if youre trans + gay (or even if ur not tbh) read lou sullivan's diaries. no piece of literature has made me feel so understood & cherished before. i wish id read it earlier in my transition when i was extremely confused & terrified, it wouldve made it all so much easier. he writes about the trans & gay experience in a way ive never seen before anywhere, its so simple & succinct yet rich & nuanced. we are very so often removed from gay &/or trans narratives & i cant even begin to tell you how much it means to see yourself in another person, specially a person that lived before many of us. its a reminder that weve always been here, we will always be here, & we r beautiful. thank you lou
Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of free resources for different sign languages:
- American Sign Language (ASL)
- Australian Sign Language (Auslan)
- Black American Sign Language (BASL)
- British Sign Language (BSL)
- Chinese Sign Language (CSL)
- Emirati Sign Language (ESL)
- French Sign Language (LSF)
- Indian Sign Language (ISL)
- International Sign Language (IS)
- Irish Sign Language (ISL)
- Japanese Sign Language (JSL)
- Mexican Sign Language (LSM)
- Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL)
- Ukrainian Sign Language (USL)
Please feel free to add on if you know of others, be it more resource for one of the sign languages above, or resources for learning any of the other 300 plus sign languages.
Two ESL (Egypt) Dictionaries' links at the end of this article ; one for children, the other is for adults and teenagers.
(They're in arabic but covers all of the basics)
A really good article, with a lot of context...
The WGA is asking strike supporters to donate to the Entertainment Community Fund. Select “film and television” from Gift Designation drop down. These funds support striking writers as well as others who have lost their jobs or income due to the strike.
@/safear215, on twitter:
Can you help us transcribe essays from incarcerated writers? Come type for liberation over Zoom on May 4, at 8pm. In The Belly is a journal for Incarcerated people practicing abolition. It is free for all incarcerated people. link: https://abolitioniststudy.wordpress.com/2022/09/25/in-the-belly-vol-4/ [The zine is freely downloadable and viewable from the link]
Infographic:
We need your fingers
For Liberation ITB needs help transcribing essays from incarcerated writers. May 4th, 8pm. On zoom. DM For Link @/Safear215
("In The Belly - an abolitionists journal. Vol 4, September 2022")
Direct Message, Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Safear215
Love goth culture but not really loving this prevalent shift into distinct gender presentation that's developed as its become accepted in society. Or the... I guess gentrification is the wrong word.
Like. You remember goths with huge ratty hair and KISS makeup and men in heels and corsets and women in huge shapeless sweaters till you couldn't tell who was under what? Remember when the clothes were hand-shredded from the thrift store for five dollars and some spit?
My first black lipstick was eyeliner. What's this Women Get Crop Tops Only For $60 crap. What's this Being Goth Too Expensive shit. Girl draw ur nails on with sharpie and embrace damnation wtfff
Alt fashion being gentrified (which is the right word, you nailed it) is the most bullshit thing. My forebears didn't thrift/shoplift leather and jeans and hold their clothes together with pins and dye their hair together at whoever's house had a sink sprayer just so modern punks could lament the cost of a good battle jacket and ripped pair of off-the-rack jeans like! Girl!! Rip them yourself!! Throw box dye in your hair and leave it on for an hour before rinsing in the sink!! Keep your jeans for so long they tear THEN pin that shit together!! The entire point was that we didn't contribute to the capitalist machine by buying new things!!
Cheap, shitty, and now!!
You want a fishnet/mesh shirt? Get those halloween costume tights, or others that are on clearance. You cut off the toes, cut a hole in the crotch, and that's your shirt. (Psst! You can also use striped tights for this.) I like the Halloween costume kind because they are usually all fishnet without the more solid upper shorts bit regular tights often have, and they're usually way cheaper even when they're not on clearance.
Get cheap black clothing, bleach, and cheap paintbrushes or cotton swabs (or a bleach pen). Put a layer of cardboard between the layers of fabric and paint whatever you want on it with your bleach. (Search for "bleach painting" for more detail and inspo.) (I think some people use spray bottles bottles, too, but I've never tried that.)
Add safety pins to everything. Hell, string them together into a necklace and dangle charms from individual pins.
Get your black lipstick (or other uncommon color, like green) when halloween makeup is out. Wet n Wild often have fairly inexpensive products, and they're pretty good quality in my experience. (Plus sometimes you can find them on clearance even cheaper.)
