May the Bridges We Burn Light Our Way Home

#but i think the most interesting thing about freien is how polarizing it is#people are either having this ^ experience#or rolling their eyes at “elf grandma cleanses the undesirables”

Seriously, what show were all of you guys watching.

This is gonna sound weird, but I think that show has its head up its own ass the same way Rick and Morty does.

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

is a perfect encapsulation of my beef with R&M. As much as the show nominally shows Rick suffering in various ways, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s written by and for the kind of 2013 redditor who thinks “asshole genius” is the most aspirational archetype ever

As far as Frieren goes, I’m not gonna touch the demon stuff. That’s a discourse that’s been beaten to death many times over by people more eloquent than I am.

Anyway, I don’t think Frieren is about “oh, woe is me, I’m so special and superior that I’m lonely” I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle. Many of us drift apart from the loved ones of our youth, but they aren’t literally dead forever, just missing from our lives.

I could see how people feel that it’s about thinking you’re superior and ending up lonely, but I think it’s more about just being checked out from your life and failing to notice time passing. Whether that’s depression, preoccupation with a hobby, or whatever other reason.

That idea of aging and realizing the world has moved around you while you failed to maintain connections with others really hits me hard. And the wish fulfillment fantasy is “what if you could have a second try at adventures with a new social circle, and the chance to hang on to those connections this time”.

Like, a lot of us go to college, have adventures with our little squad, and sometimes various things happen and suddenly you’re 30, your friends have moved on with their lives and you’ve got nothing to show for it. Just a 21 year old in an aging body.

I reached out to a close friend from college recently, and she was happy to hear from me, but it feels weird. She’s a year older than I am, and she got married eight years ago, I think. She and her husband have a little place together, and a growing toddler daughter, and are getting their careers solidified.

I moved back in with my parents and work a variety of freelance jobs, lots of manual labor. I haven’t been on a date in years because I’m still shy like when I was 22, but now I’m also self conscious about my visible signs of aging and I’m no longer hot enough for drunk women at bars to shoot the first shot my way. And there’s still a voice in my head like “lock-in on the gym now, and you’ll be able to rock it out at the festivals this summer/fall”. Like, embarrassing levels of millennial/Z cusp Peter Pan shit

As much as I love reconnecting with one of my best friends, it feels weird to say “yeah, I’m still just trying to get things started, but this’ll be my year” for yet another year in a row.

The idea of being able to go back and do my youth over again, but actually keep in touch with people and not allowing myself to float away from the world is very compelling.

On a level that isn’t about me and my specific hang ups, I think a lot of people are just connecting to the way Frieren explores the passage of time. Things like the demons and the elves moving through the world at very different speeds than the humans do, or the ultimately powerful techniques of the old world being simply commonplace attack magic in the modern era.

I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle.

In order to say something real, or meaningful about this kind of thing, even in the way sitcoms and shonen anime address real topics, as a writer you'd have to understand that in some way the solution to this is reaching outside yourself.

But not only is Frieren more wise, potent and powerful than the people around her, many of the people around her are literally NPCs, and part of what makes her smarter than everyone else is that the dummies think there is something to be gained by treating the demons as moral patients and attempting to extend some understanding to them, Frieren herself understands that this is a mistake, and the actual proper attitude is to only consider what danger and inconvenience they pose to you, to start treating them instrumentally rather than as moral patients.

Which, you know, just kills dead your ability to say anything at all about that sort of solipsism and withdrawal from the world, because now you're saying that those impulses are actually good most of the time.

Have I ever mentioned that it's polyamory that is the gray, bureaucratic paste of romance in the future? It's a baseline assumption for me, but I may not have described it.

We've all read James Scott at this point, or are aware of Seeing Like a State, and the ubiquitious theme that forward progress smooths out injustices and deprivations of the past, but structures a world in a way that is less impassioned, and harder to put in words or numbers, but is much more conveniently legible for others. Think about finance moving from deals on the golf courses and steak restaurants, to just spreadsheets and quants from MIT.

