Pancakes and String

The New Year is a great time to commit to self improvement. Commit to self care, to self love, to being happier and more successful.

fandomsandfeminism:
But it is also a time full of emotionally manipulative, body shaming bullcrap.
So here is a reminder to all the wonderful women out there: Your value is not determined by your weight or your looks. Other people’s perception of your attractiveness is not a metric of your worth.
You don’t owe anyone your beauty. Not your spouse or your friends. Not in public or in private. Not in the grocery store or the movie theater. No one is entitled to seeing you look slim and pretty. And not doing so is no failure on your part.
Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”. ~ Erin McKean
(the full “You Don’t Have to be Pretty” essay by Erin McKean)

Source: fandomsandfeminism

winchestersinthedrift:

for those of us
who during the holidays are far from home, either in space or feeling
who outgrew childhood Christmases and never found other ones
who never had good ones in the first place
who have lost people, to death or to other things
who just aren’t in the mood to be festive, because of money or jobs or personal estrangements or new normals we’re not used to yet
who have family members, kids or siblings or parents, whose dementia or autism or physical illness or anxiety makes a “normal” Christmas impossible
who would like it to just be over
who will use it to marathon TV
it’s ok. There’s no ‘should’ about Christmas. There’s no moral imperative to do it a certain way, or at all. Be as happy as you can. Be as OK as you can. That’s it.

(via packbat)

Source: winchestersinthedrift

Re: the recent news: Packbat’s social media, December 2018 (don’t reblog)

Keep reading

Packbat’s social media, October 2018 (don’t reblog)

Keep reading

automated sexual harassment

This afternoon, I saw a like on the post I made day before yesterday - the fifth note on the post, and the fifth like - clicked through to the blog, and was confronted with page after page of porn gifs. Mainstream porn gifs, which means white cis patriarchal male gaze porn gifs, if you want to imagine (which I don’t recommend) - gifs of porn being marketed to people who don’t want to think of the people in those gifs as human.

I blocked the account. I tried to walk away. I found myself sobbing in the bathroom for a good twenty minutes, moving to the couch to sob some more, taking the advice of a friend to take a comforting shower, and then sobbing in that comforting shower for half an hour. I bawled, I wailed, I wept. I cried messy, noisy tears, because I didn’t ask for this.

I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t want this, the people in the images didn’t ask for this (didn’t ask to have their bodies thrown in my face, didn’t give permission to whoever stole their likenesses, didn’t even get paid a fair wage in the first place, I’ll bet), and I can’t do anything about it but leave Tumblr completely and never come back. To spend time in the place that taught me more than I can reckon - taught me the very language with which I describe who I am, at least in a gender way - is to be subjected to this again and again, and I can’t do anything to change that. I can have stolen copies of exploitative porn thrown in my face by machines that do not care what I feel, or I can leave.

I’m leaving.

We deserve better than this. You deserve better than this, if you are a person, if you are a being capable of opinions and desires. Tumblr has let this go on for years and it’s never gotten better and you don’t deserve this. Nobody does.

If you follow my blog and want to keep listening to me, you can send me an ask or look for the forthcoming post listing my other active social media accounts. Other than that, there are nine posts in my queue, posts I scheduled because I decided they were worth reblogging every year, and the last of them will go out in October 2019.

And you can reblog this. Or not. If this goes viral, I’ll probably never know and it probably won’t matter, won’t matter except to the people who choose to read it, but those people deserve to know they’re not alone and to know they deserve better, so I do hope this goes viral. But I don’t expect it to, and you should feel no obligation to reblog it. That’s not why I posted it.

I posted it because I deserve better, too - because my friends told me I deserve better, better than crying for an hour, better than wading into muck that makes me sick when I think about it and wading into it over and over - and I posted it because it’s true, and a true that deserves to be said.

I’m sorry to go, but this is why I’m going.

Goodbye.

(P.S. There’s a difference between mainstream porn and creator-owned porn, indie erotica, people making art that they want to make and getting compensated in ways they chose. Trust me. At most, the latter leaves me baffled that people use their NSFW blogs to listen to me blather about webcomics; the former … well, scroll up, I just talked about it.)

(P.P.S. that post I mentioned at the beginning? The fourth like was from a mainstream porn spam blog, too.)

studiominiboss:

Pedro’s tutorial on how to make a top down attack animation! 🗡️🛡️
More on his Patreon page

Source: studiominiboss

on promising your account is safe for a marginalized group

(Reposting from my Mastodon.)

…the more I understand about how many complicated ways people can be vulnerable and how diverse all our marginalized groups can be, the harder it feels to promise safety. I’m trans and nonbinary, but I’m also indubitably transfeminine - so how do I promise safety to transmasculine people when I don’t really know what they need?

Heck, I can’t even promise safety to my future self - there is so much I don’t know, and so much that I’ve learned that I haven’t noticed the poison in, that I’m sure to err in ways I cannot even imagine until later. I’m ace and I reblogged acephobic crap on Tumblr for a while - and while I’ve deleted those reblogs and unfollowed the person who posted them, how many other things have I screwed up unwittingly?

I’m trying to be safe for nonbinary people, for trans people, for queer people, for lesbians and other gay people, for bi people, for polyamorous people, for polysexual people, for ace people and aro people and people who are both, for autistic people, for trauma survivors, for disabled people, for PoC, for sex workers … I’m trying, and I’m getting better at it, but I can’t just say that I’m safe. That’s a promise larger than I can make, larger than I feel comfortable asking anyone to make.

I can try to be safe, I can (hopefully, barring overwhelm from torrents of trolls) listen to critique when I err, and I’m getting pretty good at noticing the difference between “this is a member of a marginalized group asking for consideration and respect” and “this is an advocate for a harmful ideology co-opting a language of social justice for the purpose”.

