Everything is like “QUEER history” and “List of QUEER young adult books” or “Top 10 QUEER movies” and queer this and queer that and for the love of god please just say LGBT.
But queer is more inclusive
And faster to pronounce if you are talking instead of writing.
It’s not more inclusive, and if your excuse of using a slur as a blanket term is “it’s faster to say”, GENUINELY what is wrong with you
It’s called economía del lenguaje.
It’s also the respected academic term?? The acronym isn’t static and it’s usage is varied by things like generational difference, location, and knowledge of the community. Even just in the U.S. in the last few decades the common usage gone from GLBT to LGBT to LGBTQ, to LGBTQA/LGBTQIA/LGBTQIAP/etc (Which, let me tell you as someone who has given presentations in the past using these updated acronyms, are all real mouthfulls), to LGBT+.
Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.
Like yeah if you’re talking specifically about gay or trans people you can just say gay or transgender, but if you’re talking about more than one identity or someone who doesn’t conform to our perceptions of ‘LGBT,’ or a person or people whose identity you don’t know, queer is just the better word.
“That’s SO gay”, “Oh my god, you’re not a LESBIAN, are you?”
Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?
I’m here, I’m queer, go fuck yourself.
queer is not a slur, stop drinking the TERF koolaid
every time one of you fools spout about ‘queer is a slur’ a terf laughs because their fucking plan to make that word ‘taboo’ is fucking working you dipshit.
I did not get my degree in queer literature for you all to keep pulling this bullshit.
baby gays,,,, i beg of you to learn your queer history and stop listening to terf bullshit
every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.
terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.
we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
I don’t know if this is just because I’m not American but I’ve never heard queer used as a slur. Ever. Meanwhile gay was the insult in the 2000s here. Everything you didn’t like was ‘soo gay’. Queer wasn’t even a word most of us knew back then.
It just baffled me that people would think an identifier is automatically a slur just because someone uses it to mock someone. If we did that gay would be a slur. Stupid would be a slur. Autistic would be a slur.
The reason people are upset about the word queer is that it’s a unifying term. You can say you’re queer and all people will know is that you’re part of the community. But you can’t say you’re LGBT, you have to say you’re gay or trans or ace. They don’t want you to be ambiguously queer. They want you to say which kind of queer you are so they can decide whether you’re undesirable.
yeah in the 90s and early 2000s kids would call each other “gay” as an insult. But no one ties themselves in knots over whether “gay” is a slur. So yeah, please ffs learn your history.
They want you to say which kind of queer you are so they can decide whether you’re undesirable.
My brain nearly short circuited once looking at the tiktok of an English kid who argued up and down that there was no colonization because Ireland was already part of England…because the king had declared Ireland part of England and declared himself king of Ireland… therefore making him the king of his own land and not a colonizer. He also HONESTLY seemed to believe that during the Revolutionary war the British were JUST trying to free slaves and defend Native American land.
The English and more generally the Brits learn nothing about their empire and colonialism. It is currently not compulsory for primary or secondary school students to be educated on Britain’s role in colonisation. European teachers of mine at our Scottish University did a survey asking British students what they knew about colonialism by their government and they knew nothing. Nothing. Colonialism had happened and it was bad - when, where, how and to what extent none of them knew. The Empire was something positive or neutral in their mind but they had no idea what it meant effectively. We French and German people knew much more than they did, and that’s something given colonialism is very little covered in Germany and still not extensively covered in France (though it’s the subject of multiple History and Geography lessons from middle school to high-school and the main subject of one module in philosophy). I was in an international British section in my French high-school, and my French British History and Geography teacher had to constantly correct and question the official lesson plans he was supposed to follow to give us the bigger picture. So I wasn’t even shocked when my classmates discovered in Irish literature class that Ireland was Britain’s first colony, and that the bloody methods of plantations were tested there before being exported to America.
Discovering how bad the History and Geography curriculums are in Britain really opened my eyes on many consequences of this lack of awareness of the nation(s)’ past, directly reflected in today’s politics. And this comes from someone educated in the second former colonial Empire in the world - which means it’s also in my government’s interest not to mention the subject too much.
Saw my first post with someone admitting they used chatGPT to ‘write a fic’ which they then shared here on tumblr and on Ao3.
To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.
Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.
It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.
‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.
Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.
Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.
You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.
The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.
In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is both hurting my heart and enraging me.
Just wanted to add to this really important post. (Thank you sm @shealwaysreads)
I think part of the issue here is that people who do this think of fic as an end product. As a thing to be consumed. As content.
That’s not fanfic.
Fic, in its essence, is the act of creation, of transformation. It is critically analyzing characters, exploring ideas, relationships, societal values, the dynamics of love and sexuality… the list goes on. Fic is a process that encapsulates all of this, the effort to make something that means something. That says something about what it means to be human (yes, kinky smut included). That takes vulnerability and guts and love to put out into the world.
If you think of fic as content that is there to be consumed, then yeah, it makes sense to find a quick and easy way to produce it. If the point for you is getting attention (kudos, reblogs, etc) with little to no work, using AI is tempting. But that’s a capitalistic mindset that entirely negates what fanfic is.
If we instead think of fanfic as a creative process, then AI fic is not fanfic at all. Call it something else.
Lukewarm take from left field. I’m not threatened by this, in part because I write weird. Like, nobody following me is here for a bot-logical good story. If I thought my writing could be indistinguishable from a bot, I would *die* terrifically.
Fascinating to see a take on a post about the intrusion of ai tech into a creative community be so entirely focused on the self.
To clarify for anyone confused:
I made my original post because this is the first time I saw it happening, despite the fact we all knew this was coming as soon as midjourney landed in the art scene and we heard about the ao3 scrape.
While my writing is my own, and I’m secure and proud of it, I’m not under any self-congratulatory illusion that I was that good when I started. Many of the fics I’ve read by first-time writers are similar to what this bot produced, and those writers still deserve basic respect and civility.
Anyone working under the delusion that ai tech won’t get better at its manipulation of the data is sadly mistaken. If you haven’t been following the ai progress on visual art, you might have missed that you can now request pieces to be produced in the specific style of an established artist. And the bots can do that now! They can make visual pieces almost indistinguishable from the original artist’s style—no matter how unique, or weird, that original artist’s style is.
My post wasn’t about me, or my writing. It was about the encroachment of ai and the accompanying cultural devaluation of human artistic expression outside of the work-based capitalist model.
It was about the impact of wholesale thefts of a community’s collective work.
It was about the meaning and importance of people’s generosity in sharing their genuine creations.
It was about vulnerability and the creative process being more important than the ego.
Pulling this out of Tee’s tags because it’s brilliant:
I am interested in reflections on the human condition from other human beings. I am not interested in the guided narrative of a theft powered sophisticated averaging machine.
If the point for you is getting attention (kudos, reblogs, etc) with little to no work, using AI is tempting. But that’s a capitalistic mindset that entirely negates what fanfic is.
If I ever come across a fic that I liked and discovered it was written by a bot I would feel extremely cheated tbh. I’d rather read a badly written fic by a first time writer who poured their heart and time and love for their fandom into that fic than some souless attempt for clout, kudos, and online attention that AI fanfic “creators” have posted.
AI is a plague on creativity and I truly hope we can find ways to make it fail.
shout out to people who’s family isnt entirely bad or entirely good, but something in between and you dont know how to feel about them. you feel angry but you also feel guilty, because you know they genuinely love and care about you, but sometimes they show it in a way you know its not okay. your feelings are valid, your anger and sadness and grief are valid, and you dont have to prove this to no one. bigger shout out to those with memory issues who know something isnt right but can’t recall all of the bad events, only the feelings, which only increases the guilt.
you have to understand that there is an overlap between drag queens and trans women and between trans women and cis lesbians and between lesbians and drag kings and between drag kings and trans men and between trans men and cis gay men and between gay men and drag queens and between lesbians and bisexual women and between gay men and bisexual men and between lesbians and asexual women and between gay men and asexual men and between all sexualities and nonbinary people and between butches and transmascs and between binary trans people and genserqueer people.
basically what I’m saying is that we’re all family. there aren’t clear divides or walls that separate us. and that’s the point. being easily separated into perfect neat little boxes is exactly what queerphobic people want. don’t let your oppressers trick you into thinking your family is your enemy.
if you tried to map out our community, you wouldn’t get a bunch of neat circles that don’t touch or overlap or have any relationship with each other at all. you’d get this.
even if the fraud was like 5% it wouldn’t compare to rich people cheating the system by trillions lmao
Also, SNAP “fraud” is like exchanging some of your stamps for cash to buy necessities you can’t buy with stamps, like soap or deodorant or tampons
TBH even if one hundred percent of people on food stamps were committing food stamp fraud I’d still be in favor of keeping the program around
Hey I wanna talk about this.
