Reblog if you're black tumblr.

You don’t have to be black, it just means you support us, you stand by us and your for us.

BLM is still a thing. If you don’t reblog this, but would’ve in June/July you were only in support of black lives when it was a trend. They still need justice

Dandelions symbolize everything I want to be in life:

- No remorse - Hard to kill - froral - Full of sunlight - Brillant - Beautiful in a way that the conventional and the controller hate, but can never totally destroy - Stubborn - Happy - Friend of bees - Full of wishes that will be carried long after I die.

Lashana Lynch as MARIA RAMBEAU CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019)

Yesterday, one of my preschoolers came up to me very concerned, and said, “Miss ____, this book doesn’t have any pages!”

Now, this kid is only three, and I can’t always understand what he says because he’s still so little. However, he carries himself and has the conversational lilt of an 80-year-old academic, so I absolutely believed him. Also, like any library, not all of our books have been as gently used as one might like, so there’s always a chance that the pages of the book this kid was holding actually had fallen out somewhere, and he was only holding the cover. I hurried over to see if this was the case and he opened the book for me, still very concerned.

He had only opened to the end sheet, that blank page at the front of a book. I turned the page for him to reveal the title page. This look of absolute relief crossed his face and he went, “Oh, silly me. I didn’t look hard enough!”

I love kids.

One of the best and most helpful things anyone ever said to me was: Don’t advertise your mistakes.

You will often notice when you’ve made an error, or when there’s something you could have done better, or etc, and sometimes other people will notice too. But often, they won’t. So don’t point it out.

It’s really a sign of a lack of self confidence – you think that if you point out the error first, it will save someone else from having to point it out for you. That by being self-depreciating, no one else will feel obliged to point out your flaws.

But here’s the thing. People don’t notice jack shit, most of the time. Sure, yeah, sometimes you’ll fuck up and people will notice and mention it, and thats fine, but 95% of your errors will go unnoticed. Unless you choose to point them out, in which case, you ensure that 100% of your errors get noticed.

The above sentence was said to me during a dance rehearsal. I’m not a pro dancer by any stretch of the imagination – this was a fun little between-friends dance that we were going to perform at a medium sized function full of people we knew. Half the people in the group did have dance experience, which made me - a non-dancer - feel self concious. So every time I messed up the steps, I would laugh at myself or made an “agh” sound or be verbally frustrated with myself that I was struggling to get that move, or whatever. Which drew peoples attention to the fact that I’d made an error.

There were like 10 of us doing this dance; me missing one step went largely unnoticed in the scheme of things, because with ten of us, anyone watching the dance had so much to look at that the likelihood of them seeing me misstep was extremely low. Unless I made a big deal about it, which would draw their attention to me, and ensure that they were made aware.

I used to point out my mistakes all the time. Not just with the dance, but across the board in general life, too. “Agh, whoops,” or handing over a completed project like “I know I could have done [thing] better, but hopefully the rest is ok,” or whatever. People were often frustrated with me, and I feel, in hindsight, that they were frustrated with me because in their eyes, with me constantly highlighting my own errors, they knew I could do better but instead here I was, giving them a shoddy, half-assed, error-filled effort. By me pointing out my every mistake, they were aware of how many I was making, and they were frustrated by my seemingly endless errors.

Then I got told to “stop advertising your mistakes,” and it was a bit of a revelation moment for me. I made a concious effort that day to minimise my reaction to my own mistakes – for the rest of the rehearsal and into the final performance – and you know what happened??

After the performance, countless people said some iteration of the phrase, “I didn’t know you could dance!!”

They thought I was a dancer. That I’d been dancing for years. They hadn’t noticed any of my missteps.

I messed up multiple times during the final performance. If I watch the recording and focus on me, I can see my missed steps, the time I span clockwise on the spot instead of anticlockwise, the time I was slightly out of alignment with the other dancers, etc. But if I watch the dance as a whole, watching all 10 dancers instead of just me….. I dont notice the mistakes I made. They blend in. Theres too much other stuff going on for anyone to notice the one dancer who spun on the spot in the opposite direction to everyone else.

