the original sentence is the kicker from one of my absolute favorite tim kreider essays and i demand that all 31k people who have reblogged it go read the whole piece, the thesis of which is “a no from me dawg”
today’s depressing sight on reddit: a woman being downvoted into oblivion for saying that there is, contrary to what the other posters claim, a vast array of books authored by women prior to 1950 and that, in fact, at one point in time in Western Europe, the novel was seen as an emasculating form and thus avoided by men.
how_to_suppress_womens_writing.txt
Had I expected this to get more than two notes, I would have linked a pdf of How To Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ instead of working under the assumption you all would know what I’m referencing, so here’s the text, belatedly.
So I know it can be hard to find good original m/m specifically by category. Some publishers offer tagging systems and some don’t.
QueerRomanceInk is a database (free for readers) that allows you to search original published m/m by a lot of different categories, including orientations like asexual and non-binary, tropes and potential trigger warnings. It’s very fandom friendly re: search parameters.
It’s gaining momentum in the m/m world and will be very helpful given so much quality m/m is actually self-published these days and therefore very hard to find (especially given the implosion of Riptide Publishing in the meantime).
But it’ll only get better if folks check it out! So if you’re someone who is interested in having a place to have a to-be-read and favourite authors list, get notifications for books on sale and new books by fave authors, and don’t want the entrenched drama that is GoodReads, I highly recommend you check it out!
Cursor*10 – little game where you have several “lives”. you use your cursor to navigate the floors, and when the time runs out, you go back to the beginning. however, the previous cursors will go through the same path they made before, thus allowing you to get further each time.
Daymare Town – creepy point and click game. very inky, interesting drawings. you have to find your way through (or perhaps out of) Daymare Town, which is inhabited by obscure prickly people.
Grid Game – there are a bunch of little circles. click one, and watch it rotate and set off a chain reaction. mindless distraction game.
Samsara Room – a strange escape game where you’re stuck in one room but pass through different dimensions to get out
Feed the Head – more like interactive art than anything. there are several different things to do in this game.
Factory Balls – a bit of a puzzle game. you have to paint a bunch of balls to match the model shown, using various options and paints.
Grow Nano Vol. 3 – one of my favorites of the Grow series. you have to click the options in the right order in order to make the sick person feel better. this one just warms my heart.
make sure to click the tags to find more games by the creators and companies and the rest of the games in the series!!!
I find Tonypa’s games to be simple, unique, and enjoyable. A lot of them involve patterns, colors, and matching, so they’re very calming as well.
some from me!!
deep thinking games with exploration themes…
6 differences – a pretty cool find the difference game that’s very atmospheric and somewhat soothing in the first levels, mostly takes place at night around a city, features sound effects and music and even moving cars down the highways. content warning for some surrealism and acid-trippy effects in the later levels (a person with a deer head, some kind of alarming music, the level’s walls moving as you look for the differences, etc – sometimes the level changes after you find all but one clue, and in one instance a train goes by rather suddenly and loudly, but it didn’t make me jump and i am sensitive to jump scares)
i can hold my breath forever – a game about exploring underwater caves in search of a friend. some references to drowning!
i wish i were the moon – short and sweet game about two people and a moon! clone things and move them around to get different endings :3
small words – a soothing platformed-style exploration game that lets you uncover different maps/pictures as you walk around
don’t look back – a creepy game based on the myth of orpheus and eurydice, this is a platformer-style game that has you going to the underworld to get your lover back. very atmospheric, but a slightly creepy atmosphere that (of course) references death, so take care
alight in dreams – during a dream you get wings, and explore the dream to find out about the history of a person who has never dreamed before. mentions death and suicide.
a house in california – explore an old house and learn its history, very atmospheric. can be a bit confusing for some, you may need a walkthrough.
silent conversation – a soothing game that makes levels out of passages of classic books; you win by toughing every word. not my preferred reading material, but the way the levels are built kind of force you to drink it all in stead of speeding through it.
games that are a bit creepy…
prior – you, a little box creature, wake without your memories in an unknown place. you must explore to find your family and figure out what happened before you woke. a dark game with multiple possibilities – can be a little creepy.
immorTall – an alien makes friends with a human family after crashlanding to earth. defend them as long as possible!
loved – a dark sort of game where you go through the levels deciding if you will choose to obey the voice giving you orders or defy it. in some casing obeying makes things easier, but in other cases the voice asks you to make things hard on yourself – throwing yourself onto spikes so you have to start over, etc. sometimes it is almost impossible to do what the voice asks. (serious warning for emotional manipulation, just to be safe – the question at the start will purposefully misgender you depending on your answer, and continue to do so throughout the game, but, depending on your actions, will then correct the mistake at the end.)
