Okay, this is something that has been a long time coming I suppose. Warning: This is probably gonna get long because I tend to ramble.
TL;DR: Some close friends and mutuals have informed me that I was marked red on shinigami eyes - basically, someone flagged me as being overtly anti-trans. This is pretty concerning to me because, well, I’m trans. Some of my close friends are trans, and I try and strive to make my blog a LBTG+ friendly place! Through talking with friends, I realized it’s probably because someone browsing the depths of my blog found posts from a period of time, about 2-3 years ago, where I was an anti-sjw. Yeah.
Now, I’m not proud of this. It was a dark time where I was in hard denial about my gender and sexuality, and I felt like I was forced to hide a part of myself to avoid ridicule. I mean, my dad actually told me, to my face, that he didn’t think gay people should be able to get married! I was a social outcast, heavily bullied for most of my life because I was mentally ill and gnc, and was actively suicidal.
It took a lot of work, and the help of my lovely friends (an therapist!), for me to move past all that and accept myself. I’m in a much better place now, and I’ve moved past a lot of the opinions that I realized I had simply absorbed from my childhood. I’m still working on myself, and I’ve got a long way to go!
But this entire thing means nothing if I don’t actually… state what I believe. SO, here we go!
Me - Afab, Nonbinary, Bisexual (Mainly attracted to women)
I’m a socialist liberal. I’m not a trans-medicalist, I am not a radical feminist, and I hope nobody thinks I’m even near being alt-right or even conservative. I believe trans people should have access to a therapist specializing in trans issues during their transition, it should be on a voluntary basis. If you see me reblog from anyone like that, it’s probably because I saw a meme and didn’t actually check who the meme came from.
Lastly, I want to let my followers and mutuals know that they can come to me with any concerns or questions they have. Again - I want my blog to be welcoming, not exclusive. If there is a post you have questions about, send it to me! I may not respond straight away because tumblr is trash and refuses to notify me when people send things in my inbox, but I’ll try and make sure to respond.
Aaaaahhh LGBT+. Not … Lbtg??? Kinda wrote this in a panic on my phone but I don’t know why that wasnt auto corrected
Here are a huge group of the earrings I have made! These projects have made me so happy and I love being able to create these for people of their fishies or of other animals they love!
hot take but none of you are allowed to use deer/antler imagery when working with cannibalistic themes anymore. you need to be honest with yallselves on WHY you’re associating deer/antler imagery with cannibalism. just because you aren’t naming the name doesn’t mean that the original anti-indigenous racism isn’t still inherent to what you’re doing.
For those who need more explanation, a well known (but often misunderstood) figure in Algonquin and Aanishinabe culture is the wend*go.
No, I’m not fully typing out the name cause we don’t say that name and don’t want to attract its attention. Yes, all of this is taken very seriously by us Natives.
The problem is that this very serious figure isn’t taken seriously at all by non-Natives and, instead of respecting our culture and the fact we don’t even say its name, its perceived as this cool monster to add to movies, video games and cool edgy OCs.
And, as with all thing Native being used and abused, misunderstood, and transformed by non-Natives, we are tired of that. It’s not okay, it’s not respectful.
You want a people eating monster in a story? Use anything else.
As someone who’s absolutely guilty of this shite on this account…yeah you have the right to spitroast me for that. Fair is fair.
I do hope we can use creepy deer aesthetics on and about other mythological/fiction monster villains tho. As someone who had a deer almost kill their dog, I just find deer creepy and unsettling regardless.
first off: You are the single person who has responded to this post admitting some variant of having done this that actually listened to what was being said, acknowledged that you did such things while you didn’t know any better, expressed an intent to never do it again, and asked for clarification on whether or not “creepy deer aesthetic” is completely off-limits with that in mind. So with that said, I want you to know that you’re one of the very few folks in this post I respect sincerely.
To that end: While obviously I can’t speak for Native America as a monolith, it would be my opinion that no, creepy deer aesthetics as a concept are fine. Deer can be fucked up and weird. There is a fundamental lure to the idea of a large prey animal behaving as a predator or in ways anathema to our understanding of prey. That juxtaposition and irony has a lot of narrative potential and for good reason–it fucks severely! I don’t want to see it go away! It fucks hard, for Christ’s sake!
