m0bloo's inferno

i love how gnc they both r like haruhi was the the blueprint for me realizing i was pretty ehhh about gender all tg and even tho it wasn’t really explored in the anime tamaki would be down for genderfuckery after some character development

i fear this may have just brought back my ohshc obsession… guess i gotta go open ao3 now…

Omg thank you so much!! That’s so awesome to hear! They’re both so gender to me.

Your last sentence made me audibly go “WAIT HANG ON” because the Haruhi x Tamaki tag on ao3 is so treachorous imo. Like, so much Reader/OC stuff, breakup/divorce fics in the tag, it’s hard to find plain old shipping fics. So thought I should recc some of my favorites:

The real point is that you OWN a CD. You do NOT own anything digital you purchase.

Google Play stole hundreds of dollars worth of music I paid them for from me by forcing me to upload it to YouTube Music (or lose it entirely) which is behind a subscription paywall, requiring me now to pay more money every month if I want to listen to MY music I PAID for without constant advertising.

You do not own anything digitally purchased. It can be taken back from you at any time and it is fully legal for big corporations to do so for some reason.

CDs can't be taken from you unless they come into your house or car in person to physically pry them out of your cold dead hands.

Empty cd in the slot

Open cd on desktop

Drag music files in

CDs are useful, my lambs.

Also, you’ve unlocked a bonus story.

I work in a public service. My local school districts are cracking down on cell phones. A teen came into my work to try to burn their first cd.

Their first cd.

They were having some trouble and I was secretly like (this is my moment, holy Shit, burning CDs almost continuously from middle school until a couple years ago is About To Be Relevant, what the fuck, fucking hooray)

And I go over, and I listen to the teen (they bought a cheap stack of 100 READ/WRITE CDS. 100!!! And a single-disc cd walkman!!), and we fuss with it, and I troubleshoot the issue they were encountering.

It was So Easy. To fix this issue. I had to do almost nothing. Media player was grumpy bc the files were not in the folder it wanted them in. I moved them. It started working.

“Oh my god, you’re a MIRACLE WORKER!!”

I will be thriving off that moment for Years.

And before I had to go, I told them, “hey, if you can find a compatible player for cheap, you can fit way more songs per disc on an mp3 cd. We just burned an audio cd.”

They got So Excited.

Which starred Nathan Lane as a drag queen just two years after he had voice Pumba in "The Lion King":

And we ESPECIALLY need to remember Victor Victoria from 1982 (during the REAGAN administration) which is SET IN THE 1930S and stars everyone's favorite curtain-sewing nanny as a struggling soprano who decides to pretend to be a boy doing drag (DOUBLE THE DRAG FOR YOUR MONEY). I mean look at this photo:

Count Victor Grazinski isn't putting up with your transphobia (or you being a dick to Robert Preston).

Some Like It Hot (1959), it got in trouble with censors and still went ahead, but it featured a lot of Gender and a character getting really into this whole “being a girl for real” thing, as well as the implication of a a gay engagement being on the table

but like? It has Marilyn Monroe in it and banger music and it’s a classic! I only know from my mother bringing it up and also a tiny bit of exposure to russian tv channels, but I think it was also popular in the Soviet Union? So she’d seen it as a child and loved it so much she watched it with me when I was also just a child.

2005 movie adaptation of 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical! Lesbian couple! Kind-of-gay-kind-of-het-with-a-side-of-trans-it-was-the-90s-the-definitions-are-squishy couple! Every single couple in it is interracial!

1999 teen comedy satire about being a lesbian! Ridiculously fucking funny!

YOUR MOM'S CHICK FLICK COMEDY-DRAMA!! 1991!! The woman on the top left was in love with the woman on the top right! It's implied that the woman on the bottom right is the elderly woman on the top left! In the book the two women on top are explicitly lovers! It won two Oscars and three Golden Globes! This movie passes the Bechdel test basically every thirty seconds!

YOUR MOM'S ROMANTIC FANTASY-DRAMA! 1992! A young bride switches souls with an old man and she and her newlywed husband have to figure out how to connect! Those are two of the biggest stars of the era on that cover!! You will notice the word "joke" appeared nowhere in this description!

1994! The only "it's a man in a dress" humor comes from a male bus driver developing a crush on the titular character! There's nothing dark or deviant about the fact it's Robin Williams in drag even if the plot wouldn't pass muster today! The comedy comes from a very cishet American dude trying to navigate life both as himself and a "cishet British nanny who's a widow" at the same time!

1982 comedy! Christmas release! Similar plot to the abovementioned Victor/Victoria! Main character actually learns and grows due to his experiences as a woman!

Legal drama! 1993! You probably STILL know the names on this poster! That's Tom Hanks playing a gay man with AIDS who's suing his former employer for sexual discrimination! That's a Black man playing his lawyer!

1973! If you're wondering what the fuck a Jesus movie is doing here, it portrays Judas as being in love with Jesus! Judas is Black! He's also a sympathetic character who's doomed by the narrative! My mom remembered seeing it in theatres and told me there were massive protests, not because of Judas, but because Jesus is shown being royally pissed off! And by the way...

THEY DID IT FUCKING TWICE!! The remake is from 2000 and it kinda sucks but it also garnered basically no outrage (except from musical theater fans pissed about the weak casting) in spite of the fact it's significantly more explicit than the original and suggests that whole "in love" thing was reciprocal!

Now let me tell you what ties all of these movies together, except for the second Jesus Christ Superstar and also But I'm A Cheerleader because my mom was deeply biased against teen comedies:

THEY WERE ALL ON MY SHELF WHEN I WAS GROWING UP. A VERY AVERAGE MIDWESTERN FAMILY OWNED ALL OF THESE.

And you'll notice I didn't mention Angels in America, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brokeback Mountain, Jennifer's Body, Saved!, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Flawless, or Torch Song Trilogy. I only provided movies my family owned.

Also the Reagan years. And you can lean into the fact that the guy is in a relationship he has to hide because people wouldn't understand it, but the real standout is the character of Hollywood Montrose.

adding Different For Girls (1996) - lovely understated british film about a trans woman (yes played by a cis man, it was the 90s) and a cis guy who was friends with her at school, who meets her again years later after she transitioned, and they fall in love

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

eBird (birds

Merlin (birds)

citizenscience.gov (big project database, US-based)

iNaturalist (nature)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data) Smithsonian archives (transcriptions, many subjects)

Cornell Bird Lab (birds)

FoldIt (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

In person

Bioblitz (nature) Species watch (species) Audobon Society (birds)

Also:

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere