it’s a tough life for someone like me, who should have been born a muppet

wizard babies be on their orb watching cocomerlin

WTF this is masterful, 10/10.

Other people have said this in notes, but the Bulwer-Lytton contest involves writing the most absurd opener you can think of and submitting it to the contest. It's not a judgment like the Razzies or the bad sex in books award or something; it's a game. Diana Murtaugh of Baltimore is to be congratulated for this win.

love having mutuals that talk about stuff i dont understand. i dont know who youre talking about but i believe you have good takes. now look at that cool art of someone else i dont know. hey is that guy from like, roblox or something? life is beautiflul

compelled me

idk if y'all have had this experience but the way cis women talk about hormone cycles triggers my fight or flight response. feels like half the time i see something about your cycle is either an advertisement for an app that tracks and sells your pussy data or thinly veiled "women belong in the kitchen because our wombs are synchronized with the divine hearth" propaganda. straight up gives me the heebie jeebies

#yeah like some info is genuinely helpful to know#like your strength and energy levels can fluctuate based on your cycle#which can be helpful to know if you work out to know when to maybe go easy on yourself and whatnot#but i have seen some weird shit esp on tiktok that’s advocating essentially to structure your entire life and routines around your hormones#definitely one of the most bizarre forms i’ve seen gender essentialism take on

YES this is the shit I'm talking about. i saw some woman on Insta doing yoga while doing a big announcement how she had to go offline for her luteal cycle... like do whatever you want god bless etc. it is good to be aware of your body & how it affects your mental state and all that. but this all just feels so sinister, the way hormone phases are treated like God's plan for your life? i do not like anything that promotes the idea that "females" are controlled by their hormones and our actions should be directly based on our cycles. & it's always "divine feminine" "law of attraction" cis women saying this shit. heebie! jeebies!

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.

Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.

They need to invent more fake celebrities like Hatsune Miku and Gorillaz and the Muppets because it's genuinely the most sustainable way to maintain a parasocial relationship with the entertainer class.

Kermit the Frog can never get canceled because Kermit the Frog has no agency or personhood beyond what he is imbued with by the collective labor of puppeteers, voice actors, singers, and writers. He is, along with these other examples, effectively a celebrity by gestalt. He has transcended the inherit instability of the celebrity class through diffusion of responsibility for his personhood. He is a god.

We need to bring back the athletics body type post

This one

Tumblr has 10+ image limit had to add these on too

This photoshoot unlocked something in me the first time I saw it. The idea that EVERY body here is what "peak physical condition" looks like.

I'm sorry I'm going fucking insane over trans people in sports issues the anti trans crowd has lost the fucking plot and then has the audacity to act like its the trannies who are ridiculous

I used to be of the "well the sports issue isn't really important to me its w/e I just don't want it to be a gateway into other transphobia" but oh my fucking god we are so far gone. The fencing shit is sending me over the edge. What the fuck.

I can't even articulate my words so I'm just going to tell a story in screenshots

I am so fucking tired of being gaslit about this

I'm also still so fucking pissed that we have to include "ooo the trans fencer only finished in X place" because its a reminder that trans women will never be allowed to excel at anything in the public eye without being cut down. Fuck OFF

i hope you don’t mind me adding to this post op but i’ve got a sorta personal connection to this story. for ppl who do not know this about me, ive been fencing for like five years and am trans. i also used to fence in the same circles as this woman

this woman—stephanie turner is her name, because i think people should know it so this shit can ruin her life—regularly fences cis men and wins because fencing is fucking co-ed

i know that is in the screenshots already, but what i can add which isn’t in the screenshot is that i personally know and have fenced some of the people listed in that “competition history” screenshot, including some of the cis men which she beat. i know from fencing them myself that these guys are good, smart, capable fencers

that said, even if i didn’t know them, i could tell you a lot of these guys are solid. do you see that column labeled “rating”? being rated means they’ve placed very well or won medals at prestigious or decently sized tournaments—E is the lowest rating (but still difficult to get) and ratings go up to A (and U means unrated). if you look, you can see she beat a few rated fencers in that screenshot, some of them male!

