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I'm not too sure what's happening

@flintandfire

Multiple fandoms. I just reblog a bunch of stuff

Comic about trans men in the health care system I made for magazine Ottar last autumn! Please note that it presents a Swedish perspective unless stated otherwise, as it is mostly based on Swedish studies. I would however argue that it has implications on the state of healthcare for trans people in other places as well. Thank you so much Hedvig for translating this!

throwback to a comic about trans men’s health for trans day of visibility! ⚧

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man left without meaningful tasks for a week seen walking around with a notepad to critically assess all the wall-ceiling angles in his home with genuine contempt

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absolutely fucked

you're just dropping abstract art into my hands like it's nothing. i could sell this to the museum of modern art. or the cleveland museum of art

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do NOT sell my kitchen to the CMA i can't make the commute. MoMA is fine though i can go there with my mind

may 16: joan of arc’s canonization date, and the first MCR concert of 2022.

you don’t get it guys the first time “and so he gets to die a saint / but she will always be the whore” “take his body as a relic to be canonized” was ever performed live it was on joan of arc’s canonization date

holyth3firm-deactivated20200430

i want to shake those two little Victorian girl bitchs hands who faked the pictures of themselves playing with fairies and thank them for paving the way.

supposedlywizards

OP can we please see the pictures

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The photos are of (and by) Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith, who were respectively 13 and 11 at the time! Not Victorian, but just after - the pictures were taken around 1920.

Something that amazes me about this story is how absolutely bonkers it is that they got away with it for so long, and how if you just read about the story and didn’t see the pictures, you’d be damn near convinced that they actually took photos with actual fairies or something until basically the very end, and even then you might wonder.  Because most written accounts of what happens goes something like this: they took these photos and someone saw them, and BREAKING NEWS! And now suddenly believers and skeptics alike are itching to get ahold of these photos and determine whether or not they are real, because just looking at the photos had them either completely convinced, or else certain that some kind of photographic trickery must have been used. So there were all these experts who examined the photos, the camera, the film/plates, the whatever, to try and find out how they faked these photos (or IF they faked them). Like, expert experts. Like they got the folks at Kodak to examine them. (Over the next few decades they’d also be xrayed and all kinds of stuff.) And they couldn’t find anything. There was no evidence of early 20th century photoshop. They examined the photos, the negatives, everything, and concluded that they hadn’t been tampered with. Arthur Conan Doyle was LOSING HIS SHIT because he thought they were real and this proved it. Whether you believed in fairies or not all the experts were coming to the conclusion that the photos were totally real, and the skeptics were getting really really mad about it. Because there was no way these photos were real! Except they totally seemed to be! And the girls were sticking by their story. (And actually Elsie and Frances were 16 and 9 respectively, when the first two photos were taken in mid-1917, and the photos became public in mid 1919.)

Doyle was still losing his goddamn mind and so to put the matter to rest, another believer went to them in 1920, bringing cameras and stuff for them to photograph fairies with. The thinking was that if they were using equipment that had been examined and everything beforehand, and then developed not by the girls, then the opportunity for fakery was cut out and they could determine the truth. And lo and behold, the three pictures they girls took (alone, because “the fairies won’t show up if we’re not alone”), were also verified as being real!!! Okay, okay, you don’t believe in fairies, and believe the photos have to be fake, but still, there is the mystery of how did they do it???

And if that is what you read it’s understandable to be thinking that woah, what did these girls capture on film? Were these children just on to some advanced af photo trickery? What advanced technique did these kids figure out that fooled all the experts? Did they really actually capture pictures of something supernatural?

No. They fuckin cut some drawings of fairies out of paper and took pictures with them.  There was no trickery detected with the photos or photo equipment because they didn’t have to fake that part. They were genuine photographs....of little girls with propped up drawings. Elsie copied some drawings from a book, added wings, cut them out, and propped them up. You look at these photos today and they look fake as fuck. These are obviously little drawings. They do not look the slightest bit realistic. There are people out there TODAY who will argue that it’s totally possible that these girls took pictures of actual fairies. Because that’s a better story, I guess. But if you hear that version of the story and then see the photos it’s just laughable. 

I can only assume that the reason anybody fell for it at all is the same reason that people praised the special effects in old movies that now look ridiculous. 

But at the same time....nobody noticed that these fairies looked like children’s book illustrations???? Like it took another fifty years for this to be put to rest, because even if you didn’t believe they were real, NO ONE COULD FIGURE OUT HOW THEY COULD HAVE FAKED THEM. It wasn’t until the fricken 80s when someone tracked down the girls that they admitted to having faked the photos by using little drawings. And even with that admission and the actual book they copied from, plus computer examination revealing that there were little strings and stuff holding the cutouts in place, there are STILL people who will maintain that these photos were real.  For their parts Elsie and Frances disagreed over the veracity of the fifth photogragh (not pictured here). Both claimed to have taken it, and Elsie said it was fake while Frances said it was real. (Even in the 80′s.) The truth is most likely that it was a double exposure and so both girls did take it. Also they apparently kept up the lie because once they had fooled Arthur Conan Doyle they felt too weird about telling the truth. Seriously, EVEN THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND HOW THEY HAD FOOLED SO MANY GROWNUPS. THEY WEREN’T EVEN TRYING TO PULL A HOAX. 

Read that last sentence again. They really weren’t. They were just trying to take some fun little photos. And ALL THESE GODDAMN ADULTS WERE FREAKING THE FUCK OUT THINKING THAT THEY HAD PHOTOGRAPHED ACTUAL FAIRIES. AND IT WAS SUCH AN AWKWARD SITUATION THAT THE GIRLS JUST WENT WITH IT.  They didn’t keep it up for money or fame or pride, they kept up the hoax because it would be too awkward to tell the grownups they’d fooled them. 

THEY CREATED A MYSTERY THAT LASTED LIKE 50 YEARS BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO IN AN AWKWARD SITUATION. 

Frances straight up said: “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.” 

TL;DR: Two kids were dicking around with a camera and some fairy drawings, accidentally fool top experts in the world with super fake looking photos, feel too awkward at having fooled so many smart people to admit that it was all fake until a few years before their deaths. True. Icons.

If it's any comfort, as a kid in the 1960s I remember seeing the photos and going "they are obviously flat fairies cut out from a book, what did the people who thought they were real think they were seeing?"

And I suspect the same was true in the 1920s and 30s. You had a lot of people going "that's hilarious" and a small number of people convincing themselves that something was real.

I feel like US conservatives went from a 3/4 to 7 on transgender people over the course of a year and a half.

Basically, if this passes, the state Florida will take away your children if you are transgender or one of your children is transgender (as the bill notes it will take away cis children if they have a trans sibling).

Absolutely monstrous.

“The human sat down. Their colleagues looked as she began to eat poisoned food, a cup of venom by her side, all quiet on their horrors as casual conversation died out.

She looked up, her cold eyes filling the table with dread.

“Did something happen?”

“Y-”

“No”, a tall musician interrupted. “We were just… Talking about…”

“Food”, a historian completed, pointing at their own plate. “It’s… Uh. Delicious. Very good”.

The human nodded along. The musician almost sighed, giving a signal out to the new linguist. They would have to talk, later, about what to do in this sorts of situations, while trying to ignore how the human ate the poison with such satisfaction.

“The food supply we got was very good”, she agreed. “We should get more of it”.

The linguist looked around.

Everyone kept eating.

The human’s eyes began to tear up with poison.

Everyone kept eating.

The woman drank more of her venom, a bit distraught.

Everyone kept eating.

She smiled, showing her sharp, predatory teeth.

Everyone stopped.

The human put her poisons aside.

“So…”, she whimpered, more poison coming out of her eyes. “Ignore the crying. I just realised it wasn’t a good idea for me to eat hot-dog with pepper sauce and orange juice”.