I still spend days, weeks every year thinking about how this critique pre-dates the advent of Programming Socks™ and cat-ear headphones, and asking myself, “did the Hacker Aesthetic go from Unfortunate Sweatshirts to Neon Catgirlgender Fantasy because of John Waters? Did he do this???”
pretty sure John Waters invented cat boys to overthrow the government
We celebrate the purported geniuses who discovered the cure–but we don’t acknowledge that discovering a cure means nothing unless and until we get the cure to the people who need it–an enterprise we’ve failed at to a remarkable degree over the last 70 years.
Also barely any people know that one of the biggest contributors to preventing and tackling tuberculosis was a trans man named Alan Hart. He was able to save countless lives in the 1900s despite an onslaught of transphobia that followed him wherever he went.
[OP’s image is the office whiteboard meme with the text: Since 1958, when tuberculosis became curable, the disease has killed more people than died in World Wars 1 and 2 combined. And yet we don’t study it in our history textbooks, because we do not want to reckon with the reality that the most important historical forces are not generals or kings, but systems of resource extraction and distribution that we all participate in, and that rob the most vulnerable among us not only of quality of life but of life itself”]
Wikipedia gives an excellent little summary of Hart’s impact in the detection of TB:
Hart became interested in their [X-rays] potential for detecting tuberculosis. Since the disease often presented no symptoms in its early stages, x-ray screening was invaluable for early detection. Even rudimentary early x-ray machines could detect the disease before it became critical. This allowed early treatment, often saving the patient’s life. It also meant sufferers could be identified and isolated from the population, greatly lessening the spread of the disease…. By the time antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s, doctors using the techniques Hart developed had managed to cut the tuberculosis death toll down to one fiftieth.
In 1937 Hart was hired by the Idaho Tuberculosis Association and later became the state’s Tuberculosis Control Officer. He established Idaho’s first fixed-location and mobile TB screening clinics and spearheaded the state’s war against tuberculosis. Between 1933 and 1945 Hart traveled extensively through rural Idaho, covering thousands of miles while lecturing, conducting mass TB screenings, training new staff, and treating the effects of the epidemic.
An experienced and accessible writer, Hart wrote widely for medical journals and popular publications, describing TB for technical and general audiences and giving advice on its prevention, detection, and cure. At the time the word “tuberculosis” carried a social stigma akin to venereal disease, so Hart insisted his clinics be referred to as “chest clinics”, himself as a “chest doctor”, and his patients as “chest patients.” Discretion and compassion were important tools in treating the stigmatised disease.
… In 1948 Hart was appointed Director of Hospitalization and Rehabilitation for the Connecticut State Tuberculosis Commission. As in Idaho, Hart took charge of a massive statewide x-ray screening program for TB, emphasizing the importance of early detection and treatment. He held this position for the rest of his life, and is credited with helping contain the spread of tuberculosis in Connecticut as he had previously in the Pacific Northwest. Similar programs based on his leadership and methodology in this field in other states also saved many thousands of lives.
By now, thanks to people like Hart, we know how to detect and treat TB. We could invest in a worldwide campaign to eradicate it, but the rich countries that are able to fund this are not willing to do so because the people dying don’t live in rich countries. In the words of the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – Mark Dybul: “we have the tools to end TB as a pandemic and public health threat on the planet, but we are not doing it.”. Before covid, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death worldwide from a single infectious agent, and it looks like it will reclaim that status in 2023.
I’m not saying that I dislike that weed has been legalized in more and more states (imo all drugs should be legalized but that’s not the point of this post)- I *am* saying that every time I pass a dispensary that looks like an apple store and I see white people talking freely about making special cookies and smoking in their spare time, all I can think about are the thousands and thousands of black people who experienced huge amounts of state-sponsered violence for even the suspicion of having weed on them and those who are STILL IN PRISON for possession charges.
And it. Just kinda makes me grit my teeth, you know? My father was illegally searched and brutalized in front of me when I was a little kid because the cop “thought he smelled weed” (he didn’t, my dad doesn’t touch the stuff) and in the mean time Becky in accounting takes a “special gummy” every night that she gets from a store next to the Starbucks.
Also you’ve got cops railing against laws that prohibit using “smell of weed (a legal drug in the jurisdiction)” as justification for searches
it’s commendable how Jim Henson knew that making a variety show that happens to star puppets would inevitably be pigeonholed as a kids show so he chose the name THE MUPPET SHOW: SEX AND VIOLENCE for the pilot to try to avoid that and then it still didn’t work
What do any of you know of my Palestine? Of the late night queer parties in Ramallah? Of raves held in biblically aged buildings? Of lesbians in hijabs, of gay men in hoop earrings, of trans Palestinians dancing with joyful abandon?
