I’m PatrickDiomedes on twitter, bluesky, and discord. And pillowfort, which I made ages ago and then never did anything with. Should probably get on that.
EDIT: Looks like I also made a mastodon and never used it
going to be a hater for a moment. seeing ship stuff for “zoeystery” makes me feel insane. to get fandom’s OK to ship two women you need to provide a 300 page dissertation with citations screencaps an timestamps and supportive extraneous interview commentary from every actor writer and director involved and still none of that will be sufficient justification to people dedicated to seeing gal pals. however an m/f ship can be composed of a guy who had like one line of dialogue, which was barking, and an entire personality will be invented for him and his equally one-dimensional buddies.
I keep mentioning they made Cassandra GNC in TLoVM compared to her original design in the campaign and I want to expand on that a little: it’s not just that in the present she has the short “baby butch’s first quasi-mullet” haircut or that her general gender presentation is “masc in a renaissance prince kind of way”. The thing that really makes her come off as gender-nonconforming to me is, specifically the dichotomy between the two outfits we see 13-year-old Cass wearing in flashbacks:
On the left you’ve got the outfit she was wearing by choice on a random morning (casual shirt+pants+suspenders, hair unkempt); on the right you’ve got what she was wearing at the formal dinner where the de Rolos were massacred (giving Princess Classic™; notably the only time we see her wearing makeup of any kind).
And it’s like. That dichotomy is the most “I am an AFAB 13-year-old who is in the nascent stages of developing Gender” thing ever. You look at that difference and you can FEEL every single fight she was having with her mother over her presentation at the time. (Oh My God Child We Have To Be Presentable At Formal Events You’re A De Rolo We Have Standards To Uphold Why Can’t You Be More Like Vesper etc. etc.) You KNOW she was going to be out of that dress literally the microsecond the Fancy Dinner was over and changing back into something like the one on the left. (And then oops! She got kidnapped and super tortured in it instead.)
Which of course lends itself to its own kind of very spicy extra flavor to Cass & the Briarwoods, because she was able to do her gender manifestation while living under THE FUCKING BRIARWOODS with literally zero bodily autonomy that wasn’t an indulgence on their part, and the Briarwoods are like. They do Traditional Gender Roles as a kink thing, you know? Sylas takes care of the bandits while Delilah waits inside the carriage in their show-introduction scene because it makes both of them horny to do heteronormativity with each other despite Delilah very much being in the driver’s seat of this whole operation.
(And then of course you have the way Delilah is with her other “daughter”, Laudna—if you haven’t read What Doesn’t Break she fully comes off as a TERF in the way she treats Laudna and talks about Gender to her and I’m obsessed with it—but I digress.)
The point is: Delilah enabled Cass’s GNC tendencies and let her become the Lesbian Prince With A Sword type gender she’d been yearning to grow up to be despite Delilah having Opinions on the proper expression of femininity that are entirely rancid. And that’s because it’s an obvious bit of positive manipulation—look! We can be nice! We’ll let you be Yourself! We’ll let you be useful to us in the way that befits your interests! Aren’t we so much more permissive and loving than your last parents were! But also, it just helps Delilah’s TERF-coded ass see Cass as a punchline—it’s a joke that Cass is the butt of, it’s yet another thing that makes Cass lesser in her eyes. Isn’t it pathetic of her that she can be manipulated with this? Isn’t it pathetic of her to want it at all? Delilah thinks so!
And as we see at the dinner in the prologue of What Doesn’t Break, that indulgence is a thing she can take away at will to make Cass uncomfortable:
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(Forcefemmed! At The Evil Murder Dinner. The more things change the more they stay the same, huh?)
In conclusion: Cassandra de Rolo GNC and as with everything in her life this is something that Delilah Briarwood used to torment her.
The fact that Aperture Science canonically has a gender-neutral, polyamory-friendly partnership policy isn’t a joke about Cave Johnson being inexplicably pro-queer. It’s because their corporate medical plan allows them to experiment on your spouse. More spouses means more test subjects. That’s the joke.
The way tumblr users talk about racism makes it really obvious they learned about it from Harry Potter’s muggle born wizards plotlind
This is to say, they take the same attitude JKR does: racism is wrong because it’s factually incorrect on a pedantic level and not because it inherently places a certain group of people as inferior, a wrong belief to have no matter what.
