Hey so we've been dancing around being out about this but this blog is actually run by a system and I figured we should introduce ourselves more properly. So, little bios for everyone here.
Generally if you don't know who's talking, we don't even know sometimes, Fortune or Adrian is fine, and any pronouns, body as a whole is Jewish, trans masc, White and 22
Adri, He/Him, human, 22, fueled by spite and coffee but like... I try to be nice about it, my media taste gets more pretentious by the day, Dan Powell fiction kin
Masha, He/Him, human (?), 22, took the anxious tendencies in the divorce figuring out we were a system, causes problems on purpose
Fira, She/It, Demon (?), ???, gave Masha the anxious tendencies in the divorce figuring out we're a system, also causes problems on purpose, token extrovert, fictive?
Rowan, They/She, Human, 25, anxiety buddies with Masha, loves baking and cute things, fictive
Marius, He/They, human, 19, permanently in his emo phase, grumpy
Simon, He/Him, human, 28, fan of birds and psychology, fictive
Vanny, It/🔗, computer process, ???, songtive
song, no pronouns, something, ???, researcher and engineer of the strange, fictive
Jasper, He/Him, human, 30 something, kinda a hippie, laid back totally chill definitely not faking it, fictive
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Sometimes, in their obsession with monsters, humans end up finding other humans. In 2019, Cachét developed a crush on Salad Fingers, the main character in a British cult web cartoon. She drew porn of Salad Fingers and sent it to David Firth, the show’s creator. Firth loved it and followed her back. “He thought I was a guy because no girl would draw porn of Salad Fingers,” Cachét says.
They started messaging. Cachét complimented his drawing of a human-bug threesome and asked for a print. Three years later, Cachét and David got married. The human-bug threesome drawing hangs on the wall of their home.
sometimes your distress does indicate you should stop and respect your limitations. at other times it's more of a baby aquatic mammal being introduced to water for the first time thing. Too bad the difference is so hard to tell.
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i just got the "see where your blood has gone!" email from giving blood but it glitched and just showed me my current location. which. theyre not wrong. that is where most of my blood is
Baroness Lubinska who presided over the famous duel between Princess Pauline Metternich and the Countess Kielmannsegg in 1892, insisted that the duelists remove their clothing above their waists to avoid infection in the event that a sword pushed clothing into the wound it caused. Being a doctor, the baroness had seen many instances of septic infection in soldiers for this very reason throughout her years of medical training.
the great thing about #ownvoices is you don’t have to know jack shit about the history or experiences of people like you and you can write the worst most thoughtless drivel but it’s fine because it’s #ownvoices and your perspective is exactly as expert and valuable as that of anyone who has spent years as an advocate for your community
Adding some context of where Own Voices came from, since it was brought up in these very astute tags…
Own Voices was coined by author Corinne Duyvis in the 2010s to describe autistic representation by autistic people, in a time when the bulk of fiction about autism was by Autism Mom types. I’m pretty sure she was riffing on the slogan Nothing About Us Without Us, which is best known in disability rights circles in English.
Because it was a twitter hashtag it VERY quickly took off in the midst of (extremely necessary!) discussions by members of groups like We Need Diverse Books, who were advocating for the inclusion of marginalized authors in publishing, particularly publishing of children’s literature.
HOWEVER. The problem with hashtaggable slogans is that they are just. Not very nuanced! Even Duyvis herself has expressed frustration with some of the directions the hashtag ended up taking, eg publishers wanting work by marginalized authors ONLY as OwnVoices, which is to say, ONLY if they were Dealing With Their Marginalization. Black author but the book is just a fun romp and it isn’t about Black Issues? No thanks. Queer author doesn’t want to come out of the closet? Well then it isn’t OwnVoices is it? Better harass them out of the closet to make sure we are doing Rep correctly.
And as this thread calls out, the trend did not take into account that having an identity may not equal being knowledgeable about that identity (of course also because Identity Categories are not monolithic!).
