feels wrong to celebrate

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

If you don't want to answer that's fine, I hope you're having a nice day ❤️

The baeddel community, the actual original one not the vague insinuations people throw around at trans women with feminist politics, formed out of early transfeminist politics on tumblr.

For context, it’s important to note that many of us not only were interested in feminist theory but specifically second wave radical feminist theory, both to critique and to do “trans” readings of them. At the time “queering” as a verb was a popular academic discourse in which you would “queer” a text, film, etc to reveal what is missing from something, what if we read this text through not merely a queer critique but as if it was already affirming of queer difference, identity and experiences? What if we read it as an always already queer text?

So in a sense we were taking this academic literature framework and doing our own transfeminist spin. Dworkin and MacKinnon were popular authors to do this to. We started reading radical feminist texts and lesbian second wave feminist theory as if it was always already transfeminist, already affirming, actually from a certain perspective a pro transfeminist text.

This was very unique and frankly avant garde for even the academy let alone laymen on a blogging site. It attracted a lot of young trans women with burgeoning socialist and anarchist beliefs. We read Whipping Girl and felt dissatisfied with its ultimately liberal politics on gender - political revolution and self-abolition became popular ideas.

There was a large feminist community on tumblr for trans women, partially due to the number of graduate students who would share their reading material for a mass audience. This both became the basis for the later abuses as well as the basis for the challenging of those abuses.

Some transfeminists discovered that “bad” has roots in an olde English word for “hermaphrodite” and “effeminate man.” Despite this word (baeddel) clearly referencing people with visible intersex variations, a trans reading was done of it through bad internet entomology and it became proof of transmisogyny being at least a few hundred year old oppression. People even call it a “slur,” despite there being no evidence of it being used for violence which is usually how we define slurs.

This became a rallying call for a subsection of this transfeminist community who began adopting the term. The baeddel community had its own celebrity theorists - b8l (who was accused of race faking by a Black trans woman who met her in person) and unobject. They amassed a large amount of social influence so that when two baeddel members accused each other of rape - those two got the whole community to isolate the victim. Even their own admissions to what the situation was had a lot of holes - for instance, they claimed the victim (Elle) was actually the rapist for “rescinding consent” and even the rapist (Eve) didn’t deny that the victim was restrained while she the rapist held a knife.

But such is it with cult dynamics, even I went along at first. I still feel a great amount of shame about that. I became unpopular with that crowd because I was willing to call them on it. Eventually the transfeminist community pushed them out - too many people knew and saw through the bullshit.

But a lot of people held on - for reasons that seem familiar. This community had for years spread narratives that the only other people you can trust and will love you is this small clique and hush shhhh don’t call out rape amongst your sisters, we are so vulnerable. Everyone else is a transmisogynist monster, you can trust us we won’t let you get hurt. You shouldn’t make criticisms. It was just kink!

Seeing that come back but in a new social context is certainly disturbing. Seeing the problem become much bigger than it was the previous time, also disturbing. There seems to be less pushback than there was before. I think the fact that the Baeddels were very intentionally aesthetically offputting (not in physical appearances to be clear, but in communication style, politics and a general edgelord alternative vibe to their blogs) made it harder for them to gain traction. It also required more work - you at least had to engage with what other people were reading if not reading and producing readings yourself. There’s less barrier for entry which I think has made this new group far more palatable while also being more extreme in what they’re demanding of their followers.

Do they actually respect your boundaries? Are they trying to fuck you the first moment you’re alone when you’ve never had a sexual conversation with them previously? Are they trying to exert some kind of financial influence on you? Does their rhetoric ultimately lead you to isolating yourself socially from others, does it instill a sense of distrust towards the world? Are you told they are the only people who will love you? Is it impossible to provide constructive criticisms or enforce your own boundaries without it being seen as an attack on their personhood?

This is a red flag no matter who it comes from. It is universally true. If you feel like there are exceptions, that it is something that can be exploited by people you thought could trust. This is my advice for everyone in any community anywhere - walk away from anyone who acts like this. These aren’t trustworthy behaviors and I’m not pulling these examples from thin air.

After my experiences in the early 2010s not just with Baeddels but also monetizeyourcat I’m not just not gonna sit quietly while people engage in dangerous behavior and rhetoric or try to spin the Baeddels as actually correct underdogs we should emulate. God no, that was so much stress and anxiety and broken trust. I don’t want any young women to go through that like we either did directly or witnessed around us.

Most paid premade art courses (i.e lessons are youtube videos/written lessons) are a waste of money. They go through the same fundamentals everyone does and tend to talk about concepts and terms originating from popular books such as andrew loomis' bibliography or james gurney's color and light. just buy (or pirate) the books about the topic you wish to learn about instead.

in contrast, art courses that focus on tutoring you, even if not 1:1 (i.e its a class) are extremely valuable. they are very expensive though so I won't act like you Must do them.

in the same vein of premade art courses, most tutorials/youtube videos are also information from books of art masters through insane degrees of separation. They're free so its not like theyre bad but they slowly erase any nuance and educational lessons that the books offered in trade for being easy to put in a 10 minute video. they may be good introductions but if you ever feel like they dont give much that's why.

the reason why "just practice" feels unhelpful is because each area of art has multiple methods of practicing it, some of which are not interchangeable, and are not common knowledge. here's some ways I practice:

precursor practice that helps you in all areas -> learning about shapes. the volume of boxes, cylinders, spheres, how they move in 3d space, how they can be cut, interpolated, etc. put them in a perspective grid, try layering shapes and cutting them up.

human anatomy -> learn about muscle and bone placement, and how they move. study the shapes and planes of the body, what is hard vs soft. gesture drawing if youre stuck on poses and dynamics

light and shadow -> learn to simplify objects via planes and how those planes are illuminated, where the light positions itself and why (is it the sun? a lantern? a lightbulb?), learn about the science of light such as the different types of shadow and how light bounces. pick up photos and find the light source.

its fine to take long breaks from art. drawing everyday is not super useful and only works for a few people. yes youll have rust but its very easy to shake it off.

if you learn how to get joy from the action of drawing over the results of drawing, studies will feel less like a chore and youll be less reliant on an art piece turning out good to not feel miserable.

if the only art community you have is your followers/social media you will go crazy. your audience has no obligation of enjoying every single piece of yours and alienating them will make things worse. find actual art friends where you can have conversations about your art so you dont feel so reliant on social media numbers.

appreciate art that isnt other illustrative art. find joy in abstract sculptures, architecture, music, novels, the world around you etc.

yes materials help a lot but if you dont have experience then you'll not see a big difference in output. you also need to learn to use those materials before being able to draw how other artists do.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.