For example, in the third Harry Potter, Hermoine gets called a slur by Draco. She goes to Hagrid, upset, and instead of saying Draco’s wrong because he’s bigoted and hateful, Hagrid starts talking pedantically. Not all muggle borns are inferior because Hermoine is academically gifted, and Neville, a pureblood, isn’t. So therefore, racism is wrong! 👍🏾. Of course the implication is that if Hermoine wasn’t good at school she’d deserve it..? And that’s how tumblr users speak about racism.
My real world example is how some tumblr users tried to defend rap music by saying, not all of it is about drugs, sex and violence, so therefore it shouldn’t be dismissed. But, what about the rap music that is about those things? Does that deserve to be belittled and mocked?
Astute observation as always. It’s the subconscious belief that everything white is naturally superior because white people made it. While black art is naturally uncomfortable/hard to emphasise with because not only is it not white, it’s black, and there’s always an underlying sense of percieved aggression attached to blackness. For it to be liked, white people often project their own whiteness onto it (see things like how fandom treated Miles Morales after the Spiderverse movies). And when something, like rap music, does have an aggressive element to it, white people use that as an excuse to express discomfort while listening to heavy metal because white anger is the status quo and black anger is always a threat.
I didn’t go far enough in describing the whitewashing as I’d like so here’s my elaboration: fandom will often ignore a black character’s aspects to their black culture and give them interests more aligned with white people (example: the fandom surrounding Tyler, the Creator’s alter egos, where some of them lose their swag era fashion and get replaced with notoriously anti-black movements like (modern) scenemo), remove any “rough” edges to the black character to act “soft”, tiktok softboi style (example: the woobification of Miles Morales), turning it into a big joke to laugh at and then call cringe (examples: Drake vs Kendrick rap beef, “brainrot” words that are just AAVE) or even just straight up ignoring the black context to music to fit their own white experiences (example: ‘Wavy’ by SZA being used by white girls to complain about not being blonde, the 'Black Barbies’ by Nicki Minaj trend on tiktok being hijacked by insecure white girls, and ad nauseam).
This all just ties back into seeing black art as inferior and “fixing” what black art they deem just about good enough to be more white and ie more acceptable
No true ceasefire can ever be held with Israel, they will always violate it because they see killing Palestinians as their undeniable birthright. The abolishment of the state of Israel is the only way the killing will ever end.
Making a flat/wide/bulbous nose appreciation post because those big nose posts never include them:
a bit annoyed bc ppl are being obtuse in tags and comments
the reason i made this and the reason this feature is rarely seen in nose appreciation posts is because wide and flat noses are something that is mostly associated with people of color, Black people especially
these types of noses are rarely spoken of as elegant or referred to in poetic ways. and i don’t think i really have to spell the reason out!!! i just said it
i didn’t want to be ~annoying and say that bc ppl will probably see it as a guilt trip, bc this is how this webbed site is and i wanted the post to be positive !!!
but the responses are irritating me
since we’re talking lately about how unbearably white tumblr is, its showing in the responses to this lol
For me, censorship laws are a lot like the death penalty. There are people I wish would die, but I don’t want the government to have any say over who lives or dies (because then they can stretch laws out to justify killing someone they dont like). There are stories that I think are reprehensible and should have never been written, but I don’t want the government to have any say over which stories are reprehensible (because then they can stretch out what they deem wrong out to fit anything they don’t like)
The real wisdom of Solomon, however, came from user’s complaints that Skag Gully, one of the game’s earliest areas, had too many eponymous Skags. Players reported that they were running into too many clusters of enemies while moving through the Gully, offering feedback like, “this isn’t fun, this is boring.”
Gearbox, as a result, tripled the number of Skags in the area. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t a travel area that had too many enemies getting in the way,” Armstrong said. “It was a combat area.”
The absolute madness to respond to feedback by just doing the opposite, and yet it works!! There’s lessons to be learned here.
