I joked a few minutes ago about how in internet discourse anyone over 25 is a “queer elder” but come to think of it most of these young discoursers don’t even believe such a concept exists. Gay men who watched their entire friends groups perish to AIDS are “privileged cis gays,” older trans women who use dated terminology to describe their own experiences are problematic, elders are just a conservative old guard to rebel against, and anyone over thirty who speaks to you at all must be a predator. The first time I heard the phrase “okay groomer” online, it wasn’t coming from self identified conservatives but from tiktok teens reacting against leather at Pride. You guys are ignorant and uncultured and proud of it!

Nobody hates you because you’re young. They hate you because you’re ignorant and annoying. Hope this helps.

Speaking as a “queer elder” (don’t really feel like one but shit if we’re joking about anyone older than 25 being one might as well roll with it). To my young queers (and my young LGBT+ folks who don’t use queer).

You are not getting pushback from the older segment of the queer community because you are young.

It’s because you came into the spaces we built for you and instantly tried to kick us out.

It’s because we opened the doors for you and you walked in and demanded that everyone you don’t like leave. You demanded that the kinksters, the crossdressers, the freaks and the weirdos, the non-binary trans folks, the people with conflicting identity labels, the people who apparently don’t enjoy their smut “the right way” leave.

It’s because you have thrown yourself into queer spaces with all the fucking audacity of a straight white woman raging at a rainbow flag in a grocery store, wailing about how it’s not appropriate for children.

It’s because you apparently think that you have some right to tell us, and other queer people your age, HOW to be queer.

It’s because a SCARY number of you think that using the word queer is bad in the first place.

It’s because so many of you have come here drowning in radfem rhetoric, and your response to being corrected is to scream “pedo!” At any queer peer who disagrees with your puritanical approach to kink and fantasy.

It’s because so many of you think that being LGBT+ means you can’t possibly hold onto the conservative values you grew up with, and when you’re called on it you attack anyone and everyone in your way.

Us queer elders aren’t hating on you because you’re young. It’s because you have come into the space we built- a space that we built on from what OUR queer elders built. Which was built on what THEIR queer elders built. And so on, all held up by a foundation of fucking blood of the queers who did not fucking survive, who we lost before I was born, and continue to be lost.

If we seem hostile to you and the ideology you bring? It’s because us elders know a threat when we see it. And the shit I see SO MANY of you young queers saying IS a threat. No different than the threats we’ve faced before. Except this time. It’s coming from inside the fucking house- and we won’t tolerate that.

100% That part up right there. 

July 10, 2023 - (18:00 UTC)

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Date: 22:43 UTC July 10, 2023

kink: deleting someone’s pointless comment by reblogging the post from the same person they did

I mean, that’s censorship but okay.

ksvskwbidbwkdbskbsjw

This is sad. Are people really so very afraid of what it is to be human, to imagine, to experience complicated longing. It is different than acting on it, that is the whole point, to recognize all that goes into being human and to be at times messed up, to understand what internal forces are at work, and to then choose to act in a way that reflectes your actual values. Psychoanalysis talks about “the return of the repressed” - if you are always afraid of yourself and repressing so much, you will be even more likely to act out in some way at some point.

I have no double that this era of purity culture has had a hand in recent bouts of anti intellectualism. So many people will only interact with something that they can fully align their morality with, ignoring the fact that fiction imparts lessons onto is that can affect or change our own understanding of morals.

Facsim doesn’t want to test your morals, it wants to tell you what your morals are and stick to them.

You cannot tell an anti-war story without depicting war, you cannot tell a story about equality without first depicting inequality. But now that people aren’t interacting with moral challenging media they cannot tell the difference between a story deconstructing a social problem vs a story promoting a social problem. Which leads to people becoming susceptible to propaganda.

Of course there are stories that depict gratuitous, uncritical, unhealthy themes, but you will not know that unless you read it. One of my least favourite books of all time due to its racism and misogyny is also one of my favourite books to deconstruct and analyze, I could go for hours about how so many of the harmful themes go over people’s heads under the guise of ‘pro mental health’, but I would not have be able to have that conversation unless I had read the book.

it’s been said before and it will be said again but i’m begging you all nicely to restrain yourselves from being so casually aggressive and rude and obnoxious in the tags & reblogs of a complete stranger’s posts. no one wants to know that you hate [tv show that op giffed]. no one wants to know that you hate [character that op drew]. no one wants to hear you being ugly and negative for no reason. say what you want to say in your own post. don’t hit the reblog button. blacklist relevant tags. unfollow or block relevant accounts. log out. shut down. get help.

