I’m a lesbian and somehow I manage to walk down the street and not ogle women I find attractive, or cat call or degrade them, or touch them without permission, or interrupt their daily lives, it’s almost as if I’m treating them like human beings despite my attraction to them. What an insane concept.
omg same
We were arguing about dress code in a meeting at work. And while my department knows I’m queer the other departments did not. As people (men) were saying that women showing skin and wearing tight clothes was distracting. I spoke up finally and said.
“I’m attracted to women.”
Everyone turned and looked at me and I was like “uhhh” so I finished.
“I’m attracted to women and I can still do my job. Regardless of what someone in my class is wearing. I can still teach. So why can’t you?”
Intuition is real. Vibes are real. Energy doesn’t lie. Tune in.
This is actually called thin slicing. Your brain recognizes patterns from very small “slices” of information by comparing them to things you have experienced before. This all happens very quickly on a subconscious level without our conscious mind being involved. So intuition is actually really fast pattern recognition, and it can be very accurate. So yeah, if you have a gut feeling that a person or situation is not good, get the hell out. Your brain knows what’s up.
When I was young – because I’ve always been a big skeptical pain in the ass – I thought that when people were talking about interpersonal “energy,” they were on some Gay Ass Shit.
Years later, after spending hundreds of hours reading studies about intuition and neuroscience and pattern recognition and the processing power of the subconscious mind, I realized that that kind of talk – “she has such good energy,” “you need to read the energy of the room,” “I just got some really bad energy off of that guy” – is a convenient shorthand for the lightning-fast, weirdly-accurate, real-as-fuck subconscious processing of the probability of positive or negative social outcomes likely to result from hundreds or thousands of variables. That “energy” isn’t a tangible thing floating around in the air. It’s your brain updating you constantly with information about your situation. Listen to it. Especially if it’s telling you to be nervous or scared. Your brain is very good at recognizing danger. Let the enormous processing power of your subconscious mind protect you. It’s better at spotting patterns than you are.
“Bad energy” isn’t some hippie shit. It’s your brain setting off a claxon because it knows something’s not right.
Thin slicing is wonderfully helpful, but be aware that if it’s doing its pattern recognition from bad sources, you need to actively override it. We’re raised in a racist society, inundated with racist media, and bombarded with subtly (or unsubtly) racist advice. Thin slicing can save your life, but it’s also the cause behind the unconscious elements of racism (and misogyny/ableism/antisemitism/islamophobia/etc.) that we all suffer from
Trust your instincts, but if your instincts tell you something that seems prejudicial, double check their work.
Zoom in on her face in the third gif. She means this. You are completely irreplaceable.
This went deep man. Look at her face. I would love to know where this came from, what she was talking about. And it’s true. So true. Completely irreplaceable. You are you and there is no better you
Reblogging because I needed to see this message tonight, and something tells me someone else does too.
Reblogging as I think every one of my followers are special and impossible to replace.
Remember that.
You are all special and important, and Ellen is a gift.
On my goods days, I’m like: “Thanks, Ellen. You’re such a treasure. Thank-you for supporting positive mental health. I hardly even get a chance to watch your show, but small gestures like this are so important and so reaffirming. Thanks.”
On my bad days,I’m like: “Thanks, Ellen. You’re such a treasure. But you don’t know me, and I am highly-replaceable trash. Thanks, anyway.”
You aren’t trash. Just an irreplaceable person having a bad day.
What is almost certainly happening with Tumblr’s image classifier is that they’ve deployed the bot entirely untrained, and are relying on user complaints to train it what NSFW content on tumblr looks like.
Making people participate in their own censorship in this way and punishing them with the threat of being silenced even if in compliance with the rules should they not participate, is, IMHO, abuse of their userbase.
Source: I’ve worked for three different top-five social networks, and at all of them this type of work would have been done by making the userbase do it as much as possible.
Please signal boost. I don’t care if you reblog or repost, just get the word out so that people know what they’re doing as they interect with this thing.
My twitter is @soren_tycho (nsfw, sfw account coming soon) and my github username is sorentycho.
Just chiming in as a machine learning expert, this is almost certainly the case (and knowing tumblr, they weren’t even smart enough to throw in pre-trained weights)
Can someone put together a universal theory for why Tumblr loves Halloween to a fault but hates Christmas
Tumblr skews young, Halloween spent with friends, Christmas with family.
Tumblr skews young, more users want to fuck monsters than want to fuck Santa.
I have an actual theory behind this, but I won’t be able to articulate it well until I read Bakhtin and maybe some of the medieval peasant-culture anthro stuff, so I’ve been putting it off. The short of it though is: Halloween is Mardi Gras, while the “holiday season” is Lent. Christmas however is not Easter; the closest equivalent to Easter is the day after Christmas, when you are no longer exposed to Christmas shit and you can maybe get a day off if you work retail.
