the-resident-gay

[the-resident-gay]

the current trend of "tumblr users embarrassing themselves by proudly announcing why they don't listen to any music made by black people" is really astounding.

i cannot help but think this is a direct result of liberal White Guilt and how people have interpreted "anti-racism" as form of cultural self-segregation - the kind of person who thinks trying to cook chicken curry is cultural appropriation, or sends white people anon hate for wearing a kimono (yes, this kind of discourse happened). like, "oh, no, i could never participate in this culture, i'd get my evil white hands all over it! it would be more Progressive if I only did White things."

if you're a poc you've seen this, i'm sure - this deer-in-the-headlights stare you can get from white people when you play music / show art / share a story / anything that is Racially Coded, this total refusal to actually engage with it out of fear that it is in some way Wrong for them to have any opinion on it. because they read somewhere that it's bad to use AAVE but the only lesson they actually learned from that is "gotcha, white people are not allowed to interact with other cultures as punishment for my White Crimes. this helps to fill up the gaping pit of my white guilt and makes me one of the Good People." this transforms their discomfort around non-white cultures (black culture, especially, i should add) into a kind of virtue

anyway if you are white and reading this. go listen to some fucking haliu mergia. ethiopian jazz. will knock your dick right off. go listen to rap or reggae or bollywood and have a genuine reaction to it - like, an actual, from-the-heart reaction. you are allowed to not like some of it. but you will definitely like at least a little. yes, you can compare it to lemon demon (or whatever) if that helps you get into it and that's your only point of reference. maybe don't say that part out loud. but don't, like, separate yourself from it, like you are seeing it in a museum and the only polite thing to do is go "ahh, huh, very interesting, so much culture here."

[the-resident-gay]

[the-resident-gay]

[the-resident-gay]

Girl who says “mood” but only to increasingly concerning things

[the-resident-gay]

another underappreciated tumblr feature that you dont get on other sites is the queue. i love it when something i thought was funny six months ago and then forgot about a week later crawlts its way out of the processing vortex and i get to see it all over again.

[the-resident-gay]

Reminder to use your public library and all the resources they have it makes their numbers look good and good numbers mean the library is likely to either keep the money they are currently getting or even get more money to fund more things! Use your library!

[the-resident-gay]

[the-resident-gay]

The problem Sam Reich is going to have is that one day there will be an actual technical fault on Game Changer and nobody will believe him.

[the-resident-gay]

stop holding ya pee for so damn long

[the-resident-gay]

expand on ur "mental asylum Marxism shit" thing about children & grief?? from what you've said im pretty sure i will relate from my own experiences as a grieving child. also it sounds interesting!!

so i was thinking about how weird it is that, when a child has to deal with the death of a loved one, they say something like "no child should have to go through this! no child should have to even think about death!" which strikes me as weird because i was a child who dealt with the deaths of multiple close family members, very close together. the first was my great-grandmother, who i lived with and who was my best friend. death was never foreign to me (my mom has always been very death-positive on top of all that). grief was just part of my life like everything else was.

but i realized that its because people think childhood should not have any flaws. you should be 100% happy and fulfilled all the time. any time a child experiences anything painful, its bad. not "children should have access to love and support," but "children should not have basic life experiences because the idea of childhood being anything other than fluffy purity scares me."

because children in society are fundamentally not people. especially in a society structured around christian beliefs in natural law theory, that what is natural = what is good, healthy, and Divinely commanded. so on top of children being the property of adults, they are also forced to be the symbols of Nature. whatever is the most useful to whoever needs them. which means we built up this idea of children as tabula rasas, pureness incarnate. like a magic mirror where if we look into it, we'll be able to catch a glimpse of the true face of humanity. every single thing children do can be scrutinized for some grand truth about humans as a whole. and then, the ways children are treated also reflect how we think humanity should interact with its own nature.

example: the idea of humanity as inherently sinful and wicked, with that urge needing to be suppressed through state violence (hello hobbes) = the idea that children are annoying and shitty on purpose and need to be forced via punishment into being Good Citizens.

this is also why children cannot be trans, even though all trans people must prove that we were trans children. being queer must be unnatural; and even if not, its inherently sexual, and sexuality is dirty and bad. so children can't be trans, and they also can't read books on puberty until their parents decide when and what exactly they are allowed to learn. child victims of sexual assault only matter to the extent that they can be used as a symbol of a cultural threat; calling Jewish or trans people pedophiles means saying that they are foreigners attacking basic human nature, and indirectly, Divine command. if you aren't the right kind of victim, or when you inevitably reveal yourself to be A Person with complicated experiences and opinions, you are no longer of use to the agenda.

it sucks that bad things happen to anyone. aspects of youth can exacerbate the pain sometimes, but sometimes it does the reverse: I wish I could have spent more time with the family members I lost, but I know other people who are glad they loss family members young, because they weren't really hurt by it. I think the main thing is that, even sometimes when we talk about our past selves, we project this cultural idea of Child As Purity and ignore the actual person having the experience. when we "empathize" with children by projecting Purity onto them, we aren't actually connecting with them.

[the-resident-gay]

rewatching 3rd life after a few months really is a necessary experience because fan content creators are so talented at making even the silliest moments dramatic and cinematic as fuck that you Will forget that almost every major fight basically runs like a scooby doo chase scene

[the-resident-gay]

So you're telling me that Scar naturally got the permit for sand, giving him the coveted monopoly, and didn't even want it anymore, whereas Grian has wound up with the permit for red sand and does actually want to use it. Red sand. Red. Meanwhile the end of third life involved Grian killing Scar and staining the sand with his blood following a conflict fuelled by a hopeless monopoly. And it's still following them years after the actual murder. And I'm supposed to be normal about this how exactly

[the-resident-gay]

[the-resident-gay]

2024 is the year we stop “consuming” and go back to “reading/watching/listening to/playing” things

[the-resident-gay]

[the-resident-gay]

If you have Spotify reblog this and tag what your number one song on your “on repeat” playlist is.

#too sweet by hozier

[the-resident-gay]

You’d known, intellectually, that your heroic nemesis was a teenager, but it didn’t really sink in until the day their school called because your number was the only one on their emergency contact list.