writingfromfactorx:

shiyiya:

isabelthespy:

popca:

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

super-eklectic1:

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

notforyoutobreak:

scar-lip:

notforyoutobreak:

POP.

That will never be as bad as calling it ‘lemonade’. Ever.

…lemonade?  Like as in calling pop/coke/soda lemonade?

s’cool, imma call it soda all ovah you

sodasodasodasodasodaaaaaainyoface

yo IT’S POP! ok fact!

it’s sodaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa :P

SODA, YALL.

the weirdest/my secret favorite is i think texas? where they just call it all coke? i have heard tell of this but kind of don’t really believe it but also want it to be true?

but also it’s clearly called soda come on now.

Wait, what? Is the title saying that ‘soda’ is a northeastern US thing? Because uh, I live in the southwest, and everyone calls it soda here…

IT IS CALLED SODA.

(I might live in Georgia, but my accent is alllll over the East Coast, so. Uh, don’t use me as an example for anyone’s regionalisms.)

I don’t know what you’re all talking about. The stuff is clearly collectively called “soft drinks.”

hernameishelen:

And some more TMI: Yea, it hurts like a fucking mofo, my hymen is like extra thick and made of bullet proof flesh. Fucking bullshit.

Best. Superpower. Ever. 

greenchestnuts:

fictionalaces:

Frodo Baggins never appears to desire sexual experiences. Whether or not he is romantic cannot be discerned. He values deep friendship, so he may be romantic, but that cannot be proven or disproved.

Er, valuing deep friendship does not make one romantic. I’m not sure what the connection you’re drawing there is.

Moreover, is there anyone in the LotR universe who does explicitly desire sexual experience? Not totally sure, but my overall impression of LotR was that no one really talked about or thought about sex in the text. 

This is what makes interpreting fictional characters as asexual so problematic sometimes. Our overall culture is so uncomfortable with explicit talk about sex that many writers just leave it out completely—not because they think of the characters as asexual, but because they don’t want the “lurid” sexuality to distract from the “real” story. And in a story where sex is censored out of the world as a whole, the fact that one character doesn’t think about sex doesn’t mean much.

So I’m uncomfortable about reading any character as asexual unless they’re in a world where it’s established that most characters do explicitly desire sex. 

pinstripesuit:

In light of the most recent asexuality-related kerfluffle, I’ve been thinking about asexual allies.  I’ve realized that when I talk about asexuality, the people who tend to “get it” the most without being given the whole Ace 101 are people involved in BDSM*.  After thinking about why this might be, I came to the conclusion that it might have to do with compartmentalization. 

At least the people I know who are into BDSM, they tend to be better at seeing sexual orientation, sexual behavior, sexual desire, and romantic orientation as separate… things, and that these things can be joined up in different ways for different people at different times, whereas most other people tend to see them as pretty much all the same thing or inevitably linked. 

This compartmentalization factors into a lot of ace discussion, such as separating sexual attraction from romantic attraction as being one in the same, and - the continual message that people never seem to get - that orientation =/= behavior. 

I don’t know.  Just a thought. It’s always a bit surprising to see where allies can pop up.

*Edit: I also know that asexual people and people involved in BDSM are not two distinct groups.  For the purpose of this post, I am referring to people involved in BDSM who also do not identify under the ace spectrum.

This certainly reflects my experience, since most of my IRL social network is involved in the BDSM scene, and all my experiences with being asexual have been pretty completely positive. Well, except for the fact that watching all the fun they’re having that I really can’t relate to is kind of isolating sometimes, but that’s a thing that’s on me, not on them. 

I also think there’s a lot of overlap between BDSM and aromanticism/wtfromanticism, insofar as both groups tend to have a lot of relationships that don’t fit into the normative relationship/friendship binary. Pretty much the only place I’ve seen that offers more words to describe those relationships than the aromantic community is FetLife profiles. 

imaginationcarriesus:

Alright, I’ve been giving some thought to this stuff. There’s one particular nonsexual (though commonly perceived as sexual), intimate act that I love, but can never find the words to explain it as a nonsexual thing.

The touching of bare skin, particularly areas that non-intimate partners rarely…

This is definitely a feeling that is important to me and one that I’d like to have a word for. The closest existing term I know is “skinship,” which may or may not be the same thing. Are you considering “baring” to be the touching of those areas with fingers specifically, or any skin-to-skin contact involving those areas? 

The one thing I think is kind of awkward about “baring” is that the word “bear”/”bare” already has other meanings that might be confusing if you tried to use it in conversation. Like, “I need you to bare with me.”

hernameishelen:

I posted these when I first joined tumblr, with the help of the ineluctable Southie. I’m just bringing back the badass … I’m sure you can tell they’re from Star Trek. :D

ETA: Regarding my poor song parody choice … at the time, I didn’t know all the things I know now.