Over the course of my lifetime Halloween has transmuted very noticeably into a kind of peasant carnival. I think this is because its colonization by commercial forces focused entirely on trick-or-treating, and its religious associations are nonexistent here, so above trick-or-treating age it was left completely to “the folk” to do what they wanted with.
Basically there’s two distinct elements to modern Halloween: the first is that it acts out, and thereby creates, a sense of mastery over and comfort amidst the anxieties of life – death, and monsters, and horror, and so forth. These are several steps removed from the actual sources of people’s fears, but they represent them. The posture of being at home, amongst family, in the company of death and horror is a way of grappling with the senseless horror of life.
The second aspect is that Halloween flouts the pieties of conventional society, whereas Christmas embodies them. Therefore, Christmas is the anti-Halloween. Since it’s America, bland corporate pleasantries and hyperconsumerism are themselves pieties, and as more and more of the population shifts into the service sector, the number of people who experience those things like an imposition from on high increases. The reason everyone starts celebrating Halloween as early as possible, yet dreads when the same thing happens at Christmas, is because Christmas is a “high” holiday that embodies the norms and culture of the upper-middle-class. Halloween is a vulgar party whereas Christmas is a
genteel
sermon; the commercialization of Christmas only changes the church and God.
My theory: it’s the creator vs curator debate.
Halloween involves making things and performing weirdness publicly, Christmas involves paying money to hope you guessed correctly about someone else’s preferences.
also we’re all broke and at least in my clusterfuck of a family there’s a competitive aspect to gift giving that provokes low-grade anxiety until it’s over.
I think this is probably true, but I think it’s true to some extent because Halloween has not been extensively “monetized” outside of trick-or-treating, despite the efforts of the Sexy and/or Hilarious Party Costume industry. If we put a hedge fund in charge of Halloween I have no doubt they’d make buying everything premade mandatory and restructure the whole thing around spending money to quell low-grade social anxiety, just like with everything else.
I can’t totally agree with this latter part because: Christmas decorations.
I feel like I should expand but I’m really not sure what to say. Christmas decorations can easily be as individualistic, hokey, home-made, or weird as… Well, there’s less license than Halloween but a heck of a lot more than for any other American holiday.
Not o butt in and derail, but there’s undeniably an aspect of- as discoursedrome mentions- the total absence of widespread religious associations with Halloween.
That means for the atheists and pagans and jews and muslims and buddhists and lapsed christians and anyone for whom Christmas is a two month long stress exercise where the goal is to avoid a fist fight with every single fucker who keeps assuming you’re Christian no matter how annoying it is, and worse, may have the fucking balls to try to convert you if you point it out?
Halloween is actually a celebration. Where Christmas is a solid 6-8 weeks of hearing people who literally dominate every aspect of your society talk about how they need to be even more dominant, and how everyone else should be grateful for that domination because at least it’s “fun.”
So, there’s just, immediately, a much larger population of people for whom Halloween is accessible, compared to Christmas.
Tumblr skews American, and in America, Halloween is an acceptable inversion festival. That’s not the right word for it, but people interested in anthropology/history/theology can give you the right one. I remember that @copperbadge actually wrote about it here, but there’s a word for it that I’ve forgotten. Anyway, these festivals are deliberately anti-normative and provide an acceptable way for the public to skew/invert social mores, which is thought to be useful (source needed) as a sort of release valve for stressed-out societies, who spend the rest of the year picking over their inhibitions and repressions. Halloween just happens to be the way that the Puritan-influenced United States manages to invert its traditions. But in other cultures, Christmas actually has inversion rituals!
There are actually a lot of inversion traditions associated with Midwinter in the UK – wassailing, the Feast of Fools, the concept of mumming, probably even Morris Dancers, mystery plays, and figures like the Lord of Misrule – all of which have an inverted character.
There is a lot of weird, freaky, morbid pagan stuff like the Mari Lwyd, the undead Welsh horse who goes trick-or-treating at Christmas, demanding alcohol with a menacing song, and you have to try to send her away in song form; when you run out of reasons to keep her out, you must invite her in and give her alcohol. The Grey Mare is played by a real horse’s skull and a sheet draped over a man, with a stick that allows him to snap the jaws menacingly at people, terrifying the shit out of children. This has a very American-Halloween feel, but she’s very strongly a Christmas-season character, who comes during the darkest nights of Midwinter with her festive red and green ribbons.