You can get chain from the jewelry making/craft section and diy jewelry, or add chain to belts, hats, jackets, bags, whatever. (You can also salvage them from things like old wallets or decorative belts made from chain, which you can sometimes find in thrift stores.) Dog chains also work.
You can also as lace trim to pretty much anything, if that's more your style.
Found something at the (thrift or other) store, but it isn't black? Fabric dye, to the rescue!
Think outside the ready-made box, my lovely creatures of the night. Experiment! Get creative! Don't be afraid of things not turning out perfect!
Also: you don't have to be in all black. Jewel tones are common, but so are pastels. Be unlimited by stereotypes, and flourish 🖤
has anyone else noticed that being transgender is kind of hard
There was a massive increase in suicides because of the lockdowns.
My favorite thing about this study is that when you read further, they excluded young people, children, people in poor socioeconomic countries/situations, and people with preexisting mental health issues. So other than that . . . .
Lockdown was legitimately not much different for me as a chronically ill, disabled person who'd been homebound for several years due to my multiple disabilities. The only real difference was that I was no longer crushingly alone because other people were also home and suddenly remembered I existed.
Seeing those same people then compare my lived existence for the last seven years as being torturous and inhumane was both infuriating and validating.
As was seeing all the accommodations like work from home and distance learning which people like me had always been told were impossible to implement and would take too much effort. And yet companies swiveled on a dime and managed it pretty much overnight. Sure, it was a scramble and stressful, but could you imagine how much easier it would have been if they'd implemented these accommodations more widely for disabled people prior to a global pandemic?
Accommodations which, by the way, are now being taken away again. Why? Fuck you, that's why.
The main thing my mental health will never recover from, however-- along with the crushing weight of all the people that died and continue to die -- was seeing and continuing to see how many people consider my death as an acceptable statistic in the crusade to "get back to normal."
Fuck you. There was no acceptable "normal" before. You just didn't care about us.
How did you not come out of this experience totally radicalized and ready to fight for disabled people? Where's your fucking rage? Where's your humanity?
this addition means everything to me because I had the exact same experience, and I’ve not seen anyone else talk about the sudden lack of loneliness (’suddenly remembered I existed’) and the sheer rage and validation of people finally understanding what we go thru..
Yeah ... reading all these articles how this is so bad for the kids I just wonder, if 2 years of restrictions are so bad for them and their development ... then I just gotta ask, what exactly did a whole childhood of being stuck at home do to me ...
Like ... I went to school I went home and that was it ...
And the internet wasn't a thing yet ...
A lot of my friends both online and offline began sharing their own stories that are quite similar to yours, even your tags. For a while in 2020 and 2021 the blogosphere saw a dearth of posts by people who had already lived that way as children before the internet. And then they stopped coming so often.
At the same time, those with such lives who were already in the disability community stood up with one voice to remind the medical world that disabled isolated kids had been here all along. And that we recognized patterns, and that we remembered. We kept saying that they should listen. They didn't listen, of course.
Yo! You ever listen to Black Dresses? A lot of there music is about trauma, i find that its helpful for me and maybe it would be helpful to u!
Links to all there albums
wasteisolation (This album is manly about sexual trauma)
https://youtu.be/_VfLirxxEZk
love and affection for stupid little bitches https://youtu.be/tY2toGYATKY
Thank you
https://youtu.be/juRaYfnRpDk
Peaceful as hell
https://youtu.be/JQXniWb78l4
And there newest one
forever in your heart
https://youtu.be/j8Jes4SX-FU
Sorry i just bombarded u with shit uh anyway have a good day😳😳😳
!! Hi nonnie!! Nicole dollanganger also often sings about trauma!
My favorite ( and go to's ) in order are;
Dog teeth ( CSA / COCSA trauma )
Blood brothers ( ED, Su^cide topics. )
Trauma baby ( tw for infant death(?) )
Angels of p^rn ( both one and two ) ( CP with trauma )
He hit me ( and it felt like a kiss ) ( domestic Physical abuse )
And some other bands I recomend!!
Sleeping with sirens ( personal fav is " A Trophy Father's Trophy Son ", for those whom lacked a father figure )
Set it off ( personal fav is " Swan song ", talks of a lack with in a relationship / Neglecting. )
Get scared ( personal fav is " Cunning, Not Convincing ", About lying, and manipulation. ) , TW FOR SCREAMING WITH IN MOST THEIR SONGS.
