Oh I'm Going To Be Seeing This Show Later This Month!

Please tell me more about the teacups. They pretty

I've become a vendor at an antique fair and needless to say I'm experiencing levels of autism previously unknown to man. I'm using my Encyclopedic knowledge of teacups beam on you

do you ever read a ‘callout post’ where the summary on top is like ‘they EAT BABIES and RUN A COFFEE SHOP FOR MURDERERS and they HATE GAY PEOPLE’ and then you scroll down and actually read the post and it’s like, they posted about lamb chops once, they work at starbucks and one time someone who killed someone had a coffee at that starbucks, and they made a ‘fruit (derogatory)’ joke once

Here is the avatar I designed and illustrated for @theblindadventures

I am disabled and use much of the same accessibility technology as blind people, including, most prominently, text to speech. (Due to dyslexia.) I also use a service dog. (Due to seizures and extremely poor mental health.)

When Pete first started blogging I thought they were so cool and I was eager to support them however I could. I’m so excited to welcome another disabled blogger on to tumblr (and hopefully make another friend).

Thank you so much for giving me the chance to show off my art and replace your default avatar. 

As I’ve come to see more of your blog and who you are I do think this avatar represents those things well.

Best,

Soul

Also, for those interested, I do this sort of work on commission. I have prices for traditional work here but am still working on pricing for digital works like the one seen here.

Please note that this image is the version with the transparency replaced with tumblr’s background color.

[Image description: a black Labrador guide dog with a white harness leading a person. The dog is shaded with a moderate amount of fur texture and detail. The person being guided is visible as only a hand gripping the harness and a set of legs. The dog looks at the viewer. The dog and figure are surrounded by a white circle. Outside of that circle reads “The Blind Adventures” in a hand writing font in an arch around the drawing. At the bottom, in a straight line, is a brail font reading the same.]

So glad to see the weight loss encouragement in literally the most unexpected place. It’s been a difficult battle but ever pound loss reduces my pain. I want being pain free to be possible and I’m pursuing every possible solution.

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

Feel free to elaborate further in the tags, especially if you picked Option 3 because as a professor myself it MYSTIFIES me that there are students who do that! (Also, unless it is just the Culture at your school or something, you should not do that. For future reference)

Eventually I'm going to need some hearts and uteri for my glass art. I can't source the organs from dissection kits or anything like that because you don't want to 'cook' formaldehyde or other preservation chemicals. And I had no idea where I could get uteri from. Thanks to that goat bone ask I realized I can source from butchers / farmers in my area. I think my ask is weirder! Super thanks to you and goat bone anon!

This ask is DEFINITELY WEIRDER but congrats on realizing where you can get some fresh organs, weirdo!!!

I’ll need this tomorrow I think.

Workout For Daily Life

Once my sister entered my house (where she did not live at the time) at 1:00 am, accidentally waking me up.

The next morning (a weekend) she woke me up at 7:00 am (too early) to ask me, politely but firmly, to make her breakfast.

I told her we had eggs, cereal, and yogurt.

She asked if I could please make her something.

I told her we had eggs, cereal, and yogurt.

She told me she wanted something hot, but not eggs.

I said, "That sucks."

She said please.

I said fine, I recently (two days previously) learned an amazing grilled cheese recipe.

(It had been practically the only thing I ate during those two days.)

I made her grilled cheese.

Brie, with the lightest amount of jam, fresh strawberries, and thin slices of apple.

She thanked me profusely, said I was the best sibling ever, and that it was the best goddamn grilled cheese ever.

It makes for a great story, because that's such an absolute bat shit thing to do.

So, yes, I, non-binary, would make my spouse a sandwich if woken up at 3:00 am and asked to do so. I would only do it the once, and I would be laughing at how absurd and profoundly self centered the request was at every possible moment.

My parents think my response to when a women asked me the following question question is why stopped being pursued in my Catholic community. It was a lighthearted discussion but maybe they are right lol. Although every single happily Godly married couple who I asked this question to (seperately from each other) has given the same response, my parents included.

So, the question:

No nuance button because nuances is already baked in. We are assuming both spouses are able to make a sandwich (nobody is in a full-body cast or had brain cancer or whatever).

AND NO NASTINESS

Hi. What the fuck.

And why did I, an artist, who went to art school, not know this?

Describing gender as a spectrum implies that there are people whose gender cannot correctly be displayed in digital media because it falls outside the RGB colour gamut.

I went to University in the middle of a large city. There were was a lot of tension between the residents who lived right next to the campus and the students as well as the school as a whole.

Landlords were buying up peoples homes and converting them into apartments to rent out to the student population, displacing families and rapidly changing the make up of the area.

Students called the residents ‘the locals’, or, when they were complaining about how, ‘they just didn’t get college culture’, ‘the natives’. Yikes. Add on the residents were majority black and the students were majority white and it’s a Big Ol’ Fucking Yikes.

Moved to the suburbs and my dad was encouraging me to talk to the people I saw while walking the block and to in general ‘go native’. Oh boy that took me aback.

But even outside of the racial and economic tensions in an area, each neighborhood has it’s own little culture.

If you want to know anything about the area you go to my next door neighbor. He’s lived here 52 year and can tell you how long ago a project in your house was completed and if he thinks the people who did it would have done a good job.

If you lost your dog there’s a woman on our block who is always willing to help you out.

We have a block wide yard sale every other year.

Hey I'm sort of curious. I haven't read the book, but I'm a fan of the show and was genuinely disappointed that the phrase "going Native" had an exclusively negative connotation when I watched. Idk if this occurred to you or not, but that's pretty blatant racism. It's especially tone deaf considering this is a show about angels and demons - which have been a tool to commit genocide against us for upwards of 500 years.

Why not just use "human"? It's accurate and doesn't frame an entire demographic as inherently bad or undesireable.

Not trying to garner any ill will, it just rlly bummed me out bc I'm Native and it's an identity I wear with great pride bc ppl have tried countless times to rip it away from me. To see it treated with such disdain was very hurtful.

I understand your concerns, and do not wish to minimise them, or your hurt. Obviously the phrase has colonial roots. However, it's a lower case N, and isn't intended to talk about Native Americans. When the angels talk about Aziraphale "going native", this is the meaning they are using. It may be negative for the grumpy angels, but it's positive for humanity and for Aziraphale and Crowley.

From Mirriam Webster online:

go native

idiom

: to start to behave or live like the local people

After a few weeks, she was comfortable enough to go native and wear shorts to work.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dist-cross-dungarees/2023-06-22_21-46-38-82be74d5/images/svg/content-section-header-border.svg

Example Sentences

Recent Examples:

But dogs that go native make bad guards, hunting companions, and friends.—David Grimm, Science | AAAS, 29 Oct. 2020

Let your yard go native: The Cuyahoga Soil & Water Conservation District is offering seven native plant kits for sale that are adapted to the local climate and do not require excess watering or fertilizer once they are established.—Joan Rusek, cleveland, 6 July 2020