I totally wore this outfit in blue for most of Halloween, plus several cons this year. 

greenchestnuts:

Wow. I’m not sure I even know what a sexual fantasy is. By that I mean, while it is obviously a fantasy about sex, I have never been clear where the line between “thinking about sex” and “fantasizing about sex” falls. I’m guessing a sexual fantasy is similar in nature to the way I sometimes think about chocolate or cuddling— an instinctive want?

Getting off topic here, but I think a sexual fantasy (as opposed to thinking about sex) generally has some kind of narrative flow associated with it. Like, instead of just thinking “I want chocolate,” you’d have a set of images playing out in your head of how it would feel to crinkle the chocolate wrapper, and how it would smell when you opened it, and so on. 

nethdugan:

zedweiller:

nethdugan:

Lenin was a communist. Not actually the same thing.

clarify terms, plz?

generally it’s assumed that socialism means fighting for workers’ rights, having a really robust social safety net, etc. under a capitalist system, whereas communism means abolishing capitalism itself and moving towards a truly classless society.

is there an … objection here? 

Nope, I’d agree with you. I know historically under certain models the definitions are different, but as far as every day modern politics goes that’s pretty much it.

They’re different points along a scale, to use a model that’s as comprehensive as the Kinsey model is for sexuality (which is to say not that much but gives a general idea).

But if believing in worker rights and a social safety net is all it takes to be a socialist, then isn’t Obama a socialist after all? And every other corporate-backed center-left reformist out there?

Personally, I’d be uncomfortable thinking of someone as a socialist if they didn’t think in terms of class struggle and didn’t advocate worker control (as opposed to just workers’ rights). I also think it’s important that socialism is an alternative to capitalism, and not just a means of reforming it. (Though that doesn’t mean abolishing money or markets or trade or whatever; many socialists are in favor of some or all of those. Opposing capitalism is not the same thing as opposing a market economy.)

But, granted, the European social democracies are thought of as “socialist” fairly often, I guess, even though they aren’t particularly. So maybe I’m just being more strict in my understanding than the general use of the word would assume. 

shoomlah:

If I were to write a children’s book about derailing on the internet it would totally have whales in it

I imagine whales would have some pretty harsh things to say about anyone trying to de-whale on the Internet. 

nethdugan:

nleseul replied to your post: Things that important to know:

I’m curious what makes Lenin not a socialist. He pretty certainly thought of himself as such—unlike Hitler, who pretty much hated socialism. Marxist-Leninist statism certainly isn’t the only kind of socialism, but it is socialism, as far as I know.

Lenin was a communist. Not actually the same thing.

Reblogging instead of replying so I can have more than 250 characters to work with here. 

If you’re looking at the terms from a Marxist framework—which Lenin was—they kind of are. Marx did make a conceptual distinction, but they were certainly two linked parts of the same overall historical process. 

Basically, for Marx, socialism is a system in which the means of production have been reclaimed from the capitalist class, are available to the working class, and there is a system in place to fairly distribute the products of those means to workers in proportion to the amount of labor they contribute to their operation. Socialism isn’t seen as a goal in itself, but as the first step towards communism, which is the ultimate end of history for Marx. It is seen as achievable with current production technology, requiring nothing more than the awakening of the working class. 

Communism, on the other hand, is what socialism will become after improvements in the technology of production have made it possible to dispense with the system for fair distribution. Communism is achieved when production is so efficient that everyone is able to work as little or as much as they want, and will still be able to take all they desire from the overall social product. It’s basically socialism plus a post-scarcity economy. 

So, within those definitions, Lenin was pretty clearly both a socialist and a communist since, as a Marxist, that’s the route he advocated history taking for Russia. Now, of course, the actual Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that became the official doctrine of the Soviet state under Stalin didn’t do particularly well with that goal, but that doesn’t invalidate the fact that Lenin’s stated ideology was both socialist and communist in the Marxist framework.

Now, granted, there are plenty of ways to think about both concepts outside of Marxism. Still, I’m not aware of any frameworks that would fundamentally invalidate Lenin’s identity as a socialist. The best non-Marxist discussion of both concepts I know of is from An Anarchist FAQ, which considers socialism to be any system in which workers have the political and economic power to produce and distribute goods. (Hence, all anarchists are socialists under its definition.) In its discussion of types of anarchism, it goes on to explain communism as a type of non-individualist and non-market anarchism which prioritizes the abolition of money, but all the differences among threads of anarchist thought it talks about there sound enough like arbitrary hair-splitting, so I don’t know how meaningful that definition really is anyway. 

Anyway, if you take the anarchist definition of socialism, I guess you could argue that Lenin wasn’t really a socialist because he wanted there to be a state which would act as an intermediary between workers and the means of production (which worked out so very well for Russia!). I don’t really see the point of such a distinction, though. He certainly thought of himself as a socialist, and half his writings talk about socialism, so trying to claim after the fact that he wasn’t a real socialist seems pointlessly revisionist.