" Get scared " has helped me out a lot, same with " sleeping with sirens ".
Nicole dollanganger has helped me out the most however.
But I'll most certainly check out " Black dresses "!! :)
And you're no bother at all!!
Copaganda does three main things.
First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.
For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.
But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.
The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.
The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.
The evidence shows otherwise.
— Alec Karakatsanis, “Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”” | Jacobin, July 2022
More relevant resources about destroying the myths of policing as a positive institution:
- Video Essays on Copaganda (YouTube Playlist)
- 7 Myths About Police (Article)
- Slave Patrols and Civil Servants: A History of Policing In Two Modes (Article)
- Cops Are Liars (YouTube)
- The Police Solve Just 2% Of All Major Crimes (Article)
- De-mythologizing Our View Of Prison (Text)
- Abolitionist Study Guide (Resources)
contemplates writing a detailed guide to deradicalizing republican evangelicals for the billionth time
i've written out parts of my thoughts before, but nowadays is a different time with the absolutely unhinged paranoia about lgbtq people trying to "groom" your kids and weird ideas about "critical race theory" being promoted by politicians to stir fear
So...I would say that the key is, do not challenge people's deeply held feelings, impulses and beliefs about things, but rather argue based on values they share with you
I mean okay first of all, this is definitely going to be a controversial take, but if someone feels distaste and repulsion at the idea of a man dressing in drag, you're not going to "convince" them not to—and you don't have to, because feeling distaste about something someone else does is just...a feeling. Maybe they will unpack it on their own time, maybe they won't, but as uncomfortable as it may be to admit, feeling completely arbitrary distaste over another person's harmless action is a normal human thing and you've experienced it too. What actually matters is whether you learn to deal with this feeling in a healthy way or if you decide the feeling must be telling you that [thing] is objectively evil.
I get a lot of mileage out of saying things like "This is America and it's a free country, and we get to live how we want and express ourselves how we want even if the government doesn't like it." And I know people who, personally, believe that gay sex is "morally" wrong, but are staunchly pro-gay-marriage because they believe that it's a fundamental American value for people to be able to live their lives the way they see fit and to be treated equally to everyone else.
And I honestly do respect that? I respect people with a mature understanding of the fact that "My personal opinions and feelings on someone else's choices are not as important as their right to make those choices." I think this is something we all need to learn, because there will always be things that we will find we don't FEEL positively about, or don't personally think are good (nose jobs, recreational Benadryl, tattooing Dobby's face onto your chest, that one weird kink you think is gross) and that does NOT mean our personal feelings should be made into law and used to punish and harm people.
One thing that is a pretty consistent stated value among most American conservatives is personal freedom.
Recent events like book bans, drag bans, abortion bans, and trans healthcare bans are all attacks on personal freedom—the government stepping in to legislate what an individual can and cannot do. That is something that people across the political spectrum in America can and should be concerned about, even if they disagree on the issues involved.
Express your concerns that book bans open the door to the government arbitrarily restricting what information you can have access to. "I just don't think the government should be able to control what I can and can't read, as if the individual can't be trusted to think for themselves."
Likewise, banning drag gives the government the power to control how individuals dress and express themselves. If a public performance can be illegal based on how the performer is dressed, that can be used to arrest anybody that says anything in public that the authorities don't like. Clothes are assigned gender arbitrarily: pants used to be inappropriate for women, and men used to wear heels. Who is to say that a robe or a kilt is different than a dress? Ultimately, people have the right to live how they want in this country, and if a man wants to wear a dress, he can whether his neighbors like it or not.
Talk about how banning abortion and trans healthcare sets a precedent for the government controlling people's medical decisions. Why should someone need an outside authority to decide what medications they can and can't take?
DO remind people that what they see claimed by politicians and the internet is wildly out of touch with what the average person thinks and believes.
