These look like the little soot things from that one Studio Ghibli movie.
Soot sprites!!
THE WIZARD CLOAK COAT IS FINALLY FINISHED!!!!
…wake up babe, new Goetia demon design just dropped.
Nerd stats update! Critics of Hellvua Boss/Vivziepop sometimes like to claim that the show is dropping in popularity, newer episodes aren’t getting as many views and the studio is headed for financial ruin. So I decided to see if it was true by checking on the view counts for the episodes once a week or so
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A Shout-Out to the “Manga in Libraries” Guide
For those who don’t know, I’m a fan of borrowing manga from my local library. I’m very thankful that I’m in a situation where my library has managed to hold off budget cuts every year. And more importantly, there’s some damn good librarians in New York City who care about manga. Around 2021, I found out about a librarian in my area specializing in Japanese pop culture who started a website curating information on how to advocate for manga in libraries. The librarian’s name was Jillian Rudes, who has gone on to do amazing things in the North American library scene for manga. She’s the founder of Manga in Libraries and earlier this year, she released a book for teen librarians called “Manga in Libraries: A Guide for Teen Librarians” on how to get started in promoting manga for educational purposes at their respective library branches.
I managed to borrow a copy from my library and I’ll say that it’s a solid resource.
At first, I was surprised at the size of the book (it’s about 130+ pages) because I was somewhat expecting a huge book due to reading various large books on manga over the years. Don’t be fooled though because there’s a lot of great information found carefully catered to the librarian and educator audiences. Jillian starts off by saying “Why Manga?” followed by a introduction to manga itself, how the text needs to be read, the various genres, U.S. publishers, etc.
The book is followed by chapters on developing a manga collection in a library, representation in manga, social-emotional learning, manga programming, and teaching in manga. Several interviews with notable manga experts are featured as well.
While every chapter is great, the strongest parts of the guide in my opinion are the chapters on social-emotional learning and teaching in manga. Jillian does an excellent job in explaining the core concepts of SEL and how they can be applied to libraries. She even discusses topics like emotional intelligence and the feelings wheel as well. Jillian makes a powerful case in how manga supports SEL using Komi Can’t Communicate as an example.
Jillian would later highlight Komi Can’t Communicate among other titles when she discusses how to use manga as a teaching tool in the classroom. She provides a template on how to go about creating a course on manga using her own experience in teaching manga to 12th graders at her school. It’s a very thorough one as Jillian explains specific activities she would incorporate to slowly get students engaged in learning through manga over a certain amount of weeks. The payoff is getting students REALLY involved in the teaching/learning process as they are told to create their own manga reading guides for the manga titles being discussed in their class.
As someone who doesn’t work in a library, I can only speak for the two chapters on SEL and teaching manga honestly because of my experiences and background in researching community-based initiatives for mental health. I’m all about thoughtful reflection with the help of peers and support systems outside of healthcare. I think Jillian does a wonderful job in explaining how manga can help in that area with those 2 chapters.
Reading the Manga in Libraries guide makes me glad that there are people who are trying to promote manga to teenagers in an educational manner. I think manga can change young lives for the better and I’ve seen it over time. Personally, I credit reading comics at a young age that got me on a journey to become a lifelong reader. I also like that the Manga in Libraries guide is in print because trying to find information on manga online can be a bit of a mess and very scattered. Jillian manages to condense a lot of resources in an easy-to-find manner for her guide.
Jillian makes a note in the end of the book that reading manga can create joy for those who read it. I believe it does for many people, especially teens who often feel out of place in the world we live in. And on that note, the Manga in Libraries guide is a joy that anyone interested in and/or advocating for manga education should not pass up on.
This looks like a fucking parody post, or an edgy edit, but it’s 100% official real Flintstones.
Clarification: I don’t hate this book, I love it, it’s amazing. It’s just that taking a step back and looking it out of context is still really funny. Especially the line “We participated in a genocide, Barney.”
ok but imagine them in their cartoon forms saying this dialogue i’m
can we have some context to this, perhaps?
Bedrock is having a mayoral election. One of the candidates is a violent war mongering asshole that riles people up against the lizard people. This reminds Fred and Barney of their time in the army.
Back then the father of said violent candidate was riling people up against the “tree people”. Fred, Barney, and other soldiers fought what they believed to be a defensive measure against the tree people. Turns out, it was actually an invasion, in order to kill off the tree people and take over their forest to build Bedrock.