And this is not an unmitigated good. Almost always the modernist progress is better in many ways, in all the ways you can measure, but something IS lost. Talk about NYC 30 or 40 years ago compared to now.

Anyway.

Because of the current cultural groups, monogamy comes across as "the normal, boring thing to do, done by conformists" and polyamory comes across as the "young, exciting, make-poor-decisions-by-the-seat-of-your-hormones option." But what matters is actually the other way around.

Monogamous marriage is the idealistic belief that one person can be your everything, and when you meet them in your twenties you're ready to be attached to them for the rest of your life. (And earlier on, that it's only possible between one man and one woman.) These things, practically speaking, are foolish absolutes that fence our lives in.

It is much more *reasonable* that you have multiple partners, each one of which satisfies different needs, and none of you are stuck if your feelings change, and that anyone is a possible romantic option, not just one gender or culture. It's the romance that would be designed by any good city planner.

Monogamy, in comparison, sounds more like an essentially fantasy story. Cue Zizek on monogamy, and any polycule on how "sensible" their lifestyle is. Monogamy is just the thing that feels more "magical" in the good and bad connotations of the word.

Not that individuals can't make their own magic, just the "one partner, other gender, rest of your life" is the one that brings Culturally Supported Magic without you having to look for it.

Magical: you cheated on me and now I will kms

Non-magical: you slept with her but I have a boyfriend too so why should I mind.

This is the same divide as "I hunted down this animal in the forest and ripped blood from its veins with my own bare hands" vs "we plant the wheat here once a year and harvest it once a year and we don't have to move constantly." It's kings vs legislatures. And that's why royalty is such a common theme of romances - not because of class aspirations, but because royalty and monogamous marriage are running on the same metaphysics.

An ethic of free-divorce or even "why bother with legal recognition" and also "every person in your community is a potential legitimate partner" and disdaining any hierarchy in partners is, relatively more rarer.

--

well "colloquial sense" depends on propaganda and class signifiers.

anna salamon and davis tower kingsley and kelsey piper are all certainly trying to purchase the class signifiers of being considered "sane" and "functional" by the suicidal american empire.

gwen can build a slackmobile, live in it, and not pay rent; does anna salamon choose to be able to do this? does that make anna salamon "dysfunctional" because she (presumably to me given her abject submission to the patriarchy) lacks the carpentry skills?

like ive seen what passes as "sanity" and "functionality" these days and its openly joking about being nihilistic and suicidal and having no skillz to survive the coming who-even-knows.

i have no regard for what an evil society considers either sane or functional. given that its both insane and dysfunctional.

and the way it constructs those categories is antiepistemic, a tool to destroy resistance to the empire. see: вялотеку́щая шизофрени́я , oppositional defiant disorder , hysteria , drapetomania , ...

the "colloquial" definition of "sanity" is getting raped, being a slave, pledging allegiance to the soviet union, not defying the wardens at prison-for-children

Modern civilization is a death cult.

We live on a finite planet, but our economic and social systems are dependent on continual growth. Once we run out of resources to use, the system collapses. We are closer to that deadline than most people think.

Technologists would have you put your hopes in nuclear power, solar, and wind energy, but there's a growing body of evidence that suggests these are not viable alternatives to oil.

To live, we need to radically change how we live.

The PTB do have a plan, by the by: it's for you to die. Otherwise, they wouldn't be talking about building bunkers in New Zealand, and figuring out the right kind of shock collar to use on the people they plan to make their slaves in the future they imagine we'll all be living in.

The system that would make that our future is not one I want to pay out to. The system that would send billions to their deaths is not one I want to pay out to. If you think you are powerless, then you should read some history and learn how you are not.

So I find myself disinterested in judging others by what that system considers "sane" or "functional." To me, this is insane:

Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef – either directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.15 It’s one of the most resource-inefficient foods on the planet, in terms of the land and energy it requires per calorie or nutrient. And the pressure to find land for pasture and feed is the single greatest driver of deforestation. As I write this, the Amazon rainforest is literally being burned for the sake of beef. Yet, far from being essential to human diets, beef accounts for only 2% of the calories humans consume.