LOUDER FOR EVERYONE IN THE BACK!!!!

I wouldn’t even be nasty about a character I hate in my own post. I have drafted and deleted many a rant about a character I hate, because I know some people follow me for being in the same fandom - so the probability of some of them liking the character I hate is pretty high.

Why do you feel like you have to shit on other people’s fun instead of just having fun on your own elsewhere?

I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.

They are literally cutting off library access to minors.

C'est un sentiment doux à vivre, l'égalité.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019) | title treatment series [18/?]

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.

Time to drop some links again.

– https://searchmysite.net/ Search engine for the indie web, personal websites, digital gardens. You can also find them in websites like Neocities, Indieweb, Blogarama, and write.as. There is also a big list of personal websites.

– https://search.marginalia.nu/ Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.

– https://www.worldcat.org/ Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)

– https://scholar.google.com/ Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines A list of academic databases and search engines.

– https://tineye.com/ Reverse image search alternative to Google’s. Also, P.S.: Please stop using Google, and start using more privacy focused search engines, like DuckDuckGo or SearchX (opensource; personally haven’t used it yet, but it looks promising for privacy-focused users)

That Google and Meta can get away with this during an era of intense misinformation and disinformation signals that we cannot rely on large tech companies to provide reliable access to information and news:

it's actually so funny how challenging it is to write bona fide graphic, horny smut. like people don't give smut writers enough credit. you are constantly running out of words to describe the same 2-4 body parts and same 4-6 motions. you are constantly attempting to do interesting and dynamic things in the prose with this extremely limited set of words. you are looking at your prose for the nastier bits and wondering if it actually sounds hot or if it just sounds goofy. you are then toning down your prose and then wondering if it now sounds tasteful or if it's just boring. you do ctrl+F for the word "cock" and there are 37 instances of it in the doc but you hate the 1-2 acceptable synonyms so there's nothing much you can do about it

heartening saga honestly

Spirit: Stallion of The Cimarron & the Indian Boarding Schools/Residential Schools allegory

Holy shit!

Was this intentional?

Considering the rest of the film’s heavy anti-colonization messaging, the main antagonist being heavily modeled on & inspired by General Custer, the other main (human) protagonist being a Native man (& the fort is where Spirit meets Little Creek), yes, most likely

YES. It was 100% intentional. I highly recommend reading up on the making of this film. There was an incredible amount of care that went into the development.

They had Lakota consultants for the project, especially regarding the use of the Lakota language in the film (which is used sparsely, but when used is accurate).

It’s par for the course now to consult people belonging to a culture for projects representing it these days (i.e. Moana, Frozen 2, etc.) but it certainly wasn’t when Spirit came out in 2002.

This film is allegorical to its core.

I was a cheerleader at university, this was in the UK so not serious at all, but we did go and compete at Nationals which were being held in Bournemouth, a fair distance from our uni in London. One of the girls was like "omg you can stay at my house! My parents live like 30 minutes away." so all 25 of us got on the coach with a blanket and pillow and clothes, expecting to like, stay at a house.

Her house in the New Forest. They had a pool and hot tub, a pool house, and I think 4 or 5 bedrooms and 2 reception rooms. I say "I think" because we weren't actually allowed to stay in the house. Our coach and 2 male members stayed in the pool house, which had a very small room, plus a bathroom which all of us were to share. The rest of us had to sleep in a big tent gazebo thing in the garden. In May in England. When none of us were prepared for camping. It was about 10°c in the night, not comfortable at all.

I very briefly saw the inside of the house when I asked her mother if there was another bathroom because we were running late and i needed to put my contact lenses in, and she shooed me into a cupboard under the stairs. The living room I caught a glimpse of had enough space for all of us to sleep there.

The next day when we got back from the competition, we were given a BBQ dinner! Which consisted of 1 chicken leg and 1 potato each.

For the privilege of staying at her house, we all had to give Nadine £5.

Every time I see a post like this, I think of that time, freezing my ass off, in a mansion garden.

And they wonder why we say Eat the rich.

My dear old mum says "those who are good, give of what they have with their whole hearts, while those who aren't and who have plenty will not give a shit for free". And she is right.