another thing i know about stephanie turner is that she fences at a club my friend’s brother works at. she regularly beats said brother, who is 6’4 and 200lbs. i’ve never met this brother, but if he’s anything like my friend, he’s a damn good fencer with years of experience. stephanie turner is GOOD. per my friend, she probably would have won the bout she took a knee on. she really did not need to pull shit transphobic shit and i guarantee she knows it.

all this shit about fencing cis men really does not matter, to be clear. being a woman beating men doesn’t make stephanie a good fencer—it doesn’t even make her a notable fencer. every afab fencer who is good enough to beat other fencers beats amab fencers. the first fencer i beat as an afab person was a cis man who started the sport at the same time as me just bc we were at the same general level. because again, fencing is co-ed. i just am explaining all this to show how damn stupid dying on this hill is (and the fact she for sure knows how damn pointless and hateful it is)

because fencing is NOT a strength sport! being stronger or taller than your opponent, like how a cis man would stereotypically be vs a cis woman, isn’t necessarily an advantage—strength can absolutely fuck you up if you don’t know how to manage it, and if you know how to use it, being shorter than your opponents can actually be an advantage

if anything, fencing a stamina sport, which something you can very much train no matter your gender if you put in the work. more than anything to do with strength or speed, though, fencing is a strategy sport. there is really no reason to gender segregate it. a lot of tournaments do, but plenty tournaments DON’T, and most clubs you go to for practice and drills and learning fencing will be co-ed and have you constantly fencing against “opposite sex” fencers

(half related—one of the best foils on my fencing team is a trans woman who sometimes fences in the men’s brackets in tournaments and regularly beats cis men)

if stephanie turner is a good fencer—which she definitely is—she knows all of this. that fencing is more about stamina, that strength and height mean nothing, that the only thing that really matters is your strategy.

stephanie turner was literally just doing this to be an asshole. the fact she’s getting money for it is fucking disgusting. i hope she faces some damn consequences for this shit, because it’s such stupid, hateful bullshit, especially for a sport where that “biological advantage” shit really and truly does not matter

i do want to end this addition on a nice note tho, so i want to add: a few days after this story broke—this weekend, actually—i attended a two day tournament as a spectator. while it wasn’t everywhere, i definitely saw a lot of refs and staff wearing trans pride/support pins, as well as a few people in attendance wearing trans supportive shirts and accessories. all of the people ive spoken to in the fencing world about this—which is quite a lot—have thought it both appalling and monumentally stupid, and im hoping that will lead to consequences for stephanie turner and anyone else who tries to follow in her bullshit idiot footsteps

y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the "brain fully develops at age 25" thing? and the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing? yeah they're all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them

okay people are doing nuance in the notes about the kernels of truth in neuroscience myths but I really really need you to understand that that is not important here. people don't believe there are "right-brained" and "left-brained" people because they've misunderstood lateralisation of the central nervous system, they believe it because that binary framework was deliberately pushed by people who wanted to define who was logical enough to lead, and surprise surprise, white adult heterosexual men are left-brained. people don't believe the brain "finishes developing at 25" because they've misunderstood life stage differences in neuroplasticity, they believe it because the idea that children, teens, and young adults have inferior brains is a convenient rationalisation for a society that marginalises them. people don't believe you "only use 10% of your brain" because they misread an fMRI study, they believe it because it's useful bullshit for everyone from hyperindividualist historical revisionists pushing the great genius concept of scientific progress to hucksters recruiting for cults that will teach you to unlock your latent telekinesis for just $5000 a month. that's why it's fucking important to know that many popular science ideas are false and to push back on them loudly and frequently, because they're not just mildly incorrect, they are often active components of systems of violence.