okay but there is something disquieting about this urge to cast fan writers as altruists. they give us all this for free!! well, no.

they’re sharing

it’s a key difference in perception. fic isn’t given. it’s shared. it’s part of a fandom community— in which readers are also an integral part.

it’s probably inevitable mission creep from the increasingly transactional nature of the internet and fandom-as-consumerism, which was always gonna happen after corps worked out how much bank there is to make from those weirdo fan people

but like. fandom is sharing. i think we’ve lost that somewhere.

I love you PBS I love you NPR I love you public libraries I love you wikipedia I love you project gutenberg I love you librivox I love you libby I love you hoopla I love you openlibrary I love you internet archive I love you resources that make information free and accessible to the public

i made this instagram post !!! there isn't as big of a community of AAC users on instagram so I thought I would share this on my instagram (@cytochromesea).

EDIT: i got an ask that states that not everyone knows what AAC is which is an oversight on my part, it stands for alternative and augmentative communication!

Image ID:

A light blue background with a rainbow and a cloud and some stars. There is a blue border collie with wings holding an aac tablet that says I love you! Text reads: AAC etiquette. Do’s, Don’ts, and other stuff. By cytochrome sea.

The same background appears in every following slide. Text reads:

Don’t touch my AAC without my permission

Don’t take my AAC away from me, for any reason (joke, punishment, etc)

Don’t press buttons randomly or flip through my communication cards without permission

How would you like it if I randomly poked you on the mouth and throat (or on your hands if you sign)? It would be unpleasant, so don’t do that to me

Don’t ask questions about why an AAC user cannot speak. 

Do let us communicate however is best for us in that moment

Don’t ask us if or when we will be able to speak verbally. It’s not your business 

Do not value verbal speech more highly than AAC. Any communication is good communication

Some of us never talk, either, and that’s ok! Those of us who can talk sometimes are not better than those of us who can’t. None of us owe you an explanation for our use of AAC.

It feels like when someone is looking at your phone screen over your shoulder, so please don’t do this

This applies to low tech AAC as well, don’t look at someone’s cards or letter board until they show you

You have the dignity of forming your thoughts in your head before you say them, whereas my thoughts are all on display. Please afford me the same dignity that you get automatically.

We are real people with thoughts and feelings. Please treat us with kindness. 

We are trying our best

Don’t shame someone if their device mispronounces a word. It’s quite literally out of our control.

Other Don��ts. Don’t

Don't Treat an AAC user as childish or stupid for not being able to speak. Our ability to speak does not define our worth

Don't Show frustration at the way someone communicates

Don't Make comments about how fast or slow we communicate

Also don’t…

don't Act surprised when we swear or talk about adult topics like sex, drugs, or violence. We are not pure uwu precious smol beans, we are normal fucking people

don't Assume what is “wrong” with us. There are about a hundred reasons for someone to use AAC and you probably aren’t the expert in any of them.

“OK, so what CAN i do?” im glad you asked! When interacting with an AAC user, DO…

Ask us how we prefer to communicate and support us as you are able

Assume that we are competent

Talk to us with the same respect, tone and vocabulary that you would for any one else

Give us money (this one is a joke)

Understand that AAC grammar isn’t perfect and we are doing our best

Is it rude if…

I can’t understand your device? Not rude! Misunderstandings happen all the time in any conversation, just be patient as you would normally. 

I want to complement your AAC? Not rude!

I ask to see your AAC and understand how it works? This isn’t rude if you are already talking about AAC, but don’t ask random strangers this. They don’t owe you an AAC tour. 

Thank you for listening! This post is for the community! If you are an AAC user, let me know if I missed something in the comments and I will pin it! I hope you are filled with peace and love and I hope something good happens to you today! End ID. 

Thank you so much, this helped me form many things I was thinking but couldn't order correctly.

the thing is that childhood doesn't just end when you turn 18 or when you turn 21. it's going to end dozens of times over. your childhood pet will die. actors you loved in movies you watched as a kid will die. your grandparents will die, and then your parents will die. it's going to end dozens and dozens of times and all you can do is let it. all you can do is stand in the middle of the grocery store and stare at freezers full of microwave pizza because you've suddenly been seized by the memory of what it felt like to have a pizza party on the last day of school before summer break. which is another ending in and of itself

<3

You really do have to distinguish between the correct and incorrect use cases of specialized language to avoid going down a weird rabbit hole.