one chance – a kind of dark game; in the impending apocalypse you have one chance to decide what to do with the rest of your life. there are many endings, but you really do only have one chance…refreshing the page will not let you play again! content warning for death,suicide, impending doom, hopelessness, etc
every day the same dream – another fatalistic game with multiple endings, but this one allows you to find them all. same warnings as the one above.
elude – a metaphorical representation of depression. dark melancholy levels, nice atmosphere, but can be a little moody.
symon – you play as an elderly man stuck in a hospital bed. you sleep to dream and relive your past. this game is pretty much endless and features endless combinations of the same tasks, to reflect what that sort of life might be like. cw for death and end-life blues.
now for some lighter ones…
pizza king 2 – i found this sim where you run your own pizza shop weirdly addictive. food cw, of course, and it’s the only sim on here because they usually aren’t my thing, but, well.
boomshine & obechi – two colorful games where a well-placed click will start a chain reaction and see how many points you can collect!
music bounce – release bouncing balls to hit platforms to get the perfect rhythm!
dropsum & dropsum colors – math games where you combine numbers to eliminate them. you can choose where to drop the numbers, turn the board, and use powerups! (dropsum colors isn’tloading for me rn, but it might for you)
first person tetris – you spin with the tetris blocks! fun for pros, but it can make you dizzy.
flash tron – a recreation of the original tron game as seen in the movies. here you can play with others online!
dolphin olympics – super fun game where you swim and do tricks as a dolphin to score as many points as you can in two minutes. there’s also a freeplay mode. if you jump high enough, you may even see the moon ouo
mirror’s edge 2d – i adore the 3d version of this game for ps3, but if you don’t have access, you can play the mini/2d version. no real story, but it’s a very challenging game with rad animation!
bloons – i started playing the tower defense game, but they’re all pretty fun and complex. scroll down a bit and click any of the ones under “bloons games”
elephant games – a sort-of series with gems like “achievement unlocked” & sequels (where there is no objective except to complete all the achievements) and “this is the only level” (where you go through the same level many different ways). you grow to be quite fond of the little guy. :’D
some of these i haven’t played in awhile! i pulled from my bookmarks, because i used to spend all day curating links to these things. if i’ve missed a content warning PLEASE feel free to contact me about it or add it yourself!
I have been rereading the MsScribe saga today, which I now believe was so much more than an account of fandom because to have been able to write it is to understand fandom as it operated. This is important because we spend a lot of time on this website talking about how fandom should be, not about how it currently exists, as actual fact. Charlotte Lennox’s analyses of fandom, particularly, of how MsScribe was able to manipulate fandom, were very sharp, and talked about things that fannish people were not necessarily willing to talk about.
A few things struck me as particularly prophetic about this current state of fandom.
The fandom community is completely defenseless against bad faith actors who know how fandom works.
Consider MsScribe’s meteoric rise. Consider how knowing the right words is the one and only condition to being considered Good.
Fandom operates on a couple of perverse incentives:
Trauma will earn you not only sympathy, which it should, but also earn you authority to speak to a number of topics.
Trauma had become the only way that you earn authority to speak to those topics.
In the times of MsScribe, this manifested in her story about her accident and her stay at the hospital, but it was very interesting how she trotted out the story in irrelevant contexts.
MsScribe has also claimed to have experienced sexual assault.
Now, this is combined with fandom’s de facto policy of Always Believe. This set of rules on which fandom operates does not mean that Always Believe should be done away with, but that we have to understand that it should come as no surprise that bad faith actors will exploit this rule.
Accusations of racism and bigotry elevate fandom to a higher level of importance than it actually is.
I have a post or two about how fandom is not actually important in the grand scheme of things, so I will not belabor the point here.
Fandom still plays a huge part in the lives of fans, however, so it must be important, right? How do we make it seem more important?
I believe MsScribe’s stunt with the racist and homophobic sockpuppets presages fandom’s abuse of social justice language. This is not a new point, but by elevating shipping wars to the levels of racism and homophobia, people can claim righteousness and justify their overzealous reactions.
The thing is that nowadays, fandom no longer even requires sockpuppets to be made. Offences in order to generate appropriate outrages do not need to be odious neo-fascist statements; they are everywhere, manifest. You need to keep up with the latest non-ablest language, or you’re out. This is why fandom will never be able to surpass MsScribe’s sophisticated level of wankatry–there is simply no need for it.
Separately, it amuses me to no end that fandom remembers Dan Savage as the guy who said some unwise things about asexual folks, and not one of the media dipshits who championed the Iraq war.
So a lot of the dynamics that we’re talking about right now have already been in existence in fandom, literally as early as the first true fandom history was written. Scary, no? But this is also why I completely reject analyses like Devin Faraci’s that paint this generation of fans as particularly “entitled,” as though “entitled” is not the right wing’s favorite bludgeon with which to hit Millennials. I also reject Aja Romano’s lol-tastic version of how fabulous and important fandom is in her numerous, brazenly ahistorical posts for Vox.com. I invite the likes of Charlotte Lennox, who has a real understanding of fandom and its history, as well as a willingness to talk about oft avoided things, to contribute to the discourse instead.
