If I were your good friend, I would want you to become SOME FORM OF MISFIT out in the open with me. That’s feminism, after all: making room for something other than the twisted world we endured. A nonbinary identity isn’t a betrayal of feminism. It’s perfectly in step with the spirit of feminism. It’s not rejection. It’s a model for casting off what doesn’t fit.

Ask Polly: ‘My Kid Is Nonbinary, and I Can’t Get Over It’

Treat exposition like cheesecake. Give it out in small portions and no one will get a sick tummy.

Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, at http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17875/page2

Duty, Friendship, and Lies in The Wire (DS9 2x22)

[babeltwo]

The Wire is one of my favorite episodes of DS9, and honestly one of my favorite episodes of anything. I see something new in it every time I watch it, and it always impacts me emotionally. So, I want to talk about it. This is going to be a very, very long post.

The episode is book-ended (no pun intended) with Garak sharing a piece of Cardassian literature with Bashir. In the opening scene, the argument between them about the Neverending Sacrifice serves to set a few thematic elements. Most apparent is a tension about Cardassian culture vs. Federation(/Human) culture, which Garak snaps at Bashir about more than once.

Keep reading

[heckofabecca]

Power couple! (Miles + Ekaterin)

[sleepyfriend]

you can’t tell me major kira wasn’t the punkest teen bajor’s ever seen

(her pin says freedom but i’m shit at writing in bajoran so don’t sue me)

More misunderstanding of what technology is

[doctor-starstuck]

"But, we’ve done pretty well without our tricorders, EM converters, and comlinks, haven’t we? After all, the human body is a powerful tool. We can plow the crops, harvest the fields, construct the walls that we need for protection against the wilderness, weave the clothes that we need to stay warm.

In a way, we’ve rediscovered what man is capable of without technology.”

- Alixus, from Deep Space 9: S2E15 Paradise

No, this is wrong. What you are describing is technology. Agriculture is technology. Fabric construction is technological. Housing, tools, techniques, etc. are all part of our technological development. You may not be using the same technology you grew up with, but the things we use to accomplish our tasks to stay alive and alter our environments are technology.

It would have been more accurate and helpful to say, “Though not initially our aim, we’ve explored what we are capable of using technologies we thought we had outgrown the need for.”

I really love the phrase, “the human body is a powerful tool” because even with our sensory enhancing technology today, we still rely on the body to interpret our interactions with the world. We use ourselves to decide what kinds of technologies to develop. Sure, we can outstrip human strength and endurance quite easily with our tools of today (and yesterday,) but my point is that we use ourselves as the reference point, and if this speech was about the merits of remembering that, it would be more powerful and relevant to me, instead of making me cringe and wonder why Star Trek needed to revisit the fear of technological change and development scenario again in this way.

P.S.
I also have a lot to say about “walls to protect us from the wilderness,” but that’s another topic.

And, oops, I fucked up the formatting and was foiled by autocorrect a few times. Wish I could color the quote text. I think everything is fixed now.

teroknortailor.tumblr.com

Especially the Lies...: Piercings - more than meets the ear (a Bajoran headcanon post)

[teroknortailor]

Before the Occupation and in ancient times, the Bajoran style of piercing was much more elaborate. People would often have many parts of their body pierced with intricate jewelry connected together with chains. The Bajorans believed that certain metals could channel their Pagh along naturally occurring pathways of the body. However, the left ear was mostly free of piercing for religious purposes. 

A full ancient Bajoran piercing could consist of ear, nose, brow, lip, nipple, surface, and navel piercings (as well as some in ~other~ places) and more all interconnected with fine chains. Each piercing corresponded to a certain milestone in a Bajoran’s life, with specific ones being added according to profession and the various Pagh ‘pathways’ involved.

Specifically in ancient times, these piercings were shown off via sheer, draped, revealing styles that were rejected as immodest as the modern Bajoran religion emerged.

When the Occupation happened, however, Bajor was stripped of a majority of its’ precious metal resources and the people had to give up a large part of their piercings in favor for just the single ear. Even then, they had trouble finding good metal, and often had to scavenge it off of damaged industrial components.