I’d llove to put a copy of this article in every academic department at every teaching college in the world. This is one of the best summaries of the paradox of feedback I’ve ever read. There are so many examples of professors responding to student feedback by either ignoring it or taking the suggestions on blindly. It’s common knowledge that students are, en masse, terrible judges of how they will best learn - but, before you throw that stone, so are professors. (Consider, for example, the student who says they need to doodle/keep their hands busy to stay focused. Reasonable in theory, but if completely unmanaged, ends with the situation well-illustrated in Dumbing of Age, with Walky drawing dinosaurs and tuning out the lecture entirely. But a professor who responds by banning drawing or fiddling in lectures would obviously inhibit the learning of students who… need something to do with their hands to focus!)
Students often respond to the problems they’re experiencing the same way, it seems, that game testers will, and the stodgy professors respond by throwing the feedback out as irrelevant. “The lectures are boring (and so I zoned out, retaining nothing).” “Well, learn to pay attention!” Unhelpful! Result: students continue to zone out; students who have either better background training (usually from high-income school districts) do okay and everyone else fails.
But I have seen way too many enthusiastic but careless professors go the other way. “The lectures are boring (and so I zoned out).” “Well, then we won’t have lectures! This class is now discussion only!” Result: the students who do the reading (*sigh* usually from high-income school districts) do okay, and everyone else fails (because they aren’t getting instruction).
But if you unpack the critique behind “the lecture is boring,” it can mean anything from “the professor has poor public speaking skills,” which can be at least mitigated on the professor’s part, to “the lecture goes on too long for me to focus on the topic,” which can be mitigated by breaking the lecture up into smaller chunks, punctuated by discussions or stretch breaks or free-write reflections, or “the lecture is using language I don’t understand,” which can be mitigated by the professor either pausing to define their terms or using easier ones or putting up periodic slides that define some terms, or reminding students to ask for definitions… etc. (Or, to be fair, by a combination of the above factors and students having come to rely on constant mental stimulation via phones, which requires some of the above solutions AND a frank conversation (with follow-through) about working together to make sure we are learning the crucial life skill of silencing distractions and paying attention so students can get the thousands-of-dollars’ worth of lecture they paid for.)
And it’s the same for testing! “Essays are too hard” gets crotchety boffins complaining about Youth Who Don’t Work, which does not help anyone, and eager iconoclasts deciding to let the students do a presentation or poster instead, which does not help them learn the skills they paid to learn. But the complaint is, underneath, “I never learned how to write an essay,” to which the remedy is the class should have more structure teaching students how to write an essay, or “I didn’t have enough time to write it well,” which can be remedied by breaking the steps up and spreading them out throughout the term, or more reasonable deadlines, or coaching students in efficient research and time management, or sometimes students getting help with their learning disabilities or other struggles.
One thing I’ve learned as a writer is that readers/students/consumers/whatever don’t know what they want because they don’t know how to do your job.
The rule of thumb I use is the reader is usually correct about what they are feeling. They are usually dead wrong about why.
Readers who are bored will not usually tell you ‘this chapter is boring me’, they’ll tell you 'the plot is moving too slow’. Readers who are confused, on the other hand, will tell you that the plot is moving too fast (unless their confusion is making them feel bored and uncomfortable, in which case they might say it’s too slow). Both bored and confused readers will find nonexistent plot holes or tell you the characters are unconvincing or have trouble following plot twists, for opposite reasons. Following their feedback almost never solves the issue, because they don’t know why they feel like that. They’re guessing. You can usually trust a reader to know how they feel, but they’ll usually convey this information in the form of a suggestion, and you absolutely cannot trust those suggestions.
Tied in to this: if you’re GIVING feedback, it’s honestly great to cut out that interpretation same by giving your feelings. “I didn’t understand this” or “I got bored here” or “this is where I got so frustrated I stopped playing” are actually great feedback to hear because you’re just telling what you experienced.
People will often not do this because it sounds mean. People are taught to be constructive not insulting, and to use 'compliment sandwiches’, so they don’t want to say “I got bored with this”, they want to say “there should be another fight here!”, because the first sounds mean and the second sounds helpful.
Reminds me of a lesson my grandparents taught about a car mechanic who kept running into problems with the reports he was given being totally at odds with the reality of the vehicle in front of him, and only figured out what was happening when he gave the front desk job to a random student for their first job. Originally he had junior mechanics talking to customers, and they would inevitably take what the customer had to say and interpret it as “likely misaligned front tires” while the student who knew absolutely nothing about cars would write down exactly what the customer said, “car shakes and makes scary noises at high speeds.”
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