There Was a Girl

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

I have said versions of all this before, but not On Tumblr; which is a problem inasmuch as this is a complaint about the parochial insularity of the Tumblr mechsploitation scene. So, futile as it may be, here it is, theoretically visible at the source of the issue: the terrible shortcoming I see in the Tumblr mechploitation scene is that, for the most part, actually writing, reading, or engaging with mechsploitation only happens in other places — what happens on Tumblr is "jacking off about puppygirls."

Everyone's allowed to jack off about puppygirls, of course, should they so wish, but this shouldn't be mistaken for things it isn't, such as e.g. "reading things" or "understanding a genre" or "knowing what the fuck you're talking about."

Mechsploitation is often mistaken for a subgenre of science fiction, from which Tumblr "fans" often talk about sanitising the horrifying elements. This is a fundamental media literacy error: mechsploitation is a subgenre of horror. You cannot sanitise the horror out of horror; furthermore, the horror in mechsploitation is explicitly fascism. The horror is the horror of fascism breaking its sincere opponents — if not into genuine agreement, then at least into a drugs-and-torture-obtained simulacrum of enthusiastic participation in fascist violence.

Whenever someone says "haha what if mechsplo but nicies to puppy :)" they are saying: it's icky that this horror genre is horror. The breaking people, the bad ends, the intentional feelbad, any of the kinks too edgy for Me Specifically — all that can go, superfluous. Let's take out the horror and breaking and drugs-and-torture and simulacrum and just have the enthusiastic participation, because that's nicies! Puppygirl's nice white affluent middle-class ass Simply signed up to kill the subaltern rebels in the imperial military when a recruiter came round to her school. Uncle Sam says: Off the leash, uwu-rah! :)

And if that criticism is too pointed for your taste, consider: mechsploitation without the things that make it mechsploitation probably isn't "reverse mechsplo" or "mechsplo but". It's probably just "milSF with mechs in," something that substantially pre-dates mechsploitation and has estabished genre language for talking about it. Neither it nor mechsplo is served by trying to define the negative space of Everything That's Not Mechsploitation in terms of mechsploitation; the attempt makes you look, at best, like you should Read Another Fucking Book.

“Never Forget” until the new target is those that they disagree with.

Here it is again. You might want to save it just in case an accident like that happens again

That's what V-coding is. That is why they are so adamant about sending trans women to men's prisons, because sex trafficking trans women within the men's prison system is an essential part of that system. Being misgendered by this isn't even an issue that's on our radar!

Michaela Joffe (joffeorama.bsky.social‬):

I know that fascist attacks on "obscenity" and "pornography" are a very dangerous threat to queer people and art, but the idea that all expressions of all kinks must be treated as default value neutral, or even good, as a result is absurd. porn is art, and so it is open to criticism.

you cannot have it both ways. if porn, kink and obscenity is worth protecting, and I believe they are, that means you can't whine and cry foul when it is criticized and analyzed. your desires, like everything else, exist in larger contexts, and sometimes they are homophobic, misogynist and racist.

the idea that all expressions of human desire are equivalent, and exist free from any larger historical, cultural, artistic or interpersonal contexts… that is absurd. why would desire alone be unique in that way? why would kink be different from every other human expression? ridiculous.

[The above are stills of Lisa Diamond talking. Transcription follows: "Often, our fantasies involve things that are taboo, things that are forbidden, things that we feel that we can't express in everyday life. That doesn't mean you actually want it in your everyday life. But there's a lot of variability in sexual fantasies, and they don't tell you anything reliable about you. If you have fantasies that disturb you or scare you, and you wonder what they mean, they don't mean a lot. So, don't worry so much about them." ~Lisa Diamond, feminist psychologist.]

The thing is, the "criticism" the person in screenshots is talking about is not criticism. It's censure. They cherry-picked some of the kinks and fantasies that they knew would cause an immediate emotional reaction in their audience, that would cause a knee-jerk disgust, and relied on that to support their argument. They're appealing to your disgust.

Pornography is art, but they're not talking about art when they say "fantasies" and "roleplay". Those aren't art. Those are people's private thoughts and private bedroom activities--which are NOT, actually, open to criticism. You don't get to criticise what people do in their private homes OR the privacy of their own thoughts, because it doesn't involve you.

Be VERY attentive to the words here. Be very attentive to the motivations behind the choices this person is making in their word-choices. They're being VERY sneaky and using several tactics to make it seem like what they're saying is just common sense, that it's NOT fascist, because they've lampshaded fascism in the opening sentence to make you think what they're talking about is Different. They take care to be saying "art" and "pornography" several times to get you nodding along, before suddenly switching to "fantasies" and "roleplay", BUT using words that are an Easy No and immediately provoke strong disgust emotions in the target audience drawn in by the opening sentence, and so tries to get around you noticing they've switched from the word "art" to the words "fantasy" and "roleplay". Pay attention! Do not let your emotions drive the car and that includes Disgust!

This is sneaky and underhanded and it's how the whorephobic Neo-Hays Code fascism pipeline starts! You are being recruited!

Your FANTASIES? Private thoughts that affect only you.

Your ROLEPLAY? Private activities that affect only you and other consenting partners.

These are not "pornography" these are not "art", and therefore other people who are not involved do not get to have an opinion. It does not matter how "uncomfortable" you are with the idea that literally anything and everything is someone's kink--that's a you problem.

Once something becomes art that is public, you are allowed to offer up criticism, analysis, and commentary. But merely offering moral censure--because to be clear, that's exactly what this is--is not even all that valid to do on art. You can, of course; it's just you getting angry at the art, and saying it offends you and then sometimes it means saying it SHOULD also offend everybody else. But that's just your opinion at that point. Until you actually do real criticism, "this is bad and you should feel bad" is still only at the level of analysis as "well I hated that picture". Okay you're allowed. But it's not critical analysis, it's not commentary, it's not applying any kind of actual real critical thinking to the art.

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.