If someone tries to go the "But what about the children?" route, just straight-up "So you think that we need to reform public schools? See, I agree with you, I think it's very harmful for kids to be spending so much time in a public school environment being primarily influenced by the pressures and stressors there. If kids spend 8 hours at school and then have 5 hours of homework, of course they're parroting whatever their schools teach—they don't even have time to talk to their parents or other trusted people in their lives, and they're being forced to memorize so much stuff that they can't think critically about it! See, I would want my kids to have access to a big library with a wide variety of views, and teach them to think critically about different perspectives on a subject. These book bans are going to make sure kids never even get exposed to alternative viewpoints, and that's how you get adults that can't think!—"
Honestly censorship is hard to defend with a straight face, so the main thing here is to just defuse the irrational panic over critical race theory. If they try to allege some hypothetical book with hypothetical sexually explicit material, ask for details and watch them squirm.
Abortion is another one of those things you will not be able to change someone's feelings on, so you must focus on several things:
- the reasons WHY people have abortions, and how better education, health care, and financial resources for mothers (like paid maternity leave) would decrease this number. Yes, abortion will never be fully eliminated, but please stop emphasizing this and instead emphasize how in an ideal world, abortion would only HAVE to be sought in the most tragic circumstances because people could either prevent pregnancy before it happened or get sterilized if they are sure they don't want kids.
- the fact that pregnancy and birth are very risky and carry the likelihood of severe bodily harm and death. Absolutely have examples of awful pregnancy/birth complications on hand—personal to you or people you know if possible. There is a real effective argument to be made that regardless of personhood of the fetus, protecting oneself against severe harm to one's person is a human right that people have.
- bonus: ask them WHY they think rape is harmful/bad. This question (provided they agree with the premise) brings into sharp relief the fact that the physical boundaries of a person's body are inherently meaningful in some way. Deflect and ignore any attempt to twist your argument into the fetus somehow being a "perpetrator" of a crime. Repeatedly assert that the purpose of abortion is not to "punish" the fetus (which cannot suffer and cannot experience punishment) and shut down any claim that is based on "it's wrong to punish the fetus" as a straw man.
- Judges and politicians cannot be trusted to determine when abortion is best practice or medically necessary, because they're not doctors and do not have medical expertise. The legal system cannot be trusted to determine if your wife had a miscarriage or not.
- Also bring up proposed abortion death penalty bills. It is legitimately open season for "I told you so" on a million things pro-lifers insisted were baseless paranoia.
And honestly? A lot of people who would have considered themselves "conservative" DO find recent developments alarming, so again, your main job is to defuse the cult-ish fear and paranoia of thinking disloyal thoughts
This is why classes need library instruction
Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!
Me: Okay, what’s the subject?
Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.
Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?
Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!
Me:
I’m still mad about this because it happens frequently. Students at all levels of education need library and research instruction–they should get it before graduating high school, they should be getting it in several different classes in college, and there should be something in grad school–seriously, there are people in my master’s program who don’t know anything besides Google.
And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?
Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:
- First, zoom out. Start broad. Pick a few phrases or keywords, like “tech companies” and “culture.” See what comes up.
- Actually, back up. First, does your library’s website search include articles, or do you have to go into a database? My library’s website searches some of our 200+ databases, but not all. And you’ll need to find (in advance search or adjustable limiters that pop up after your initial search) how to limit your search to scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles.
- What other keywords are related or relevant? For the search above, you could use a combination of “silicon valley,” “company/ies” or “organization/s,” “sharing,” “collaborative,” “workplace culture,” “social culture,” “organizational culture,” and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.
- Did you find something that looks promising? Great! What kind of subjects/keywords are attached (usually to the abstract, sometimes in the description section of the online listing)? Those can give you more ideas of what to search. Does it cite any articles? Look at those! Some databases (ilu ProQuest) will also show you a selection of related/similar articles.
- If you’re researching a very specific topic, you may not find any/many articles specifically about your subject. You may, for example, have to make do with some articles about west-coast tech companies’ work cultures, and different articles about creating sharing/collaborative environments.
That said, this student did the right thing: they tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.
They tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.
I get goddamn professors pulling this shit, there is not one single level in the academy where research literacy isn’t lacking.
Also: Everyone has forgotten how to browse the stacks. As in, find a book that’s relevant, go to the stacks, then look at what’s near it on the shelf. You will find stuff that way that would never turn up on a search. It really works and can be a useful supplement to electronic research even though it involves your corporeal form and books made out of paper.
my law school requires a legal research class. you take it as a 1L, and it’s mandatory. you are signed up for it automatically along with all your other 1L courses. it’s a wise thing to do, because you’re fucked as a lawyer if you don’t know to find, you know, the law.
