Gone

Sure enough, within an hour of meeting me they asked if I was religious, in a way that was obviously asking if I had a religion, and which one it was. I calmly told them I was Jewish, and my boyfriend’s grandmother lit up. Her mother was a Syrian who moved to Brooklyn in the early 1900′s and she grew up in a Syrian and Jewish community in Brooklyn and boy wasn’t it nice to have someone around who could help her with her Jewish pastry. It was really pleasant. His grandfather was mostly quiet. 

After lunch, he and I shared a cup of coffee and some cookies and I told him about my brothers. He asked if my mom was ok with me dating a gentile. And then he looked around, saw we were alone for a sec, and asked me to follow him out to the garage. In the garage he asked me to take an old picnic basket down from off a cabinet. And then he told me to open it. The moment the lid came off I knew. I knew that shade of red. He told me to take it out and lay it across the floor. It was a Nazi flag. Not just a Nazi flag, but one that was big enough to fly outside a government office, like a massive one. I laid it out, ice in my veins, trying to figure out what was about to happen next. And then he told me to take my shoes off and stand on it. 

He told me his vision wasn’t good enough to get into the army, so he snuck on a ship and figured that they’d have to deal with him when he was in Europe, and that’s what happened. He told me he went because they all knew it was bad, and he wanted to help. He told me he took the flag off of some dead Nazis. He told me to go home and tell my mother that I was safe with these goyim she’d never met, that I was loved and welcome and that they’d fight for me. He told me “Never Again”.

He passed away a few years ago, and only after his death, cleaning out his closets did we find his old patches and look up his division. This quiet man who said very little but always shared a cup of coffee with me after lunch was in an anti-tank division, and he and his division liberated camps in Poland. He saw the horrors, first hand. 

replying is how you make friends! reply to anything you want and be friendly. don’t make rude jokes if you’re not friends already though!

quote retweeting is a no-no. when you “retweet with a comment” it’s not liked by content creators because it makes a new tweet out of their tweet and they don’t get the likes and retweets they would get if you’d just retweeted it straight up. if you want to comment on a retweet, reply to it or post a new tweet starting with “LRT” which stands for “last retweet” (it’s fine to quote retweet dumb memes and so on.)

you can make your tweets private. this means no one but your followers will be able to see what you post and no one will be able to retweet your content.  you can switch back and forth between private and public at will. some people make a separate private account to tweet personal stuff and let mutuals follow it only. it’s a good way to keep things separate.

what is privatter? privatter is a third party web app that content creators can allow to be attached to their twitter. it lets them tweet content that they can make exclusive to logged in users, followers, mutuals, or a specific list of users. as long as you are logged in to twitter and fall into the intended category, you’ll be able to see it. 

you can mute people you follow. (and those you don’t, ofc.) you can also mute words and phrases and entire conversations. if you mute someone you follow and they reply to you, that reply will still show up in your notifications. it’s a good way to keep the peace!

you can limit notifications to people who follow you or to mutuals. (notifications from people you follow will still show up regardless of which option you’ve selected.)

miscellaneous tips and warnings: if you accidentally unfollow and refollow someone, it won’t show up in their notifications as long as it’s within a couple minutes. no more accidental stuff. everyone can see who everyone follows so watch out. people will know if you unfollow. if you want to report someone and want them gone forever, report a tweet where they used a curse word. screenshotting tweets for harassment is a no-no and can get you banned. don’t be lame. don’t be a dick. vaguing others is generally really bad form and so is complaining about content within a fandom you’re in. use the mute tools at your disposal and don’t be a spoiler. you won’t come back from a rep like that and everyone sees everything.

Happy fall! I drew this in honor of the fall equinox (and Persephone returning to the Underworld).  Hit the read more for the rest!

(Warning for lots of images, and I mean a lot. I deeply apologize to people browsing on the mobile app since read mores don’t seem to work on it. I’m so so so sorry. Unfortunately there’s no other way to put this many images in a post :/)

The movie starts with the idea that the male god who wronged Te Fiti must be the one to heal her. This seems to make a certain sort of intuitive sense in that I think we all believe that if you do something wrong you should try to make it right. But how does he try to right it? Through more violence. Of course that failed. 

