For a friend like You?

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

It's a yellow bittern! They are very creechur.

in loving memory of my favorite shirt

"yes!"

"so nobody in an oppressed group was ever happy!"

"no, some of them were sometimes"

"oh so the oppression wasn't real then!"

"no, it very much was and needed to change"

"but...if they were happy..."

"humans find ways to be happy in even bleak circumstances. it's kind of a defining trait of humanity. they had to live their lives in the world as it was, even while fighting to change it, so. yeah. they made happiness for themselves the way everyone does, even now with the problems we have today. there were good things in their world, too, alongside the bad. even some things we could learn from now, though definitely not their macro-level social attitudes!"

"...ohhh you're a shill for conservative values and you wish you lived back then! got it!"

Grace is joking around with a selectively violent creature that can rip his soft squishy body apart in an instant!

But it’s also a lot of fun to hear Weir talk about all the stuff he wants to include in a possible sequel, like the fact that eridians can have several conversations at once even with the same eridian. He imagine Rocky and Adrian bickering in one conversation while having a nice conversation at the same time that slowly turns into a fight and all of a sudden they’re yelling at each other in two conversations about different things.

He also says they have terrible spacial memory because they can see everything around them all the time thanks to their echo location so to them it’s crazy that humans can only see in one direction but still remember what’s behind them and even what the last room they were in looks like. Apparently eridians mostly just remember that the room exists and that it has the computer in it but if you asked them where the computer is placed in the room they’ll struggle to give a precise answer.

And Rocky got scared when Grace hugged him because eridians don’t have a concept of expressing affection with physical touch. To them it’s only neutral or violent because thanks to their hard shell they can’t really feel much. They only use it to move each other around or to break through their prey’s shell to get to the soft insides. So in their inter-species friendship only Grace would feel any desire to touch Rocky. It makes it very cute that Rocky joins in on Grace’s hugging ritual. It’s purely for Grace’s sake.

Adding @fatfemmefreaquency tags because they are really important. Romance is talked down because it's mainly women and queer people writing and reading it, but it's still the most sold genre out there, this is known.

I do agree with everything said here, but I have a bit more to add to "self-censorship". It mainly comes down to social media (which we all know). Because, using myself as an example, I can't fully promote what I write in pretty much any social media without getting it flagged. You can't use many, many words in many, many social media platforms. Patreon allows smut but then sometimes it gets hidden because some random criteria never fully explained. Insta and TikTok are basically hell for anything remotely sex-related. Tumblr is on thin fucking ice because I have to hide most of my stories with the "explicit sexual content" tag which removes it from a lot of people's dashboards and search. Because it's starting to influence the way we talk out of social media, which is what really concerns me. We do not need to "sanitize" sexuality, we need to talk about it more freely before they cut any more rights. Like what do you mean you use "unalive" in a fucking book? THEY KILLED THEM! Use real words, don't infantilize and puritanize the world just because of a few people might get uncomfy or angry. Might be a pet peeve of mine, too 😂

It's a whole campaing against sexuality, and as someone with a fucking PhD on History of sexuality, THIS IS FUCKING BAD!!! We need to fight against this. Sexuality might seem like something silly to many people, but it's one of the first things they try to control. It's been like that for centuries. Please, don't let the bad guys win this one. Because remember something which is fucking important when talking about media in any form: women and queer people are the ones mantaining culture. Stop selling everything to the capitalistic and patriarchal freaks to get validation.

One of the central conceits of Western culture is that allowing oneself to feel any kind of pleasure at all is somehow inherently damaging and harmful. This is an idea we need to work to uproot from our minds.

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

What if Grace made a lopsided crochet Rocky and cuddled it every night.

What if Rocky couldn’t stop making xenonite puppets of his alien friend.