reading a book with a medieval setting and i was v excited for it BUT these characters have such modern hangups about touch and personal space that i keep forgetting it’s meant to be the fourteenth century. lads. get in bed together, it’s cold.
like this man is freaking out about sleeping next to someone (for warmth) because he has never shared a bed before
sir??? you are from the fourteenth century??? surely this is not such a novelty to you
also so far christianity does not exist in this book. we have not even so much as mentioned passing a church while travelling.
i repeat: sir, you are from the fourteenth century,
honestly i need somebody to write “there was only one bed with five other people in it” immediately, that sounds like it’s either going to be incredibly full of repressed yearning, incredibly funny, or just an orgy, and i would love to see it go in any and all of those directions
Comments on erotica are so funny because a lot of the people in those sections are trying to compliment the author without directly saying “awesome job, I jacked it to this!”
This post is your reminder that you are not obligated to blog about current events.
Things are bad. Really bad. Do not let people guilt trip you into tormenting yourself even further over the fact that things are bad. Doomscrolling is not activism.
If you’re just on tumblr to blorbopost or reblog pretty pictures, you are not harming people by inaction.
You are not a bad person for not dedicating every aspect of your life and leisure space to whatever disgusting mask-off attack on human life and dignity some government has decided to enact.
Take action where you can, but don’t confuse doomscrolling and digital self harm for action.
If you need to lose yourself in blorboposting, go for it.
If you need to log off for the day, whether it’s to take irl action or to protect what little sanity any of us have left over the past 7 years, then by all means, do.
Morale is important. Hope is important. Small joys keep us from burning out completely in times like this. Do not let any “if you don’t reblog this I’m judging you” guilt trip convince you otherwise.
Even investigative open source journalists at places like Bellingcat, who make a living sifting through this type of information, take breaks while dealing with this and make sure they have downtime. There are specific methods for reducing the amount of vicarious trauma that people get from seeing imagery of violence, and mixing that stuff in with the fun little escapist hobbies of one’s tumblr is not on the recommended list.
Synecdochic on how to block out seeing things related to current events, or on mitigating the trauma of seeing it if you feel you must stay informed: https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/803314.html
Thank you very much @sunlit-skycat for posting it; it was written about the war in Ukraine but goes absolutely just as much for current conflicts and everything else.
Remember that you don’t help by breaking yourself to no purpose. If anything, you literally make things worse; you create someone else that needs help.
I’ve had to block a couple people, so it’s worth noting:
if your response to this is to start screaming How Dare We when [thing] is going on, how inhuman, etc, then just preemptively block me instead; it will save you time and effort.
for many people, handling their literal fucking suicidality is in fact a life or death thing for them. And if you start with “well they don’t have good enough reason to be suicidal compared with - ”, again, just fuck off. I want nothing to do with you. You do not get to demand people risk their lives in order that they adequately perform virtue as you understand it for you, especially when it’s as pointless and useless as doomscrolling shit is.
I’m gonna be a bit mean here: your outrage is actually useless. The harm you are doing yourself is useless. Your “witnessing” is mostly useless. Your reblogging is not activism. You want to be useful get up off your ass and go raise some funds; get up off your ass and find some protests or demonstrations or useful fucking interviews to do; get up off your ass and go volunteer for an organization that might put your boots on the ground to do some work. Oh, you can’t? Disability, poverty, your job, your school, your something about your life makes that impossible? Right, so you’re in exactly the same fucking position as the person who needs to not reblog everything horrible ever in order to preserve their sanity, it’s just you perceive your limits and needs as valid, and are shitting on everyone else.
consciousness raising is only any use at fucking all if it leads to specific, targeted, effective action. Otherwise it’s a fucking performance of grief and outrage to no point, and causing no virtue.
At least a few of the people I’ve just blocked are quite young, and I have sympathy for hitting your very first Really Fucking Awful Human Atrocity and realizing how powerless you actually are to do fuck all about it, and how shit that makes you feel, especially when you’re home safe. But I’m not your mom, and you’re hurting other people as you lash out - including some of those you’re supposedly lashing out on behalf of - so unfuck yourselves somewhere other than bouncing off my reblogs.
For everyone else: honestly that utility thing - “is this actually useful? does this do anything that helps?” - actually still applies. If you’re struggling with it, it can also be worth sitting down and (possibly with help, if you’re really unsettled) going through what things that do have some uses are that you could do.
Shockingly enough, it may actually turn out that they include things like “providing some kind of diverting distraction for the person who hasn’t heard from their family yet today”, because providing a small space of escape for a friend is something you can actually do, that will help you both. And so on.
in order to remove the sexual stigma placed on breasts, we must move past the act of shaming people who are brave enough to go topless in public. myself and another transfem friend went topless at our local pride parade not because we were trying to be “sexual” at pride, but to protest the idea that some chests are viewed as inherently sexual and illegal to be viewed publicly, while some are not. it’s not a sexual act for someone with breasts to take their shirt off.
i did not have anyone give me rude or sexual comments. i received a lot of approving nods, thumbs up and polite compliments, people were even reminding me that that’s the spirit of pride, and hoped that they were brave enough to do the same in the future.
sometimes it’s nearly 100 degrees and people with breasts get dangerously overheated. sometimes people with breasts just don’t want to wear a shirt. their breasts are not an object for you to get upset about. their breasts are not an object for you to make a moral argument about. their breasts are a part of their body, and they’re not scarring or hurting anyone by existing, they are another organ on the human body and someone else’s breasts are not up for you to debate about.
It’s like the world heard that people went to kill a bunch of Jews and went, “fucking FINALLY! I’ve been waiting for this!” and grabbed their SS uniforms from their closets. There was just no hesitation to incite more antisemitism worldwide
Again, it underscores how few people actually give a shit about Palestinians, because it makes no sense to go target Jews anywhere else in the world (not that killing Israeli civilians was justified, either) unless you think all Jews everywhere are bloodthirsty killers who deserve to die, which, again, you might as well just be honest and don your SS uniform
It took me roughly 5 minutes of scrolling through twitter to find these news stories. I would have found more if I had kept going. All of these happened within the past 5 days. Only 5 days.
