Aroace disaster

Genuinely, what happened to “feminism is for everyone”?

That’s the feminism I grew up with: encouraging people to recognize that fighting sexism and restrictive gender roles helps folks of every gender. We’d push back on the idea that feminists hate men, pointing to inclusive feminist literature and how many men are feminists.

Now, there are so many people insisting that the solution to patriarchy is to openly hate and ostracize men no matter what. Why? What is the benefit? It’s certainly not effective in fighting oppressive structures to exclude half the population from your cause on the basis of immutable traits. It may feel cathartic to say horrible things about men and try to punish them for your frustrations with patriarchy. But the only actual effect I see is the increasing right-wing radicalization of young men, who are being told that the left hates them for the way they were born and presented with an abundance of proof that it’s true.

Why are we going back to treating men and women as different species? It doesn’t fix things to say “well women are the good gender and men are the bad one” this time. If you sincerely want to dismantle sexism, you’re going to have to unpack and let go of all sex and gender essentialism—even that which considers women inherently pure and men inherently immoral.

All y'all fuckers when you say you ain't gonna vote

Attn: conservative men

Idk I feel like "Men are responsible for their own actions, women aren't to blame for men being misogynistic" and "You do not have to tolerate bigotry from others, call them out on that shit" and "People may be less likely to become radicalized if they receive kindness and compassion" don't have to contradict each other

1. Everyone has grace for this group, but where is the grace for the marginalized people who are deputized to hold their people's hands, while being mistreated.

People respond and say "these are boys, young men." These young men do not exist in a vacuum.

"Oh, he just said the N-word in high-school. He was 16. No big deal."

What about the BP affected by that? What about the young people who try to get help from mistreatment and the admin and adults around them do nothing, because "It is not a big deal. They don't mean it." etc. or silence.

They are rendered invisible for the assumed goodness of the wp.

I am not saying "Oh screw them." But everyone blames the marginalized people. People are placing a lot of blame on the Left and marginalized people for this rise in radicalization.

I just wish with there was a message for the people who deal with this to say, it is OK to be angry at mistreatment. If you do not want to teach, you do not have to. Because that is true!

Everyone's first impulse is to say "Oh, they don't really think like that. They are a good person. " etc; however, when one small group says "No, we do not want to do that," they are villafied and spoken down to.

And it is a small group. For all the people who have met such mean people who are too woke, how is it in the real world? Especially at the micro level? Most people's first instinct is to be patient with these people and give them grace.

People are more offended by someone/thing being called racist and are hesitant to call someone/thing racist than by racist behavior.

1. I am absolutely in favor of holding people accountable for their actions. Being kind doesn't mean you have to pretend they did nothing wrong.

And marginalized people definitely aren't to blame for bigotry- bigots are responsible for their own actions, and the right is to blame for recruiting more and more people. We can still try our best to improve matters even if they aren't our fault.

It's absolutely okay to be angry. It's okay to be tired. There is no obligation to tolerate mistreatment. Marginalized people very much need kindness and compassion and community, and all of us should have it.

2. Those versions aren't getting reblogged as much, but there are several additions in the notes that clarify- it is not solely on the marginalized people to change others' minds. Allies to those marginalized people can and should be a part of that process- men can tell their male friends that misogyny isn't okay, white people can call their white family members out on their racist behavior, etc. And the people with internal biases themselves have a responsibility to do work as well, like you said. Definitely not just the responsibility of the marginalized people themselves.

And while it's definitely not the fault of the left as a whole, there are definitely issues of people being ostracized for mistakes and not being given the opportunity to grow, or being deemed "inherently evil" because of their identity. Fixing these things definitely isn't going to fix all of bigotry, but we do have room to improve.

It's far from the only factor, but isolation does seem to be a factor in radicalization, and that feels worth addressing.

Yoooo he just changed the game

Oh, this is really neat, this is the same thing they did in Sh! The Octopus in 1937 to do this transformation scene. In black & white, the color of your light can hide makeup, then all you have to do is flip the color, and the audience just sees the difference in the light levels, but cannot see the color shift. The quick explanation for why this works is the blue makeup absorbs red light, looking very dark when only red light is present, but also looks about the same as relatively fair skin when only blue light is present. Same goes for the colors the other way.

Ahh, I think that they had this in one of the early Jekyll and Hyde adaptations as well. :)

Twilight Zone used this trick too, in The Howling Man, where this guy morphs into the Devil.

And again in Long Live Walter Jameson, where this guy loses his artificial youth

I think the first time it was used was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1931.

