hmm...

Local goat discovers joy of painting

i love when characters lie to themselves in the complete privacy of their own minds

I especially love when the lie is that things will turn out fine, despite all evidence to the contrary :)

okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

Hell yeah

Cops have also agreed to work in the interest of state and capital. They are enlisted to silence and oppress you.

Not only are there no good cops, but all cops are, in fact, bastards.

I tell the story over and over again of when I interned at a courthouse a decade ago and got to observe the sheriff’s department. On ride-alongs there were cops who would put on their sirens to scare people walking down the street. They’d catcall women holding their partners’ hands knowing neither of them could really do anything cause it’s cops. They’d look at bumper stickers and follow cars waiting for an excuse to pull them over cause the sticker made them mad. Individual bastards.

But there were nice cops. Ones I had my lunch break with. Ones who were empathetic and kind and felt bad for people. They showed me around and were helpful to people at the courthouse. They gave good life advice.

Then, those nice cops served evictions. They dragged people crying from their homes. They showed up to collect unpaid court debt and issue legal threats to people living out of crumbling little houses. They arrested people going through the worst times in their lives who just needed help, and the cops knew it too, but “what are you gonna do, those are the rules”

At the end of my internship I was part of a protest where we passively held signs outside the entrance to a jail because the jail had assaulted a trans woman prisoner and my lunch buddies and mentor figures showed up in heavy armor to beat us for asking for better treatment of our most vulnerable.

Looking “good cops” in the eye as they wait to hit you with a big stick gives you a change in perspective.

The experience shifted 20 year old me from “the system is broken but we can fix it from the inside” to “this is going exactly as designed” real fast.

ACAB means all for a reason

i walk a fine line between “i’m asexual and i hate how much the world revolves around sex” and “sex is way too stigmatized and people should be able to be more open about it if they want to”

I think these are two sides of the coin called "sex should not be such a big deal"

Just in time for Valentine’s Day... 💔 

Ready to break up with Google?

So are we!

We’ve rounded up a bunch of privacy-centric alternatives for everything Google.

Check out the full list over on the blog!

- The Ellipsus Team xo

Fun fact, on top of being staunchly against genAI, ellipsus literally has an Export To AO3 button. I do the majority of my writing in LibreOffice, but I've been moving all my GDocs over to ellipsus for a bit and I really love the interface. If you're looking for an alternative to GDocs, this is The One.

tell me my prof didn’t upload the reading by photocopying his kindle reader page by page

bruh

Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.

"The nonbinary afab who goes by she/her, dresses femininely, and uses a push-up bra when I—" when you what? What's wrong with her?

Is she not nonbinary enough for you? Is the way she experiences her queerness and how she presents not perfect enough for you? Nonbinary people don't owe you androgyny, right? So why is she the exception? Why does she have to hate herself to appeal to your standards? Why is she any less trans—any less worthy of respect—cause it's "not visible"? Queer solidarity my ass. Don't spout this bullshit on Pride, man.

This, but also for enby amabs going by he/him and with hairy chests and beards

I can never leave Tumblr because after years of sporadic therapy utterly failed to even approach the core of my problem some random tumblr user was like “I processed my trauma by writing a 10,000 word work of filthy fanfic erotica” and I was like “fuck it I’ve tried everything else” and now I’m 17 chapters and 20,000 words deep into an unpublishable work of obscenity and after careful literary analysis with one of the Beloved Mutuals I have come to some Terrible Revelations about my childhood and may now continue the process of Healing. Where else am I supposed to get this kind of experience. Who does this. Why are we like this. I’m never leaving. I love y’all.

I call it the Blorbo Abstraction Layer, and it is also my preferred way of processing trauma.

Coward

Have you ever looked at a 24 hour clock and gone "too straight forward!"? Ever looked at a 12 hour clock and thought "what if we divided it again?" WELL FEAR NOT, I am pioneering the 6 hour clock; featuring the classic times we all know and love like 3pm and 7am as well as all new times such as 6aam and 8ppm! The new clock layout that solves nothing and makes everything worse!

why do we take towels for granted. have you ever needed to dry off and could only use your clothes or a blanket or something. little fibers all over you, just terrible. towels dont do this. not nearly as much at least. thank you towels

it wasn't ever normal that you guys were getting coffee for cheaper than people in Brazil and Colombia (the producers) do though, I hope you know that

having year round mangoes in Wisconsin isn't normal either btw there's a whole century that explains it actually

trans women belong in women’s spaces. women’s spaces are made better by the presence of trans women.

women's spaces are incomplete without trans women.

this motherfucker actually just tweeted this in the middle of his own championship match at wrestlemania

just in case you’re doubting me

he lost, btw

When people see deviant behavior and comment that that person needs therapy, they’re not actually wishing that person well. They’re hoping to eliminate the deviant behavior, and failing that, to incarcerate them.

It’s also a gross misunderstanding of how therapy works. If you don’t want to be there, you won’t get anything out of it. I think people who say “they need therapy” do know it works that way, but they’re taking a mental shortcut. They’re imagining a deviant person who wants to change already, whom they can put in the Therapy Vortex and get a normal person out of it. If you’re intellectually rigorous about prison abolition, you have to grapple with the fact that you can’t incarcerate or therapize people into changing.

You also have to grapple with the difference between deviant behavior and harmful behavior! Someone who self-harms displays deviant behavior, which is harmful to them but not anyone else, and it’s your goddamn right to be mentally ill in a way that disgusts other people. If you want to stop, then therapy might be helpful, but it’s offensive to say that someone should get therapy just because you want them to stop.

Compare this to scamming people with fake blood testing machines. I saw people talking about how Elizabeth Holmes was a narcissist, a sociopath, whatever stigmatized cluster-B diagnosis they could throw at the wall. Maybe she is a narcissist. She doesn’t necessarily need therapy about it. She certainly doesn’t need therapy inflicted on her. It wouldn’t stop her from doing a scam again. She needs to be banned from the medical industry. Her actions were harmful, and we should address the actions, rather than trying to solve whatever the psychological cause was.

Much of this has been said before, but I’ve been seeing a lot commentary recently that criminals and deviants should go to therapy. IMO it’s a sanitized way to say “lock them up.”