That’s what Fred means when he says he and Barney participated in a genocide. They literally did.
(Extra fun fact, Barney adopted a tree person baby after the war, and his son Bamm-Bamm is the last tree person.)
There are a lot of interesting things about this post but the AK-47 shaped spear is what really got me
This is just as wild with the context
Some of my favorite moments in the series
From the foreword to 2021 print of the comic.
Saw this screenshot on twitter and now I’m wondering - did they make up this symbol, or is it taken from mythology? It’s not one of the 72 Goetia sigils.
One of the really fun and interesting things about writing a polyamorous romance as someone who is ambiamorous/polyamorous is finding new ways to make sure the narrative hits the expected genre beats without just sort of... mushing it into a pre-existing monogamous romance mold, which is what I'm afraid happens a lot of the time.
Trust me, it was my job in the publishing house to make them fit that mold. I hated it.
Reading other poly-centric romances, I can always somewhat tell when someone is writing polyamory from a sexual fantasy aspect (zero shade; I'm here for all the group sex) without actually considering how it functions as a relationship dynamic, which can often come off as... well.
It's lacking for me as a romance.
Erotica-wise, it's fine. But it misses the romantic beats for me that I want as a polyamorous-leaning person.
There's so much emphasis on the polycule and never the individual dyads within the larger relationship.
For example, in a triad, there are actually four relationships to handle.
The dyad between A + B.
The dyad between A + C.
The dyad between B + C.
And the overarching relationship between A + B + C.
With monogamous-leaning authors or authors that've been pressed into conforming to the pre-existing genre beats, there's a tendency to treat the relationship as a homogenous mass where everything is fair and equal, and you treat all your partners the exact same way.
And I get it. It's easier to write everything as peachy-keen and to have external conflict be resolved with either acceptance or a brave confrontation.
But it doesn't always land for me as someone who wants to see my style of love represented in the genre.
In healthy polyamory, either closed or open, each relationship is unique in its own way. Taking the example of a triad again, the way A acts with C likely differs from how A acts with B.
And that's a good thing!
Because C might not want the same things as B, so trying to treat them both the exact same is a surefire way to make sure someone isn't getting their needs met, and that will lead to conflict.
Polyamory isn't striving for equality between partners but rather equity.
What are your individual needs, and how do I meet them, as well as meet the needs of my other partner(s)? What do you want from the larger relationship as a whole? How do we accommodate everyone without making someone feel neglected or uncomfortable? How do we show this in the narrative? How do we make sure character A isn't just treating B the same as C in every interaction? Do they ever fall into that pitfall? How do they remedy it?
It seems like common sense when you write it out like that, but it's a major pitfall I see time and time again. The characters never alternate their approach between partners, if there's any focus on the individuals at all.
The other major telltale thing I've noticed is that taking time to be with one partner is seen as a step down from the "goal" of the greater polycule.
The narrative is framed in such a way that they might start out with individual dates, but the end goal of the romance is to eventually be together 100% of the time all the time, and wanting individual time alone with any one partner is somehow "lesser."
Which is the goal of romance in monogamy, but it's not the goal of romance in polyamory.
Granted, you do need to end on a Happy Ever After or Happy For Now for it to fit the genre requirement. And a nice way of tying that up is to have everyone together at the end as a happy polycule all together all at once. I'm not disputing that as a narrative tool. I'm just pointing out that there's a tendency to present those moments as the sum total of the relationship when in actuality, there are multiple relationships that need to end happily ever after.
The joy of polyamorous love is the joy of multitudes. It's the joy of experiencing new things, both as individuals and as a polycule. If you're not taking care of the individual dyads, however, your polycule is going to crash and burn. You cannot avoid that. So why, then, is there such avoidance of it in stories meant to appeal to us?
Is it simply inexperience on behalf of the author? Or is it that they're not actually being written for us? Is it continued pressure to meet certain genre beats in a largely monogamous-centric genre? All of the above?
Either way, I'm having fun playing around with it and doing all the things we were warned against in the publishing house.
I'm having fun with Nathan and Vlad enjoying their own private dynamic that is theirs and theirs alone. I'm having fun with Ursula and Nathan being so careful and vulnerable around each other. I'm absolutely 100% here for the chaos of Vlad and Ursula without a chaperone. And I'm here for the chaos of Vlad and Ursula together and Nathan's fond, loving eye roll as he trails after them, too enamored to tell either of them no because where would the fun in that be...