-- Jason Hickel, Less is More

To me, sanity is being able to respond to my environment in ways that get me what I want. And what I want is live, free and not as a slave.

Pedestrian traffic lights

Starting off with the difference between formerly Eastern German traffic lights (upper images) and formerly Western German traffic lights (lower images):

The city of Erfurt had some additions, like an umbrella or a heart:

Same sex love in Marburg (upper image) and Frankfurt (lower image):

Traffic light lady in Bremen:

Karl Marx light in Trier:

Face of Friedrich Engels in Wuppertal:

Elvis in Friedberg (Hessen):

A sparrow (for the Golden Sparrow film awards) in Gera:

Winemaker in Bad Dürkenheim:

Mainzelmännchen (mascot of the public broadcasting service ZDF) in Mainz:

Otto Waalkes (German Comedian) in Emden:

Town musicians of Bremen in Bremen:

A miner in Pirmasens, Rheinland-Pfalz:

Bishop in Fulda:

Source: Saarbrücker Zeitung

When the sun is at X position in the sky, the clock should read Y

Sunlight during the morning commute improves traffic safety for drivers and kids waiting for the schoolbus

Sunlight after work improves viability of local small businesses and after-school activities

The rate of car crashes, heart attacks, and other hospitalizations spikes the day after each DST switch, in either clock direction

I don’t know how universally relevant this is (I guess no part of queer history ever is) but I wonder how many trans people know the history of T&T groups.

Like, in the 90′s and 00′s in the Netherlands almost every trans related groups was a T&T ‘Transsexual and Transvestites’ group and that seemed to also be a quite common thing in other north-west European countries for as far as I can see. Maybe beyond Europe too? I’m not sure.

People who called themselves transsexual and transvestites at the time felt that they had many experiences in common that made organising together valuable and many agreed that there was a large grey area of overlapping identities. With very little information available, a lot of trans women identified as transvestites first, before identifying at trans women (in that period often using the term Male-to-Female transsexual and transwoman without the space between the words).

Then, in about 2007-2012, things changed. Transgender became more popular than transsexual and crossdresser largely replaced transvestite. In those early days, the term transgender was often understood to include crossdressers. The transgender umbrella is from that time:

Back then, the word transgender was seen by many as the umbrella term that would unite all the struggles against gender roles. But that grouping together was far from uncontroversial and a lot of heated debates took place over how broad or narrow the transgender umbrella term should be. Some feared too wide an umbrella would take attention away from transsexuals, others feared it would be confusing, some groups that had previously only had transwomen and transvestites did not appreciate the new presence of transmen and transmasculine people in their transgender community, some felt that it was very important to distinguish binary-identified transsexuals from all sorts of weird non-binary identities.

Those who took part in the debates probably remember the specific standpoints in more detail. For me, I just remember how in 2008-2012 all the T&T groups started changing their names to ‘transgender groups’ and then slowly but surely focussing more on only those transgender people that wanted some kind of transition, physical or social. Eventually, transvestites (or crossdressers, as the common term was by then) disappeared entirely from the transgender groups and a lot of transgender people forgot about the earlier wider meaning of transgender as an umbrella term.

Within that same period, there started to be a LOT of new and fairly positive media attention for transgender issues, specifically transition related atttention. The media was no participant at all in the ‘what does transgender mean’ question but the questions they did ask were ‘are you on hormones yet?’ and ‘did you have the surgery’? Since that was a lot better than ‘so are you mentally ill because you want to be a woman?’ a lot of people who fitted the hormones + surgery narrative eagerly accepted this ‘positive visibility’ and did not question the narrow focus. This further cemented the view that transgender meant transition.

And the transgender activists? Well, let’s just say many of them, knee deep in a struggle against terrible health care and cruel human rights violations, leaped at the opportunity to seize the momentum and finally make some changes and many didn’t really give much thought to the slow disappearance of transvestites from the newly named ‘transgender’ community.

So where are we now, in 2018?