Essentially, it was a phrase coined with good intentions, co-opted by marketing, and ultimately, arguably, a phrase that has outlived its usefulness. Twitter is dead OwnVoices is dead and me I feel also not so good
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
I’m glad so many people have discovered Judith “Judy” Heumann through this silly little gif set. I am sorry to say she has died at the age of 75. She was known as the mother of disability rights. In 1970 she sued the Board of Education to become a licensed teacher and she won. In 1977 she was one of the organizers of the 504 Sit-in, a 24 day protest for disability rights. You can learn more about her story from her book Being Heumann, the picture book Fighting for YES! or the documentary Crip Camp.
Judy Heumann believed in the inherent value of each disabled individual and would never back down on what she thought was right. Her friends and fellow activists remember her as a strong leader.
I did a paper on her for one of my college classes! She’s so cool! Here’s some facts!
She’s Jewish and born to immigrant german parents who migrated in the 1930s
She has been in a wheelchair for nearly her entire life due to contacting polio at a very young age.
Due to her wheelchair, she was actually barred from most schooling including kindergarten as her wheelchair was deemed as a “risk.” because it could be “in the way” if there was a fire.
She was the first wheelchair teacher in New York after suing when she was once again denied her license for the same reasons she was denied kindergarten.
She worked as the Assistant Secretary of Education for OSERS for 8 years
Her parents, especially her mother, were big parts in her becoming an activist as her mother Ilse was a community organizer and fought hard to get her daughter as much education as she could, it was her activism that helped her daughter and other disabled children be allowed to enroll in High School instead of being separated into a specific disabled school. (We don’t have time to go into all that but tldr; those schools sucked and its a genuine accomplishment disabled kids no longer have to learn in like, cramped attics that didn’t teach anything)
She was a founder of the organization Disabled in Action! She didn’t just organize sit-ins, she helped RUN the organization that was organizing them!
The president she butted heads with the most was Richard Nixxon, this isn’t that important I just know everyone loves when he gets dunked on
She helped CREATE THE INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES EDUCATION ACT!!! I cannot express to you just how important that is, if you have basically any kind of disability, this act is a big reason you were able to go to a public school instead of being shoved into a warehouse.
The Black Panthers helped with the 504 sit-in! They helped bring food because the organization also included black disabled people, and one of the members of both, Brad Lomax, asked for help!
She had a podcast! You can go listen to that podcast right now!
Honestly just check out her website in general
She also founded the Berkeley Center for Independent Living!!
Honestly I could keep going on but she’s genuinely one of my heroes and was an amazing person who it is not an underestimate to say changed the world for the better.
May her memory be a blessing!!! May the disabled community always remember how much of it was built on the work and back of a disabled Jewish woman!!!
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Do you think it's possible to fake being plural even to yourself?
One or two genuine questions to you, anon, before I give my usual spiel on "I think I'm somehow faking it unconsciously and I think I should be ashamed because the fact that I can't stop faking it makes me morally bad":
What would it actually mean to fake plurality?
What does it mean to fake anything, in plain language (and ideally without moral weight attached)?
What makes a thing fake?
The usual spiel on secretly faking it:
First, if this is about you: try to turn it off for one week. Or a day, whichever feels better. All of it. I don't mean pretend that it doesn't exist, I mean stop doing it altogether. Just stop. Snap of the fingers, cold turkey, stop.
You are actively doing it, aren't you? Like, intentionally? You know you absolutely do not identify with the plural label or any plural experiences, that none of this has any possible application or interest to you, that plurality is completely and utterly irrelevant to your life... but you're putting in a large amount of intentional effort to appear as though you're plural for reasons that you don't understand whatsoever? Even if you really want to stop sometimes?
Why are you faking that instead of, I don't know, faking your way into a massive celebrity party or something? You must be talented, and this sounds like it would be exhausting to juggle. Compared to seeing the inside of a nuclear reactor or getting into a festival for free, this is pretty boring as far as pretending goes. Why keep it up? What are you gaining for all that work, especially when you'd be socially fucked if someone called it out?
It's not intentional? You keep trying to stop and you can't? It's not going away no matter how hard you try to change it?
You're probably not faking It. Sorry.
"fake", verb:
- tamper, with the purpose of deception (source)
- "counterfeit", to imitate or feign especially with intent to deceive (source, source)
- one does not fake without intent.