I have a library and information science degree, which I often refer to as a degree in google, and I’m only being a little facetious with that. I often impress people with my ability to find things online, but it’s only because I’ve taken so many classes in research methods that I know how to phrase a search well. It’s so important, not just in school!
Goddammit there is so much information and so many way to access it that it burns my biscuits when we don’t give students the tools they need to succeed at this. Hell yeah all y’all above!
And here’s what I’ve got to add:
Ask a Librarian
Seriously guys librarians are here to help. We would love to help you find the right resource for your particular informational need and we’ve been trained to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Nowadays you don’t even have to go to the library in person as many libraries offer online chat services as well as the option to contact via email. Further, and I think very importantly we are dedicated to our patrons rights to privacy. To quote the American Library Association the “rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”
Search the Stacks
This is one of my favorite ways to immerse myself in an area of study. While a good subject or keyword search will lead you to some good results sometimes is just as fruitful to go the library and plunk yourself down in section and browse all the books in a topic area. Libraries will label the (book)stacks based on whichever classification system they use and you can use the links below to figure out which area of the stacks you’ll want to look through.
Dewey: used in public libraries
LOC /Library of Congress: classification system used in university libraries
Online Books
Some websites like gutenberg project are dedicated to making public domain books accessible to the public. Using the search term public domain books is a good way to go about looking for more sources of them. Open sourced is another good term to use when trying to find freely accessible books online and that’s not just limited to fiction books but textbooks are also offered by various sites.
Project Gutenberg is an online archive of tens of thousands of books that have enter the public domain that can be freely accessed.
Openstax is one website that provides access to Higher Ed and AP open sourced textbooks.
Libguides and Pathfinders
As stated above librarians are in the business of connecting people to resources. If we can’t do so in person then we also do so by creating guides that can be found and used when we aren’t around. These guides are filled with search terms, books, articles, reviews, lists, links, and anything else we think would be helpful for patrons trying to explore a particular topic area.
Pathfinder is a particular term used for these guides. Libguides is a particular platform which to host these guides. Using either word at the end of your search terms online will bring up guides that have been created in that particular subject area. Or you can explore libguides directly with your search terms to find what guides librarians across the country have created.
Note: Using pathfinder in your search terms may pull up resources about Paizo Publishing’s same titled tabletop RPG series and while dragons are cool you can modify your search to library pathfinder to exclude these resources.
Other than using a search engine or libguides directly I find a great many pathfinders on university library sites. Usually what I do is find a university’s library webpage, find their pathfinder/research guides/guides section, and then browse through their lists of guides. These are generally organized by field of study so just pick the one you are interested in and look through the resources they have listed.
Some of the resources will be accessible for anyone while some might be locked for students of the particular university. If the article, book, or resource is locked by a school portal you can either search for it online outside of the university portal or you can go to your own university/public library to see if they have access to the resource there. Even if they don’t have it currently in their collection libraries are often connected with other branches and may be able to request an interlibrary loan of what you need.
Online Reference Resources
Sometimes the problem isn’t finding information but finding good information. Below are two sites that I use regularly to help me with this issue when searching online for resources.
The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association gives a list of the best free reference sites on the internet
The Ipl2 is a good authoritative source to find general information on a variety of topics. Even though the website is no longer updating there are still a plethora of subject guides that can be explored.
Open Sourced Journals and Articles
Just as there are open sourced books and textbooks so too are there open sourced journals and articles available. Again you can add the term open sourced when searching for these resources.
DOAJ is the Directory of Open Access Journals and you can search through here to find both articles and journals freely available to access.
Journal Article Tips
Finally whenever I’m searching through journal articles there are a few things I always like to keep in mind.
Build context. Once you find an article that is relevant to your search you can do this by exploring the citations. Both those that the article you are using references in its bibliography and those that reference the article itself.
Every database is going to do this differently but generally with a few clicks you can find out who has cited an article that you have read. If nothing else try popping the title of your article into google scholar and you’ll see a blue ‘Cited by’ below the description. Also in some cases you can click on the author directly in a database to see what else they have written in the subject. Totally ask your librarian for help navigating the particular database you are using again they will be stoked to do so.
