how sad, how lovely - connie converse

Neil Gaiman and the Good Omens team deserve so much better than to have something like this spoiled. It's one thing for Amazon Prime to accidentally spoil something, but it's entirely something else for "fans" to keep sharing the photo/video around.

It's just over a month to wait. I'm sure you're capable of waiting that long. Aziraphale and Crowley waited 11 years to see if their plans worked out, you can wait a month for season two.

And, no, I won't give context if you don't know what I'm talking about. Keep it that way. Show the show some respect.

This.

To make it clear, I'm not upset with the fans, whether they shared anything or not, although I would greatly prefer that the leaked stuff goes away, or at least is tagged in ways that allows people who don't want to be spoiled to avoid it, and would request that you don't further share it.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - 100th episode celebration

April, 1991

Today, I would like to commemorate an event which has laid a very profound impact on the internet.

Ten years ago on this day (06/08/09), a forum website called SomethingAwful held a photoshop contest titled “create paranormal images”.  The contest would require participants to edit ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images, and then try to pass them off as authentic photos on other paranormal forums.

Two days later, on June 10th, a user by the name Victor Surge would find this thread, and become inspired.  He submitted the two pictures above, featuring a tall, faceless monster which would stalk children, who would then disappear.  He called his monster “the Slender Man”. After this initial post, Surge and others would expand on the character and the story, creating one of the internet’s most famous monsters.  The Slender Man proved to be popular enough to spread to other websites, with 4chan, Deviantart, and TV Tropes all having their own Slender-Mania. On June 20th of that same year, another user on the SomethingAwful forums found the Slender Man, and also wanted to contribute.  Noticing nobody had made any videos yet of the monster, he sat down with some of his friends and planned out a video webseries involving a former college film student discovering and unravelling the mysteries surrounding Slender Man; this would become Marble Hornets, one of the first horror-themed ARG’s of the internet.

That all happened ten years ago.  Ten years of haunting the darkest corners of the internet, and Slender Man has built up a surprisingly dense resume, for a fictional monster.  Several popular webseries, a couple hit games, at least two movies, even inspiring other characters in seperate series like the Silence in Dr Who and the Enderman in Minecraft.  And all this within a ten-year period.

I think this just attests to how much humans can be inspired by an idea.  From a small handful of edited photographs, we collectively constructed a new monster which lurks in our nightmares, and now it almost seems as natural as the horror mythos he was based on.  For better or worse, the Slender Man seems to be here to stay. Happy Birthday, Slendy!  Here’s to hoping you continue to be both terrifying and terrific!

Fuck personality quizzes who do you think of when I say Neil

Production houses: but if the writers stay on strike we can't guarantee the future safety of your favorite shows 🥺🥺😭😭

Viewers who 1, have already lost their favorite shows because they were cancelled in spite of good ratings and good reviews or 2, have stopped watching new content entirely until the entire series has aired and concluded as a result of so many good shows getting cancelled on cliffhangers and thus leaving said viewers unable to gain closure with those characters and with a hollow viewing experience, so they've begun a, watching older shows they know came to a planned conclusion or b, revisiting their old favorites and enjoying the nostalgia or c, reading new books or fanfic instead: YOU ALREADY CAN'T GUARANTEE THE FUTURE OF OUR SHOWS SO GET FUCKING WRECKED AND PAY WRITERS WHAT THEY DESERVE!

JUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMEVAL (2023)

SNOOP DOGG goes off-script in a conversation with Larry Jackson, formerly of Apple Music and current Co-Founder and CEO of Gamma, moderated by Shirley Halperin, Executive Editor of Variety Magazine at The Milken Institute. (May 3, 2023)

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds - Ada Limón

@filmnoirsbian

Allow me to assure you, as a librarian, that if you as a concerned citizen present us with a list of Books that are Bad and should Not Be In Our Collection and which you Require us to Remove At Once, we will scan it for titles that we don’t have yet to add to our purchase list.

Ah, the “limiting access to information is okay if they’re takes I object to” squad has begun to appear.

This is your helpful reminder that:

a) There are legitimate information access needs even to bad information (one cannot, for example, study and deconstruct erroneous information about climate change if you don’t know what people are saying) and it is actually part of my vocation to provide ACCESS to even books I vehemently disagree with. Sometimes I even get to bond with the person checking it out over how appalling it is! Sometimes the reason they’re checking it out is because they need to read it but don’t want to buy it.

b) The presence of a text in a library collection does not imply agreement with or endorsement by the library as an entity; it just means for one reason or another it fits in our collection management policy. Often it’s based on patron requests from community members.

c) The absolute last thing you EVER want is your librarian to be empowered to decide whether your information need is Good Enough to be “allowed” access to the text. You, personally, even you reading this who knows you share the same values as me, do not want your access to be subject to my judgement as to whether or not your information need is “valid”; to be subject to my assessment whether you can be trusted to have access to a text.

I’m not your mom. I’m not even your teacher. I’m your librarian; it’s my job to help you access information YOU need, and YOU decide what that need is. If you ask for my help then sure it’s also my job to help you assess it based on my training and experience, but it is not my job to ARBITRATE your access to information based on my decisions about the legitimacy of your reason to seek it out.