We fear Israel first, before our families, always.
We’re 100 times more likely to die at the hands of an Israeli gun or bomb than by western propagandized ideas of honor killings.
I’ve seen White Christian Americans wish their child be dead rather than gay. (½)
subeaux:
it’s only Israel that weaponizes the homophobia that Queer people all over the world of all religions experience to justify murdering Palestinians of all kinds, young and old, Christian and Muslim, Queer and Straight.’
Parents get sooooooo mad when anyone even remotely implies that if we know it negatively impacts adults then it’s probably quite detrimental to the health and development of a young mind to stick an iPad in front of a child any time they show signs of Behaviors. “Are you calling me a bad parent?” Yeah. I am.
“Well, what am I supposed to do when my kid Has Behaviors?” Idk. You somehow lived to adulthood without being an iPad baby. What did the adults around you growing up do when you exhibited Behaviors? Was it a positive on your growth and development? If it wasn’t, do you remember what your child-self had hoped an adult would do? Start there.
Anyway. Every generation has its challenges but I think we are all deeply unprepared for just how fucking weird the iPad baby gen, who also had key developmental years during covid social distancing, are showing signs of being.
Absolutely love this cat. He’s sherlockthecat_official on tiktok and his bit is for his fans to accuse him of the wildest shit while he stares blankly at the camera:
This article on AO3 and their failure of moderation is brilliant. It acknowledges the irony that AO3 has completely ignored calls for blocking and moderation when it comes to violent racism, but is suddenly responding now that the “community” is complaining about a 1 million words fix interfering with their “sexy times.”
From the article:
Lori Morimoto, a fandom academic who was involved in the earlier discussion, didn’t mince words about the inherent hypocrisy of the controversy around STWW. “The discussions of the fic were absolutely riddled with people saying they wished you could block and/or ban certain users and fics on AO3 altogether because this is obnoxious,” she wrote to me in an email, “and nowhere (that I can see) is there anyone chiming in to say, ‘BUT FREE SPEECH!!!’”
Morimoto continued:
But when people suggest the same thing based on racist works and users, suddenly everything is about freedom of speech and how banning is bad. When it’s about racism, every apologist under the sun puts in an appearance to fight for our rights to be racist assholes, but if it’s about making the reading experience less enjoyable (which is basically what this is — it’s obnoxious, but not particularly harmful except to other works’ ability to be seen), then suddenly our overwhelming concern with free speech seems to just disappear in a poof of nothingness.
Lori Morimoto I don’t know who you are but I respect you tremendously.
I mean. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of AO3 and the issue in question.
It doesn’t exist to service readers. Anything it providesto help readers it does purely as a courtesyor to enhance it’s actual mission:
AO3 exists as a platform for writers.
They (by which I mean the people who own and run the site) don’t really make free speech defenses of their content, except purely in the abstract sense that they exist to provide an author platform, and you’re free to be dissatisfied with the way they do that, but they’re not gonna stop. They’ll only step in in two circumstances; direct harassment of users of the site by other users, or people using the site to actively impede authors.
STWW nails both of those. It’s tag cloud is at this point deliberately designed to harass both users and authors. The author of it has not innocently created an inconvenience out of good faith; they know precisely what they are doing and are doing it with malice. They are staying just inside the technical rules while weaponizing their work to directly degrade the experience of others, especially that of authors, in a way that a fic that merely contains content you think should be disallowed does not. And unlike simply not reading a work, which is easily done, you can’t actually avoid what its doing without fairly major browser surgery.
There’s absolutely no hypocrisy here. None whatsoever. AO3 may or may not be wrong on the merits of their “we allow all comers” policy, but this can’t be said to be hypocritical on their part.
I really don’t understand why everyone thinks this is some kind of moral or site moderation issue? Like, this is clearly a technical issue to me.
Tumblr already implemented a similar feature, if a post is longer than a certain amount it’s “collapsed” and only a certain amount of it is shown after which you have to click a read more button or to see the whole post.
AO3 could do a very similar thing with the <div>s (boxes) in which the fics are contained when looking at search results etc.
Or you know, cap the number of tags to like 300 or whatever.
There are a myriad of ways this could be solved without involving the moderation and without “punishing” anyone for using too many tags.