Anyway. Don't mind me. Just getting my thoughts out while everyone else is in bed.
More thoughts, hope this is not bothersome:
i think if i had the spoons/executive function to write longform fiction, i'd want to write stories that focus on on dyad of a polycule for the plot+arcs, without discounting the other relationships. because thats how i experience polyamory. relationships come in and out of focus but i am typically focusing on one at a time. usually. so thats also the kinda story i wanna read
so i think a story can conform to genre (focus on the relationship between two characters, end with just them having their arc-concluding alone time, etc.) without necessarily being overly monogamous because like the other partners and metas and etc can be important supporting building blocks for that arc. i think it would be neat.
personally i m also tired of the focus on triads in polyamorous representation, although i recognize how great that is that polyamory is being portrayed at all its just. very different from my experience and i would like MORE polyamory EVERYWHERE thanks of ALL kinds. :3c
I’ve never thought about writing a poly relationship in a story before, but this is making me seriously consider it.
being asked follow up questions while infodumping is what i imagine sex would feel like if it was real
Anonymous asked:
Hey if you're not physically disabled and just ND, please don't say "cr*ppling," or any variations thereon, since it's ableist toward physically disabled people. "Disabling," and "incapacitating," are two better words to use instead.
theunitofcaring answered:
(It took me a while to figure it out; anon was bothered by this post.)
Okay, sure, I’ll try to do that. That said, I want to encourage people engaged in anti-ableism efforts that take the form of asking people not to use certain words to put their energies elsewhere. Firstly, I think they make the disability advocacy community inaccessible to a lot of people, since having to relearn which words are “allowed” is overwhelming and particularly difficult for people who have limited access to words in the first place.
Secondly, every time I’ve seen this implemented it…hasn’t made anyone less ableist? People who scrupulously remove “crazy” from their vocabulary in favor of “irrational” still treat the people they’re talking about like unpersons. Often the recommended replacement words are just as good at suggesting “less valuable person” as the words they replaced. I think there’s some value in asking “does our use of words surrounding disability to mean ‘bad thing’ come from a place of treating disabled people like tragedies?” and often it does, but that doesn’t mean that challenging that mindset is as easy as changing out the words.
Thirdly, I think it emphasizes the wrong concerns. I saw a newspaper headline the other day saying “the president’s plan will be a crippling blow to the economy” and one about the “crippling burden of student debt”. I’d think that the fact the president’s plan includes making it harder to get SSI, or the fact disabled students are way less likely to graduate and likelier to end up in debt, is a much more urgent problem than the turn of phrase used in the headline.
Lastly, it seems like the anti-words advocacy often pretends at a false consensus in disability activism. There are physically disabled people who are bothered by that newspaper headline and those who are not. There are mentally ill people who are bothered by use of crazy and some who couldn’t care less. But no one ever says “hey, that word bothers me personally because people have used it to be mean to me”, they say “it’s ableist towards physically disabled people,” as if all physically disabled people agree on this (or as if the ones who disagree are just obviously confused poor souls and don’t merit a mention). “There are physically disabled people who dislike the phrase ‘crippling anxiety’ and there are physically disabled people who don’t care and there are physically disabled people who have, themselves, described their anxiety as crippling” is much more accurate, but less compelling.
Not to mention how constantly making previously common words or terms into ‘bad’ ones discriminates against older members of all kinds of communities, from queer people to disabled folks. So they suddenly become the enemies of younger community members over the use of words rather than behavior.
But yeah, treating any group like a monolith is a bad idea.
I’m 40 years old. This is relevant because in my lifetime, I have seen multiple renaming/rebranding efforts to find words that are not as hurtful to disabled people.
And each and every one of them failed. Within a very short time of going mainstream, the words that were supposedly neutral and less pejorative became, in practice, every bit as nasty and horrible as the word they replaced.
This is called the euphemism treadmill.
Why? Simple.
If someone thinks a group of people are scum who shouldn’t exist, and you tell that person “please don’t use [old word] for that group, use [new word] instead” you have not actually changed their mind about the group they hate one bit. They still think they’re scum who shouldn’t exist! It’s just now they have two words that mean “scum who shouldn’t exist,” [old word] and [new word]. There is no vocabulary change that will make them think about the group they hate any differently. You can shame them into not publicly discriminating (if you have the social buy-in from other people) and sometimes, sometimes if you have a relationship with someone you can over time influence them to be less hateful*, but just changing the word they use does absolutely nothing.