And everyone thought i was brilliant. All I noticed, while dancing, were my mistakes, but no one else saw them, and everyone who saw the dance was super impressed with it and with me. That would not have been the case had I reacted to every one of my errors as I’d made them.

So I took that concept and applied it to the rest of my life. And you know what???? People were less frustrated with me. Because they weren’t noticing my minor errors, and I wasn’t pointing them out any more, so from their perspective, it looked like my output had improved. It looked like I was making “less errors.” I wasn’t, its just that before, I was pointing every one of them out, and now, I was letting people notice them on their own. And they didnt notice them.

You are always going to be hyperaware of yourself and your own mistakes, but other people are way too distracted by their own crap and have too much other stuff drawing their attention to notice your every misstep. So stop pointing your mistakes out. Stop being your own worst critic. Everyone fucks up now and then, its fine. You fix the error if you can, and you move on. You dont have to pre-empt someone else pointing out your mistakes, because its extremely likely that they wont notice your errors. Unless you point them out.

So stop advertising your mistakes, people.

PSA: You’re allowed to be crap at your hobby. It’s your hobby. It should be something you do to entertain and amuse yourself. You do not have to be the best at your hobby, you do not have to set yourself deadlines or productivity goals in your hobby, you do not have to turn your hobby into a business. It can be just your crap hobby you do because you like doing it. Really, it can, that’s fine.

These are true words of wisdom. Thank you for this, @indigosaurus.

we as community didn't talk about him enough

Why the hell are rich people so boring with one-upping each other? My bf showed me a little documentary clip about this artisan making tiles by hand using a technique that’s gone largely unchanged for 200 years, and I’ll admit my brain rot but my first thought was damn, if I was rich I’d commission a whole wall off this guy. Fucking imagine having a gorgeous tile wall in your house and telling your neighbour like

Yeah these are all handmade, there’s just straight-up one fucking guy in Egypt who’s a master of this specific technique and you can’t get these anywhere else. Copy that you bland-ass McMansion-having fuck.

For those who might not click through to the video, it’s well worth watching, and only 7 minutes long.

Good news, if you're a middle class American you can probably commission a wall from the guy if you can contact him! And if you can buy from him, you should!

It says in the video that they sell one square meter for 500 egyptian pounds. Let’s see...

Six square meters is a good size wall, and would cost about $190. Honestly, the main cost would likely be shipping, as cement is heavy.

I feel it. The stares, The judgment. And there's nothing i can do to change it. Yet, i'm still here. No super serum, no blond hair, or blue eyes. The only power i have is that i believe we can do better.

THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER (2021)

↳ Episode 1 : New World Order

you’ll get that hug you deserve, soon

BLACK PANTHER (2018) Dir. Ryan Coogler

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”

This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.

sam wilson deserves better

Fandom likes to sexualize children

Olive skin is the skin tone of many MENA light skin people so where do we go from here

grrm said the dornish are mediterranean and dummies like anon think that means only spain and portugal when it also includes north african and asian countries.

Also, he specific mentioned the Al-Andalus ages, you know, when moorishs rules over Spain. And, you know, they weren't white people.

Dorne is not white.

/Also, if there are spanish people with olive skin is bc, gasp, moorish were here for like 800 years/

Sharon: spent years in Madripoor making bank and building a high society life for herself

Zemo: comes from royalty, was always rich

Bucky: probably collected about $5,000,000 in backpay from the us government

Sam: 👁👄👁

I'm sure one if not all of them would take you as their sugar baby

Just our boy Sam Wilson out here actually making Baron Helmut-friggin-Zemo reconsider his life choices lol. Obviously, it doesn't quite stick, but still quite impressive.

Even after everything Zemo did, after how vehemently Sam was against working with him at first... He's willing to listen to him, hear what he has to say, and then try to reason with him.

Because, just as we see with Karli, Sam doesn't automatically see the bad. Sam genuinely believes there is good in people, and he is willing to latch onto that good and try to work with it. It's what makes him such an interesting and beautiful character, and why he's Captain America.