Creepy abusive guy who uses therapy speak for manipulation isn't an indictment of therapy speak in its intended usage, where it provides tools to process and improve on thought patterns which are otherwise harmful to the patient.

Weirdo reactionary pseudofeminist who thinks turning a penis into a vagina is a reification of patriarchy because their "boundaries" extend into strangers' bodies is not an argument against the correct application of feminist theory.

Guy who thinks "amab = penis" and "afab = uterus" and spins bioessentialist nonsense from that starting point only makes it more important to center that birth gender assignment is a political and social power structure rather than an accurate reflection of biology.

When you're in obscure online spaces a lot it's probable that you'll see misuse of terms more than you see the correct usage just because you have a higher rate of encounters with malicious and/or clueless people. That does not mean the terms are bad, it means you're on the website that made the skinny capitalist guy from the Lorax movie into an avatar of multiversal selfcest through telephone games.

Love when I point out a problem with capitalism and people are like "oh so we should hate and shun technology and live like peasants" like living good is a sin we must atone to the God of Socialism by living in medieval villages. I say something like "climate change is bad" and they're like "then we must destroy all industry", I say something like "space exploration is good" and they're like "no only billionaries do that that is a sin", I say something like "electronics in the first world are artificially cheap by exploitation" and they literally, like right now, just said to me "have you heard of luddites they had good ideas".

It's never about dismantling current oppressive systems and building a better society, as socialism as the path to a communist society, it's always about getting punished. Because of your Sins.

You can teach Usamericans Marxism but you have to work triple time to unteach them Puritanism.

every piece of advice I see on this site for getting "fandom" tattoos is useless. "wait two years" "wait until the show has ended" right so wait until you're not invested and you don't care and you're not as excited to get the tattoo? nobody's listening to this.

the real advice. is to make sure the tattoo is a piece of art that you will enjoy having on your body even if you lose your connection to the media that inspired it. it should be meaningful or beautiful to you on its own merit, and not just because of the connection to the thing.

this is the same advice I give to people who want matching tattoos with another person.

I have two "fandom" tattoos for pieces of media I'm no longer invested in and a matching tattoo with my ex wife. I still love all my tats, because they're good pieces of art that I enjoy having on my body, even seperated from their original context.

do not get a tattoo of an actor's face or a highly recognisable symbol unless you've really come to terms with the fact that someone involved in your chosen property may be outed as a predator or other vile asshole later on.

A caveat to this study: the researchers were primarily looking at insect pollinator biodiversity. Planting a few native wildflowers in your garden will not suddenly cause unusual megafauna from the surrounding hinterlands to crowd onto your porch.

That being said, this study backs up Douglas Tallamy's optimistic vision of Homegrown National Park, which calls for people in communities of all sizes to dedicate some of their yard (or porch or balcony) to native plants. This creates a patchwork of microhabitats that can support more mobile insect life and other small beings, which is particularly crucial in areas where habitat fragmentation is severe. This patchwork can create migration corridors, at least for smaller, very mobile species, between larger areas of habitat that were previously cut off from each other.

It may not seem like much to have a few pots of native flowers on your tiny little balcony compared to someone who can rewild acres of land, but it makes more of a difference than you may realize. You may just be creating a place where a pollinating insect flying by can get some nectar, or lay her eggs. Moreover, by planting native species you're showing your neighbors these plants can be just as beautiful as non-native ornamentals, and they may follow suit.

In a time when habitat loss is the single biggest cause of species endangerment and extinction, every bit of native habitat restored makes a difference.

The world has a LOT of climates. Over eons, our native fauna has evolved alongside our native flora and lots of the fauna have become “specialists.” Things why monarch butterflies need milkweed—it’s the only thing the larvae can eat. Milkweed sap is very poisonous for most creatures, so they have evolved to tolerate the toxin because the plants are often free of predators.

However, the adult butterflies need more nectar than the milkweed can produce, and butterflies don’t usually make their chrysalises on the plant they eat. They lay eggs there, so the larvae can eat it, but if they make their chrysalises there, nothing can eat the leaf it hangs on, and the less leaves on the plant, the less cover there is from predators.

So monarchs need more than milkweed to survive.