Building this context of literature by finding and reading these extra articles is important to building a critical understanding of your topic and will allow you to build the best possible defense of your arguments. This will also allow you to see if the article you’ve initially selected is in itself a viable position or if it is an outlier of its field.
If you can try and find reviews of literature articles and special issue/special topic editions of journals. These are your best friends in the resource world as these types of articles and journals compile a great deal of information on particular topic in a tiny space. They are immensely helpful in building context in an area of thought and useful to finding out what to read further to be informed in an area of study. Add those words to your search terms to see if you can get some useful resources.
Can you offer any advice for what people can do for chronic pain in terms of lessening the pain besides taking medications they have been prescribed? It feels like very few of my go to remedies (including ice and sleep) have been helpful and I am waiting (in worse chronic pain) for an appointment with my doctor. My insurance hasn't approved something new I was prescribed yet and I am experiencing more concerning symptoms as I wait (but they might be for another reason as well, though).
Honestly, I'm not sure that I feel qualified to answer this. I am not a medical professional, and any tips for managing chronic pain that I've shared on my blog come from my own experience. I'm deeply sorry to hear that you're dealing with a lot of chronic pain, but I don't think there's much I can tell you.
The one resource that I can direct you to is Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Howard Schubiner. Depending on the nature of your chronic pain, this may or may not be helpful for you. You can get the first five chapters for free on Kindle Unlimited.
-Reid
Worrying about whether this is the real reality or whether we are a trillion layers deep in computer simulations comes from this neurotic default toward hierarchical thinking
Like why am I meant to be worried about how high or low I am in the simulation stack? Why am I meant to escape and rise the planes like some Gnostic? Why am I meant to leave Plato’s cave? Why are you prioritizing higher planes or spheres or if you’re all edgy lower planes and spheres? Who told you it went up and down? What does “up” mean in outer space? How do you know what lies outside is more real? What’s so wrong with immanent experience of our present reality? Why must we escape the flesh? Who says it’s lowly?
Also how much of this anxiety about our hypothetical simulatedness is tied to the fact that machines and computers in our techno industrial capitalism are so profoundly alienating and disempowering? Like would we be as worried about this if they weren’t, in our reality, these pacifying or disciplining arms of spectacle and control in our lives? In the crystalline liquid hypercomputational dimension from which we are simulated and projected or whatever is there an NSA, AT&T, Microsoft Excel, proprietary software, and a TikTok algorithm? Is that what we are afraid of? That the secular Gnostic heaven we might be ascending/escaping to is somehow perverted by the bureaucratic cruelty of our own machines of labor and social control?
Anyways I fucked your mom, she’s gay
If you want to be on the top layer of ultimate reality you’re not ready to be on the top layer of ultimate reality
OP deactivated, and some of the links were broken/marked unsafe by Firefox, so here's a new compilation post of Leslie Feinburg's (She/her, ze/hir, any pronouns) novels and essays on being transgender:
Stone Butch Blues official free source directly from Author's website:
Stone Butch Blues, backup on the webarchive:
Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come, on the web archive:
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, on the web archive:
Lavender and Red, PDF essay collection:
Drag King Dreams, on the web archive:
(Also, if anyone ever tells you that the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues ""ends up with a man""........ they're transmisogynistic jackass TERFs who are straight up lying)
Please also check out your local public libraries for these books and see if they carry them, to help support public libraries! If you have a library card already you can checkout Libby and Overdrive to see if your public library carries it as an ebook that you can checkout :)
EDIT: another not included on the orignal masterpost-- Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or blue !
Nappy.co
You know how long I've been looking for something like this!?
To any sketch artist out there too.
[Image ID: a black woman wearing a plaid shirt and red bandana around her head. Her braided hair is coming out of the top od her head and falling in front of her. Text says "Did you know there's a black-owned stock photo company nappy.co that provides stereotype-free images of black people" /end]
the other day i was trying to find reference images of black people for art things but all i was finding were black-and-white images of white people! love this!!
Also! They accept submissions. If you’re a photographer and want to contribute, the button is on the bottom left of the webpage.
I wrote an essay chronicling the history behind the influence and power within Black-led factions and how the carceral State has failed to undermine their collective spirit.
God the prices of tvs have changed so much let me get my graph
wow thats crazy... tvs used to be so expensive!!




















