Thorns

I keep writing out responses to posts on tumblr, making them a draft while I think about it, then never posting anything. So I'm going to make more of an effort to post this stuff to dreamwidth instead.

From this tumblr post:

the ideas that “libido and attraction can be separate and for many aces they are”, “aces who have and enjoy sex are still ace” and “aces who do not have sex and don’t want to shouldn’t be pressured” and “you should accept aces regardless of their sexual behavior” can and should coexist

ok this is a bit of a half-formed thought but it just occurred to me to compare this to my experiences when I identified as a wlw, and some general thoughts I've been having about how people treat bisexuality as "gay mixed with straight" rather than it's own experience.
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Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human


Creative Interventions: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence
Gotta be honest, I only got partway through this, it's a bit repetitive and long winded. Also the attempt at trans inclusion is patchy. But the part I read was really thought provoking and avoided some of the major pitfalls I've seen in other similar toolkits.

And now some things I already posted to tumblr:

A discussion of Camp Which I still don't get, tbh.

mistakes don’t mean you deserve to suffer

The key to co-liberation is that it requires a commitment to and a belief in mutual benefit

the 14 properties of “ur-fascism”

I was happy with my addition, so am going to crosspost it here. Just had my second vaccine dose so hopefully this isn't incoherent.

Advantages to younger people from knowing older ones.

Age Poll Results

Apparently sqbr followers are the most enthused about filling out polls :)

Inspired by this essay about the misremembering of Captain Kirk, I had some extra thoughts on tumblr and then I had some EXTRA extra thoughts and decided it was probably time for a proper post.
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Inspired by this twitter thread via tumblr:

I think millennials are taking a longer time coming to terms w/ the fact that we’re adults b/c a lot of us can’t afford to live like adults.

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Got most of the way through this before remembering I was going to put all my long tumblr responses on dreamwidth haha.

Post I am replying to:

There’s a post that appeared on my dash earlier... the tl;dr summary of said post is that fandom ‘isn’t required to be a safe space’. ... Fandom isn’t here to create a safe space for creators either: it is literally a community about sharing. And sharing is a two way street.

“It’s ok to criticise fanfic just don’t attack the person” shouldn’t be such a rare point of view, but here we are. Anyway, I agree in principle. I’ve seen pushback against excessive criticism which goes past “don’t send death threats” and even “don’t criticise racism” to end up at “don’t criticise plagiarism” which is something I thought everyone agreed was worth criticising.

I think a major problem here is a flattening everything from “has a pairing I don’t like” to “actual hate speech” into “problematic”, and flattening everything from sending death threats to saying you didn’t enjoy something into “criticism”.
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I know this has been adressed many times by a lot of people, but I was pondering this question from someone who is hurt by some of the problematicness themselves, and the usual response didn't quite cover it.

My opinion in short:

There's lots of ways to "support" a work: watching/reading it, paying for it, promoting it, etc. Each should be considered separately.

And there are two questions when it comes to whether you or not you should "support" a work, for whatever definition of "support" is relevant:
1) What effect does it have on you?
2) What effect does it have on other people?

How you weigh the two answers is a matter of personal ethics, but they should both have weight. And it's very important not to weight what affects you more than what affects other people in anything claiming to be an objective analysis of the ethics of a situation.

Unfortunately people tend to conflate all the different forms of support, which I think is unhelpful.
( My opinion in looooooong )

Disability Fest is a tumblr for fannishness about canonically disabled characters, they have a fest coming up in July and some nice posts in their archive.

Going to see if there's stuff I can organise for it! You just have to tag it "disabilityfest" in the first 5 tags.

Recently it's felt like I've totally lost the ability to express disagreement with people I like without utterly ruining that relationship. Part of that is to do with various things going on with my personal life/brain chemistry but I'm wondering how much of it is that a lot of these conversations have moved to tumblr.

Like...in my experience the best arguments happen when you can be open and understanding and try and see the other person's pov, engage with what they're actually saying instead of what you THINK they're saying, and not get all defensive and antagonistic.

But I'm too wordy for asks or replies (and those often get replied to publically anyway) and when I post a reblog I feel very aware that I am engaging not just with that person but with everyone who reads me, everyone following the post, and all of their followers (if they reblog my reply). And that awareness makes it SUPER HARD to be all the things I said in the paragraph above. Even if I trust that person to engage with me in an open and productive way, I don't trust all those other people, and so I put my guard up.

Does anyone else have this problem? And if so how do you deal with it?

Emailing them privately is an option when I have their email address, but it makes everything seem SUPER SERIOUS which puts me off. There's also writing out my argument in a text editor and dividing it up into as many asks as neccesary, I again feel weird about it but maybe it's a better approach. I like that reblogs can feel more like a casual discussion instead of a super serious "taking aside to express private disagreement" but it so easily goes from casual discussion to huge visible argument it seems not to be worth the risk for fraught topics.

"Don't argue with people on tumblr" is not a helpful aproach for me, I have recently tried arguing less but there are some opinions I find too upsetting to let slide and in my experience these unspoken arguments have a tendency to bubble up and explode if you ignore them. "Don't follow people with opinions you want to argue with" would mean cutting out a lot of people I mostly really like. And an echo chamber of people who all entirely agree with me is not entirely appealing. I really like being able to have productive discussions with people with different povs, and I know I used to be better at it.

Thinking about, I have taken the "just don't argue with people and unfollow anyone who makes that unbearable" approach to twitter, because expressing myself in 140 characters is just impossible. But I follow a very different group of people there, and barely post at all.

EDIT: Some interesting responses on tumblr...which of course I can't easily link to because tumblr but at worst you'll have to scroll down a little through that tag.

(going to post this on tumblr too, god help me, but point out that this post exists as a space for conversation for those who prefer it)