I have had "friends" -- people who I had considered upstanding, trustworthy folks, whom I'd helped and provided for before with no expectation of reciprocity when I was poor and struggling myself because I thought we were friends -- present me with an itemized bill after a car ride. Including cleaning and petrol for their car, which the company they work for pays for. On a black AmEx.

Don't trust rich fucks, they do not see you as people, never mind equals.

Don’t trust rich fucks, they

do not see you as people,

never mind equals.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

i think some of y'all really need to learn is that you are only entitled to safety, not to feelings of safety. you need to recognize that your feelings are fallible, shaped by your cultural upbringing and intrinsic biases, and that they are not always reflective of reality.

for example, imagine you've been raised in a society that violently stigmatizes drug use, mental illness and homelessness. you're walking down the street, and you see someone who is disheveled, talking to themselves or yelling, pacing, maybe even smoking or injecting drugs. you feel unsafe, even though this person poses no threat to you. you call the police, even though no harm has been done and a reasonable assessment of the situation can tell you that no harm will be done. the police come and arrest that person, and although your right to safety was never violated, you've now put someone else in harm's way. you've traded their right to physical safety for your own perception of safety, and that is morally indefensible. that cannot be explained away by saying that you deserve to be safe in public, because you were never unsafe in the first place.

how long are radio stations gonna say “80s, 90s, and today!” We’ve entered the third decade of “today”

I work at an oldies station. Every six months we sit down look around the table and someone goes "Y'know, we could start adding '90s to the mix. It's within our format." We all nod and no one plays anything produced after 1989 because time stopped here sometime around 2003, and no one wants to be the one responsible for whatever consequences come from breaking that fragile illusion.

not to be boring, but I’m boring

There’s a reason for that, and it’s Napster and iTunes. People could suddenly buy and listen to whatever music they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. Starting around 2003, we were no longer all forced by media conglomerates to listen to the same few songs anymore, endlessly repeated on the radio till we were sick of them.

So our taste scattered, in a way that I find really beautiful. The long tail was born. The rise of the indie musician began. The 1,000 true fans theory (briefly) become a possibility, and record labels lost their chokehold grip on both artists and listeners. But! Also! Collective nostalgia also froze at that point. After 2003, we only culturally shared the experience of a song or two a year, and often we did that for a reason external to the song itself -- like a dance or a controversy or the rise of a new platform (“Gangnam Style,” “WAP,” “Old Town Road”). The songs that we have in common now, we no longer have in common because we are forced to listen to them four hundred times a month by record labels, radio stations, and MTV, but for other reasons. The advent of truly open personal choice in music was also the end of collective music culture. And that’s why time stopped in 2003.

I just went on a rant about plungers, how’s your day going?

“go off bestie”? Okay, I will.

This is a plunger.

Classic red cup with a wooden stick. We all know it, love it, and have seen a cartoon character using it to unclog a toilet. Right?

WRONG.

The image above is actually a drain plunger, used on sinks, showers, and baths. Not on toilets.

These are a toilet plungers.

Take note of the variations. Each of them have a flange of sorts at the bottom, either connected via a cup or more accordion-like tube. These are designed to actually get down into the toilet bowl where it flushes down, giving it more space and leverage to unclog blockages. See the example below:

Notice how the flange allows it to go deeper into the toilet to provide more power to the plunge. Sink/drain plungers are far less efficient and effective at the task.

Sink plungers can also have an accordion shape to help with power in plunging, but crucially do not have or need the flange that toilet plungers do.

To recap: cup plungers are for sinks, showers, bathtubs, and other drains. Flange and accordion plungers are for toilets. Notably, accordion plungers are slightly harder to use, but are more powerful when used correctly than their flange counterparts.

So the next time you see a cartoon, video game, or stock art depicting a cup plunger being used on a toilet, you can feel the same levels of anger and emotion that I do!

why does this have nearly 100 notes

Because with this level of passion, containment is futile 

The real question is why does this not have a million notes? This is information that will very likely, at some point, be incredibly useful to anyone who has indoor plumbing. Which is, you know, probably, 99.99% of this website's user base. (I'm sure there's someone out there using Tumblr who lives in a house built in 1850 which never got upgraded and they still have an outhouse rather than toilet.)

current note count: 4,970

Seriously, a toilet plunger will save you so much money. Get one.

that third flange plunger in the pic above? AMAZING!