I can’t promise to be safe, but I can promise to avoid most of the big mistakes, to acknowledge the mistakes I do make when informed of them, and to forever seek to do better by people.

…and maybe that’s what people mean when they share those “my account is safe for” posts. But this is what I mean when I don’t.

“

Seventeen things you have to learn for yourself
as a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual
or otherwise Queer youth
by the time you are seventeen.

One is that the first Pride was a riot
I don’t mean that it was full of laughter, or that it was some grand party
where everyone spiraled up to dance among the stars
because the only glittering that night
was broken glass on cobblestones.
The first Pride was a riot
on the backstreets of New York
and they never tell us
that night
we won.
The only protest
in a decade full of turmoil
where the cops had to hide out in the bar they raided
and run from shouting rioters
who fought to reclaim the only patch of ground they had ever claimed as theirs
the first Pride was a riot,

and two, around the same time it took place
it was a debated topic in the gay community
whether or not they should say
that they weren’t mentally ill

which, three, homosexuality was removed
from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses
in 1974
congratulations
all it took was a vote to declare that, whoops, we were never mentally ill

except, four, there are still teenagers being tortured today
in what some dare blaspheme as “therapy”
used to destroy their self-identity
in the hopes of making them normal.
except, four, the queer community still carries overwhelmingly high rates for poverty and homelessness and depression.

Did you know that, five,
over half the children forced into conversion therapy
commit suicide?

And six, that lesbians
were regarded as “hangers-on”
of the movement
by much of the gay community
before the AIDS crisis?

Because it turns out, seven can wear a rainbow on your shirt
and still be a bigot.
There are people who stick rainbows in their ears
or wear them on their fingers
or slap them across their cheeks in badges of defiance
and will still hate you for the color of your skin
or the size of your thighs
or your gender
or the way you like to kiss two or more genders
or none of the above.
Don’t ask me why this happens
it just does
I think it might be that we’ve all been taught to hate ourselves
for so damn long
that we don’t understand what to do
in a space with no hate.
Or maybe it’s that the space seems too small, because

eight, there are people who will tell you that you are not enough
that you do not reach the magical benchmark of “gay enough” to pass through the gate even
especially
when you are some flavor of the rainbow other than straight-out gay.
eight, this is bullshit
eight, those people are bullshit.
eight, you are enough.
eight, there is always enough room.

nine, there is no overarching “homosexual agenda”
sorry
we’re all kind of flailing along in here trying to figure out some way to make it work
when most of us have nothing in common
except that society looked at us in different ways and decided we didn’t fit
so we could all go be misfits together
under one big rainbow flag

but just so you know, ten, there are plenty of other flags
there is one for you, I promise

and eleven, misfits may not all need the same things
but we need to stick together, especially in a world where

twelve—refer to point seven—there are lesbians who hate other lesbians
for having the audacity to be born in a body
that everyone looked at and saw “boy”
which brings me to

thirteen, there is so much to understand.

fourteen, you need to understand
because we need to stick together
and to stick together we do not have to be the same but we do have to understand
and it will be hard because
you were probably thrown into this world with no warning because

fifteen, being queer is not genetic and we are not unique among minorities
in that we collect our heritage through broken bits of history and research in a world constantly working to make those misfit bits go away
but we are unique in that when we try to prove our legacy
we can be laughed down
or re-erased
or flat out ignored
but I swear to you
you have a history as old as Alexander the Great
as beautiful as Sappho
as dignified as Abraham Lincoln
and as proud as Eleanor Roosevelt.

But even with that behind us
sixteen,
they have always watched us die.
because even though the bystander effect is bullshit, sixteen
Kitty Genovese was a lesbian, sixteen
Ronald Reagan is a mass murderer, sixteen
our children, your brothers and sisters and siblings of all stripes and all colors and sexualities and genders are being murdered
through neglect
and rejection
and hate.

Sixteen, there is an entire generation of gay and bisexual men
missing from history
because the government chose to do nothing
when they were dying by the thousands.
sixteen, we died from the disease and died from going back into the closet and died for staying there and died for coming out,
sixteen, they laughed at us because they believed god was punishing us for daring to love,
sixteen, ashes of your forerunners rest on the lawn of the White House because
SIXTEEN, THEY HAVE ALWAYS WATCHED US DIE.

SEVENTEEN
you are allowed
to be angry.
You do not have to be one of the nice gays
or one of the nice trans people
or sweet or kind or educate the rest of the world in something less than a yell
you are allowed to be so furious it scalds your bones
at the way we are forgotten
and passed over
at the way, as soon as June becomes July
we are expected
to go back to dying in silence
and mourning our dead
and kissing all alone
when no one can be offended
at the sight of us.
You are allowed to be angry
and scream down the stars
to shatter like broken glass at your feet
because you know what?
The first Pride
was a riot.

”

— October 11 (via spondee-soliloquy)

(via packbat)

Source: spondee-soliloquy

A new streaming project.

heartofaquamarine:

Hey everyone. I’ve started doing a new weekly stream where I mess around in Twine and show some tricks in it and make some small programs and games. I’m hoping to a.) show how to use Twine to make games, b.) show off some other possible uses of Twine, c.) improve my own knowledge of the subject and d.) maybe even make a proper game!

The streams themselves happen every Wednesday evening (UK time), and will hopefully feature a co-host so it isn’t just me rambling. This week we have the wonderful @packbat!

The streams will go up on youtube afterwards, and the files I make will go up on itch.io so you can download them and play around!

Hope people enjoy it!

Here’s the first stream on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv9y_yv66v4

And here’s the itch.io page: https://aquaheart.itch.io/twine-make-a-game-stream-results

Source: heartofaquamarine

Source: 1041uuu