*If you want to work to change peoples’ perspective, the Hidden Brain podcast has an excellent episode on how to handle conflict that touches on “how can you influence people who disagree with you to move their position closer to yours.” Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling
So while I try not to use words that will hurt people (because knowingly hurting people is a jerk move), I also don’t put that much effort into policing mine or other peoples’ language. Because there are so many other things that are more important to spend my time and energy on.
frankly the harder my disabilities are hitting me the more appreciation i have for the word ‘crippling’
honestly, the ableist word stuff makes me so angry nowadays.
Which. Historical context.
I cannot prove this, but I am about 90% sure that the way we talk about ableist words and ableist language has strong roots in the Ableist Word Profile series run by FWD, a blog by feminists with disabilities that ran 2009-2011. I was hanging around there from the start, guest-posted once, and not only was it the first time I had ever seen anyone call out the ableist underpinnings of some common terms like that, I remember it taking off wildly from there through the social justice sphere even at the time. By now it’s gd everywhere, but hey, things do start somewhere.
At this point I would like to quote the bloggers who contributed to the column:
Here’s what this series is about: Examining word origins, the way in which ableism is unconsciously reinforced, the power that language has.
Here’s what this series is not about: Telling people which words they can use to define their own experiences, rejecting reclamatory word usage, telling people which words they can and cannot use.
You don’t necessarily have to agree that a particular profiled word or phrase is ableist; we ask you to think about the way in which the language that we use is influenced, both historically and currently, by ableist thought.
It was never about saying “these words are bad, don’t use them”. Nor was it ever the main focus of the blog. I’d ballpark estimate that it was less than 5% of the overall posts. And my friends, there was so much cool stuff on there, media criticism, awareness raising, intersectionality guest posts, information on web accessibility, so many incisive thought-provoking posts that stuck with you. The site’s still up, you can check them out.
Even back in 2010, people noticed that there was a… weird imbalance… in exactly which of those incisive thought-provoking posts were getting spread more widely and which stayed consigned to a smaller readership. Anna’s post Why Writing about Language Isn’t Enough is still absolutely worth a read over a decade later:
And yet, when trying to have discussions about ableist language, we’re back to the silo of disability. Instead of talking about ableist language as part of the manifestation of the disdain and abuse of people with disabilities, it’s treated as isolated – the problem, instead of a symptom of the problem.
Ableism is not simply a language problem.
and yet, and yet, of that amazing blog, the thing that seems to have made the absolute most impact in the social justice sphere in the long run is… language.
and not even in the nuanced, let’s examine how ableism influences our language historically and today, way it was intended as. In the incredibly reductive “hey, these are Bad words, use these Good words instead” way that the original bloggers actively wanted to prevent. The way that can make spaces hostile to non-native English speakers, people with specific verbal or cognitive disabilities or some people with OCD. The way that is both incredibly punitive and, at the same time, has ceded such important ground in the fight - oh, it’s a simple replacement, say Y instead of X, it’s just that the etymology is ableist you see, it’s that the word is triggering. It’s not like you need to worry that the concept you are trying to express in and of itself might have ableist underpinnings. no need to think about it that deeply.
ableism is just a language problem, don’t you know.
Even the goddamn web accessibility stuff hasn’t gone big to the same point, and that contained some serious low-hanging fruit for improvement. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone be publicly berated for no image descriptions, no subtitles on video, or non-descriptive link text the way people get over language. and when’s the last time I saw someone talk about whether a website was screen-reader accessible.
But really. Every time I see the “X word is ableist, don’t use it” it’s like I’m seeing the horrible bastardized knock-off version of the beautiful work my friends and community put so much of themselves into back then. And yeah. It makes me angry.
I’m generally in favor of keeping the words and working to change the mindset.
I have definitely known people who use “crazy” to mean “shouldn’t be cared about”, but you know what? It doesn’t matter what word they use. The problem is that they’ve decided that anyone who doesn’t meet a particular standard of rationality isn’t important.
On the other side of the fence, you have people who will say “oh, yeah, X is crazy” by which they mean “X has a problem they can’t just overcome by Trying Harder, so you need to accommodate them a bit”.
And honestly, those are the people who are doing something good and useful. It’s easy to get the first group of people to change their language, because they don’t care about the language or the people at all, they just care about lookin good and being admired. The second group of people won’t change their language easily because they have more important things to worry about, like actually solving problems. And I like those people better, even when the words they use for me are not the words I’d pick.