unrestrained summer fun

great lakes kids are like "you wanna go to the lake this summer" as if any of us have a fucking choice

if you're from here ↓

you're Going to the Lake

post is a hit with the great lakes region residents

The "and Ken" sign says so much. Not only do the police identify him as some crazily dressed guy just tagging along with an equally crazily dressed girl who just decked someone in the face, they also cuff him even though it seems like he hasn't done anything because he tagged along with his girlfriend even to get arrested.

He's an accessory even to a convicted Barbie. You do not separate a Ken from his Barbie even in jail. Ken is having the time of his life even in incarceration because he's there with Barbie.

He's an accessory... TO CRIME

Trixie Mattel is right, getting to know your neighbors is the best inoculation against being annoyed by their noise. it only works up to a certain point, but for just regular footsteps or the occasional bass leaking through or a party once in a while, the anonymous Fucking Neighbors are people i will kill for doing their laundry at 10:14pm, but Steven and Ray who live upstairs and sometimes have to jog across their hardwood at 8:39am because they forgot to pick up their Clif bar before they put on their shoes for work are my good pals and i look forward to barricading the building together during the financial collapse.

Also great inoculation against landlord bullshit if you have close relationships with your neighbors!

count dracula? um, okay. 1. now what

There needs to be way, way more of a conversation about how being unable to drive in America means you don’t get to participate in society. That shit is genuinely life ruining. My neuro shit has kept me from driving my whole life and it’s always meant I can’t go do stuff I want to, I can’t get the trade jobs I know I’d be good at, I can’t even see the people I want to. Unless you’re in one of a handful of major cities in the US with decent transit systems, you’re basically expected to drop dead if you can’t drive.

What bugs me is that the proposed “solution” for this never seems to be more public transport infrastructure. Self driving cars, easier to drive cars, ride share, like y'all just build a fucking t r a i n. you get a good municipal electric rail system? suddenly you have a lot more accessibility, AND traffic goes down because fewer people need to drive. AND AND auto manufacturers can start making good, fun cars again because the consumer base goes from “people who need the simplest vehicle in history because driving is a necessity” to “people who can actually drive and want to.” this is a win for everyone.

segregation in the united states still functionally exists. that’s why we’re never getting decent public transportation. the minute it was desegregated, white people with power lost interest.

there’s a war between Sucking and Fucking

you people cannot be trusted in the war room

there's a reason i mostly ignore asks where people call me a hero, i don't wanna be a hero, i wanna fight side by side for a common goal

Parasite in chief in his idiot hat

after being successfully blazed twice, tumblr review rejected this post for a third blaze

sorry but it’s actually so horrific how little of a sense of community people have, how little regard they extend towards the other humans around them. killing people for being loud on the subway or turning around in your driveway. loading your gun and waiting at the door because a child ran your doorbell unexpectedly. ring cameras, neighborhoodapp, community watch group Facebook pages. you’ve assigned yourself the role of the one true peacekeeper and casted everyone else around you as a threat to be controlled. there’s no connection or love or compassion. just a deep distrust and hatred.

and the people who face the most significant consequences from this are the ones who are already deemed as outsiders. people of color, especially Black people, disabled people, people with mental illnesses, homeless people.

and so many people are willfully promoting this complete alienation from each other. the obsession with true crime, the hatred directed at children for existing in public spaces, the policing and controlling of where homeless people are allowed to be / what they’re allowed to do, the constant fearmongering about public transportation. you are building a society of FEAR. you are conditioning yourself to distrust everyone around you. you need to make an active, conscious effort to engage with the world and the life around you in a healthy manner.

don't usually add to posts but I think that it's worth noting that this is an explicitly conservative/reactionary project. the goal of the left is (or should be) to build a just world, to mitigate violence of all kinds, to promote more peaceful local, translocal and global communities. the right explicitly sees this as absurd naivety/optimism. the reactionary viewpoint is that the world is violent, brutish, cruel + this is not a problem to be addressed but a natural and invariable state of affairs that cannot be met with kindness or mercy, only with equal or greater violence, brutishness, and cruelty. our alienation from one another isn't solely the product of individual disengagement, but the result of an extensive coordinated political project which is founded in then axiom of "kill or be killed" and whose proponents intend to be the ones who do the killing

Back when I used to walk around my college in a corduroy blazer and slacks I didn't call it "dark academia" I called it "professor drag" and the purpose was to smoothly walk into parts of campus I wasn't supposed to access

Makoto "I turned the male love interest into a chair to make it less heterosexual" Shinkai

it was awesome being a kid worried about the environment. like oh they are cutting down too many trees, we have to work together and plant more :~) but these days its like its in the air its in the water its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood

So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.

See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.

I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.

Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.

In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.

They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.

Conservatives lost their damn minds.

Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.

When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.

Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 

Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”

Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.

The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.

This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.

Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.

The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.

I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.

Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.

Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.

The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.

That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.

They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.

So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.

We have! To keep! Pushing back!

Someone reblogged this saying they'd never heard any of this before and they didn't even know how to begin verifying it, so let me help!

Here's a 1995 article from the NYT about Disney putting this policy into effect after promising to do so in 1994.

Here's a wikipedia page about Disney's unofficial Gay Days and how they've been protested by Christian groups.

I tried to find the book I read, but honestly so many different weird evangelical anti-Disney books came up when I was googling that I can't be sure which one it was. 🙃

i was supposed to go to bed an hour ago dont tell my mom

my mom says i have to go to bed now which one of u fuckers told

my mom says i have

to go to bed now which one

of u fuckers told

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

change that word back into meaners right now you sinner

Writer's Guild of America voted to strike, good for them