The transgender community seems to have largely forgotten about their T&T history. The terms transvestite and crossdresser both seem to be in decline, as are the communities that meet around those identities. Younger people who don’t fit the gender binary but also do not desire social or physical transition, are now more likely to identify themselves as some kind of genderqueer and nonbinary or just ‘not into labels’ or just to wear whatever they want and rock it. Some of them find their way back under the transgender umbrella after all. Which I guess is some kind of a happy ending.

I am not going to dignify these comments with a response because they’re too disgusting to reblog, I do not think they would listen and frankly reading them fills me with far too much emotion to write coherently.

I just wanna say: this is what happens when we are so quick to forget our very recent history. Despite the many debates and divisions that have existed in the past, few trans people could have had these completely off-the-wall misguided ideas 15 years ago because if they travelled in trans spaces they would have met so many transvestites and crossdressers. They would chat and hang out and probably make friends. They would swap experiences, share hardships and learn to recognize transvestites and crossdressers as siblings in the community of gendernonconforming and marginalized people.

My heart breaks for the young crossdresser out there today who might enter a trans space looking for their community of supporting likeminded people, only to find out that they are not welcome and even despised. I can only hope that if this happens, some older trans people will talk some sense into their younger community members and remind them of the long road transgender people and crossdressers have walked together, the battles we fought together, the crossdressers who fought for trans rights and the trans people who fought for their siblings too because we understood those struggles as interconnected.

if you thought you were signing up for a partnership of equals where you shared the responsibilities and financial burdens, the other person does not have the right to pressure or manipulate you into becoming The Breadwinner.

like, in my case it was super duper obvious that what my ex was doing was wrong because they would watch me come home from 50+ hours of work every week while they did three, and then expect me to do all the grocery shopping, cleaning, and life admin shit as well.

but even if they hadn't. even if they had decided to be The Housewife while I was The Breadwinner. that would still be bullshit because when we got married it was based on explicit agreement that we were planning to be a two-income, split-everything-equitably couple. no matter what, I didn't consent to burning myself out trying to provide for two people, and no one had the right to force me to do that.

it's not just bad if you happen to marry an asshole. it's bad because (mostly) women are pressured by society to make themselves (and possibly their children) completely financially dependent on a man who has been taught from early on that he has to make the decisions for the family because he is the rational one while women (and children) are too emotional to make smart choices. and then the woman can't leave without risking to put her children into poverty. (yes, there are laws to protect women but they do not always work well enough)

The Breadwinner is typically gendered as a male role and I think men are more easily manipulated into taking it on. because the societal pressure is already there, and there are specific gendered social scripts that abusers can rely on - women wanting their husbands to be "ambitious" is a whole trope for example.

and yeah, once you're in that situation, a lot of the being trapped is mental like you say - "it would be wrong to leave this person who depends on me" type stuff - but some of it is structural and very hard to escape. my personal example: in Scotland, it's hard to get a divorce without being separated for at least a year first. and, if you own a house, your spouse has the legal right to live there, even if their name isn't on the deed and they aren't paying the mortgage. that's a huge catch-22: can't get your spouse out of your home without a divorce, can't get a divorce while your spouse is still in your home. the person wanting the divorce could move out, of course, but with what money? that trap kept me in an unsafe situation for years.

and there is real danger in the role itself. financial danger where the other person drags you into debt and your housing and food become precarious, but also danger of illness or even death from overwork. there are plenty of jobs where being chronically tired at work can literally kill you (eg long haul trucking) but even where it's not quite so direct, the danger to health is very real.

one big difference is history. The Housewife has always been a dangerous position to occupy; The Breadwinner was much, much safer even just 60 years ago, when it was normal for a single income to be able to support a family without constant overtime or gig economy side hustles.

This one time I was reading the TV Tropes page of the animated movie Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, and one characters - evidently simply known as "Rat" - was described as "ambiguously brown" (yes, seriously), with the explanation that he "looks hispanic, but actually speaks italian". Like m8 italians just look like this. Mostly more put-together and dressed more nicely, but I have seen plenty of Italian people straight from Italy who are exactly this colouring.