I went to a bookshop and I got dizzy at the amount of books on stuff like “astrological feminism” “reclaiming womanhood through numerology” and all that shit…… One was called “cosmic fanny” or for my french speakers out there, “foufoune cosmique”. I think the fight against patriarchy is going really well
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
Ursula K Le Guin, from What Women Know
One night we had a thrilling summer storm… We hadn’t been in the house long, and it was the first time in this house we’d had to close all the windows. In the morning I smelled gas, strong, unmistakable. “I smell gas,” I said to my husband. “I don’t smell it,” he said. He had a friend come over. “Why are you having a friend come over,” I asked, “when it doesn’t matter if he can smell it or not, and none of us can fix it?” His friend didn’t smell it, either. I called the gas company. The gas company employee didn’t smell it, either. He waved his reader around and it blasted off in three places, substantial leaks behind the stove and in the basement. “Always trust a woman’s nose,” the gas company employee said.
Yes, I thought, believe us.
Then, No, I thought, I’m not a fucking witch. Believe anyone who smells gas. If someone smells gas, believe them.
for a while there i was sympathetic to tumblr because of how much they’re in debt; i was kind of like “well of course they’re absolutely desperate for new users, they literally need the money or else tumblr goes down forever”. and then suddenly today it hit me that there’s actually no fucking reason for that debt to be causing these ui changes? the userbase has been INCREDIBLY clear about what they want from tumblr over the years, not to mention clear about the fact that even twitter people don’t need this place to look like twitter. it actually would be very… EASY? for them to just make changes in a direction people would actually be HAPPY with?
for fuck’s sake there were people trying to organize a “crab day” for tumblr despite tumblr doing nothing but telling us to go fuck ourselves for months on end. there were people spending hundreds of dollars on check marks just for the glee of MAKING FUN of twitter. can you IMAGINE how much money this userbase would donate to tumblr if they actually made ui updates geared toward what people have been asking for?
if tumblr actually crowdsourced ideas or even just LISTENED to their userbase it may have been possible for them to make way more money than they’re begging for now, they just insist on trying to drive their actual demographic and loyal userbase out for literally no reason
The Greeks had this word, right, we have no idea where it came from, it just kinda popped up out of nowhere, and it could mean either apples, cheeks, or boobs. Problem is it looked and sounded *exactly* like another, unrelated word which could mean sheep, goat, or any animal in general really, which must have got confusing if you were a farmer talking about your livestock, but anyway…
Then the Romans, having stolen practically everything else from the Greeks, thought they’d nick this word too, because Latin isn’t confusing enough without throwing in a bunch of loan words. And they adopted it to mean a pumpkin.
Then the English came along and were all like “when in Rome”, and stole it, where it became our word ‘melon’. Which has now come back to mean boobs.
One time a DM let me play a Venom inspired character where I played the host and my long distance girlfriend played the symbiotic alien. How we did this was set up a discord call where she could hear everything said at the table but I had one head phone in my ear and only I could hear what she was saying and if I wanted to respond I had to speak out loud.
words of power do exist…. i can walk out of my apartment wearing the most fuck shit, e.g. swim trunks as shorts w a zipped up hoodie and no shirt underneath, and just say the words “laundry day” and suddenly it’s way less weird
“laundry day” spell: decreases target’s judgment of outfit by 80%
I picked up a banana print shirt in Vietnam - were talkin LOUD - and the first time someone commented on it I said “It’s banana shirt friday” which stunlocked them and blocked any followup questions.
Turns out that saying “it’s banana shirt friday” enough actually created a holiday at my office where everyone would wear fruit print clothes on fridays! So yes, words of power exist. :)
Waiting for people to fuck up so you can cancel them, gatekeeping, communities self-policing to the point of self-destruction, debating each other’s validity, communities infighting over terminology, fighting over the Best way to exist, trying to define what a Bad Community Member is/does, vilifying those people.
Besties I think we fucked up and internalized the surveillance state or the omni-present judgment of god or purity culture or perhaps just maybe all 3
I will say I get the vibe that a lot of peoples interest and support for strikers is a bit too much for a vicarious ‘burn it down’ thrill, rather than for the actual goals of a strike.
Like UPS has agreed to come back to the table and it is very possible they will concede to Union demands and avert a strike. And if that happens (so long as the union does not make concessions on its key demands) it’s a good thing. It’s a victory for the laborers. It is the same ultimate conclusion that a strike would intend to produce except without the workers having to go on (not so great) strike pay for a week or two.
This is SO SO SO important!! The goal of a strike is to end up with a good contract. This is the goal of any action to support a group of workers engaged in collective bargaining, many of whom will never go on strike because they don’t have to. Strikes make the news, but they are a last resort when negotiations aren’t going anywhere. I want a world where we have fewer strikes and more employers being reasonable at the bargaining table.
