I appreciate the sentiment behind posts like "if you can learn how to pronounce [european surname] you can learn how to pronounce [non-european surname]" but it does unfortunately rely on the base assumption that your average english speaker actually does make an effort to pronounce european surnames correctly
if I ever have to see that fucking blorbo jesus crucifixion scene from good omens again i'm going to fucking lose it.
if I ever have to see that fucking blorbo jesus crucifixion scene from good omens again i'm going to fucking lose it.
me explaining that finesteride can stop facial hair growth to my hrt doctor:
"Oh, he's cinnamon role coded! He's so soft boi!"
OK. Is he Jesus Coded?
Cut the yaoi and get back to God.
my top 30 songs of 2024
5. death & romance by magdalena bay (x)
Imaginal Disk is definitely my top contender for album of the year. I was semi-familiar with Magdalena Bay prior to its release and this really feels like they've elevated their sound into something genuinely unique genre/production wise. it's such a vivid, mesmerizing piece of art, I love it.
two zany guys from @maximumgraves's comic
you have just got to stop crowing about "the ruling class losing control of the narrative" every single time a bunch of usamericans on twitter are doing meme politics with zero understanding of or commitment to basic principles of historical materialism or anti imperialism. some of these are legitimate opportunities for radicalisation if the organisational infrastructure existed but they're emphatically not radicalisation or mass politics on their own
russian speaking guy who is like "okay libs this is basic grammar: there are three genders"
the thing about "don't shame people who choose to try to lose weight" is like in its initial iterations among fat liberationists it was largely intended as guidance for talking about people who are 1) fat and 2) some degree of participatory in fat liberationist activism. like i remember this coming up when roxane gay wrote about deciding to get weightloss surgery for example. the point (again among more radical fat lib types) was to recognise that it was something she pursued because of how miserably the world treated her, economically & interpersonally -- "don't shame her" wasn't supposed to detract from conversations about fatphobia but ironically was supposed to be a framework that pushed people to focus more on those structural factors, and to understand individual choices as being the result and not the cause of those factors. in this understanding, inside activist circles, often the people choosing to lose weight are also some of the people bearing the most brutal effects of fatphobia and so the thinking was, don't shy away from analysis of the systems that force them to seek weight loss but at the same time don't treat them with *needless* hostility for responding as individuals to those pressures, assuming they are amenable to actually deconstructing fatphobia. it's a contradictory position to be in of course but such is often the case (an obvious comparison being, like, a feminist who argues that makeup should not be required for women to exist in public, but is also dealing with say a boss who punishes her if she skips it). but the nature of social relations is such that it's very hard to keep terminology in some kind of linguistic quarantine esp when it's regarding a political position designated as fringe & cringe by (for example) an extremely profitable medical industry so now you just see "don't shame people for losing weight! ^-^" on like pastel infographics and comment sections of virulently fatphobic 4% bodyfat fitness influencers &c
every time i download a pdf to put on my ereader i take bread straight from the author's mouth. for dessert i eat the moths that fly out of their empty wallets. i saw stephen king walking around wearing a barrel and suspenders today. i don't even read the things
— Gilles Delueze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
People (sometimes rightfully) criticize negativity and hatred as foreclosing thought and the enjoyment of life but nowadays it’s much more often the case that enforced positivity and agreement foreclose thought and life. It’s so obnoxious how the second you start going into your actual thoughts about something and your belief that things can and should be different, people just start trying to stop you because it doesn’t involve immediate agreement with the way everyone lives their lives. Who fucking cares, I’m not jumping in front of them and restraining them, and I’m not gonna just yammer about myself all day. I’m already part of the world, how am I supposed to skirt around the edges of it without ever saying anything about any of it? These positivity freaks want to reduce all language to description and affirmation, they want everyone to sound like a fucking advertisement
a Very Important Purchase
once every 2 million babies, a “strong baby” is born. That baby has the strength of one hundred regular babies. I am that baby, and I wish you a merry christmas
No matter what pair of words you try to use to illustrate a difference in pronunciation, there is unfortunately some commonly spoken dialect of English which is specifically designed to defeat you. There are English dialects where "dog" and "cat" have the same vowel sound in the middle. You can't win.
In 1967 the government discovered that specific syllable structures combined with specific vocal tones and ultra-low-frequency sounds could speed up the process of unconscious internalization by over 1500%. This became particularly useful for teaching low-level employees large amounts of information, as "hypnophonic learning" could be done while the subject was asleep.
Hypnophone use became standard for new employees of the IRS and SEC, as it made large scale memorization of tax code and financial law significantly cheaper and easier than traditional conscious education.
However, long term use causes the subjects long term memory to atrophy, requiring nightly repetitions of hypnophone use. Some enterprising employees found that the effects could be counteracted with low dosages of LSD to preserve neuroplasticity.
Roughly 1 in 7 employees encountered a strange phenomenon: Mild financial clairvoyance.