But it is my opinion that the use of deer aesthetics within the specific context of cannibal themes isn’t able to be used anymore. The well has been poisoned too deeply. I never said once the specific being I was referring to in nearly any of my responses, but everyone knew exactly what I meant. Even trying to purposefully distance the racism from the imagery would be useless, since the racism is baked in to the assumptions by now. Reclamation may be able to happen in the future, but first we need to accept that setting it down completely is the right play for a while. You can distance racism from creepy deer stuff by purposefully and actively distancing it from Native America and cannibalism–if it becomes a recurring imagery on its own throughout multiple types of horror, rather than being innately tied by implication to the winter hunger, that’s when we could maybe begin talking about whether or not to start re-examining our relationship with it.
The Algonquin are Anishinaabe. I’m guessing you meant to say Algonquian, which for some reason no one on tumblr can spell right.
The Algonquin are a specific Indigenous people, and part of the greater Anishinaabeg.
Algonquian (with an extra A) is a language family which includes the languages spoken by the Anishinaabeg, as well as Cree, Blackfoot, Mi'kmawi'simk, and others. The cannibalistic spirit you are speaking of is part of the stories of quite a few different tribes and nations, including my people, the nehiyaw.
TLDR Algonquin =/= AlgonquiAn
The cannibal creature is not JUST Anishinaabe
It’s important that if we’re teaching about Native stories that we get them right, and spell the names of the nations involved correctly
Yes BUT. This specific desk is in a library so a parent that needs to use a library computer can do their work and have a little ease in managing their kiddo. In a library environment this is less productivity culture bullshit and more ‘oh this is a fantastic solution to a difficult situation library staff see 8 times a day’. Is it still productivity culture bullshit because this parent may not have affordable childcare or internet available to them? Yes. Am I glad it exists in a library environment to fill a demonstrated need? Hell yeah.
and keeps library staff from having to act as babysitters…
dear GOD we could use a couple of these. we keep crayons and coloring books on hand for the ones old enough for that, but the wee ones squirming and fussing in laps while the parents are fighting with job applications or convincing gmail’s current 2-step verification to let them in so they can print off a return label (both of which i have seen)? this would be SO NICE.
library groups have been loving this & are spreading the word & actively trying to purchase/create similar things in different systems
lmao tumblr letting their users choose whether or not they want their likes to be public but then pulling a twitter 2.0 and showing your likes on your followers’ dashboards and specially saying who liked the posts in their new update, without the users’ consent or a way to turn it off, is actually pretty insane.
like how many times to we — the users — have to tell them we don’t want tumblr to be like any other social media platforms and that tumblr’s being different than twitter, instagram, tiktok is actually what makes us stay on this silly little site.
respectfully @staff you’re driving your users away. stop trying to “fix” things that are good and don’t need to be fixed. we want tumblr to be tumblr. we don’t want the site to be twitter or instagram 2.0
why would they change this site too look like Twitter if everyone here already hates Twitter and everyone leaving twitter also hates twitter. Like elon musk wasn’t the only bad thing about twitter. It also just sucks to use
so SAG-AFTRA finally released some official guidance for fans, viewers, creators/influencers, critics, and more during the strike. here’s what you need to know:
if you see a publication/news source/journalist talking about a piece of struck work, that’s ok. they’re allowed to do that.
2. they’re asking regular viewers and fans to DONATE TO STRIKE FUNDS, SHOW UP TO PICKETS IF YOU CAN, and please do NOT boycott streaming services or movies in theaters.
3. influencers, content creators, cosplayers, and anything in between is still a bit of a grey area, but they’re asking people to use their best judgement. “organically” means UNPAID promo (like an invite to a premiere without being paid, being sent a publicity box, letting the company’s social media post a photo of you in cosplay, etc).
obviously this doesn’t answer every question, and isn’t hard and fast rules for fanworks, but it can at least inform how you personally choose to move forward when posting online and moving publically. i hope this helps!