If someone is faking something, then by definition, they know. It's an active and intentional effort, something that they have to put energy and work into sustaining, something that's a relief to turn off. They can turn it off, and they know this because they are intentionally choosing to pretend to have an experience they do not actually, "objectively" have.
And here are the two important points:
Faking is an intentional act. If someone is faking something, then they know for absolute certain that they are faking something. Intent is required to fake something.
The concept of "fake" plurality relies on the idea of an objective state of the self/selves: some existential, absolute truth about whether someone is plural or not.
On point two:
We have no metrics to determine an absolute reality of the self for absolute certain. There are some physical characteristics that have been noticed in brain scans comparing DID systems against controls, but regardless of whether you believe in inherent differences in brain structure, most of us can't get a brain scan on a whim, and we don't have much of this kind of data yet for most other plural experiences. (Tulpamancy brain scan study when? Has that come out yet?)
We also have no idea why consciousness exists or where it's located, if anywhere. It's enough of a slippery issue for the concept of the philosophical zombie to exist: how do we know that anyone else is conscious? We don't. How do we know that plurality is an inherent or objective property of a body? We don't.
Do I believe that faking plurality is possible at all?
Sure. I think it could be done and I've seen it confessed to. I don't think that hunting for "fakes" or accusing strangers of faking their experiences is going to help anyone, though.
I do think sometimes that if someone were to fake this in the long run, then they would have to be very careful that none of it took on a life of its own. I've met a few accidental tulpamancers. It happens.
Do I think it's common to fake plurality?
No. It's a lot of effort for fairly little reward given that some people still think Split is basically a documentary.
Do I think that faking plurality can be done without knowing it?
No. A person might later find that another framework or explanation works better for them, but that doesn't mean they were secretly faking plurality. It means that they have an experience, and they found a different explanation for that experience that worked better for them. Good for them.
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Talking to my traumatized friends like “take your time responding and don’t feel any need to cater to my opinion in this matter just tell me the truth about what you feel. Your feelings are valid. ” and it’s about like choosing where to go to lunch.
Y'all do not know how long it took for me to finally realize "telling other people what I think they want to hear" is not the nicest kindest choice for me to always make. And neither do I, because I'm still learning it, but as soon as I do I'll be sure to tell you How Long It Took.
Because, haha, it turns out? Most people actually don't need to be constantly right, always in control, and perpetually being reassured. And they'll feel funny (negative) when you treat them like they do. Because people mostly assume that how you treat them is a direct reflection of how you perceive them, and they will never assume you're treating them that way because of someone who literally isn't currently in the room.
Wild, I know.
In actuality, people already know you have a preference because that is a very normal thing to have. And because you're never as slick as you think you are, you definitely won't fool anyone by pretending you don't. So the actual kindest choice to make is to just be honest about what you want, because most people will feel most comfortable when they know for sure that the decision you've both made is truly a mutual agreement.
Genuinely? Mind-blowing concept. But a very helpful thing to remember.
As July gets started people on tumblr will invariably turn their mind to International Bog Day, and I want to get ahead of it and propose something.
Bog Day falls on the 4th Sunday in July, the 22nd the year the screenshot was taken but this year the 26th.
Given that this always takes off with the assumption that its the 22nd, I think we should split the holiday into two forms: observed and official
Observed will take place on the 22nd as usual, and we can celebrate it here with memes, shitpostery and bog awareness.
Offiical is for action and celebration away from tumblr. Make something with dolphin-safe cranberries! Find out about wetlands in your area! Visit them if open to the public! Sign up to volunteer with orgs that protect them! Donate to nonprofits looking to preserve them! They’re very vulnerable habits - ever more so in the U.S. after the devastating Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency decision from the supreme court in 2023, which limits the Clean Water Act and took protection away from the majority of the nation’s wetlands. The Audubon Society is one of the orgs working to look after them in the face of that, and Wetlands International has a fund you can donate to help monitor the areas used by migratory waterbirds, but I encourage you to do your own research and find ones that speak to you. It’s worth it - they are so important to natural world and the one built by humans alike.
(If you are in the Southern hemisphere and this doesn’t appeal to you in the middle of winter, World Wetlands Day is February 2nd!)