A ton of our butterflies and moths are specialists… and the fauna native to your climate has adapted to need the flora native to your climate. This is why HGNP focuses on *native plants.*

Native plants and wildflowers are not the same thing! “Wildflowers” is a general term for flowers that are in the wild. Even “native wildflowers” are not the goal—if you can plant one oak tree, you’ll do more good than a hundred wildflowers. There are also a lot of native grasses that provide habitat. But they need to be native to your climate.

There are a lot of ways to look up what’s native to your area. Google “keystone” plants for your state. They are some of the most important to pollinators. Even a 1’x1’ square of a keystone plants in your yard or a 16” pot is enough to help.

But political boundaries don’t really give us what we need. Pollinators don’t see county or state boundaries. So the EPA has organized the US into areas called ecoregions, where the boundaries are drawn and areas are organized by the climate/topography. For example, the Ozark, Allegheny, and Oachita mountain ranges are all the same region, even though they’re not connected physically, because they have similar climates and topography.

The ultimate resource is www.bonap.net. It’s kinda complicated and it has a lot of functions, but once you learn the map color key, you have tens of thousands of species and millions of data points at your fingers. It’s organized down to county level, but if you want to get nerdy you can compare the maps to the ecoregions.

http://www.bonap.net

But if you want to get a LITTLE more specific and not super nerdy, there are other places to look.

Cooperative extensions are incredible programs with a WEALTH of information online. Look up your state; the cooperative extension will run out of a state land grant university (PA’s is PSU, NY is Cornell) and they have a master gardener program full of volunteers trained to educate and share quality, science-based information. They can help.

The USDA has a user-friendly database called PLANTS. (They get their data from BONAP.)

bplant.org is nice because it will show you plants based on ecoregion. It’s also pretty user friendly.

Native plants make a huge difference. They do. And you will see more bugs. I planted black eyed Susans and in a few years I started getting ladybugs. I bought a pot of garden phlox and saw hummingbird clearwing moths before I even planted it in the ground.

You can make a difference. You can.

Reblogging for this fabulous addition!

Just a small addition: I'm not sure that it's true that planting a white oak is more valuable than native flowers. It really just depends on what ecosystems are over/underrepresented in your area.

Where I live it would be far more valuable to make meadows, grasslands, or wetland spaces rather than more oak forests. It's worth looking into, and if you can find some local ecological orgs they probably have that info available or would be happy to tell you!

I agree--this is always going to be a pretty nuanced discussion. The important thing is to look at the types of habitats found in your area. Even if you don't know what the location you're trying to replant looked like 200-400 years ago, you can at least figure out whether a tree is an appropriate thing to plant or not.

For example, here in the PNW west of the Cascades, most people's idea of "nature" is a mixed conifer forest. Which is not a bad thing, given that we have plenty of them, especially in the Cascades and Coast Range, and scattered throughout the lower elevations as well. But--both the mountains and the lowlands have historically had localized grasslands and wetlands. While some grasslands may be dotted with Oregon white oaks, and the wetlands often have red alders soaking their roots in the mud, they don't generally have as heavy treecover as a proper forest.

Moreover, many of the people in the U.S. saying "We need to plant more trees!" are in the wooded areas east of the Great Plains. It makes sense to plant trees in a lot of places there because forests are common (though not ubiquitous). However, did you know the American Arbor Day started in Nebraska City, Nebraska? That's in the middle of what was once tallgrass prairie, where oak stands were primarily found in bottomlands, surrounded by endless acres of grassland. Settlers in the Midwest prairies mainly planted non-native trees as windbreaks--the region is full of Siberian elm, for example, because it grows quickly.

I've written about afforestation before, and it always bears mentioning again. Yes, trees are lovely and ecologically important--but not everything needs to be a forest. If you live somewhere that was historically grassland or desert, where trees may be few to nonexistent, you don't want to plant a forest of trees, even if they're native to the region. Instead, look at what the keystone plant species of the area are, which ones may be scarcer than they used to be and could use a population boost, and which ones do well with being planted as opposed to only popping up of their own volition. (Most states have Native Plant Societies you can ask for advice.)

Time Travel Question : Miscellaneous II

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct grouping.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.

Listen.

Ever since First Contact came out, my goal has been to make it to the year 2063, April 5th to be exact, and see if the Vulcans do actually land.

I'll be 83 by then; should be doable. Plenty of people on both sides of my family have lived that long.