So yes even when that list of books has books on it I think are full of lies I’m probably checking to see if it’s something someone in my community might need access to without having to buy it or expose themselves to the malware risks of pirating.

Because while I kinda hate him Jordan Peterson’s bullshit is RELEVANT to understanding a lot of shit going on today. And you do NOT want to live in a world where it’s my job to test and see if you have a good and pure enough reason for wanting to check his book out.

I’m ages late but:

Excuse me a coworker caught me making a warding sign at fuckin’ Ted Cruz’s piece of shit book the other day, I feel very called out right now.

what do you want!!!!!!!!

can someone please be proud of me like fuck I’m trying

reblog to let prev know you’re proud of them

“nice blog”

thank you im really good at clicking reblog

Never gonna know them, but shoutout to the healthcare workers who are breaking the law to help their patients get life-saving care. I'll never see an article about you because knowing you would risk everything including jail time. Nurses who lie on medical records so their patients can get abortions. Doctors making up shit so their patients can have HRT.

Wherever you are, you are keeping your promise to help your patient.

My mom is dead so she can’t get in trouble for this.

Many years ago when she was still healthy enough to work, she was the manager at one of those select-your-own-tests labs. They didn’t take insurance, which meant they had no insurance department, which meant it was actually cheaper sometimes than even getting the same test elsewhere WITH insurance, so her clientele often came in with doctor’s orders, and it is about one such patient I’m about to tell you. He was four years old and had leukemia.

At 3am the day my mom did his labs, she got a stat call. “Stat call” means “drop everything, contact the doctor, these numbers are outside the acceptable range and urgency is required.” She woke me to drive her to the lab so she could try to get in touch with the doctor on the way and say “I live five minutes from the lab I want you on the phone as soon as I get those numbers from my email.”

The doctor did not pick up.

Standard protocol at this point is to wait 20 minutes and call again, repeat until you get an answer.

My mom was not allowed to interpret lab numbers. She didn’t have the official credentials. But she was a medical assistant and had self-taught a lot of medicine to make herself a better MA (call it unofficial continuing education), and she took one look at this little boy’s numbers, and she had to make a judgement call. That call ended up being “Mrs. X, this is Catie from [lab name]. I received a stat call for your son and can’t reach the doctor. I’m not legally allowed to interpret these numbers for you. But pick an ER, I will call them and send the numbers and have them waiting for you. Go NOW. Don’t wait. I cannot stress enough how urgent it is that you GO RIGHT NOW.”

Had she chosen law over life, that little boy would have been dead by morning.

Instead she risked years in prison and being stripped of her license to practice. She got cupcakes and a thank-you card instead. As far as I know, the boy went on to make a full recovery.

When I think of my mom, this is what I want her to be remembered for. Nobody could ever know while she was alive. I want everyone to know now.

(And if you’re a 14-year-old on this website in 2023, and this sounds eerily corroborative to a story your mom has told you, and you grew up in Arizona, hi. My mom would love to meet you if she was still alive. But in her absence, will you tell me how you’re doing? I’ll tell her the next time I get up to her grave. She’d like to know.)

the point of my masculinity and male positivity posts are to underline that masculinity and manhood are seen as a threat or in direct opposition to queerness, and that often times in order to be seen as queer you have to be partially or wholly feminine or gender neutral, or express your manhood in a feminine or gender neutral way in order to no longer be threatening, invasive, or a problem.

it is very difficult to exist in queer spaces as a hyper masculine person & a man. you're made to feel like you need to walk a tight rope feeling like you're inherently out of place, as if you existing and being masculine or a man in queer spaces makes others uncomfortable inherently.. just know that when i make positivity posts it is to remind us all that masculinity/manhood and queerness are not opposites and that you do not have to be a feminine man or masc person to be viewed/seen/heard as queer.

chasing men, masculine people, and masculinity out of queer spaces isn't helping anyone currently and won't help anyone down the line. please accept masc enbies, butches, bears, and masculine trans men with the same kindness, love, and passion that you do neutral and feminine people. that's the point when i make these kinds of posts. thank u

tags by @mac-n-cheese-flavored-arson

This is 100% thanks to the “No kink at Pride” people. Because?

They didn’t want these men at Pride. This is a leather daddy. (A rather covered-up leather daddy, because this addition doesn’t do anyone any good if it’s flagged into invisibility, but best believe that dude has hella abs under there, and a 50/50 chance of heavy tattooing.)

Here’s another. Again on the modest side for the sake of not triggering the automod thing, but you can see the interplay of queerness and masculinity—particularly a kind of forward, unashamed sexual explicitness, if you take a look at their crotches. That’s a kind of…for lack of a better term, mating display. “I have this and want to use it, or at least know there are men here fantasizing about me using it.” It’s akin to a woman wearing a plunge neck. You’re supposed to look, and if you’re a dude, he’d like you to like it.

