably leaves him feeling like he cant rely on Himself. like he had, if not a little crush on bad, at least some Interest in him, before. as well as several islanders. i remember the days of the Bed Threat.

but thats part of it, too? because those flings didnt have that emotional connection, and i always got the sense that he started looking for that with maximus, to Love and Be Loved rather than pure lust. To care about someone, genuinely, and be cared about in return. but he didnt get that with the flings, and We know that max was using him, but i dont know if he did, but maybe he had a feeling about it and maybe he also had a feelinf about maximus’ feelings towards bad and maybe- there’s something about that? A little push of not-spite-not-projection onto bad.

because bad IS that reliability, right now. he’s a fucking gremlin. a bastard. a prankster silly guy. he trusts aypierre and aypierre trusts him and they dont share everything but so often, when it comes down to it, it is them against the world. them in the corner, caught, aypierre shouting about kissing as a cover for their crimes while bad runs giggling away from him.

It's not that I don't get the arguments about how by operating within, rather than fighting to overthrow, an unjust system I am contributing to the legitimacy of the system.

However,

I don't care if you would be willing to be homeless or in jail in service of The Cause, my clients aren't and they are the people whose opinions on the subject matter to me; and

The only real resource I am potentially diverting by doing this work that could otherwise go to systemic change is my own time and effort (because the systems funding me won't pay to overthrow themselves). On the other hand, you are spending all the time you could use to try to convince people to join you acting like an asshole to potential allies and supporters because we/they are Doing It Wrong.

Accidentally Undercover - It's one thing to know your nice neighbor is also a secret agent, and probably not scared of you. It's quite another to see them react to what you usually only use for intimidation (:

(via Six Qualities of Effective Change Management Sponsors)

space movie WHEN

[movie 9 - Strategy Above the Depths]

b’elanna vs her mother at similar ages, plus some sketches!

I just finished listening to the finale and I have to ask, did that bit about people ending up wanting "more" from Jeremy confirm he may be on the aroace spectrum?

(tagging @alexisstiel bc they asked this question just after you!)

so, firstly, it was definitely intentional! I really wanted Thomas and Jeremy to have the "my happiness might look different from yours" conversation because not everyone gets fulfillment in their lives from the same things, and I think that's a particularly hard thing to square for family/across generations. parents especially can have a hard time imagining their kids without partners and not everyone wants a partner!Jeremy does want people in his life and I think has been very lonely, but it's not about romantic relationships for him.

I have my own ideas about Jeremy's romantic history/sexuality and I'm sure Misha does as well - it's not something we've discussed in depth or come to a firm consensus on, so I wouldn't want to say, yes, definitively Jeremy is this or that thing, because I really believe in shared custody of characters when it comes to working with an actor like Misha!

or, to put it another way, I can't say with 100% certainty that Jeremy would identify himself as aroace, but I personally lean in that direction for him. I think one of the reasons that there hasn't been a discussion around it in the creative team is because romance is something that is not important to Jeremy. and not necessarily in a "oh holy shit monsters are real I can't even THINK about romance" kind of way but in a "oh, that? yeah, I've been on some dates, I don't get the fuss and haven't dated in, like, ten years" kind of way.

the tldr is, I guess, I have definitely been writing him as being somewhere on the aroace spectrum since the beginning, but I've also really been building the character with Misha and wouldn't want to put a huge CANON stamp on it, because I don't consider myself the sole steward of the character. I hope that makes sense!

Another L for the Max hating Seb girlies, we love to see it! <3