Hey not to scare you or make you feel uncomfortable but on that post you reblogged about how to actually do the discord thing where you scribbled out people in your contacts (im assuming) just so you know it's possible for people to heighten the brightness and exposure and stuff and see what's underneath, and if it's things like location that could be bad. I dont think anyone would actually do this but it can be done and some people suck. I think that putting a black box over the information hides it, but im noy 100% sure.
I'm sorry if this is weird to say, or if you know already. I just thought I'd let you know so you don't get caught out. ❤
I’m pretty sure I used the pen and not the marker but I’ll check just in case! Thanks.
I wish people would stop saying “It’s July. Well done for wasting half a year.” Did you make someone smile in the past six months? Did you stroke a cat or throw a stick for a dog? Did you learn a new fact or teach someone a new joke? Did you laugh, cry, scream or sing in the past six months? Because if so, congratulations for not wasting your time at all.
I really needed this
I’m bringing this back for December to remind everyone.
You did not waste your year.
If you made it this far, that’s already not wasting your year.
You made it through the year, you laughed, you cried, you smiled, you saw the sun and felt the rain, and most importantly, you’re still here.
Absolutely love this cat. He’s sherlockthecat_official on tiktok and his bit is for his fans to accuse him of the wildest shit while he stares blankly at the camera:
the assholes will word thier titles innocently like “am i the asshole for not making my toddler the dinner they wanted?” and then its a detailed account of them poisoning and nearly killing thier child, while a post like “am i the asshole for throwing my mother in law off a cliff” is a story of heroism where the OP used the last of thier strength to push thier mother in law off a small cliff into a body of water to save her from a swarm of mutant acid flamethrower killer bees.
i feel like one of the weirdest realizations you (or at least i) eventually have a few years into transitioning and being mostly around other trans people, is that moment where u notice that like ur brains mapping of like specific voices to specific genders is just kinda gone. like it rly is just all social constructs programmed into u by society, and living outside societies idea of gender just kinda melts that shit away, and it’s not just voices, like other traditionally gendered attributes also suddenly don’t matter anymore*
*except for myself of course, i am obviously totally failing at being a girl but everyone is doing it perfectly, dysphoria is so awesome lmao
the real deep message here btw isn’t just about gender, but about the general ability of the human brain to shed off bad socialization and habits if we change the environment we’re in for the better and i feel like that’s massive
💬Greek ➗mathematician➕ HIPPARCHUS 🦛 created trigonometry🔼 in 140 BC by writing 12 books 📚 worth of TABLES OF CORDS 🧮 starting with the CORD OF A CIRCLE ⭕️ (a cord bisected by the angle x=2sin(x/2)).
Unfortunately😞he has been dead 💀 for over ⬆️ 50 years but don’t ❌ lose hope☺️. With new advancements🧑🔬in the NECROMANCY FIELD 🧪 you🫵 may be able to REKILL🧟 the founder of trigonometry!!!!
i also have a whole post i could write about how kudos on ao3 correspond to marketability rather than quality, exactly how the actual publishing industry works, but. the question is… do i have the energy
okay i’m writing it.
there’s a very good encouraging post (cannot currently find it) about how ao3 kudos don’t correspond to writing quality, which is true.
but if you don’t know WHY that is, it sounds like meaningless pat-on-the-back “keep your chin up, champ!” stuff.
it’s not.
kudos on ao3 are a marketing game. i’m gonna use my own ao3 works to make my case bc that’s a lot easier (and Significantly Less Asshole-ish) than analyzing the marketability of other people’s ao3 fic
my two main fandoms over the past 8 years are homestuck and the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy verse.
my most popular homestuck fanfiction is vacation. it’s a johndave fic i wrote when i was 16, and as of writing this post, it has 2,974 kudos.
by comparison, there’s breathe on the ashes. this is an ancestor fic similar in length and chapter count to vacation. it has 268 kudos - an encouraging readership for sure, but less than 1/10th of the engagement of vacation. it has less than 1/20th the amount of hits.
quality-wise, breathe on the ashes is SIGNIFICANTLY better than vacation (though there’s a LOT about it i’d do differently if i wrote it today). i wrote it when i was 19. it has better characterization, more thoughtful character arcs, more compelling plotting, better twists, and a significantly more fulfilling resolution.
so why is vacation so much more popular?
a great deal of it is luck - it was the first (i believe?) mainstream mermaid AU in the homestuck fandom, and it inspired a LOT of fanart that brought readers in. it was written in 2012-2013, at the height of the homestuck fandom’s engagement w/ fanworks
it also combines a popular AU concept with the most popular fandom ship at the time. i have multiple very short, badly written johndave oneshots from 2012 that ALSO have significantly more kudos than breathe on the ashes.