These dudes (well, most of these dudes)? They’re bears. (I said “most” because the guy in the sunhat is technically a cub. He’s too young to be a bear.) The furriness and the beards and the age and the bellies ARE THE POINT. The name “bear” is an affectionate one. Literally “I’m big and hairy!” In the 00s there was a stereotype(?) that bears were also super-cuddly. I don’t know how true it is, but I can confirm every bear I’ve ever met gives amazing hugs. They will readjust your spine, your touch starvation, and your entire outlook on life.

None of this touches on the rather large queer kink communities around “men in uniform.” Military, police, construction, I can’t tell you how many strip nights I’ve been to at a local gay bar with a guy dressed as a sexy firefighter getting absolutely swamped with dollar bills and lap dance requests.

You aren’t seeing these men because they’ve been forced out of spaces THEY CREATED. One of the best things you can do is to help bring them back.

They’re not threatening, they’re not disgusting, they’re not somehow dangerous just by virtue of being open about their sexuality and sexual desire. They’re just human beings who human slightly differently than you.

But more importantly?

They’re family. And don’t you forget it.

Leather daddies, imho, are fucking around with hypergender performance as much as drag queens. It's two sides of the same coin. Leather daddies literally have beauty pageants.

Also, there's a solid 50% chance that when you talk to those masc-looking leather daddies and bears are just much femme sissies as more femme presenting gay men.

Sincerely, a genderqueer amab bear who dresses like a dad half the time

Your local leather historian here to add a little bit of context to the "this is the fault of the no kink at pride" thing.

The leather community has existed formally (in the United States) since the mid 50s. The Satyr Motorcycle Club was founded in San Francisco in 1954, it is still around today making it the oldest continously run gay organization in the country. This is 15 years before Stonewall. The first gay leather bar, the gold coast, opened in 1958 in Chicago. 11 years before Stonewall. Informally the leather community has existed since the end of wwii when men who had spent years wearing leather, riding motorcycles, and having gay sex came back home and kept doing those things.

Gay men have been arguing about whether or not the leather community belongs at pride since 1970. Since the inception of pride, or more accurately, "Gay Freedom Day." Because the leather community has heavt ties to the SM community. (Whether or not the Leather community is a sub community in the larger SM community, or there's just a lot of overlap is a conversation leathermen have always been having) but there has always been push back because of the tie to radical sex and because of accusations that leathermen are trying to "act straight"

In an essay in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice Leatherman Michale Bronski recalls hearing a lesbian tell a gay man "“Give me a break. You think that someone wearing chaps, a black leather jacket, a motorcycle cap, handcuffs on his belt, two different color hankies, and 36 inch high black boots looks Straight!”*

Which brings us to their presentation of masculinity. If you'll excuse me for becoming An Academic(tm) for a moment, if you look at these communities, Leathermen and Bears, what you find is that popular theories of masculinitu don't work when describing these men, at least not when they're in the spaces that the audence that their gender performance is for also exist. Queer masculinity is a performance for queer people, framing it in the lense of heterosexuality does not do anyone any good and erases the nuances of what is happening.

The leather communities are some of the oldest queer communities in America. To push them out of the queer community or suggest that they're toxic, or somehow harming the community as a whole is to ignore history completely, and engage with an argument that's half a century old.

In 1982 leathermen founded AIDS Emergency Fund in San Francisco. Consistently through the first decade of the AIDS Crisis leathermen (and other radical sex communities) were promoting safer sex, and hosting all kinds of fundraisers to raise money for PWAs and reseach (a lot of leather beauty pagents popped up just for the purpose of rasing money.) All this while they were being told BY OTHER GAY MEN they were the ones killing everyone, they and their weird gross sex were the problem (never mind that a lot of what the leathermen were doing was already safer than monogamous anal sex)

Leathermen are your family, we're part of your community and have every right to be here, even if you don't understand our masculinity.

❤️🖤💙🤍💙🖤

*none of this even begins touching the surface of the discourse leather lesbians and feminists have been having since the 70s. It's tied to TERF rhetoric and the anti-porn movement.

Historic note on bears: the origin of the community is shouded in myth, but certainly by the late 70s the beginnings of the community were there. The AIDS Crisis shot the community to popularity. Because AIDS will cause incredible weight loss, the eorticization of fat bodies was the eroticiaztion of safe bodies. If you read porn written by bears in the 80s and early 90s you'll notice the use of condoms where in other erotica that is lacking.

A photo shoot at Baizhangji (百丈漈) in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province

simongerman600

i was going to say ‘i have no idea what to do with this information’ but then i realized its a handy guide to generate fake words that sound english

“What to do with this information”: kick ass at hangman

Being nice to someone you don't like is not manipulation btw it's being civil

Mmm no, this is like seeking validation. Ofc it's best to be nice but if I don't like you or we both dislike eachother, then there's no reason for us to communicate or be around eachother. It's not about being immature, I would much rather not put myself in such a situation.

Have you ever had a job

or family members who you dislike but aren't actively bigots

Link to the gay porn library of Alexandria.

Happy pride.

This is the best version I've seen of this thread. Reblogging it enthusiastically. :)