****Coming to you soon, maybe: A long ass post about everything wrong with Faraci’s and Romano’s takes on fandom.
i’d never heard of this before, but am reblogging it mostly for @vastderp, who may get a kick out of it in light of his experience with similar scoundrels in other fandoms. 😀
That storyline cuts pretty close to the id, you know? And it’s just one of a large number of similarly… charged storylines (soul bonds, every fuck-or-die scenario ever written…) that you see very very often in fanfic, and from time to time in profic as well.
And the profic? Almost uniformly sucks.
Because pro writers either have some shame, and relegate the purest, most cracklicious iterations of those stories to drawerfic that their workshop buddies will never see, or else they’re shameless. But they usually have to be shameless alone– and so their versions are written so solitarily that they don’t have any voice of restraint, to pull them back from the Event Horizon of the Id Vortex when it starts warping their story mechanics.
But in fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material– not all of it, and not for everyone, but. A lot of it is, and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (At least in matters of content. Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.)
And so we’ve got all these shameless fantasies being thrown out into the fannish ether, being read and discussed, and the next thing you know, we’ve got genres. We’ve got narrative traditions. We have enough volume and history for these things to develop a whole critical vocabulary.
We have a toolbox for writing this sort of thing really, really well, for making these 3 A.M. fantasies work as story and work as literature without having to draw back from the Id Vortex to do it.
a friend was asking, in light of me promoting@iddyiddybangbang about the use of the word “id”. This post really helped fandom define the term for itself.
I used to be such an uptight miserable jackass that I *hated* this concept for a while (even while I was writing werewolf porn, idk). NOT ANY MORE.
If you have a passing familiarity with who Jack Harkness is and that Star Trek exists, you’ll be able to follow this one. Aka, Horta Bangs A Who.
Says Ellen of her inspiration: “… this started when I thought of how Naraht was totally Jack’s type except for being a large acid-secreting rock with no recognizable genitals.
“And then I thought, this is Jack. He’s not going to let a little thing like that stop him :-D.”
This is his Jokers first day on the job, and he’s being such a good boy.
Donald W. Cook is a Los Angeles attorney with decades of experience bringing lawsuits over police dog bites — and mostly losing. He blames what he calls “The Rin Tin Tin Effect” — juries think of police dogs as noble, and have trouble visualizing how violent they can be during an arrest.
“[Police] use terms like ‘apprehend’ and ‘restrain,’ to try to portray it as a very antiseptic event,” Cook says. “But you look at the video and the dog is chewing away on his leg and mutilating him.”
Cook says the proliferation of smart phones and body cameras is capturing a reality that used to be lost on juries. “If it’s a good video,” he says, “it makes a case much easier to prevail on.”
The new generation of videos is capturing scenes of K9 arrests that are bloodier and more violent than imagined by the public. An NPR examination of police videos shows some officers using biting dogs against people who show minimal threat to officers, and a degree of violence that would be unacceptable if inflicted directly by the officers.
…
In fact, in many videos, the release of a dog appears to escalate the violence of an arrest.
“You just look at the dog as the source of pain and you do everything you can to address that pain,” says Seth Stoughton. He’s a former police officer, now an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. “Those shouted commands — you’ll deal with that later, when the pain stops.”
And yet suspects who kick and try to shake the dog off are often accused of resisting arrest.
i don’t care what this dog in particular is being trained to do. furthering the idea that police dogs are somehow cute or good directly contributes to injustice and the perceived acceptability of police violence
My aunt rescues and rehabilitates german shepherds, and the vast majority are failed police dogs. The rehab process for these dogs is intense. They are trained to be hyper vigilant and to resort to violence. They are often is worse condition than formerly abused animals.
I spent a summer training one of these balls of anxiety. She was too fast and strong for my aunt to train her, so I did it. The biggest hurdle was getting her out of the mindset that biting someone gets her a treat. I had to let her bite my arm, forcible break the hold, and kennel her all without giving her a response because these dogs are trained to equate someone screaming at them as Go Time.
By letting her attack me and showing her that I was stronger than her and then not allowing her to play with the other dogs was what finally got her to stop attacking whenever she heard a loud noise or was surprised or just felt like it.
She still had to be homed in a gun-free, pet-free, child-free home because of the sheer anxiety she was bred for. These dogs are not cute, they are horribly mistreated.
holy fucking shit apparently after the events of Back At It Again In Krispy Kreme the starring acrobat (who teaches tumbling now) stuck the landing then calmly walked out the door as 100+ people stood in silence processing what they had just seen
the police came to his house later and just said not to do it again
thank you @eightfilms for linking me to the most satisfying possible aftermath of a vine I could ever want
just moving along like everyone else 