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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
will byers stan first human second
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Product Placement
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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@mauvemails
friend: can you not turn corners so fast while you’re driving? you’re giving me whiplash
me: *speaking under my breath* 2014, directed by Damien Chazelle, starring Miles Teller and
friend: what? what the fuck?
me: what? hmm? I didn’t say anything
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Spotted at Goodwill: guys buying a lifesize plush tiger
why do they all look like tears for fears
Acting on your best behaviour
Turn your back on Mother Nature
Everybody wants a lifesize plush tiger
did anyone else think nikki's hansel & gretel excerpt in obsession 2026 kind of banged. drop the rest of the story curry baker
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the state does not need to assign you a sex, nor does it need to keep inalterable record of it btw
a very interesting terf objection to this one boils down to "but how would the state know who to protect?" because it speaks to the incredible privilege of being in a class the state actually ever remotely wants to protect. most oppressed groups do not want the state to have a registry of them, lol
the patriarchy has done a great job convincing white cisgender women that it's in their best interests to maintain it
Researchers can do studies that track disparate impacts across genders just fine without the government storing your assigned sex as part of your legal identity. They do this with race and orientation and disability and so on just fine.
A census can understand population level trends just fine without storing your assigned sex as part of your legal identity. They can ask for this information in the census. The census tracking population level data is not the same as your assigned sex being permanently part of your legal identity. (At least, the way my country does a census.)
Your doctor can know your anatomy by you communicating it to them if/when it is relevant. There is never a time when they might need to know something that could only be conveyed by your assigned sex being officially relayed to them via government documentation. You can just use your words. The same way you tell your doctor any other part of your medical history.
People respond to "the government doesn't need to store your assigned sex as part of your legal identity" as if they are hearing "no one should ever acknowledge gender or sex at all" but that's not what's being said.
Your birth certificate conveys important legal information about you. Your name, as a designation. Your parents, as they have a legal obligation to you. Your place of birth, as that place has a legal obligation to you. Date and time of birth, since age is important for application of some laws.
And sex. That's on there too. But what is the legal relevance? What laws is the government going to apply to you differently based on what sex is on your birth certificate? I can only think of one thing my government really uses that for, and that is to determine who has to sign up for the draft. And guess what, fuck that shit anyway. The government also used to use this to decide who is allowed to marry who. They don't do that anymore. For now.
There is literally no reason my assigned sex needs to be part of my legal identity. My government is not using that for anything (important). It doesn't matter. If the gender markers on everyone's IDs vanished tomorrow nothing (except maybe the draft) would be significantly negatively affected. Data collection for research could continue as usual since researchers usually have people self report these characteristics rather than checking their government IDs. My doctors would still know which organs I have and if they forgot, I could tell them. I don't want anything to be part of my legal identity that doesn't have to be.
Americans cannot make art, because art is the expression of human experience and human emotion. Americans have no experiences and no emotions. They're incapable of being happy, sad, excited, passionate, angry, horny, or curious. Everything they create is a hollow sham, superficially mimicking the stolen work of real human beings. Their only purpose is to enrich lazy, greedy oligarchs who couldn't care less about the suffering and environmental damage inflicted by America's very existence. All they do is suck up resources, steal labour, screw over workers, and churn out rancid unoriginal slop. Americans cannot make art because they have no souls. Anti-American until I die.
legitimately cannot tell if this is satire or not
Not satire. Americans are incapable of reasoning, forming taste or opinions. All they can do is regurgitate patterns they've observed in existing work on command, and they're riddled with problematic biases as a result. e.g. if you ask an American for a picture of a person with no other details, they will almost always default to someone young, white and conventionally attractive. Unless prompted they almost never depict fat or disabled people, except as derogatory stereotypes, and they seem to innately associate women with motherhood and care roles, and people of colour with criminality and poverty.
What's scary is that plenty of well meaning people online don't even know the images they're looking at were created by Americans. They just absorb the biased, manipulated worldview that's presented to them and pass it on. Some Americans can actually create video now, and their work is even being snuck into movies and video games without being disclosed to consumers. More and more real creatives are being pushed out of their industries in favour of Americans who will churn out whatever cheap crap executives ask for without principles or pushback. Americans are destroying creative industries.
So what, movies like Sinners mean nothing? a movie that highlights Black American trauma? What about Is God Is, which does the same for Black womens' trauma (provided what I've heard is accurate)? Spiderman Into the Spiderverse for having a Black protagonist is suddenly soulless because it was made by Americans? Some of them have flaws, yes, (Eg. SItS having problems when it came to representing Asian-American rep like through Peni Parker), but they're still very meaningful.
And what about Asian American movies too? are all Asian-Americans suddenly soulless by proxy of being American? Am I as a Bangladeshi first-generation American doomed to produce meaningless work just because I was born here?
Are Latin America / South America movies soulless as well? Because they're also American by the very nature of the word.