It was only when another woman, Moana, saw past the “demon of earth and fire” that the traumatized Te Fiti had become (what a good metaphor for trauma, right?) and met her with love instead of violence that she was able to heal. Note that they do the forehead press before Moana restores the heart, while Te Fiti is still Te Kā. Moana doesn’t wait for her beautiful island goddess to appear in all her green splendor before greeting and treating her as someone deserving of love.

This is a touching anaylisis but it’s extremely racist as not only have you completely ignored the whole point of Maui’s character, but have managed to incriminate a man of color on a tumblr wide scale.

First of all, Maui’s character does not represent male violence—it represent human greed. Maui did not take the heart because he is a man, and Te-Fiti is a woman. He took it because the humans asked him to. The humans asked Maui to do everything for them, not caring how greedy or selfish their requests were and in the end it was Maui who suffered for it. Maui is supposed to show the flaw of humanity.

This has nothing to do with sexism, it has everything to do with the fact that Maui gave and gave to the humans who could never stop being greedy. Moana giving the heart back wasn’t supposed to be her “making up” for the male violence that Maui represents. It was her making up for the greed she and her people represent. It was touching however because yes it was an important moment between two women, but you missed the point and you’ve come off racist and very disrespectful to a culture at that.

Yes, Moana is an empowering movie for women, especially women of color. But the last thing this is about is Maui being an abuser/rapist or whatever. That is not the point of Maui’s character.

And to assume so is racist. You are a white woman completely dehumanizing a man of color and ruining his image because of how you see him. And other white girls here on tumblr have happily picked up that image and interpretation and rolled with it. Maui’s character is now seen as an abuser or as someone who is violently because of white girls here on tumblr—which it doesn’t surprise me. (an in a historical context this is even MORE racist because white women would always make Maui’s people out to be savages and abusers etc., simply because of the color of their skin and their culture so yea, this is bad).

You can see the morality of the movie however you want, but do not be disrespectful toward a character and in this case a culture.

I’ve thought about replying because I’m tired of seeing these kind of “Moana is a feminist movie” posts collect hundreds of notes despite the fact that these posts always conveniently fail to mention Pasifika people, but it always stressed me out, so thank you.

This is insight for me as well (as I wasn’t aware that the movie also came fro the culture of the Pasifika people), and does give a very important perspective. I do agree with you, this movie is about environmental restoration, not some white fem bullshit.

I tried over and over again to explain to I-want-cheese about how she was being racist, but she responded by blocking me and other poc who called her out (even other polynesian people). People to this day are still trying to explain that she is being racist and culturally insensitive but she ignores us.

I’ve made a few posts about this, hoping that people realize how problematic it is to agree with i-want-cheese.  Explaining to her racist white ass that this was problematic was like explaining to a bird. She wouldn’t listen and neither would have of her racist friends.

his brothers mocked him for being a poor fisherman, he crafts a fishook from a jawbone and proceeds to raise new islands from the sea the sky is so low the trees bend, maui raises it for everyone, then fills the new sky with wind

the sun flies so quickly there is not enough time in the day to do the labors for everyone, maui has to lay traps for each of the suns many feet, chase after it as it was slowed, and then threaten to chop its legs off if it would not slow down

he then due to the complaints of the now longer dark night creates the moon and is upset his creation will not please humanity for it does not make sufficient light, then shows it to the sun so that it may learn how to be bright maui was credited with having invented as gifts for humanity the outrigger canoe, stone tools, and seaworthy boats that had no mast or sails. he was credited with inventing tattoos as a gift to dogs, however humanity is still not content so maui descends to the land of the dead to ask the secret of creating fire from the grandmother, who kept it hidden in her fingernails. he dropped the fingernail in the water as he tried to return to the land of the living, came back for another, dropped it as well, and went through all ten fingers and toenails untill he had to then interrogate birds the grandmother had shared the secret with to tell him how

