jexistential jread

Fatness, like singlehood, is seen at large as a state of failure. Everybody is supposed to want to be [thin / partnered], and if you are not, that is a personal failure on your part, and you are pathetic and mock-worthy. The popular idea is that of course everybody wants to be [thin / partnered], and everybody is striving towards the goal, and anybody who is not [thin / partnered] is either temporarily inconvenienced on their way to correctness, or has something fundamentally wrong with them. And because [fatness / singlehood] is something that is treated as fixable, if you have not fixed it, then there is something wrong with you—and thus discriminating against you is acceptable, because your [fatness / singlehood] is based on your own bad choices.

The world is, in some cases quite literally, not built for fat or single people. If you are fat or single, the world is much more difficult or expensive to live in, because it is structurally designed for the assumption that you are thin or that you have a partner. The normative Person, after all, is thin and romantically partnered. If you are not thin or not romantically partnered, there is something fundamentally less human about you.

[Fatness / singlehood] is something embarrassing, something worth mocking others over, something that reflects your fundamental unworthiness. Every fictional hero is thin, every fictional happy ending ends with romance. Everyone in your life is either quietly or not-so-quietly worried about you.

Today is not like any other day. Today is a time of reflection and a time of reckoning.

🫡🫡🫡🫡🫡

FIVE YEARS OF QUINNDEPENDENCE

DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU DOWN

AS FANNIE LOU HAMER SAID, “NOBODY’S FREE UNTIL EVERYBODY’S FREE”

PEACE AND LOVE TO YOU ALL

if you're learning HTML for any reason, i can't recommend HTML for people highly enough. it's a fantastic introduction to HTML and CSS targeted towards beginners who aren't technically inclined, and it isn't patronizing towards the reader for that. it's a very relaxed and kind (but informative) resource that even i reference from time to time (and i consider myself pretty good with semantic HTML).

so a normal world loading square is supposed to look like this

and not like this (or the abover screenshots)

Twilight Princess

What a red flag actually means: something here is an indicator of a potential problem (but might be fine with a reasonable explanation)

What people have now decided it means: abuse

I've lost count of the number of times I've now had to read variants of "My partner takes all my money and gives me back an allowance because he says it's a man's job to control finances, but he's racking up gambling debts" being met with "Wow this man is a walking red flag" no Becky that is abuse. That is not an indicator. He is an abuser. Call the police. We have lost the concept of a proxy: a thing that indicates a more important thing. And it's relevant to this conversation because I'm actually going to go out on a limb here:

With the obvious exception of paedophilia, age gaps themselves aren't a problem at all - they are a proxy for the actual harmful phenomenon. Hea me out, let me explain

The reason we don't like age gaps is because of the implied power dynamic. If one partner, usually male, is older than other - particularly if the other is still quite young - the risk is that what we're seeing is a worldly wise predator who is exploiting the lack of life experience of a young beautiful woman by mentally abusing her until she's no longer young and pretty enough to satisfy, at which point he'll move on to the next. There have been enough examples of this in human history. It's unfortunately not an uncommon pattern. Genders can also be diverse in this scenario

We can't necessarily see that dynamic from the outside. But we CAN see an inherent element of it: the ages of the people involved. So age becomes a proxy for the abuse. And, hey, it's often correct.

But here's the thing: the ages themselves are not causing harm.

The power dynamic is. The abuse is.

Plenty of age gap relationships are loving, healthy and steadfast. Two people met and genuinely fell in love regardless of the outer packaging, and have a relationship with all the highs and lows and challenges and rewards as any more traditional pairing. This happens all the time

Is the age gap a red flag? Sure! It indicates a potential issue.

Is it inherently abusive? Absolutely fucking not.

OP is right - we need to stop focusing just on the numbers and twisting the facts to fit by infantilising the younger partners, and start focusing on the actual harms. The DiCaprio Pattern of only dating under 24s repeatedly is itself a proxy, too, actually - but a much stronger one than the simple presence of an age gap.

(Even so, in DiCaprio's case, until any of his former partners come forward and describe him as abusive, actually, even that is up in the air - my personal interpretation, given how strong a pattern it is, is that he's a loser who views women as trophies (consciously or not). If any have come forward and I don't know about it, of course, fair enough. But those women were adults capable of making their own decisions, even if they might later come to regret it. And regretting poor decisions is part of life! That's how it goes, particularly with relationships. As long as they weren't abused, there's no biggie. And just as he was looking for young-and-beautiful, there's no way they weren't, on some level, looking for rich-and-famous; it goes both ways.)

Also, another element of this: I think a lot of modern extreme puritan discourse on this is actually ironically down to the age of those taking part. Up until your late 20s, ten years is actually a huge span of time to you, because in your own life you were in a completely different developmental phase ten years ago (teenager), and a completely different phase again ten years before that (child). That skews your sense of what a ten-year gap means. Whereas once you're in your 30s and beyond, ten years is like. Yeah I was an adult ten years ago, and I still am now. That's two adults. Who cares.

chatter: I'm choosing to read this as "don't @ me or send me content that makes me uncomfortable, and I won't go looking for it in spaces (like tumblr or w/e)."

* im allowed to change my ocs design

* nobody will kill me if i change my ocs design

* compliments are not threats

* just because somebody said they like my ocs design that does not mean they will hunt me down and kill me if i change my ocs design

* my ocs are mine and i can design them how i want

[sees a drawing of a non-conforming trans woman and immediately turns it into a transphobic caricature] what'd they mean by this

if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope

if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion

thought 1:

it absolutely is possible to justify the presence of potatoes in fantasy medieval europe; however, important to consider if you are actually trying to write a less eurocentric fantasy world or just trying to prop up your existing potatoes

& ultimately, the core issue here is less about the presence of potatoes and more about the absence of south america.

thought 2:

"imagine what a european cuisine without potatoes would be like" was perhaps poor phrasing given that, as several people have pointed out, pre-potato european cuisine is well documented. 'engage with' perhaps a better way to express this.

i think possibly a related issue here is that some people have a, wrongfooted idea about what pre-colonial european cuisine was like? I think some people have heard 'europe invaded the rest of the world for spices' and extrapolated that pre-colonial europeans were all eating flavourless grey porridge & then I suppose don't want that for their fantasy world. in actuality medieval europe did have interesting and tasty cuisine going on - here's a list of medieval european recipes.

thought 3:

it's true that this does, at least some of the time, stem from ignorance, the fact that people are able to be ignorant about this is itself part of the problem.

additionally, i think there is a difference between the average person on the street being like 'oh, I always thought potatoes were from ireland' and someone writing a fantasy novel set in medieval europe being so incurious about history that they've never clocked that potatoes are American. I'm happy to hold writers to a higher standard on this.

thought 4:

for anyone who is just now learning that potatoes come from South America: