#which was... certainly a take that was heavily rooted in bigotry

[transingthoseformers]

Technically, every single transformer is nonbinary even in canon and here me out on this because I'm going to deconstruct a misconception.

Think about how the the majority of people* interpret the therm nonbinary. In fact, what do you see when you hear the term nonbinary? They/them pronouns, androgynous, an alternative lifestyle... a stereotype? I don't think i have to say on tumblr of all the places that nonbinary people come in a wide variety of shapes colors and personalities. But i think a common misconception is that being nonbinary is some magical third gender. And tbh that always makes me sad because can you imagine growing up thinking there's only two colors, red and blue, and oh maybe you learn that yellow is also a color and you go "cool so there's three colors", then realizing that holy shit wow there's an infinite amount of colors and shades out there! It's one of the things i actually miss about when i first started realizing because that beautiful learning feeling.

This is when I reintroduce transformers into the conversation. The meta reasoning is originallythe audience they wished to sell the cold war propaganda toys to, modeled the characters after the image they created, and only added the girls when they realized how gay the show had become. I believe the various idw comics were the ones who decided that on Cybertron the glyph(s) for he/him pronouns were considered neutral. A headcanon that I'm not sure if it's fanon or canon is that the Cybertronians came to Earth and went along with the genders and pronouns that the humans assigned them. Which I've seen many irl nonbinary people explain their genders like that "oh I'm ____ but I'm willing to let people assume I'm ____" which i admit I'm guilty of and has came to bite me in the ass.

How does this mean they're nonbinary? Well they quite literally do not exactly fit into the binary that human society has created because oh i don't know Robots who don't have the same culture as us. In a way they're all trans as they kinda transitioned from cybertronian gender to the human genders or otherwise alien genders. A character can be a man while also being nonbinary. A character can be a woman while also being nonbinary. A character can be genderfluid. A character can straight up just Not state a gender like Nightshade which is valid as hell; you don't need to sit there and explain your entire set up to nosy people valid valid. They're also you know fictional characters! You can have headcanons and popular fanon and an adopted take you saw one time. One of the major reasons I became an active member in this fandom rather than inactive is because of how much variety there is here.

*at least people who are allies because ofc transphobes are going to just. Not acknowledge us in any meaningful way and think of us in very impolite ways. They'll hear the term androgynous and think "I'll guess what your AGAB is and automatically assume you have the characteristics I associate with that and will refer to you as only that [often insert slur here]* if i have to hear the blue hair thing and the goddamn attack helicopter thing one more time i will end up killing someone and i know where i will hide the body.

#nonbinary #transformers #this take is entirely subjective and based on my experiences and interpretations in this fandom #people are allowed to see this and just. ignore it #the ''nonbinary means One magic third gender ever dever'' take always makes me sad because i want to show people how much more there is #fun fact! did you know that being queer in general at one point in history was considered another gender in its own right? #which was... certainly a take that was heavily rooted in bigotry #and i heavily dislike the take that canon took again and again that associated gender neutral with masculine. #part of a reason i absolutely love the fact that we're yassifying the nemesis in my tfp au #it makes perfect sense that they wouldn't entirely subscribe to human gender norms for the sake of the humans... being less outgoing lol #long post

[politicaltheatre]

In A Clearing

So, here we are. At last. At long last.

For too long, we’ve felt as if we’ve been lost in the woods, blindly tripping over roots, stumbling through muck, fearful, frustrated, angry, not knowing which step would put us in the right direction and not knowing how long it would take us to reach open space, sunlight, and safety.

But we’re here. We’ve arrived. We see light ahead of us and darkness behind, and, if we aren’t careful, we’ll convince ourselves that we’ve made it out of the woods, that it really is all behind us.

That’s the trap. That’s the lie that we long to hear. But we know better. Or should.

Yesterday, the Electoral College voted to confirm the victory of President-Elect Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and Vice President-Elect Kamala Devi Harris. After four years of naked corruption culminating in a campaign of naked racism, hatred, and fear, the arrival of a president seemingly in it to serve rather than only in it to help himself should have us elated. But we aren’t. We can’t be, and we know why.

The Electoral College itself is emblematic of where we are and of how far we still have to go. As a system, the use of electors is obsolete, like relying on a video store when you’re already paying to stream high-definition videos. The electors, representing only the major political parties, are gatekeepers, a class unto themselves who are chosen from among a select, well-connected few.

It’s one more remnant of a world in which being a wealthy, white, male land (and people) owner meant you had the moral character to decide whether or not those allowed to vote had chosen well. However much Alexander Hamilton and others talked up checks and balances, this was one thing seemingly designed to maintain imbalances of power, for that is what it has come to do.

It badly needs to go. Even some of the electors say so. Unfortunately, that will require a constitutional amendment, which will require states to ratify. And wouldn’t you know it, the states needed to reach the 75% threshold for ratification are the ones benefitting from it still: sparsely populated, rural states.

To be fair, a country dominated by the economic interests of heavily populated cities isn’t a country any of us should want to live in. We need balance (and checks), and rural regions have good reason to fear that without something to force attention onto them, they wouldn’t be heard, let alone listened to.

And yet, the electoral college isn’t the means we need to that end. It forces attention, yes, but it also enables abuse of power by the few over the many and, as the past two presidential elections have shown all too well, it encourages bigotry as a means of maintaining regional identity and securing (or suppressing) votes.

The road to eliminate it is so far out in front of us that we can’t even see it. It would require convincing small states to vote for it or creating newer small states - D.C., Puerto Rico, splitting California - to push the margin. There’s so much we have to do just to get to it, and knowing that is what should tell us where we are, not at the edge of the woods but in a clearing, still deep within.

The seemingly easy solution is simply to go forward in the direction we took to reach the clearing. Just keep going. However, without knowing what we face in the woods beyond the other side of the clearing, how will we know where it leads?

What we should do, as always, is stop to get out bearings, to know where it is we actually are, and then to ask the questions we should know to ask.

The first question upon entering the clearing is: What were we escaping from? That, of course, only leads to more questions. For example, 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden, but how many of them were just voting to get rid of Donald Trump? If just getting rid of Trump was all they wanted, how many of them are committed to getting rid of the culture that gave rise to Trump? How many would just be satisfied to return to the world as it existed January 19, 2017? Or November 7, 2016?

The uncomfortable truth of this moment is that the answers to those questions are probably: Trump in the White House; The majority; Few even think about it; and, Way, way more than is good for us long term. If facts matter - and do they ever matter - the most simple fact of all is this: There’s a pandemic going on and people want certainty, first and foremost that the pandemic will be ended soon by competent, compassionate human beings.

That, voters of America, might as well have been Joe Biden’s campaign slogan. If you’re looking at him nominating one Washington and Wall Street insider after another and pulling your hair out, keep in mind that metaphorically turning the clock back four years was his entire campaign promise and is exactly his goal. To him and those working with him, this is what the world needs to see. He wants to reassure banks and to reassure the militaries of both allies and foes.

“We were sick,” he’s saying. “But we’re healthy again.”

That Biden is sending this message just as the first COVID-19 vaccines are arriving around the world is a little ironic, but only because the drive to release them was as much a political one as anything, pushed by a man who cared less that the vaccines worked than that they came out in time for him to claim credit. And credit will only really be due if they actually work, which we won’t know for months, possibly even an entire year.

What, then, of this coming year? Well, if you thought getting Trump out of the White House would be enough to get rid of him and his influence, you were deluded.

As much as 81 million Americans just wanted Trump gone, 74 million took a good, long, four years to look at who and what Donald Trump was and what he did and what he said and what he was doing to this country and thought, “That’s the one for me!” They’ve tied so much of their identities up in seeing him succeed, that, like die hard fans of a losing sports team, they just keep coming back for more.

If you’ve been wondering how and why 126 Republican men and women and 19 Republican Attorneys General would sign on to a lawsuit filed by the Republican Attorney General of Texas to invalidate votes in States that were not Texas, well, you have 74 million reasons, all of them potential campaign donors and voters in just two years. Of course, they all knew the lawsuit was a joke, that it would fail.

Most of them probably also knew that seeking to invalidate votes and install the loser of a presidential election could be seen as sedition or treason, but how many of them sincerely believed the lawsuit would go anywhere? To them, it was just another empty campaign promise made to suckers and losers. And to Ken Paxton, that Texas Attorney General, it was little more than a valentine to the man who, for the next four and a half weeks, has the power to pardon him for multiple federal crimes.

Which raises another question: How many of those 126 believed that they would ever be brought up on charges in this political culture? Is anyone charged with anything anymore? Certainly, no one ever goes to jail. And if they do…well, maybe there’s a pardon, from this president or whichever Republican wins in 2024. Just because they’re cynically using Republican voters for profit doesn’t mean Republican politicians can’t be just as deluded as their marks.

We live in a cheating culture. Electing Joe Biden does nothing to end it. Mitch McConnell and his House counterparts are counting on that. So, too, are current White House staffers, from outgoing Attorney General William Barr down to the lowliest interns manning the paper shredders this Christmas. They all see this moment and think, “This won’t last. We’ll be back.”

They may be right. Hell, even the Houston Astros coaches and executives who cheated their way to a championship a few years ago have jobs in baseball again. The sport entered that particular clearing, one in which cheating and cheaters were publicly shamed, turned around and walked right back where they came from. Of course, they have some experience with this kind of collective amnesia, and there’s so much money to be made.

That’s why the Republicans are acting like this moment is just that, a moment, a pause, a break. They fully expect us to turn around and go right back into the woods we just escaped. That’s how they make their money. They expect us to see Joe Biden in the White House and lose our way, either to confusion, frustration, or complacency. We’ll look around ourselves and see woods in every direction, with no sense of which path to take or how far the woods go in any one direction.

And there they’ll be, at the edge we just left, beckoning us back, telling us how foolish we were to allow ourselves to be dragged out into the open where we are vulnerable. The longer it takes for us to get vaccines, the longer we go without jobs and stuck at home with our kids, the more they will play this game. To them, that’s exactly what it is, a game with only winners and losers, and the more they play, the more uncertain the results will be.

That’s how they win, and it’s the specialty of Mitch McConnell. It’s what he did to obstruct Barack Obama and, given that Joe Biden will undoubtedly negotiate exactly the same way he did as Vice President, it is undoubtedly what McConnell will do again. Anything he can do to delay relief to those who have been made most vulnerable by the pandemic, he will do in order to extract more profit for himself and his benefactors.

That anything includes enabling and encouraging right wing violence, which has increased in lockstep with the Republican Party’s dismantling of functional governance and which will very likely increase even more now that Trump’s roadshow circus of lawsuits have resulted in comical defeat.

Trump is doing it for the obvious reasons: adulation, power, and, most important, to leech every last penny he can from his devoted followers. McConnell and the rest of the “we don’t know who won” Republicans in Congress are doing it for those reasons, too, but they have one other reason: the two Georgia runoffs on January 5th. They have two candidates battling accusations of insider trading (and cozying up to white supremacists), and desperately want Trump voters (including those white supremacists) to vote Republican.

Which takes us back to the newly-re-re-re-christened president-elect, who has until today resisted visiting Georgia to help the Democratic campaigns. He’s still been a presence there - How could a president-elect not be? - but only as a distantly reassuring face for Democrats and a menacing bogeyman for Republicans. Think the attack on Dr. Jill Biden has nothing to do with Georgia? If Republicans can’t run against “socialists”, they’ll run against “uppity, liberal elites trying to tell everyone how to live their lives”, which amounts to the same thing: “Freedom!”

All of this is to say, we can’t expect the right wing to learn the lessons we want them to learn from defeat. They never have, and they never will. If they could learn those kinds of lessons, they wouldn’t be right wing. Their instinct isn’t to accept defeat and be humbled by it, it’s to figure out ways to get around it without having to admit they lost at all.

When Nixon was forced from office, his closest supporters didn’t take the lesson that corruption and an illegal war were wrong, only that he failed to get away with it. Thirty years later, two of them, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, led the United States into a still ongoing war in Iraq from which they and they friends made billions. Their push for deregulation led in no small part to an economic crisis, for which they and their friends were bailed out. What lesson do you think they learned from that?

And almost fifty years after Nixon initiated the “Southern Strategy”, one of his most faithful acolytes courted white supremacy to gain and then attempt to hold onto the presidency. The Southern Strategy was something of a revival of Jim Crow - a mutated strain, if you will - which was a revival of the Confederacy, which was an attempt to hold onto slaves, which at its root is an economic system built on an imbalance of both power and accountability.

There is no permanent cure for things like racism and sexism and bullying, because it is the motivations, such as the craven desire not to have to be accountable to others, that drive such behavior. If I am not accountable to you, I can take from you, I can hurt you, I can humiliate you, and I can enjoy it. The abuse not only is the behavior, it is its own justification for the behavior. That is what hides waiting for us in the woods. That is what we have escaped from - or tried to - as we entered this clearing.

If only we could stay here. We have this brief moment, out in the center of the clearing, out in the sun, safe and warm, but in a few short weeks it will be time for us to choose a direction. The risk we face by stopping is that we may get turned around. From the center of a clearing, the woods look the same in every direction, just trees and shadows and whatever dangers they may hide. Lose our way and we may end up right back where we started. We can’t allow that. We can’t settle for it.

This is an inflection point. Things can go in any direction. We are the ones who have the power to decide, not the gatekeepers and not anyone preying on the worst of our nature.

Choose accountability. It may not be the fastest way through the woods, but it will be the only way out.

- Daniel Ward

#joe biden #kamala harris #politics #accountability #2020 presidential election #electoral college #power #imbalance of power #racism #sexism #bullying #aggressive selfishness #defensive selfishness #in the woods #in a clearing #The Constitution #amendments #long reads #long read #corruption #ken paxton #126 republicans #mitch mcconnell #sedition #treason #greed #dr. jill biden #jon ossoff #raphael warnock #kelly loeffler

[liskantope]

Back during my early days on Tumblr, around the time I started here actually, I started reading Questionable Content comics from the beginning, 10 per day, to catch up to the current ones (at the time the comics numbered just over 3000). The day I finished the first 1000 I blogged about it, and then after the 2000th and 3000th I reblogged to update my review. The final reblog, from December 15th, 2015, is here.

The 4000th QC comic came out on Friday, and I’ve decided that in keeping with tradition it’s time to write a review of the past 1000 (although I’m doing it in a fresh post and not reblogging because apparently back in 2015 I hadn’t discovered readmore links yet and the post would look annoyingly long). So let’s get right to it... under the readmore link which I now know is a thing.

This past thousand comics, more than the previous runs of 1000, happens to converge upon a few prominent themes and one very prominent new character: Bubbles. As Bubbles is introduced soon after comic #3000 and is then heavily developed through the next thousand comics, with many of the story arcs (including the longest one ever seen in QC) centering on her, I might call the period of this past thousand comics The Year of Bubbles or something like that if in fact it were only a year instead of almost four (The 200-Week-Period of Bubbles doesn’t roll off the keyboard quite as nicely).

More generally, this webcomic has taken the AI theme to a whole new level in the past thousand comics with Bubbles’ introduction and development only the most major component of this -- whereas the presence of AI was a very minor and almost awkward side-issue in the early days of QC, the comic has now gone full-on robot-themed. I’d estimate that something in the ballpark of one third of the content in the #3000′s was focused on robots’ interactions and relationships with each other -- I think for the first time one could say it passed the AI-rights analog of the Bechdel test. Some 1000 comics ago I remember being mildly impatient at how robot-themed the content was getting, perhaps out of a vague feeling that the human characters were the ones I identified with the most (perhaps in the QC universe, and possibly the real world before the end of my lifetime, this would be considered a semi-subconscious form of bigotry which I can’t call “human-ism” but would deserve some term). I particularly remember not being enthralled with Bubbles when she was first introduced and was slightly irritated that she was immediately taking center stage.

But Bubbles, as well as the story arcs involving AIs in general, grew on me a lot, not just as an allegory of real-life social justice issues but as stories which provoke ideas and questions that I find interesting in their own right. In the case of the comics involving Bubbles, I think they mainly show just how masterful the cartoonist Jeph Jacques’ writing and approach to character development has become. Every bit of dialog taking place between Bubbles and other characters (particularly Faye of course) is gold, often without a single word that could be changed. The sequence of scenes during the #3700′s through which Faye and Bubbles finally get together is the epitome of this and in my opinion the very best writing we’ve seen in QC.

The actual outcome of Faye and Bubbles winding up in a relationship with each other, along with all the constant hints and speculation and build-up leading up to it, now that I have much more mixed feelings about. It precisely puts its finger on one of the main ever-present aspects of the ethos of QC which I’ve complained about before more than once and wound up calling “sex-causality”. Part of me wishes I hadn’t spent as many words ranting about this issue and I’m still uncertain on exactly how I categorize it, as purely a personal distaste or something more objective that does happen in certain subcultures and is bad when pushed on members who are uncomfortable with it, or what. But I do think the slow development of Faye/Bubbles over the course of most of the past thousand comics deserves a brief discussion as an example. There are two prongs to this thing: the fact that Faye and Bubbles getting together was the outcome, and the intermittent banter of all of the other characters about that outcome through hundreds of comics in approaching it.

With regard to their getting together in a both romantic and sexual relationship, it would go against my principles to oppose something like this. That said, it’s a departure from what we knew about Faye (which, to QC’s credit, is openly acknowledged), I would imagine that in a universe with human-like still-made-of-metal AI such a thing would still be somewhat more unusual than it’s given credit for being in the comic. Then again, it’s almost impossible not to underestimate the variety and frequency of still-under-discussed sexualities that are out there (e.g. romantic love and sexual attraction towards metal objects is definitely a thing), and certainly it makes the story more interesting, which after all is part of the writer’s job. No, what I think bothers me here is what feels like an under-representation or under-recognition of profoundly intimate friendships that don’t at any point contain an element of one party wanting to sleep with the other -- does there have to be a sexual element to every relationship that’s deep? It was mainly for this reason, I guess, that once I saw a meaningful (platonic) relationship blossoming between Faye and Bubbles, and noticed how well it was written and how much good it was doing each of them, that I feel it was a really beautiful thing as it was and began actively rooting against the ship that most of the other characters were rooting for.

As for the speculation between the other characters, well, if you’ve been following QC and my posts on this issue like the one I linked to above (those of you who have even made it up to this point in this post!), then you might guess rightly that my main reaction was profound annoyance. I don’t like getting on my high horse about other mostly-inoffensive adults acting kind of immature because I’m trying to stay open to it possibly being a personal-taste thing and maybe mostly on my end, but, well, I thought a lot of the banter irritating in a way that perceived immaturity irritates me. These two comics epitomize what I find annoying, and the “You just... seem to care about her a lot, that’s all” line at the start of this one points to precisely my complaint about the existence of deep platonic friendships not being recognized. Anyway, by the time we got past the dinner conversation in the comics I just linked to, I was throwing up my hands and fully onboard with the Faye/Bubbles ship just to finally be done with all the excited speculative giggling. And as I said, when it finally did happen, the writing (including of the reactions of other characters) was fantastic.

To (finally) change the topic away from Bubbles, some of my emotional reaction to QC has shifted subtly while the last thousand comics were coming out. The period of publication from #3001 to #4000 happens to have spanned a segment of my life (which will hopefully be ending soon) in which I’ve felt quite lonely and isolated. And watching all the interactions going on in the QC world makes me feel... not nostalgic exactly because I was never really part of a social circle quite like Marten’s... but rather bittersweet because of how much I’d like to be in so many ways. QC presents a fictional environment that in the confines of my brain I often call a “social utopia” or, perhaps slightly less ridiculously, something like a “social circle / subcultural utopia”. It’s poor terminology because the QC universe on the whole isn’t a utopia in any sense of the word -- in fact there are plenty of social ills that form the backdrop of many storylines -- and even when confined to looking at how the particular social circle operates “utopia” doesn’t seem like an appropriate term. But the variety of people in the social group, the places, they meet, and the way they interact with each other all seems to click together and operate in what I would consider -- and I believe the artist Jeph Jacques would consider -- to be pretty close to idyllic. I like especially how much diversity there is among the characters, both in their backgrounds and interests as well as their quirks, and how completely at ease and accepting they are of each other in spite of or almost because of them. There’s this vibe of “We’re all a little weird but we share the same values about how to be decent human beings, so let’s all revel in our weirdness together and be there for each other through thick and thin!” (Of course there are some bad characters lying on the periphery and kinda-sorta-dicks like Sven who are mostly excluded from the group, but that’s not the core of the world.) With few exceptions, conflicts are resolved in a very systematic way and almost immediately (with only a couple of exceptions that did eventually end happily).

And as a matter of fact, even during times when I was fairly socially happy, I was never part of any group that was so exemplary in this particular way. But reading QC, which is hopefully at least somewhat drawn from the cartoonist’s own experiences, sort of gives me hope or at least a very concrete means of imagining such a crowd. And even if I did feel the need to gripe from time to time about what I call the “sex-casual” norms that permeate the group interactions, honestly in the grand scheme of things that’s just something I could live with or even enjoy if comes through in a non-pushy, non-conformist way, in order to be part of such a welcoming and healthy family.

#qc #bechdel test #artificial intelligence #sex casuality #social life

[dorthydent18782-blog]

Bodega Vending Machine Application Ditches Breakfast Sandwiches, Cats And Also Latino Roots

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