One in roughly 50 employees experienced more significant effects, generally those ensconced in large isolated IRS warehouses, which seemed to replicate the monastic lifestyles of historical sages, depriving subjects of ordinary stimuli in favor of becoming attuned to minute changes in the sub-finantial background grid.
Once it was learned that these "enlightened" employees could predict market trends before they happened, the technology was bathed in funding, patented, and made the soul property of the IRS.
Now, these "Plutophants" are kept in nigh-perfect sensory deprivation at all times, fed a constant hypnotic fugue stream of psychic conditioning in the form of "radiosonic neuro-induction" which contains a special form of the United States Tax Code modified for recursive hypnophonic induction, as well as a ticker tape wired directly into the users spine.
The effects achieved are nothing short of stunning. The invisible hand is no longer invisible to us. The market can be fine tuned with surgical precision. The price of bread has maintained a perfect 0.002% +/- variance for over 25 years now, and those who attempt to disrupt the guidelines are regulated by the SECs crack psychonautics division, who are now able to hunt market manipulation via their disruption in the financial dreamscape.
Very rarely, a Plutophant can become so attuned to the guidelines that they achieve a sort of catastrophic neuro-depatterning, their synapses begin to produce a counter-signal to the neuro-induction frequencies; jamming, and eventually overpowering the machine. Study is still ongoing, but it is believed that they somehow perpetuate their own neurological fingerprint into the financial causal background grid itself, literally becoming "one with the market."
Study is ongoing.
a lot of behaviors that get attributed to "female socialization" can be so much more easily and accurately understood as a person recognizing the power differential surrounding them and behaving sensibly in response to that.
like. does a woman politely listen to a man monologue at her because of some experience she had when she was twelve that magically cursed her to behave that way forever, or does she do it because the man has the power to hurt her and she knows it?
does a woman do all the dishes in her household because she is less capable of breaking out of a long-ago conditioned response than, like, your average trained dog, or is she doing that because she knows that all the men in the house will blame her if she doesnt and will make life worse for her if she speaks up?
maybe a lot of sexist patterns of behavior that are widely observed in society arent caused by women like, lacking willpower or backbone? maybe it is super fucking weird for supposedly feminist movements to imply this is the case when they talk about female socialization as the end all, be all of predicting human behavior?
isnt it both more useful and more respectful toward women to consider that they are perceiving their present circumstances accurately, and recognize when power is already being wielded against them, and take logical measures to deescalate and protect themselves because it works? is it not fucking clear to everybody that trans women in particular have to do this all the fucking time?
while I'm generally pretty wary of narratives that assume transmascs have a more developed feminist consciousness than cis men, I do think it's fair to say they do at least have more opportunities to gain that consciousness. I don't even think this necessarily due to their personal experience with misogyny, as while that can certainly be a factor, "suffering doesn't make you a better person, it just makes you suffer" etc. and being oppressed does not automatically result in a correct analysis or understanding of the structure of that oppression. An equally important factor is that transmascs are much more likely than cis men to be exposed to trans/feminist theory due to their proximity to queer, trans, and feminist spaces, and are therefore more likely to at least be familiar with the idea that masculinity, as it is currently constructed, is inextricably tied to oppression. this is also why I find it very misguided to interpret the pattern of transmascs distancing themselves from cis men as a sign that they are secretly not trans or whatever. instead I see this stemming from a very real internal struggle with the concept of masculinity and what it means to belong to broader social class of men. this is partially because transness is inherently antithetical to cispatriarchy and exposes a lot of its internal contradictions, but it also applies to anyone masculine aligned who also wants to support the feminist project. what masculinity is, and what it could be potentially transformed into, are very good questions that need to be grappled with, and is a discussion where transmasculinity can offer important insight. anyway tldr, I think transmascs are often uniquely positioned to both gain a greater understanding of misogyny and leverage their privilege in discussions with other men/mascs, but none of that is guaranteed by virtue of you being trans. you still have to put in the work, stop squandering your potential by whining about trans women who you think are too mean to men
usamericans and europeans love to moralize objective economic categories by transposing the relations of oppression to a good-and-bad dynamic which affects everyone as individuals, so that a statement of fact without any bearing on their individual personhood becomes an accusation to them, one that must simply not be true because their self-imposed moralization goes against the real oppression they do face, an oppression which has of course also been unnecessarily moralized, resulting in a completely self-fabricated contradiction between being oppressed (good and righteous) and benefitting from the oppression of others (bad and despisable)
my dealer: got some straight gas. this strain is called “linguistics class” you'll be zonked out of your gourd
Me: yeah whatever. i dont feel nothin.
50 minutes later: dude i swear there's invisible words in these sentences
my ∅ friend, pacing: the determiner phrases are lying to us
i love you and we will make it thru this together
Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1954 (Ed Emshwiller)
The Colour Out Of Space (Salvador Sanz)
i couldn't make myself choose so
I still think its the funniest shit ever that when I used to volunteer at planned parenthood every week even though I walked past mostly the same protesters every single time they were begging me not to get an abortion theres other options yadda yadda. Like meemaw you see me here every week. They call me abortions georg because I get another one every Monday at 8am