» gender: something about mirrors

You're talking with a cishet man, and the conversation has turned a little bit serious, you're talking about your feelings or maybe your family, and in a moment of really letting your guard down, you tell him something personal. In my experience, this often happens when I come out as gay, which often takes me a few weeks or months after meeting a new person, but I've seen it happen when someone opens up about drug addiction, or their wife cheating on them, or basically anything where you might want the other person to keep it a secret.

In response to this revelation, the strait man immediately gives you verifiable kompromat on himself, as a way of reassuring you that hey, you gave him a big secret he could socially wreck you with, now he will give you one of his, so you're both safe. You were out on a limb, telling him you have a husband, so now he's telling you about the time he committed treason. Now we're even, I can't betray you by gossiping, because you could get me locked up for 20-to-life. Mutually assured destruction.

When I hear "tumblr sexyman," I think of Cecil Night Vale being constantly depicted as a skinny white man instead of literally anything else. I think of the background character white men who get elevated over protagonists that are women, people of color, or otherwise not the white man power fantasy.

Cecil Night Vale, as previously mentioned.

Oncelercest, because if there aren't two skinny white men to ship, tumblr fandom will start shipping the skinny white man with himself.

Bill Cipher inexplicably being fanon'd as a white twink despite being a fucking triangle.

Everyone fawning over Marvel Loki while shoving every woman and Black person in the MCU aside.

The way nearly every single character in Hazbin Hotel has the same "tall and skinny" body type, along with all the criticisms Black audience members have made about the issues with Alastor's design.

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

#the idea that someone can simultaneously be a bad parent and a good person is one that seems to escape a LOT of people#I see far too many people who insist that if someone is a bad parent they're also a bad person#because being a bad parent MAKES them a bad person#“well they never should have had kids if they were going to be bad at it!” cool cool so I don't know if you know this but#not everyone is able to see how things will play out before they happen#also someone may be a GREAT parent for one kid but a mediocre one for another kid#because (and I know this is another pretty alien idea to a lot of tumblr) everyone is different#what one child needs is not necessarily the same as what another child needs#anyway#it's much more fun to explore this concept in fiction than in reality#when it happens IRL at least one real person gets screwed over; in fiction it's an interesting story to explore

So fucking true

1. Check that you have good access to shade trees, a shelter custom made to fit you and all your friends, and plenty of good airflow

2. Find the hottest, sunniest, and least windy part of you pasture and lay down

3. Make sure you look as much as possible like you have died of heatstroke

4. Get your friends in on it

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.