This Sheep Tablet Woven Band Might Be The Cutest Thing I Ever Did. Probably Because I Don't Do Cute Things

Preoccupied by the way polyamory is treated with hate. I've gotten hate for even approaching the subject in the past. There's so much violent rhetoric and ideation surrounding it, so much genuine bigotry and prejudice towards people who practice it. But if you mention that, you get met with dismissal. It's not a big deal. You're taking it too seriously. Who gives a shit. Get over yourself. It is something that people respect so little that they refuse to even see it as a legitimate identity. Even left-wing progressive types will make jokes tantamount to thrashing blue-haired SJW snowflakes when it comes to polyamory. They're gross. They're weird. They're always cringe. It's never the people you want to be poly. I would rather kill myself. You'd think simply changing the structure of a relationship wouldn't be a problem, but even the most ardent defenders of equality can begin to say some pretty awful shit. Problem is, fundamentally, it is not seen as legitimate. It's not seen as deserving respect. There's all this handwringing about how these relationships are doomed to fail in order to justify this kind of thought and speech. It's bizarre to watch unfold. Frankly, it's the same sentiment and a lot of the same jokes as those cracked about nonbinary people. We're at a point where we've firmly accepted that everyone has a right to do what they want within the structure of social norms, you can take any side you want and do it with whoever you want. But as soon as you step outside of those norms, as soon as you go beyond the boundaries of social convention to find what suits you personally, everybody becomes a bitter reactionary.

saw a family tree template were you marked family members as male, female, or deceased. so glad we're finally recognizing a third gender (corpse)

spent almost five hours clearing up my floordrobe and excavating my off-season bins and making decisions abt clothes i don’t wear and i’m not even done 😩

(as a compulsive sourcer, i feel compelled to note that this is apparently the chapel choir of pembroke college, cambridge, conducted by anna lapwood, and that in 2020 they released an album called 'all things are quite silent' which includes this track and also a bunch of other really gorgeous pieces like elizabeth poston's setting of 'jesus christ the apple tree' my eternally beloved <3)

happy sunday. may I offer you this absurdly beautiful piece of music about it.

the thing about this post is that, in my experience, people don't complain about so-called smith college problems (which was always itself an awfully snide coinage) because they don't understand that they're localized problems; they complain about smith college problems because said problems are cropping up like caltrops in a subcultural space to which they belong, and rendering it hostile to them.

and obviously one can come up with examples of this dynamic it's very easy to portray as ridiculous and entitled, like the first two in this reblog: 'support women who shave their legs and wear makeup every day' and 'let's hear it for masculine men.' absurd! but the thing is, it's also very easy to imagine the sort of subcultural toxicity that would produce complaints like that: criticism of compulsory femininity, while hella justified, can very easily tip over into an anti-femininity that's liable to leave a lot of femmes feeling as though they're being sneered at, because, well, they are! similarly, a lot of this website is sufficiently misandrist¹ that it leaves very little room for eg trans men looking to lean into a masculinity that broader society tried to deny them. and then there's this reblog of the smith college problems post, that rolls its eyes at bisexuals who object to other-gender attraction being framed as necessarily straight, and the first reply to the more recent post, that says snidely 'normalize not transitioning,' as if there weren't plenty of queer spaces in which sneering at 'bihets' and 'theyfabs' is a nastily common pastime.

i don't, personally, think it's an accident that all these examples affect groups who exist in a liminal space between hegemonic acceptance and outgroup acceptance, and in practice end up feeling alienated by both types of space. and personally, i think we can and should do better; i think we have to disarm broader societal inequality by working towards actual equality, for everyone, and firmly refusing to indulge this persistent, pernicious urge to revenge that wants, so very badly, to just tilt the social seesaw in the opposite direction…

⸻ ¹ no, misandry does not per se count as oppression. it does, however, combine with other axes of oppression like Blackness, transness, queerness, &c, in complex ways. it's also just tar pit behavior, imo, when indulged in with any serious frequency.

i was just thinking earlier in vague terms about a specific but weirdly prevalent thing which consistently bugs me, namely: when cis men attempt to be self-deprecating about their unfamiliarity with feminine things, except that of course it's not actually self-deprecating to bring up how categorically distant you are and have always been from a stigmatized practice…

and then ran into this post, in which a presumably-white anon attempts to be self-deprecating about their unfamiliarity with the racialized genres of hip hop and rap (specifically by characterizing themself as a[n implicitly uncool] 'blorbo enjoyer,' which of course—as @‍batmanisagatewaydrug correctly points out—has the knock-on effect of framing fandom as Not For People of Color, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is racist), which illustrates exactly the same dynamic along a different axis…

anyway i guess my point here is just (1) to note that yeah, this really does seem to be a pattern! and given that, (2) to underscore in my own mind that this is probably something for nerds vel sim. in particular to look out for, because we often have insecurity modifiers that makes us feel like we're not ~really~ solidly part of the privileged group, which seems to make us feel like disclosing our ignorance can somehow constitute a self-deprecating self-own, rather than an offputting humblebrag about the privilege that made it possible…

the Guardian

Trump signs executive order on water pressure to ‘restore shower freedom’

White House says order will ‘make America’s showers great again’ and ‘end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure’

somehow this is not an onion article.

Tricycle Gang in Brooklyn, New York City (1930s)

Chameleon by Mansur Mughal, c.1612

Braun T52 // transistor radio (Germany, 1961)