F. Zoe Blackheart

Alien comes doen to earth and is like "bold of you to domesticate creatures bigger than you"

15 generations later the aliens are also domesticated

"Listen I didn't mean to sell out our entire species over weed and cosplay but look at how good this maid outfit matches my tentacles it's like I was born for this"

🌱Kin I regret to inform you that if I must, I will be hot plamt mommy to keep you in line. [I am however dressing both of us in the maid outfits]

They want a war on us because they desperately need anything to cling to power, and we're an easy target because let's face it: even most proud Democrats are at least a little homophobic if you catch them in an unguarded moment.

They know they can go after us and the people in power, even the supposedly "progressive" ones, will quietly look the other way.

They¹ want us to take it off the streets so they can target us in the alleyways, they want us to take it out of the light so they can hunt us in the darkness. "Be respectable" is saying "be out of sight", and atrocities thrive when they are not seen.

They can't hurt us openly yet, so they demand we are respectable and quiet so they don't have to hide our screams. Only be obvious about your queerness in specialized containers so we can grab a dozen of you at once, call it obscenity or call it a tragic accident or call it a lone wolf.

They cannot force us into special neighborhoods yet, but they can moralize us into hiding when we're not gathered.

If your existence makes cishet people uncomfortable, then exist more so they have to adapt to you. Be loud. Be open. Because if only one of us is that person is a target, but if all of us are than we are a fucking movement.

And the reason is obvious, too. You see it happening all the time. Nixon did a similar version - quote is form a former aide of his, pulled from here:

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Except now they can't make it illegal to be gay or trans, but by getting the public to associate gays with kink and trans with drag, and then criminalizing both heavily.... well, I don't need to say the rest. And we can't forget how the fascists and their ilk try to associate queerness with "leftist ideology" or how anti-queer measures disproportionally disrupt BIPOC communities - it's all connected, and that's why intersectionality is so important.

The cops are not our friends. There is no being "one of the good ones." And if you're trying to get other queer people to be respectable, you're just helping those with power push your queer siblings into neat little pens before they come for you.

1. And to avoid implications, They here refers to the cops, and the GOP, and the evangelicals, and of course the capitalists who all find us uncomfortable and inconvenient.

because I keep seeing some variation of this, mostly from capitalists and tech people (and those subjected to that ideology) with no real sensitivity to what is actually involved in creating or learning. To put it plainly, you know when pasta is finished when it's al dente. You know sausage is finished because it's cooked. All other problems (bringing your $3500 face-mounted camera computer into a hot steam-filled environment) aside, the time given in a recipe isn't the thing. Time passed has only a surface relationship to the processes involved in cooking, but it's the only parameter that can be made cleanly instrumental in a way that doesn't involve a practitioner having to learn how to listen to their body, their eyes, their taste buds, their olfactory faculties, their innate sense of real materials in the existing universe coming into contact with one another.

I had a similar experience, also yesterday, in a musical community. Somebody asked how they should go about ear training - a wonderful question. But I was so shocked when everyone came back with interval-quizzing apps. Software that plays two tones then has you listen and identify that tonal distance as a minor Third, Perfect Fifth, and so on. This is the same exact problem as the cooking with AR headset problem. The intervals aren't the thing. Recognizing that one tone is 6 semitones from another tone can be helpful, in the same way that having a rough sense of how much time something should take in boiling water is helpful. But what your brain actually needs is contextual information. How you build this is by working out how the musical ideas you hold in your head - the birthday song, childrens' rhyming tunes, that song that's been stuck in your head since high school prom, whatever - map to the instrument you're learning, its relationship in physical space to your physical body and mind. Raw intervals are only ever relevant in context, and outside of that context they are actively misleading. But they are the parameter that it's possible to shove into an app. So they're what we get, and they're what we reach for.

Ultimately, I feel it's about maintaining an emotional distance. So many of us are trained to find comfort in distance from our bodies, from our faculties, from perception and relationship to the world around us. Skill-building is so much about re-finding that connection, an engaged curiosity ubiquitous in children then worked out of us in a thousand thousand ways.

It's done when it's cooked. You know it's cooked because you learn to trust yourself. I'm pleading with you: there's no need to be afraid.

realize I'm very much showing my inner cranky old grandma here but... good lord how divorced from the actual art of cooking do you have to be to think that a bunch of AR timers are going to revolutionize anything. what if I'm trying to make something not in its database? what if I want to make something new?

call me a luddite or w/e but this just smacks of the same mindset as the one behind AI art and LLM shit - automating the creative element for the sake of productivity, leaving the actual person as little more than a cog performing neatly laid out steps with zero real input of their own, for the sake of selling more shit in the name of Numbers™

awful.