Χίμαιρα corvids @autistikai@computerfairi.es

story idea based on some conversation with @vyr

a demon who was sent to corrupt a little outpost of the church finds a paladin who easily saw through her disguise... only to ask her for help with the fact that she's lesbian/trans/both. so they talk (and do more than talk), and live in this uneasy truce. the demon doesn't try to corrupt things *too* much, and the paladin doesn't reveal who she is.

then, one day, the paladin is gone. the demon asks around in her mortal disguise for what happened, and discovers that the paladin's been discovered by the church, shipped off to be 'corrected'/tried/executed.

but, somehow, her sword was left behind. and the demon takes it up, and its enchantments of light yield to her. and the demon reflects on something the paladin told her: that unlike most of the holy swords, hers was special. it only kills monsters. she draws it across the back of her hand, experimentally. no blood.

but oh, does it draw blood from those that stand between her and her journey to rescue the paladin.

but not the paladin herself, during their confrontation. she'd been broken, twisted against herself, made to believe she was a monster that could only find salvation in destruction. but when the demon brings her sword to her neck, nothing happens. not even the slightest scratch. and the demon implores her to *remember*, to remember what they shared, the love they had. to remember that she's not a monster.

and the impossibly-bright halo shatters, the searing armor fades, and the paladin collapses in to the arms of the demon, of the only person who ever truly knew her.

and together, they find their freedom.

Tf (tensorflow) kink

I used to be one of those “words have to mean things” assholes until I remembered that all language 1. Is defined by culture 2. Changes over time with culture and 3. Labels are individualistic and shouldn’t serve to be shorthand for cishets to be able to put us in boxes

If you are a web developer trying to keep spambots out, DO NOT use reCAPTCHA. It is an unethical privacy invasion that follows people around the Web and stops disabled people from accessing information or services for no good reason.

Instead, just ask a (very) simple logic puzzle from a decent-sized set. Ask the questions in regular text and give an option to change puzzles. Switch out the library of puzzles occasionally. This will stop the vast majority of spambots.

White people wanna be oppressed sooo badly

mecha are trans culture

it's transphobic that i don't have a bipedal heavy weapons platform to pilot and modify with ever-more-ingenious weapons as i'm deployed across far-flung worlds to fight the enemies of Union

cannot believe the lengths discord will go to suppress the truth

Every gay person falls into one of these catagories:
- war criminal power broker
- authoritatian femme
- Olive garden bomber
- fired from boy scout troop leadership due to constant discussion of Epstein
- accidental eldtrich worshipper
- 70 different bees pretending to be one person
- goth clown demon
- anime fan

most of the time, the most productive way to deal with a 'rude' interaction is to assume the other person was doing what they thought was appropriate and move on.

when we, as white people, feel like a person of color is addressing racism 'rudely'? we need to deal with that perception on our own. anti-racism *is* disruptive, because racism — which benefits white people! — *is* the norm. to disrupt the normal state of affairs is good when the normal state is bad. a conflict discussed out in the open is a strict improvement on a conflict we, as white people empowered by racism, can ignore; and just because white people can ignore a situation doesn't make that situation 'peaceful' or 'civil'.

just handle the emotion you're having, and take the criticism. don't let your kneejerk feeling of 'that's rude!' stop you from *listening,* because that kneejerk rejection is there in order to keep you from listening, to keep you invested in the racist norms.

politeness norms differ from place to place. one example I see discussed a lot is that in New York City, the polite way to interact with strangers is to take up as little of their time as possible. if you come from a politeness culture that sees chit-chat as a way of affirming a stranger's humanity, that can make your visit to New York City rather upsetting; everyone seems so 'rude,' which is to say, short-spoken and directly to the point.

most 'rudeness' is like that encoutnter between a New Yorker and a tourist: two people, being polite as they understand politeness, but because their politeness norms mismatch they both walk away thinking "how rude."

most politeness norms are okay, by themselves. there is nothing wrong with most politeness norms; there's just some context where following that norm will make you seem rude.

however, the white people 'politeness' norm where people of color aren't allowed to make us uncomfortable in any way? sucks. we need to be made uncomfortable.

@CyclopsCaveman what I find to be a real whopper is when people who do bring up that "normalizing this thing that I don't like is just going to make it is so it happens openly more" when discussing anything outside of the established "norm" (cishetero/white/usually male dominated/dominant religion/surburban leave it to beaver lifestyle basically) but can't take into account that traditionally that's exactly how established oppression already permeates society and therefore one cannot ignore it

you can’t just take a pattern of behavior that’s been normalized and point at something as the true root cause. for many things that get normalized there’s no such thing as an easy answer to what’s been normalized. we can say all we want that a certain media creator or a certain industry “caused” something but that doesn’t really account for the confluence of various factors that all go into the normalization of certain behaviors, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with each other. so it’s weird. you have all these things which most genuine arguments wouldn’t consider related to one another and you have to prove have a relation to one another, but the only relation they have is a loose, hard to prove cultural relation that don’t seem connected to the genesis of the pattern of behavior you’re trying to show has been normalized.