When I say Star Trek has shaped me, this is one way of it: giving me a year far in the future to say "I will make it there."

Make it so. (sorry could not resist)

similarly, I've always wanted to spend a quiet afternoon with the 24th century computer banks.

There's so much in our encyclopedias that are like "we don't know how this works" or "maybe this exists" or "we've not figured out what happens". I wanna skip ahead to star trek times and see the answers. I'm curious!

ooh, go on, twist me arm. gotta go with Replicators & the Holodeck personally, though aliens are a close second and finding out who wrote My Immortal is up there.

I hate when there's no toilet paper coming out the bottom of these gentlemen and you have to tickle its nutsack to de-piss yourself

what sicko blazed this

schrodinger's chekhov's gun. a detail in a story that looks like it should have some big payoff but it's too early to tell if that's relevant or if the author just has a passion for lovingly describing guns.

schrodinger's chekov's occam's razor: you find an inconsistent or inaccurate detail in a work that would be brilliant if it was foreshadowing a plot twist later on, but it's too early to tell whether the author expects you to be smart, and the simplest explanation is that they fucked up

Image description: Screenshot of Bluesky post from Hank Green:

One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.

It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.

Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!”

Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”

How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?

Please.

OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!” [emphasis mine]

Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you're saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you're an idiot and you should be punished, probably"

contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them

and if you don't think you should have to worry about that: why not?

I teach Intro to Psych, and I’m lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:

When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesn’t work very well on animals (because it doesn’t), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.

And it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESN’T. And research absolutely backs that up.

Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And that’s when you get any change at all.

Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.

Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isn’t nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)

If you’re telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESN’T.

real question,

why do proshippers love rape so much? do you guys want to rape someone irl?

why do you guys love pedophilia/grooming so much? have you ever had thoughts about doing those actions or irl minors?

why do you guys love incest so much? is this just a way for you to vent your frustration cause your sibling(s) /step sibling(s) rejected you for your literal illegal behavior?

why do you guys love all these crimes so much? why do you love it when someone calls sexual and predatory abuse attractive as if it hasn't traumatized billions of people word wide?

this is like a genuine question I'm being deadass

Proshippers do not "love" these things. Rather, we're committed to defending the right of people to write about them - even in ways we might personally find disgusting or upsetting - because we understand that engaging with something in fiction is not predicated on defending or desiring it in real life. Even if someone is aroused by something in fiction, it doesn't logically follow that they're aroused by the same thing in real life, because context - the question of how, when, why and with whom - is foundational to both desire and consent. Meaning: it is possible - and, indeed, extremely normal - to enjoy something only as a fantasy: to be compelled, aroused by or interested in it only because it's fictional, in much the same way that we might be compelled, aroused by or interested in all manner of ideas or activities only under specific conditions.

For instance: I enjoy cake! But if someone handed me a piece of filthy, rotting cake they found on the floor, I would not want to eat it, because the context of the cake matters to my willingness to consume it. Similarly, I enjoy murder mysteries! But if someone in my life was brutally killed by an unknown assailant, I would be devastated, not entertained. And this latter example is particularly important, because our consumption of fiction is at all times informed by our awareness of the fact that the characters don't exist. No matter what befalls them on page, stage or screen, no real person has been harmed, which allows us to react to the content differently than if we were seeing the same events unfold in person, or in a live recording.

Now: it's true that, just as fiction is influenced by reality, so too can reality be influenced by fiction, both on the individual level and at scale. Fictional characters might not exist, but their stories still meaningfully impact real human beings, both positively and negatively. But this impact doesn't work on anything even vaguely resembling a universal, one-to-one basis, such that X story is guaranteed to cause Y effect, or that X topic is only ever explored for Y reason - and this is just as true for dark, unsettling and taboo topics as for anything else.

Which is why it's important to understand that, particularly when it comes to sex and desire, human beings are complex. At the most basic level of arousal, our bodies and brains are frequently in conflict. From teenagers dealing with unwanted erections to seniors mourning their loss of libido, none of us has perfect control over when and how we get turned on - and this extends to situations involving rape and assault. It is common, for instance, for rape victims to experience some level of arousal in response to their assault, because our bodies and minds do not exist in a state of perfect sync. Many victims experience deep shame as a result of this, thinking that, because they got hard or wet or came, they must've secretly wanted it - a trauma that's intensified if their assailant makes the same claim. Victims, too, can have complex relationships to their assailants, particularly if they were abused by family members or as children; can sometimes take years or decades to understand that they were harmed at all.

