Seyla Aurora (she/her)

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.

Before I started writing in earnest, I did not understand how much writing was going to eat into my fic reading time. We joke about having too many tabs open, but I have a different problem: the amount of tabs I have open on new fics is way smaller than it used to be. My ao3 wrapped would be a sad affair. Unless I’ve subscribed to an author or come across something on my dash, I basically don’t see it

Which has really driven home for me how much fandom cannot just be creators. You have to have people who want to read fic and meta discussions and joke posts. You have to have people who want to look at art and gifs. It has to be mutual.

Community thrives on flow. You have to have that movement of people sharing things with each other for a community to exist

It was dreamlike. Nightmarish? Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful.

And my mum said "well, maybe in that case she'd learn to be more careful."

Aaaaand I think my resulting reaction of horror at the idea of forcing 50% of children to play more carefully due to clothing requirements made her realise exactly what she'd just said.

- Loudly tell men off when they're incompetent

- Make everyone feel uncomfortable and ruin the mood when they're talking about Harry Potter

Tarantino’s “favorite editor” was Sally JoAnne Menke who edited all of Tarantino’s films until she died.

Because naming and credit is important, especially when you’re talking about women not getting credit and recognition of their work as named individuals.

If you want to know more about women in early filmmaking (emphasis American) and the sociology of how different roles were divided, gendered, and re-gendered in the first decades, I highly recommend Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar.  

he sells the original handwritten manuscripts to a private collector - often for as much as the publisher pays in advance for rights to the book! - with the agreement that this mysterious buyer won’t reveal what’s on the page until after the author (we assume that’s the husband - much of the content comes from his own experiences in war) dies

I’ve spoken with them both several times and known them for decades, and the woman half of this creative team prefers the arrangement like this, because she detests the spotlight. even so, pretty much every pro in the field who knows them assumes she’s a significant if not major force in creating the published versions of “his” books

one day in the not-too-distant future - when the private collector can reveal what’s on those handwritten pages - we’ll be able to learn just how much the woman who has guided this man’s career also served not only as editor but as a creative in their writing partnership

Notably, she is married to director George Miller. I think many of these women are happy in their marriages and proud of their work, but wow is this a thing worth discussing.

This phenomenon is known as a ‘Secretary Wife’ and many of my female friends and I have had passionate discussions about how much we want one. Someone smart who loves us and loves our work and throws themselves into the labour of crafting and promoting it? OF COURSE it would make our lives hugely easier and our work better and our chances of success in our careers far higher. I’ve seen it do so for many male authors - who love and appreciate their wives but don’t see how much this is Not an Option for all but a very, very few women.

Women can of course have wives, and men can be Secretary Wives, but few women get Secretary Wives - women are socialised to be helpful to men and respectful of their work.

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.

Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!

Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.

No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.

It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.