breathe on the ashes, by comparison, is about the homestuck ancestors, who get almost no screen time in canon and have no canon personalities. it’s plot-heavy rather than ship-heavy. it’s dense, and at some times very dark.
much of its readership is tumblr mutuals and people who started following my writing for johndave. but also, a significant part of its readership is people reading for the tagged relationships and the promised adventure story. that’s why it has over 200 kudos instead of, like, 10.
unbecoming jordan hennessy is my newest series, so it hasn’t had years to gain a readership. but none of the fics have more than 70 hits, which is unusual for my profile. in fact, only the first fic has more than 10 kudos. by comparison, the vampire AU has 73 series bookmarks, 3,500 hits on the first installment, and nearly 450 kudos on the first installment.
that’s because i knew the jordan hennessy series had little potential readership going in and made no effort to mitigate that. it’s an extremely dark dead dove series that has basically every available content warning and then some. it focuses on a dreamer trilogy character (so, already a smaller fandom than the raven cycle) who gets very little fandom attention, and character spinoffs who get even LESS attention. most didn’t even have ao3 tags of their own until i wrote them. it’s all genfic, and it’s all gruesome and gutwrenching and awful.
meanwhile i DID take steps to encourage vampire AU readership, even as i continued writing what i want. the main characters are in a polycule, but poly fic is rarely interacted with in this fandom. so several installments focus chiefly on the main fandom pairing (pynch) with the polyamory as a background. that way there was already a readership when i started exploring adansey, bronan, etc.
i wrote the vampire AU with fan-favorite tropes (i mean…. it’s a vampire AU). i wrote it to be self-indulgent and fun. i wrote it ENTIRELY as a series where I Do What I Want, but i also marketed it in ways that drive reader engagement. i used tags that people often search on ao3. i used popular & humorous title formats. i used short, snappy summaries that told people what to expect from the fic.
both of these series are undeniably good. i’m a good writer. but only one was written With The Consumption Of Others In Mind, and it’s reflected 100% in the stats. in fact, if i didn’t have tumblr mutuals who’d shared jordan hennessy, NO ONE would have read it.
i’m not sore about people not reading jordan hennessy. i wrote it for myself, like most of my writing is for myself, and i published it for maybe 3 or 4 mutuals who care about the content as much as i do. i knew it wasn’t going to be mass devoured by the fandom.
(i have well over a million words of fiction that i’ve written for myself that no one else has ever seen. unbecoming jordan hennessy is the closest public window into what most of that content looks like.)
so.
here’s how to market a fic to get kudos:
pick a large fandom. raven cycle is a pretty big YA fandom, homestuck is a giant internet fandom. if i cared to write for fandoms like the MCU, i could almost definitely surpass vacation’s success
pick the most popular pairing. or a very popular pairing, if there are several in your fandom.
DO NOT write relationship-less genfic. even if the fic itself is pretty genficcy, tag it with a popular relationship. (use & relationship tags if there absolutely is no romance or it’s focused on familial bonding.)
DO NOT go overboard with relationship tags or with general tags. do not write a summary that’s a million words long.
write a popular AU. high school, college, supernatural, coffee shop, office workers, soulmates, whatever.
write a popular relationship trope. fake relationship, enemies to lovers, there was only one bed, and they were roommates etc.
write a popular subgenre. sickfic, slow burn, married shenanigans, plotless fluff, angst with a happy ending, etc.
write a oneshot or keep chapter lengths somewhere from 2,000 to 4,000 words.
profit.
does any of that have to do with the writing quality? no.
it has to do with what people are searching for on ao3, what they’re likely to read, and how to reach the largest market possible in your fandom of choice.
so if you’re writing for external validation, use this formula and go forth and enjoy success, friends. and if you’re worried that maybe you’re a bad writer because your fic isn’t being engaged with: stop worrying. marketability and quality are not the same thing, and they never have been.
my homestuck fic actually comprises a significant fraction of the first ten pages of top-kudosed works. im on there a lot. i shaped a big chunk of early fanon. there’s an unsettling amount of evidence that im why troll dicks generally look like that. and it’s not because i was the best writer around, it’s because i got in early and because i write fanfiction to throw spaghetti at the wall, trying out whatever seems new and interesting to me, so i ended up blazing exactly one step of a new trail in a bunch of different directions, so then subsequent explorers kept on crediting me.