Regardless of whether we've been victimised ourselves, are proximal to someone else's trauma or are simply impacted by living in a world where such things can happen, fiction is the safest possible way to explore these ideas. But precisely because people are so different - precisely because our reactions to the same event or idea can vary so wildly - these stories will not always look the same. What disgusts or triggers one person might be healing to another, and that's not determined by how eroticized the content is or isn't. Sexual trauma responses can encompass opposite extremes: where one rape victim might be utterly repulsed by rape content and need to avoid it for their healing, another victim will feel compelled to seek or create it in order to achieve the same ends, and neither of them is wrong.

I have, for instance, known victims to write their own assaults into fiction. Sometimes these accounts are eroticized as a way of regaining control over a situation in which they had none. Perhaps the writer wants to accurately depict the confusion they felt at being aroused while being assaulted; or, conversely, perhaps their lack of arousal at the time increased the level of physical pain they experienced, and they want to write something which shows that, even if they had been aroused, it would still have been rape. Or on yet a third hand, perhaps they weren't sure if a given experience was rape or not, and want to try and make sense of it. Perhaps they want to try and imagine their assailant's perspective, to better comprehend what happened to them and why. This might mean a complicated, nuanced depiction that sways between awareness of the crime and minimization of it; it might also involve painting them as a flat-out villain, or as someone who believed they were acting only out of love. All of these things are possible! But no matter how much some or all of these portrayals might disgust you, the casual reader, you will not be able to tell, just by looking, who has "really" been assaulted, and who is exploring these topics for other reasons.

Because of course, not all people who write about abuse have experienced it themselves; nor should this be a requirement. Sometimes, we write about dark things, not to achieve catharsis in relation to a personal experience, but to conquer our fear of it happening to us, or perhaps even just to get an adrenaline rush - as is, for instance, extremely common with fans of horror content. Our brains produce a variety of fun chemicals in response to various stimuli, and we don't generally get to choose which ones we find the most engaging. Some people are horror junkies from childhood, seeking out scary stories from the moment they're old enough to ask for them, while others remain terrified of something as mild as cartoon comedy horror well into old age. There's no morality associated with this; it just is - and that all comes back, once again, to the fact that we understand fiction as a separate thing to reality. No matter how horrific the thing depicted, our enjoyment (of whatever kind) is predicated on knowing that no actual human beings being harmed, even if the bad in the story - an axe murder, a war, a rape - is something that really does happen. And returning again to matters of sex, regardless of whether they rise to the level of a kink or fetish, all sexual proclivities are ultimately products of native inclination, life experience, trauma, and/or the overlap of all three, while a specific fantasy might be either literal, metaphoric or a mix of both. A literal fantasy, for instance, might be: what if my hot boss fucked me over his desk at work, because he's hot and I want to sleep with him. A metaphoric version of the same fantasy might be: what if I was so insanely desirable that my boss fucked me despite his being married and straight and me being a man. To take another example, and one which has been studied extensively by psychologists, literary historians and academics alike, rape fantasies are commonplace, not because the vast majority of people are rape apologists, but because, at the level of metaphor, they allow the possibility of sex without having to take ownership of one's own desires, which is of particular value if, say, you've been taught that wanting sex makes you slutty and wrong and gross; which is, in turn, why so many old Harlequin and Mills & Boon romances feature encounters that we'd now class as non-consensual between the hero and heroine. It wasn't because the writers didn't understand rape: it was because they were writing in a time where women were taught that wanting sex made them harlots, such that it was difficult for them to fantasize without shame. The hero knowing what the heroine "really" wanted and giving it to her despite her protests was a loophole. I could go on, but the key point is this: given that nobody on Earth can perfectly control their own arousal, it is imperative to acknowledge that being turned on by something doesn't mean wanting it in real life, because the alternative is forcing yourself to choose between sexual shame and justifying it in real life. And neither of those things has ever led anywhere good.

i'm a horror writer and no one's EVER asked me if i want to put parasitic wasps in someone's eyeballs irl. what do I have to do to get podcasters to bring the same energy to the interview as people who don't like Game of Thrones bring to the blog post?