I work at a drug addiction counseling center. A ton of my clients have, at one time or another, sold their food stamps. This is basically exactly what the GOP is afraid of, right? Drug addicts selling their food stamps.
I have learned, now, to ask them WHY they sold their food stamps. Here is an incomplete list of the answers:
- I need tampons, and you can’t buy them with foodstamps
- See above RE: toilet paper
- I was living in a hotel with no kitchen then. I had to buy pre-prepared food
- The homeless shelter won’t let me keep food in my locker or room, so I have to buy pre-prepared food (Yes, really)
- I had to make rent
- My sister had to make rent
- My son had to make rent
- I needed co-pays to get my medication or I’ll die
- I needed co-pays to get my medication or I’ll loose control of my mental health
But the absolute most common form of food stamp fraud I see? Giving away food stamps to other family members who get no food stamps or insufficient food stamps to feed their families. I see that every month. People glassy eyed and hungry because they gave away their food to their adult kids, their grand kids, cousins, siblings etc.
So, is food stamp fraud rampant? In some places, yes. And I’m not about to chastise people for it.
i’m just gonna take this post for a moment so i can rant but like
i Hate how entitled adults can feel over a child’s hair!
it started when i was young myself, i wanted a mohawk, but my dad didn’t approve of that look on a “girl”, and insisted i’d regret such a bold cut. at 16 i was finally given full autonomy over my own head.
but then i have a son and everyone around us is trying to keep his hair short. when we finally moved out just me my partner and him, i told him he doesn’t need to get any haircuts he doesn’t want.
so he starts growing it out, it’s still short but coming on mid-length. his teacher makes a point to tell me it’s getting long as if i don’t have eyes. i hear her walking out with him one day talking to him about haircuts, as if to coax him into one. eventually i get child services called on me for ‘forcing a transgender lifestyle’ over what i can only assume is from a combination of me drawing cute ponies on his valentine box and letting him go to school in a ponytail.
he kept it short for awhile after but told me he wanted to grow it out again, so i let him of course. he comes home one day after getting a haircut at his grandpa’s and tells me he didn’t Want the haircut.
i ask why he got it then and learned he was bribed with a promise of a surprise IF he cut his hair.
tl;dr people need to back the hell up off of children and let them have owership of what’s on THEIR body! /rant
Same thing about getting a child to curl or straighten their hair. Or do anything with it. Just let kids have control over their bodies.
This happened to me when I was little too!! Growing up I had naturally tight Shirley Temple curls. The only problem was that you can’t get a hair brush through it if your life depended on it until it grew out over a few years.
but This One Lady from church decided that leaving my hair messy and curly was child abuse and threatened to call social services on my family every damn time she saw me until one day she was the designated kid watcher and ho boy my momma tells me i came out with tears in my eyes and greasy slicked down hair and that’s where she ends the story because i think my mother beat her ass but yeah.
Leave kids hair alone.
I’m going to be honest, parents who are super-controlling of their children’s hair creep me the fuck out and I’m not entirely certain why except that I get a vague feeling they kind of relegate them to, “annoying talking doll” status.
I loved my daughter’s long blond hair. It was thick and wavy and beautiful but when she told me she wanted it cut short ‘like a boy’(she was four) I took her to the salon and let her whack it off.
The stylist was skeptical, ‘are you sure?” and the thing is, she said this to me, not my daughter. So I asked my girl ‘are you sure you want it cut short?’ She was. The hair went. The stylist acted nervous most of the way through like she was waiting for one of us to burst into tears, but it looked cute! And my daughter loved it! (And it’s been short ever since.)
Autonomy over your hair is bodily autonomy and we as a culture need to start holding bodily autonomy as sacred
there is a reason that so many of us who’ve experienced trauma will reclaim control over our bodies and our selves by cutting and dying our hair. it’s part of us. it’s part of our expression. that’s vitally important to people, especially kids, who are still early in the process of learning how they fit into the world around them.
