Knight Errant of Alder

Actually I'll never forgive Punk Rave and Killstar and fast fashion brands for tricking people into thinking that being goth or punk or emo is expensive. Babygirl the only goth brand names you need to know are Rit, Good Will, Etsy, and Studs and Spikes, we used to shove safety pins through our ears and then they started selling earrings that look like safety pins for 15.99. We used to dye thrifted wedding dresses black and they started selling gothic gowns for 300 bucks. We used to put studs on boots we found in the back of the good will and they started making Demonias. DIY or die wasn't perfect it can be exclusionary to disabled people but whatever the fuck we've got going on right now is so much worse. It's not any more inclusive to the disabled and it is exclusionary to the people who made punk, to the people who made goth, to the people who made emo. If you've got the funds and you don't want to do diy pay someone else to do it for you but please let it be a small artist or a friend not some guy in a suit who's made it his business to gentrify punk. You can turn flats into platforms with flipflops, hotglue and gumption don't let anyone tell you different.

There is something peculiar in this bouquet in my Study.

I hate you "click now to sync contacts". I hate you "sign in with Facebook". I hate you "connect with your Twitter". I hate you targeted ads. I hate you social media algorithms. I hate you brands and mascots with accounts. I hate you "upgrade to premium". I hate you free trials that require credit card info. I hate you pop up ads that take up half the screen. I hate you ads with sound. I hate you unskippable commercials. I hate you anti-piracy firewalls. I hate you late stage capitalism.

‘macho slut’ photographed by robert no for xy magazine july 1997

phone is the main enemy. never forget this

Indigenous Horror Films

Surprised he didn't mention it (maybe too obvious a choice?), so I would like to add Blood Quantum:

it stars Michael Greyeyes (who is amazing in everything he does)

It's got camp, it's got social commentary, it's got zombies, it's got complexity, it's got indigenous ass-kicking, I don't know what else you need in a film. Check Does The Dog Die for content warnings. You can stream it on Shudder.

am i insane or should masks be mandated for hospitals as a permanent installation. a forever institution. always. covid is an irrelevant factor when hospitals are always full of both very sick and very immunocompromised people..?

🖤💗gfs staying over the other‘s home

i love the concept and the details still but the paper just wasn’t having it fsr. might do a redo in the future, or at least smth with these characters bc they’ve grown on me

Internalized homophobic zoomers on twitter will see a gay guy post about something as normal as armpits and be like “that’s it, I’m gunna unalive those f words! Calling Millie Bobby Brown!” Miss clearly you are not having sex to be having these reactions

This user blocked me, but why am I bringing sex into this? Because sex has been integral to my experience as a gay man and how people perceive me since before I even started having it. Because not everything has to cater to you, and I don’t care if that makes you uncomfortable. When I made this post I was not thinking about asexuality in the slightest, but about people in my own community who show contempt for their more sexually active, less monogamous, more experimental peers. I was thinking of those with the ahistorical notion that assimilated gay men are the ones who paved the way for freaks and not the other way around. I don’t think you’re homophobic because you don’t have sex. Why would I even care about that? I think you’re homophobic because you can’t read a gay man complain about internalized shame in the community without taking offense and making it about yourself. If the shoe fits, wear it.

EXCUSE ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?????

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:

death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.

you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.

this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.

A very similar approach is also the main focus of Kate Bernstein’s Hello, Cruel World. Besides the free “lite” version she put out (linked there), the whole book is available to borrow on archive.org.

Rebels of the Neon God, 青少年哪吒 (1992) dir. Ming-liang Tsai

André Leon Talley, Grace Jones and Keith Haring photographed by Andy Warhol at the Factory on July 24, 1984.