there's our catastrophe

haha man as a pro-feminist dude I can’t get over how fucked up these MRAs are.  soooooo funny how they believe men are oppressed in contemporary society!!  I can’t get over how some people are dumb enough to listen to them.  haha yup they sure do have a surprising degree of influence over the legislature, judiciary, and broader social norms.  sooooooooo lolzies when you think about how many lives they’ve colluded to ruin.  look at this dude making a joke that minimises women’s suffering!  it’s like he doesn’t realise that this is a really serious issue for some people!  he’s pretty stupid, that’s for sure.  man all you can do is laugh.  that’s literally all you can do.  it’s a wacky world *black hole forms around infinite density of own smugness*   

literally everyone I know who is an “extrovert” works really hard at it

this is often because they are marginalised in some way in most social situations they find themselves in. they can’t afford to be seen as rude, they have to work twice as hard to be liked half as much

literally everyone finds social situations draining and difficult at times

it’s awesome and useful to talk openly about ways to navigate social anxiety, or social norms that are opaque to you — I think realsocialskills does this well, for example

but if you’ve ever felt like you’re just shy/introverted and those Dang Extroverts just don’t understand and should maybe even check their privilege, I’m asking you really seriously to stop making assumptions about the experiences of people who deal with the world differently to you

I do have a particular design-related pet peeve that is actually about design rather than designers, and it’s the overuse of the combination of black or dark grey/light grey or white/red, especially in architecture, especially in crappy new apartment blocks. 

I mean take a look sometime, you’ll be amazed. my dad pointed it out to me, once you see it you can’t unsee it. 

that’s what made me cool off on red as a colour, because I realised it’s, like, the safest way of being ~daring~ and adding ~vibrancy~. it’s the default accent colour. so many shoes and accessories come in black and red and no other colour.   and I always used to get the red because I thought I was being bold.  but electric blue, burnt orange, neon yellow, maybe bright white, ugly browns, any colour that was in fashion exactly ten years ago  — these are daring colours, colours that shock people and that are difficult to work with and are maybe ugly.  culturally speaking, red is your boss’s favourite led zep song.  it’s safe subversion. 

I still wear red sometimes but I refuse to wear any kind of black/grey/red combination. 

for future reference, my pet peeves include but are not limited to people not putting salt in food that needs it, when people insist that shaving hairs makes them grow back thicker, any kind of rhetoric about what’s “natural”, signs that say “your mother doesn’t work here”, recent transplants to Footscray who say they live in the “inner west” (you think this is Sydney?  you think you’re too good to be associated with Sunshine?), food metaphors for sex, yarn-bombing, being called “quirky”, and any kind of designer who does not also manufacture the things they design

I’ve never met a 20something who was super into “teen culture” and “anti-ageism” who actually made a serious effort to reach out to anyone other than similarly nostalgic 20somethings to get sanctimonious with

really I’m just super-bitter because of this one time I was going to go to a kind of expensive 18+ gig and someone I know started ranting about how nobody should ever go to shows that weren’t all ages, much less pay for them, or for that matter go to shows that cost more than $10, sorry if that was “punk elitist”, then changed their mind when they realised a lot of their friends were going (because someone they knew was gonna be a dancer and was getting people on the door), made a few phone calls, got on the guestlist, started excitedly dressing up, and in the meantime I realised I was the only person I knew who wasn’t getting in for free, and felt so small and so uncool that I couldn’t face going at all, and also felt stupid for wasting money, and also for having spent money to waste in the first place, in a recursive dorky-feeling loop, and I generally have pretty OK social confidence so you can imagine how depressing the whole situation was to bring me to that point. 

like, my emotions were affected by a lot of other things going on at that time, I’m not trying to say that person’s terrible cultural politics caused me to collapse in a puddle of anxiety, but fuck you if you think having better connections than other people makes you more radical than them

also the thing that builds those connections is years spent in a scene, and few teens from the sticks have those connections, teens are generally much more able to rustle up a fake ID than get on the fucking guestlist for an international act

I just really want people to remember what it was like to be a teenager, rather than romanticise the figure of The Teen, because that’s no different to Impulse deodorant advertising

anyway, that person is super into Rookie now and still doesn’t hang out with actual teenagers

I mean you know I judge no-one but if you ask for “less hip-hop and r’n’b” and “more of an 80s vibe” at 3am at a party in 2012 then you’re a bad person and you should feel bad

there are so many people with a liberal arts education who should just not be allowed  to have one.  like.  some people are too manipulative and self-centred to be allowed to extend their skills in rhetoric. 

anyway what I’m saying is that there should be a law against it and if someone can find a way to make such a law practicable and effective and put it in effect then that is it, statists you have won the great debate, I take back anarchism

there is a big difference between “making space for others” and “lazy rationalisation of your unwillingness to engage”.

a boycott is not a movement.  inaction is a form of action in that it impacts the world but it is not a substitute for positive action.  refusal to learn about other cultures than your own on the grounds of wariness of cultural appropriation is lazy.  not saying anything when your friends are getting harassed is not respecting their strength and autonomy, it is weak as shit.  only eating out or shopping or living in already-gentrified communities is not fighting gentrification.  not going to solidarity events you’ve been invited to attend because you’re wary of taking up space is paternalistic.  not participating in solidarity movements because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and offending someone is the rankest exercise of the privilege of comfort.  being more concerned with not fucking up than with doing good is about your personal purity, not about the effect you have on the world, and very few people have the resources to maintain this illusion of purity for themselves.  I hear so many rationalisations for staying within your comfort zone under the guise of “solidarity” and I have to say that they all strike me as utterly self-indulgent and self-deceiving.   push yourself or don’t, but don’t try and recast your every action or inaction as anti-oppressive.