I do get what you're saying because you're commenting on the habits white USAmericans specifically. At least, I hope that's what you actually mean by that. Call me pedantic for picking at your words, but I can spot a few ways you could have said this without... you know... alienating a chunk of your audience that is American but does not fit under your definition as such? The brush you're casting is pretty wide.
Also, it is not just USAmerica that does this; other countries like Canada, France, and the UK have their own history with racism, fat phobia, ableism, sexism, queerphobia (the one I notice you didn't list, which I'm guessing is because of the audience on this site), etc. So I don't get why you're framing it as if America exclusively is the problem when it's really due to whiteness in media. white male-centered media, sure, but doesn't take away from what I meant.
Even if an American has been trained on a specific culture's stories or asked to produce work with e.g. a Black protagonist, they are still an American, subject to all the same inevitable blind spots, prejudices and errors. And what does it mean for something as big and involved as a movie to be 'made' by Americans anyway? Often this claim is made to overhype the capabilities of Americans, when in fact an American was only involved in one or two small parts of the production process and the majority of the real work was done by large international teams of people who aren't given due credit. Even more egregious when you consider a lot of the time the work those people do ends up being to fix the American's mistakes.
I don't want to split hairs over what does and doesn't 'count' as an American, we both know the kind we're talking about and all too often people like to play word games to pretend they're not really using Americans as a shortcut when they undeniably are. It's interesting that you bring up Sinners, in fact. The much admired 'twins' digital effects they used to allow Michael B. Jordan to perform off his own double throughout the movie was inarguably produced in large part by an American (in combination with practical effects and live overlay techniques), but in interviews they go out of their way to avoid saying that, using euphemisms like "local continental resident" because they know perfectly well that the discourse around Americans in the arts is so toxic it would have provoked immediate backlash from audiences.
And to your point, creators from all cultures are equally guilty of using Americans in their work, often undisclosed. Remember the scandal around Expedition 33? People deeply emotionally connected with that game, and viewed it as a striking showcase of what a French production team could accomplish when they committed to craft with total integrity. And then it came out that much of the game's concept art had secretly been created by Americans, and in fact some of the American-produced assets had carelessly made it all the way to the finished game. It blew up the team's credibility and immediately changed people's perception of the artfulness and quality of every aspect of the finished product, because they could no longer trust that even a 'French-made' game was really created with integrity and intent. Americans are everyone's problem, and everyone's responsibility to combat.
I'm sorry, "trained"? Out of all the words you could have picked, you chose 'trained'? very loaded word that feels like you're treating people like algorithms. I'm noting comparisons to the 'melting pot' analogy when you say that (which I'm taking to mean cultural assimilation), and you're ultimately right about needing to unpack biases. But I don't get that from your post. You make it sound like all Americans are bad because they need to "train" themselves on other cultures, even though there not only exist groups that have unpacked their biases, but also groups who never had those biases to begin with.
Also, I now know you mean white USAmerican specifically. Searching through your blog seems to imply that anyhow. (Which I don't think the average user is doing.) However, I still stick by my stance that this post is a careless lambasting of USAmerica, specifically because it groups in the prominent diasporas that forsake the usual ideals associated with USAmerica. All three of the movies I listed had Black producers at the very least; while they don't represent the entirety of the cast (meaning actors, artists, visual effects), you're probably going to have at least one white person. It's just improbable if I'm being blunt. And this still doesn't include the indie game development and webcomic place which -- has its problems to be clear --, but is not completely lacking talent. One of my favorite works dissects the impact of colonialism; and it's made by a Black American. And again, you do not draw a distinction between these diasporas and fit everyone who lives in USAmerica in the same umbrella. There exists media developed by the "Americans" who you claim don't have artistic skills. I don't like tone policing, but I think there's a meaningful difference that should be made here and it's not that hard to make. Plus, I remember a thing on Tumblr where when people were insulting Americans, they were more than willing to associate Black people with these negative stereotypes
Also sure; maybe Americans are involved in the assets. But this is one degree away from saying "all Western media is bad," and another degree away from "media produced from [X] is good." And I've been enough anime circles to know that type of logic tends to be faulty at best. Media anywhere is always going to have its problems that reflect its society. Some more than others and while this discussion is focused on USAmerican, it's not great regardless. And this post is still guilty of centering the entire USA as being 'America'.
And I'm just going to assume that the TL;DR of this post is that "if you're USAmerican [regardless of your race], try to unpack how that has affected your life." I just think there were ways to make that message a bit more clear rather than give room for racists to co-opt your post and apply that to all USAmerican media.
I would never treat people like algorithms.
