someone needs to make an anime opening for steam powered giraffe reprise
Yes! Must have Rabbit being a magical girl!
(Source: ff-chan, via nilasjunkart)
Random Steam Powered Giraffe head cannon
The girl who The Spine was asking out for a cup of tea… works in a tea shop.
And he’s been seeing her when she’s working.
Stand back, I’m about to lay some truth down.
I am a big fan of Steam Powered Giraffe.
And I was moderately upset to see that another fan couldn’t quite handle the fact that Bunny Bennet is a girl. Said fan has since deleted their blog, so I can’t tell if they’re a troll or not. But I figure it’s high time I gave the beleaguered transfolks a break and educate some people.
People who already know about trans* issues, feel free to correct me when I get things wrong. I might yet do so, but I am honestly trying to get things right. I have actually done more than passing amounts of homework on this.
People who don’t know about trans* issues, please do some fucking research before lending me your opinion. Thanks.
Long rant ahead.
TL;DR: Nobody has any right to enforce methods of self-expression on any other individual. Everyone has the right to do whatever they want to their own body, so long as they are not hurting themselves. If you don’t like it, find somewhere else to be.
Baby Version: Some people are born with the wrong meat suit. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s up to those people to get their own levels of comfort with that. None of which is any of your business.
Sympathetic Version: Let’s go to imagine-land and pretend you have the wrong meat suit. You still identify as your original gender, but the exterior is the wrong one.
Picture what it might be like to go out and relate to people who can’t seem to get their heads around the idea that your OS doesn’t match your case art.
Now imagine the vast number of people who want you to die.
And picture trying to live every day, trying to get comfortable with yourself, in the face of that constant ire.
Yeah. No wonder that genuine transfolk get tetchy about your demands to educate you. No wonder they get angry when you misgender them. No wonder they get upset when you call them a slur. Please stop that nonsense, now.
Science Version(with icky pictures): Y'all have probably seen that picture of the human nervous system shorn clean of the muscles and bones that are its interface. If you haven’t, here it is:
This is the operating system for our meat suits. As you can see, it’s kinda difficult to tell if that was once a boy or a girl or any kind of person in-between. This is us… underneath.
This is not an excuse for a “we all bleed red” pseudo rant for equality. I’m not going to go there. Because we also have a society that pulls fuckshit on a regular basis. Back to the gender game.
Everything that makes me a me and not you works from this core system. Everything that makes you a you and not me does likewise. This does not, ironically, make us all the same in the end.
This operating system is so darned important that it gets its own set of hormones during the build stage (aka: gestation/pregnancy).
And that’s where things get complicated.
Transexuallity happens when the foetus changes in utero. We all start as girls. Girls are the ‘blank slate’. And then, around the second trimester, hormones flood the foetus to change certain aspects. These hormones happen in two groups. One for the brain and nervous system, and one set for the body. When one of those sets doesn’t arrive(or when one set arrives, counter to instructions), you get a baby transsexual person.
The leading cause for this “print error” is usually excessive stress in the mother. Most often, sadly, associated with abuse.
[I am deliberately not covering intersex folks as thoroughly, because I am not certain of the science. My apologies to you all]
Now… your baby transsexual person has no gender identity when they’re born. Another wonderful poster said that babies are asexual and agender and they’re right. Your average baby’s priorities are (a) sleep, (b) comfort and © milk.
Sex doesn’t -and shouldn’t- come into the picture.
As we learn social interaction, society comes into play. Baby learns that, according to the rules, boys are one thing and girls are another.
And society confuses the issue by taking a look at Baby’s genitals and enforcing set behaviours based solely on the meat suit that’s visible.
That’s kind of messed up.
And it has lead us to such acronyms as DMAB, AMAB, DFAB and AFAB. The FABs and MABs stand for Female At Birth and Male At Birth, respectively. The leading D and A stand for Designated and Assigned, respectively.
Intersex folks tend to use AFAB and AMAB more often, because their genitals are forcibly reconfigured shortly after their birth, and the surgeons and parents basically flip a coin or choose according to their own wants. As you may be able to guess by now, this is messed up.
Designated gender means that an attending physician has made a premature diagnosis based solely on visual evidence. This is just bad science.
Society tells us that DFAB people need to do X things, and DMAB people have to do Y. Why? Because apparently your genitals are THE MOST IMPORTANT DECIDING FACTOR THAT EVER WAS.
That’s real messed up.
Just think for a second about the number of things you do on a daily basis that you actually need your genitals to be able to do.
…yeah. Not many.
Now take a while to ponder how many “male” occupations or “female” occupations similarly require the use of genitals.
That number is almost zero.
So why is it that we value male writers more than female ones? Or that male teachers are instantly treated with more suspicion than a female teacher?
It is because of the Victorian Era. This was the time when white heterosexuality went forth to teach the world that everything everyone else was doing was naughty and should be covered up and never mentioned again. We have the Victorians to blame for hyper-sexualisation, pregnancy taboos, homophobia, transphobia, and anything messed up that is also associated with the phrase “sex sells”.
Sexism is older than dirt, alas, and stems around the idea that a cis woman’s uterus has to be controlled by controlling the cis woman surrounding it.
BUT - the Puritans and the Victorians both had a lot to do with how messed up our society is, today.
And guess what?
By attempting to enforce your own standards on someone else’s body, you too are contributing to those levels of seriously-messed-up-edness.
Trans and intersex people have enough shit to deal with without having to dodge low-flying and unwanted opinions from strangers about their own bodies.
What’s in our collective pants is the LEAST important thing about us. How anyone has sex should only matter to the involved parties.
What we do for others, what we say, how we act towards our fellow humans? That is.
I hope everyone’s GD educated, now.
Steam Powered Giraffe | photo by trekkiebeth
I love this photo and I don’t know why.
The Spine looks like he has a gap in his teeth.
Rabbit looks terrified of the audience.
And Hatchworth is all, “Yay! I can play a guitar!”
…and then I start wanting fic of how that even happened…
Happy Activation Day SPG!!!
118 and going strong!
Very much yes!
To the Tumblr Community: WE ARE AN SPG FANBOT BAND
To every wonderful person in the Tumblr world,
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Duane Olson and I play the fanbot Razor Blade that you all seem to hate. I would like to take this moment to address and issue that has made you all very upset.
We are simply and SPG Fanbot Band. That’s all there is to it. We got started when someone wanted us to perform Honeybee at a talent show. So rather than pretend to be SPG which would have been even WORSE, we just sort of made up our own fanbots and called our group Automaton: The Musical Mechanical Men. Since then, we’ve only performed TWO MORE TIMES. We are in no way popular at ALL. This controversy is the only real attention that has ever ben paid to us.
The reason the whole SPG thing was never really mentioned in our “backstory” is because we really didn’t even think it was necessary! We thought it was obvious that we were a bunch of fanbots to that wonderful Steam powered group that we all adore so much. But now we see that that was a HUGE mistake, and we are extremely sorry.
As of right now, I will be working to modify our page to give full and total credit to Steam Powered Giraffe for inspiring us and motivating us. We want to make it perfectly clear that we’re just fanbots like a lot of you are. The only difference is that we make music together too. I guess you could call us a fanBAND.
No, we are not a Steam Powered Giraffe ripoff.
Yes, we are TOTALLY non-profit.
And if after the address and changes, the SPG community is still greatly angered by our presence, we will dutifully leave tumblr and stop.
If you have any more questions, please feel free to (nicely?) ask.
Thank you for your time! :)
Duane Olson
of Automaton: The Musical Mechanical Men
Fanmily, please take note. Now is the time for hugs and kittens.
SPG: THE GAME!
all the water is turning into a slimey radioactive snot substance!
the land and creatures are dying and that also spells bad news for our favorite steam powered gang! will they be able to save the land and water and discover the menacing force behind it all before it’s too late?DUNDUNDUNNN
you control all 3 bots by switching between them as your main character while the game controls the others, or you can play with friends against each other in a different version world where you race robot giraffes.
multilevel sidescroller that takes you from swamps to suspended industrial air crafts and land and flying sideshows.
water powers your stamina and fruits power your health and there are vending machines that will help you with energy drinks but be careful because they don’t last long and make one stat go down as the other goes up.
they all have strengths and weaknesses to help you on your journey.
the spine is strong and agile but not very fast, rabbit is quick and agile but not very strong and hatchworth is strong and fast but kinda clumsy. so while manning a task they’re not very strong at their water supply will deplete faster.baddies include robotized undead people and creatures. who could do such a thing?
each level has a certain amount of goals and getting them all will net you points and a bonus level!
there are shops set up in market towns with waltergirls to help you with any items you may need. (they’ll trade you for scraps you pick off your defeated enemies) from extra gears to build your power bars, to different costumes for those levels where you need to blend in. (penguin suits anyone?)
fun is sure to be had by all! (rated E)
spoilers: the bad guy at first is little steve but it’s not his fault because he was easily brainwashed and puppeted by the real bad guy- a “marketing genius” who is a giant moose pig squid man named buford..
also you later find out that the energy drinks are made of the left over creatures after they’re cyborg’d and that is why the waste is killing everything so you have to kill the bad guy and shut down the plant to save the little planet.
Where can I beta test this?
(via teagator)
Time for The Spine
I can not have enough sexy The Spine on my dash
Remember how I said I was writing a botfic?
I finished it.
An SPG/M*A*S*H crossover. With horrible continuity.
Anyone want it?