Otter's Rock

Today in "Things I will die mad about" -- Why doesn't https://usps.gov exist? Why the FUCK is it usps.com? The United States Post Office is Not A Business, It Is A Public Service.

people just hate children. it's a sorry state of affairs. they hate children being starved and bombed overseas. they hate children laughing and playing in the park. they hate their own kids, whom they popped out because social norms told them it was an obligate milestone for their own enrichment and not the creation of another human being whose life then takes priority over theirs. they don't want to be around children, they don't want to raise them, they are always foisting them onto someone else and no one wants to take them. they hate children even though we were all children once and most of us probably know, in some way or another, how withering it felt to be a hated child, whether it was some stranger on a bus telling us to shut up in an isolated incident or our parents resenting the fact that we existed. nothing will get better if we don't stop hating children and start seeing every child anywhere as a vulnerable citizen we ought to look out for. our society is only as healthy as the poorest, loneliest child in it.

Working an office job will truly make you have the wildest enemies, bc why is my nemesis rn a woman I’ve never met and who exclusively haunts me by sending diabolical emails, and also a specific guy who left my company before I even worked here and made the system so fuckass that it ruined procedures for like a year

in the first episode of the original star trek series spock says "one of my ancestors married a human female" and later in the show we find out that said ancestor is in fact his dad who married his mom who is human

OH

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

this female character has toxic masculinity because she's rude and angry. it's misogynistic to hate my male fave because he's popular with women but it's ok to hate on this female character because she's bad female rep and women who like her don't count. it's actually misogynistic to like badly written women because it is rewarding low effort of male writers and I'm the sole arbiter of what is a badly written woman. it's misogynistic to write women with personality flaws because complexity is for silly boys. it's feminist to remove women from stories and focus on the men because I don't have to deal with that bad rep in my fanfiction. it's misogynistic how the narrative has reduced her to a love interest for a man so I reduced her to the mom friend, yaoi cheerleader, and therapist for the same man instead. she deserves better so I decided to remove her from the narrative altogether so she won't have to suffer all the interesting conflict my guys will have to suffer instead. no, I'm not a misogynist, my disregard for women is 100% feminist.

I’m not sure if this will be helpful to anyone, but you literally do not have to be a good writer to write and post fan fiction. Yes you will naturally get better at writing and finding your voice the more you do it but you do not have to be or become a professional level writer to enjoy writing and sharing fics. It’s common to hear people praise fic writers by saying their work is better than published books, and while I think this comes from a good place, that’s not the norm or expectation. There is also a sentiment that fic writing is “good practice” for becoming a better writer or doing something else later, but if fic is the only creative writing you ever do that is literally okay. Your technical skill does not mean you cannot have fun and build community with your writing, or that other people cannot love and find meaning in your work.

but can we TALK about the racialized subtext of "his wife has filled his house with chintz" linking together femininity, indian export goods, commercialism, and superficiality vs "to keep it real I fuck him on the floor" linking together masculinity, AAVE, authenticity, sexuality, and vulgarity? if our aim as critics of poetry is to reevaluate this text and arrive at a feminist interpretation then we must also consider the poem's vexed relationship to race so as to not be anti-black in our criticism of the piece's presentation of masculinized sexuality nor uncritically reproduce and elevate its image of orientalized femininity.

also, from looking at the original post (non-explicit gay sex photo but still a gay sex photo so you've been warned): there isn't even any chintz in the photo. the design elements in the room all look broadly western european with the exception of a tall ceramic vessel that may be decorated with a reproduction of a chinese ink painting. chintz is an indian textile pattern, you'll see it on dresses, bedspreads, wallpaper, tapestries, upholstery, etc., but nothing like that is in the image. to imply that the house's interior design is frivolous, artificial, and unusable, the poem utilizes "chintz" despite the obvious lack of chintz because "chintz," as a popular asian export good that went on to be imitated by european manufacturers, is considered kitsch, cheap, and womanly. and, though the angle partially obscures them, the two men in the photo both appear to be white, so the poem uses the AAVE phrase "keep it real" despite the lack of black people to invoke the perception of AAVE as raw, crass, and primal. in both cases, the racialized language is being ascribed to european/white subjects to impart the white subjects with different moral values.

i have a suggestion

Good. One of the things I love about the USA is that we have birthright citizenship. People come here for better chances and better lives. That's the whole fucking point.