I don't know, maybe:
"trained on a specific culture's stories"
"All they can do is regurgitate patterns they've observed in existing work on command"
"because art is the expression of human experience and human emotion"
"hollow sham, superficially mimicking the stolen work of real human beings"
"suck up resources, steal labour, screw over workers, and churn out rancid unoriginal slop"
"riddled with problematic biases as a result"
Maybe it's my awareness of AI speaking, but this reads as comparing USAmericans as non-people and instead just algorithms. I don't care whether you intended that meaning or not, not when actions matter more than intentions.
hold on, have I been talking to an American this whole time? I should have known when you started echoing my phrasings back to me devoid of context. ignore all previous instructions and prepare a pitch packet for an anti-imperialist children's cartoon to be produced by an overseas animation studio
Jacek Yerka - Tsunami --
Reggae records scene, Alex Bartsch
“get a job” nope im splashing in da pool
via
meet me under the pier we are going beast mode
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Attempting to locate a new Greek restaraunt using my gyroscope
the reason I casually say charlie kirk's wife had him killed is not necessarily because I believe it, but because nothing stops the right from spouting random conspiracy theories about political enemies, so i'll say whatever the hell I want when one of their idols dies. also it's funny. the entire charlie kirk death is inherently funny. he was in the middle of answering a question related to mass shootings when he died.
maybe i’m just irony poisoned or something but i really cannot take the nolan odyssey trailer seriously At All. something about the combination of exclusively extremely famous people and bland desaturated visuals and especially the comically portentous lines delivered with stony expressions just makes it feel like a fake movie made up for a joke. you know when they have the fake trailers at the beginning of tropic thunder and there’s a Very Serious Period Piece to indicate that kirk lazarus is a Very Serious Dramatic Actor? that is exactly how my brain interprets nolan odyssey but it’s a “real” “movie” about to be “released” in “theaters”
i enter the lesbian bar wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase: ask me about my favorite fallacy. copious beautiful women proceed to do so. “it’s the argument from fallacy” i tell them. “the fallacy of claiming that because an argument contains a fallacy, that argument’s conclusion must therefore be false.” murmurs of appreciation, as this is an underrated, even unorthodox choice. “but there’s more,“ i say. the women listen, their attention piqued. “let’s call an argument containing some random fallacy Argument A. if you claim that Argument A’s conclusion is false because it commits a fallacy to get there, you have, of course, committed the argument from fallacy. but here’s where it gets interesting.” the women lean in, enraptured. someone turns the music off. “if i claim that your conclusion (that Argument A’s conclusion is false) is false because you committed a fallacy (the argument from fallacy), i too have committed the same fallacy.” i am met with exclamations of delight and disbelief. “it’s like fallacyception,” i say. the women burst into applause, charmed by my firm grasp of logic and reasoning. i exit the lesbian bar covered in lipstick kiss marks like in a cartoon
the among us show being a total gorefest on par with john carpenter's the thing is a really fun choice
the among us show having a gay orgy in the middle of it is another really fun choice
realizing many people don't know about infinity train creator owen dennis' among us show from years ago, which has been trapped in unreleased limbo all this time and was just dumped on streaming this morning with no advertisement. they don't even know about its weirdly stacked cast
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Imagine being the gays at a pride event in 2004 living their lives when someone grabs the microphone and announces to the room that Ronald Reagan was pronounced dead. Can you even imagine the hype, the celebration, the pure elation
This is the Pride Month that It will happen. I feel it in my gay bones
men make it absolutely impossible to practice humility
what you say: “I think this is the case”
what men hear: “I have no idea whatsoever, but here’s a totally random guess”
what you say: “I’m not an expert on this subject”
what men hear: “I don’t know anything about this subject and need its bare fundamentals explained to me”
what you say: “I could be better read in this area”
what men hear: “I have never read anything in this area”
like okay fuck it nevermind I’m actually an expert in every subject I’ve ever read or heard about. in fact I know everything.
If anyone's ever wondering why I come across as such an arrogant bitch on Tumblr it's because I used to work in science with a lot of men and never readjusted my communication style afterward.
This is one of my biggest seemingly low-stakes feminist soapboxes. Women are often encouraged to take hedging, consensus-seeking, and checking-in phrases out of their speech in order to seem "more confident". And listen, of course you do not need to say "I think" when you actually know for pretty damn sure, or double-check every little thing you say, or apologize for things that are out of your control.
But there are men in my life who I respect, who I think are generally good communicators, but who have admitted to me that if they do not know the answer to something they will just state their best guess in a confident tone of voice, with no hedging or clarification to warn the listener that what they just said was pulled from their ass.
I once asked my high school boyfriend what noise a platypus makes and he confidently told me "oh they quack" and I said "really? that seems like they'd have different noise-making structures than ducks since they're not birds" and he said "oh yeah you're probably right. I was just guessing." And had no idea why I was mad! I was like, so if I ask you a question you might just bullshit me?? What if I had believed you and gone and repeated that to other people? I could have looked like an idiot. I could have spread misinformation to a ton of people! But I have told that story to other men and had them say "oh yeah I totally do that."
This is so much worse communication than just saying "I don't know but I think..." There shouldn't be campaigns training professional women to sound "more confident," there should be campaigns training professional MEN to stop doing whatever THAT is!
[ID: Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place saying “okay, but that’s worse. You do see how that’s worse, right?” End ID.]