a monstrous eel tried to put the moves on his wife, and again maui had to prove his worth to reclaim her by breaking the monster eel’s spine, shoving him into the ground to create the first coconut tree, the single most useful thing for polynesian life, as a gift to humanity yet again Maui, as a mythological figure, did nothing but give from the day he was born. he gave humans tools, land, fire, boats, light, the wind, everything except life itself and he even tried to give them that- and it killed him, he was bitten in two a crucial part of Maui as a legend is that he failed, its literally part of the point, also that he was driven to prove himself endlessly to the (during his life) ungrateful. do not try and drag Maui, its disrespectful on a level i cant express thank the man, you asshole Moana succeeded where he failed, for she saw that she did not have to prove herself. the whole movie up untill then she was trying to put on a brave face (there was literally a cut song ‘warrior face’ where maui teaches her Haka), shout her courage, announce to the world at large that she WILL do the thing and fix the world and be the hero, just like Maui

now,

There is a very old organisation called La Real Academia Española (the Spanish Royal Academy or RAE) whose sole job has been to maintain strict grammar and language rules for the entire Spanish-speaking world. Whenever someone is unsure of a word or rule, it is very common to consult la RAE, but it’s a much bigger deal than just Googling something on Dictionary.com or Webster’s in English-speaking countries. You know those old-people minion Facebook memes people like making fun of? There are some for RAE-approved grammar and language. I’m completely serious. I’ve had Spanish literature professors fucking email RAE officials when teaching some obscure grammar rule to make sure they’re up to date with RAE standards. I’ve had them scold students or dropping points for using a new or loan word in class because “it’s not RAE-recognised”. It’s the biggest deal.

Even if a word is widely understood and used, there are people who refuse to recognise it because “La RAE” doesn’t either. La RAE’s word is law for many Spanish-speakers, and it very rarely adds or changes words. They would never dream of adding “selfie” or “muggle” to the dictionary the way it has happened in English.

Spanish is a gendered language, so it’s hard to make things gender neutral without drastically changing centuries-old language rules. For example, the Spanish word for child is “niño” for masculine and “niña” for feminine. The correct gender-neutral way according to la RAE is “niño”, but lots of people use the “@“ symbol in the place of the gendered vowel to make it more inclusive, giving you “niñ@“. And RAE-thumpers get pissed about it. It’s impossible to make something widely recognised without RAE approval, which sucks because the people who manage RAE are a bunch of stubborn and elitist old people. To be fair, using “@“ is a bit cumbersome and only good for written works, and it’s always been a struggle to find a spoken gender-neutral equivalent. That’s where this sweet girl’s solution comes in.

Using a neutral vowel “e” instead of the gendered vowels “a” and “o” is an incredibly elegant solution to this problem! It’s easy to say and it’s easy to write. But for the average Spanish-speaker to accept “les” instead of “los” or “las” is a huge feat we’re undertaking. Standing up to her teacher, who most likely adheres to RAE rules and regulations, is a huge deal. These rules are centuries old and haven’t changed that much this whole time. What she’s suggesting is making a lot of people irrationally mad.

As an artist I can give you a snapshot into a world.

But a writer.

A writer can take you there.

They can weave together words and create a portal to anywhere. You can visit those places instead of looking out a window and wishing to be a part of it.

A writer can give you a story.

But an artist.

An artist can show you the exact emotions behind everything.

They can paint a picture worth a thousand words without ever writing one. They can show you every single emotion, every single thought in a second. They can show emotion like a writer never could.

2) it stops you from growing as a person and activist

3) it makes you come across as an actual asshole

4) it makes you defensive in the face of being held accountable. You think you can do no wrong and do not respond well to any challenge of that.

5) it makes you blow things way out of proportion. You get so busy trying to be Wokest of Them All that you’ll argue and send incredibly aggressive and sometimes violent messages to people over things like iPhones.

6) you start to lose sight of your goals as a person passionate about social equality. It’s all a performance now.