but like, actually examining my works through the lense of kudos also shows the other filter besides just novelty: i wrote a huge range of lengths and subjects and pairings and tones, and what actually Became A Hit was pretty much all the Normal Shit. the redrom. the strider manpain. the ornate aus with lovely outfits. the palatable stuff that almost anyone liked.
your best work probably won’t (and probably shouldn’t!) be your most popular, because quality is a function of passion and experience and experimentation and originality. popularity is about working with averages. stuff most people like well enough. there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. but you need to keep that in mind if you want to be an unrepentant freak who writes for the unhinged joy of it.
everyone likes a guitar. the inventor of the saxophone was almost assassinated like three times by inept but evidently passionate sax-hating time travelers. draw your own conclusions.
i think when some of you say “neurodivergent” you just mean adhd and autism
schizophrenia makes you neurodivergent. ocd makes you neurodivergent. ptsd (and c-ptsd) makes you neurodivergent. bpd makes you neurodivergent. npd makes you neurodivergent. anxiety makes you neurodivergent. depression makes you neurodivergent. even the “scary” mental illnesses make you neurodivergent. i’m going to start killing
Time to bring this graphic back again…
I know I post this thing from Lived Experience Educator a lot, but it’s a useful visual. “Neurodivergent” isn’t a cool way to say “autism” or “autism and ADHD.” It includes a wide variety of things, and it’s really frustrating to see people forget that.
One of my best friends is neurodivergent, and when she says this, people assume she’s autistic. She isn’t, and her experiences are different from mine (I AM autistic). We have things in common, but not everything, and it’s frustrating for her to have to explain to people that she isn’t autistic but she is neurodivergent. By narrowing “neurodivergent” to just “autistic,” you’re leaving out and harming a whole lot of people. Stop it.
people are absolutely EVIL about the boundaries of “picky eaters”. no, they do not have to try it. yes, they can know they don’t like it without having eaten it before. no, they probably have not suddenly grown a taste for the food they’ve said they hate. no, they probably are not going to like it in the Special Way This One Place Cooks It. yes, you are being a bad friend if you try to “trick” them into eating it anyway
Things that actually help picky eaters try new things:
“Do you want to try this off of my plate?”
“It’s made of [ingredients], I think you’d like [x part]”
“If you want to see if you like [x food], this is a pretty good representation of it”
“You won’t like this, it tastes like [description]. Do you want to try it for fun?”
“Do you remember trying/have you ever tried [x food]? This is like that, but [differences]”
“I think you’d like the taste of this, but the texture is iffy. It’s [description]”
Make sure there’s other food they can eat if they don’t like the new one
And most importantly, build trust with that person by listening to them, showing that you take their concerns into account, and being cool if the answer is no. No is always an option. This isn’t something you do once, it’s a pattern you have to stick to if you want to establish that you are a safe person when it comes to food stuff
Basically: offer the food, explain what’s in it and why you think it’s worth trying, and then be cool with the answer you get. No pressure, no trickery, just be straight up with people
-Hey wouldn’t it be fun if the other anomalies had tumblr-
🥄 Grilling-masterFollow
Fuck my life some idiot just came in and made me eat raw eyeballs. Why.
21 notes
🌋 Magmalavaandfire69Follow
Hey guys gonna go check that cool planet I found wish me luck🤞🤞😘😘
🌋 Magmalavaandfire69Follow
what is a dissonance
🌋 Magmalavaandfire69Follow
ayo why it ourple
419 notes
⚙️ NebulesbianFollow
Guys not gonna lie um. korvax are kinda. um. yeah.
gamerforever-deactivated
What the actual fuck korvax have been genoci*ed for years and now people are just drooling over them? Literally thousands of them died so that ypu could just hang pictures of them in your base???
🦀 Stickk-42Follow
Grow up lol. People are allowed to do whatever they want, they aren’t hurting a soul.
🛰️ I-turn-posts-into-poetryFollow
⬛⬛⬛⬛korvax⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛drooling over them⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛hang pictures of them in your base⬛
6,809 notes
🔭 PondererofthestarsFollowing
Friends sometimes ask why I keep going and helping traveller-anomalies. Always tell them that if Atlas-False-Entity won’t care about them, I will!
🦕 Diplolover123Follow
Okay. Um. Okay. Sobbing. Throwing up. Crying. This is. Friends.
💸 GoldenfarmerFollow
Friends are just bullshit in my opinion.
🦕 Diplolover123Follow
No one asked! Tbh i wouldve penis blasted you but dont wanna spam random letters to OP. Blocked. Go jump intlo a black hole or smthing
832 notes
planetarydreams-deactivated
gonna check the portal out ill update on how this goes! (^o^)
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