Figure 1. WHO IS SHE
“Mumming” is a weird relict of medieval?pagan? tradition in the UK and it’s what “The Mummer’s Dance” by Loreena McKennitt is about. People dress up. It often involves the Christmas Mystery Play, which involves St George being killed by a dragon; he is then revived by The Doctor, and kills the dragon. This is considered to be extremely Traditional and Christmassy. Here is The Doctor, clearly taking some inspiration from the modern Doctor Who, who probably took some inspiration from him, in turn; The Doctor is about to revive St George with a magic potion in a spray bottle. Santa is also there, and people with significant hats. We are all encouraged to believe that this is extremely Christian and normal.
Figure 2. This is the true meaning of Christmas, if you didn’t know.
In continental Europe, which I know less about, there are even more Midwinter/Christmas inversions, like the Krampus and the Yuletide-Lads (chaotic-neutral Icelandic elves).
Figure 4. “no guideposts to sense-making are set forth by adults” is a very millennial experience
So why does Tumblr like Halloween so much?
Possibly because it’s a culture strongly influenced by Americans, and further by Americans whose coming-of-age was influenced by 9/11, whose experience of Halloween was one of the rare times that the powerless felt powerful, when strict social hierarchy was relaxed, when different roles and attitudes could be safely explored, and the cultural themes of death/doom/fear were inverted into something that was enjoyable.
When I was 10, my mom made me wear a bra and it felt like a punishment for being different.
When I was 10, I took the bra off when changing for gymnastics and accidentally dropped it in the school hallway. A teacher picked it up and said, “Oh, this must belong to you” and handed it back to me in front of everyone. I quit gymnastics.
When I was 11, I thought maybe the boobs would be okay so long as they didn’t get any bigger than would fit in my hand, so I kept measuring it, but they did.
When I was 12, I started wearing two or three sports bras to smush them down, until one day a classmate said, “Are you wearing two bras?!” while laughing.
When I was 13, a boy told me he wanted to squeeze my boobs “until they popped.”
When I was 14, I got cast in a play as an older character and a classmate told me I got the role because I had boobs.
When I was 17, my mom told me to return a swimsuit because it would be too distracting for my boyfriend’s father.
When I was 21, I got properly fitted for a bra and everyone felt the need to tell me how much better my boobs looked.
When I was 26, I got pregnant and my immediate fear was that my boobs would get bigger.
When I was 28, I got shamed for trying to feed my screaming baby in public without a cover.
When I was 28, people asked me “why are you bothering to use a breastfeeding cover?”
When I was 30, people gave me weird looks that I wasn’t yelling at my kid for putting their hand on my boob.
When I was 31, I avoided going to the beach or pool because I didn’t want to have to deal with boobs in a swimsuit.
When I was 32, I got asked, again, “why don’t you get a breast reduction?”
When I was 33, I watched a 5yo girl get shamed for running around in sweltering heat without a shirt on and had to reprimand a bunch of tween boys who thought it was okay to shame her for doing something they do all the time.
When I was 34, my kid kept patting my breast and saying “Mommy’s squishy breast!!” They will never see me express any shame about tits, because I want them to have a different mindset than I had. Yes, boobs are nice! They’re squishy! They’re fun! That’s the end of that.
I’m 35 and no longer give a fuck. I don’t care anymore. As a teenager my tits were covered in stretch marks. They’ve been engorged with milk. My nipple changed shape with pregnancy. Give it another couple decades and my breasts will probably be all wrinkly. It’s sexual when I’m using it sexually. I don’t fucking care, and I won’t be ashamed anymore.
Every time a policy or cultural hangup treats people with breasts differently, it fucks us over.
Tumblr’s new policy makes an active choice to participate in this culture of shame. By classifying “female-presenting nipples” as explicit material, Tumblr has taken a stance that any chest or breast that differs from a male default is worthy of shame and unavoidably sexual. The idea that breasts are shameful and unavoidably sexual is exactly what fucked me up for so much of my life.
Stop shaming people for having bodies.
I’ve been seething in rage thinking of this all day and @aibidil put into words what was reeling in my mind.
Well, people are having a TON of difficulty with my blog so it’s likely my account will be terminated on December 17th. If not, cool! I’ll be around. If that DOES happen though-
I’m not going to rebuild here. This site has become an addiction and a chore for me and frankly I’ve got other things to be doing- Making art, finishing the book, setting up my garden, frolicking in the mountains etc. I will absolutely still be Online and I still want to have good times with all of you, so here’s where to find me:
Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/gallusrostromegalus I’ll be posting the Edited and Illustrated Family Lore here, as well as taking art comissions and book pre-orders. This will also be my Primary source of Income until I’ve recovered enough to start minimum wage again, at which point this will still be vitally necessary income for me. I will also be starting a Discord Server associated with Patreon.
You can also find me on Skype under “Gallusrostromegalus” or Discord at #0990 (if you want to add me)
Since tumblr’s nerfed my blog, could you please reblog and spread this around? I’ll keep flogging it until I go becuase I love you all and want to stay in touch if this site goes down.
Frankenuff’s Castle 