God, I love practical effects

How do I always forget how hot the devil.is in the howling man

i love this team so much. this dude ballerina twirled around the first defender who came at him and then hurdled backwards over the next one, an entire grown ass man, like it was nothing. like he's in a goddamn sports anime. unbelievable

can you imagine the kind of bonkers athleticism you have to display to get an entire sideline of professional athletes to react like this

1000% this, people need to stop calling their impulses and random thoughts "intrusive thoughts", they have no fucking clue how debilitating it is to have ocd

I hate that so many people aren’t aware of this. Like having intrusive thoughts is a sign that your subconscious really DOESNT want you to do the thing. That’s why the thoughts are so upsetting. You’re not a bad person omg

I swear the fucking god. Leave it to Tumblr to be the only website who wants to be the bucket of slugs

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

#this has wrapped back around to reaching someone who cares about security more than writing#like this kind of thing is EVERYWHERE#anyways @op drop the title

@demo-ness, here you go:

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

When people graffiti on buildings: Yes! Ha ha! Fuck yes!

When people graffiti on rockfaces and cliffsides on hiking trails: What the absolute fuck.

It's not punk to poison the soil, dude.

It's down with The Man, not down with Mother Nature, my dude.

using "what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament" to mean "yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing" is very funny to me

my favorite part is that absolutely nobody says this except here. so if you use it in public, it's a dead giveaway that you spent the last ten years on tumblr. but then again, they recognized it, which means they were at the devil's sacrament

the “i am from russia” was a warning

I asked a taxi driver in Bucharest to take the quickest route to the airport. 10 minutes later we're doing 120kph the wrong way done the street car tracks when another taxi tried to pass us and dude just floors it. Never spoke a word, smoked 9 cigarettes over the 30 minute ride, never took off his sunglasses and blasting opera all the way. I look at it as paying 15€ plús tip to lose all fear of death.

the "i am from russia" was both a warning and a promise, and one that would weirdly put me at ease about the situation.

how could you leave this in the tags

second hand story but one I know is true, but my dad worked as a taxi driver in Monteray in the 90s. Now, it’s important to note that there’s a racing event in town, so lots of people are coming through. My dad just so happens to get a group of people in town for the race in his car.

Because taxi’s are not like uber and you are basically expected to make conversation, my dad asks if these guys are in town for the races. They say yeah, so my dad asks “are you participating or are you watching?”

“Participating”

“Well then, I don’t like you”

They ask why, and my dad explains that they’re doing what he’s always wanted to do. Well, this small guy right behind my dad makes the mistake of saying “Well, show us what you got.”

My 25 year old father, takes this as a challenge. Now, his driving is still scary to this day, so imagine how it was when he was 25. He fucking floors it down the highway, and there is an exit they need to take to get to the bar the guys are going. This exit has hedges on the drivers side, so my dad slows down to 60, takes this turn on 2 wheels. All the guy behind him see’s is these bushes coming at him, so he does the rational thing and he screams like a little girl.

When they arrive at the bar, everyone piles out, and then one guy stops, turns around and motions for my dad to roll down the window. He tosses a $5 at my dad and says “I’ve never heard anybody make Christian scream like that.”

My dad had Christian Fittipaldi and his pit crew in his car, and made him scream like a little bitch. It’s my all time favorite story.

@dear-ao3

Loving how as soon as electricity was like, a Thing, people just went "you can make toast with this" and started working on electric toasters but they didn't quite have the whole heating element thing down so there was a not insignificant chance of it just exploding

People have been making bread crunchy by heating it up for Ages but for some reason I thought electric toasters would be happening around the same time as like, refrigerators but no people went "easier crunchy bread?" as soon as the technology was available. Not even remotely safe but like, existent. It took Way longer to figure out how to make things cold with electricity

I specify electric toasters because before that they had these bad boys

You just put your slice of bread in there and hold it over your fireplace and bam it's toast time

Actually you didn't have to use those, if you find yourself wanting some toast in victorian england you could also stick your bread on one of these motherfuckers right here

These are the very creatively titled (/s) toasting forks and they look metal as hell for the purpose they serve

You might notice that the tips are bent upwards, which is actually not for inflicting more pain when tormenting the souls of the damned but rather because the bread goes on them like so

And the bend helps keep the bread from sliding off

I know this is the most niche interest shit in the world but just look at that. The victorian era had no reason to go as hard as it did but every day I am grateful for it

But sliced bread didn't exist until... I dunno, but it was after Betty White was born. So would the Victorians just stab a wad of bread and toast it like a s'more or what?

I don't know how to tell you that you can slice a loaf of bread

something about the way watson is immediately intrigued by holmes's character ("the proper study of man is mankind,") immediately begins studying the man like an anthropologist, has a natural inclination to help people, and continues to write and think about Who Holmes Is in addition to chronicling his actual work makes me think that, if the field had existed, he'd have been a psychologist.

something about being a doctor and then transitioning into the exact type of writer he becomes, his concern for holmes, his preoccupation with the unknown/darker aspects of human nature/taboo subjects not often addressed, his innate compassion... lad was writing letters to Freud fr (don't do it watson)

This is honestly better advice than “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”

By all means try again. But do that after you figure out WHY you failed!