For some reason, “stop enforcing your gender identity and sexual orientation on children” never applies to cis-het people who are the only ones actually enforcing it.
About this:
Some reasons, not exhaustive:
Parents tightly controlling this shit is damaging and super often indicative of sexism or queerphobia they will begin imposing or are already imposing on the child.
Early form of indoctrination into boys vs. girls behavior; it begins super young when the child is very malleable. Sets the stage for strict gender roles.
A parent who does not respect their child’s autonomy over something as trivial as their hair is absolutely not going to defend their child from other assaults on their autonomy, unless those assaults are property crimes that challenge or might lead their child to challenge their ownership of the child’s body.
It’s disgusting.
It also goes for life partners. Controlling someone’s appearance either directly, or indirectly through repeated “hints” and shit-talking people who don’t meet their standards is at the very least toxic, and sometimes it is downright abusive. There’s a reason “woman cuts her hair in a way that she knows you don’t like” is seen as a “warning sign” that your wife might “leave you.” The hold is breaking. I did it, progressively, as things spiraled down. It wasn’t rebellion. It was reclamation. (Also me realizing that I really didn’t like having long hair. This is way better.
By the way, cutting someone’s hair without consent is assault, same as punching them, and in many places it is legally recognized as such. Get their asses.
Honestly I think this disconnect largely comes from how our behaviour looks from the outside (aka to neurotypicals) and how they then interpret what we mean and how we feel about things from how they see us and their assumptions based on those observations, versus the actual internal lives of autistic people and our actual intentions and feelings. I remember my brother giving me some news and being really excited to see my reaction because he knew I’d be happy and excited about it, and then saying, “Oh, I thought you’d be excited about it,” and being really let down by my outward expression because my face and voice were really flat and I didn’t say much. The thing was, though, that I *was* super excited on the inside. Luckily my brother is also autistic so he understood when I told him I was excited it just wasn’t showing on the outside very well.
I imagine it’s a difficult concept for most neurotypicals to really wrap their heads around. Our internal worlds don’t match up with the expected look or tone or word usage or what have you that most people would have, so assumptions that we don’t intuit or understand half the time (or more, or less, depending on many factors and individual characteristics of our autism) are made about those internal words, thoughts, intentions and feelings. We can come off as opaque, and in the absence of the level of transparency most people expect assumptions are made. Little do neurotypicals know that they are equally (or sometimes more) opaque to us and we are constantly analyzing and looking for any scrap or clue to what is going on inside for them because we know from painful experience that our assumptions are often *wrong.* But the thing is, there’s just less of us, so society isn’t tailored to our needs or guidelines; we can’t live our lives never investigating questioning our assumptions if we want to get along in the world.
Basically, most writer rooms need more autistic consultation and less assumptions based on looking at us from the outside then trying to extrapolate our interior worlds from those same assumptions.
This is absolutely fascinating. I’ve now been looking at Alex Colville’s paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn’t exist yet. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don’t fade into the distance)
- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.
- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)
- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture
- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don’t communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.
- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person’s head in the snowy driving scene)
- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I’ve already listed. In other words, details in the “wrong” places.
What’s fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.
But Colville wasn’t a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?
Quick google research says he was particularly interested in being inspired by objects and things around him and in investigating our place in the world. He started drawing when he got pneumonia as a child which took him six months (days before there were antibiotics for that kind of thing) to recover from and left him mostly on bed rest alone. He said he mostly drew boats, planes, cars and such (maybe from toys or models? speculation on my part here).
Notably he was also a war painter in the Canadian military during the second world war. He was with the forces that fought up through Belgium and the Netherlands that were nicknamed the water rats; the conditions were absolutely terrible due to German forces sabotaging dikes and dams as they retreated leading to tons of flooding. He was also with the Canadian forces that liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the mass graves (as well as other horrors) first hand there.
It seems by the time period shown here he was largely using a pointilism technique to render things. I’ve seen some of his other pieces in person, and I can say that at actual scale the pointilism (while not super noticeable) is more noticeable and does make the pieces feel a bit less flattened out. Still super surreal in a way though. Anyway, quick google research said he was very particular about the construction and order in his works, and that he was attempting to bring order to the world around him as he interpreted it.
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