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H. Savinien

@hsavinien / hsavinien.tumblr.com

For medieval weapon geeking, look on the Weapon Rants page. I'm also on Ao3. The Owl House is my coping mechanism right now. Buy me a ko-fi?

I saw your rant about bows in LOTR and I’m in love with ancient weaponry and thus with you now??? Please tell us all about swords!

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Hi, I noticed interest had picked back up again!  I guess somebody popular reblogged it.  For the convenience of all parties (and preservation against tumblr shenanigans), all my mini-essays about medieval weaponry, including the swords one, can now be found on my Ao3 account at https://archiveofourown.org/series/1207902. Reblogs of useful weaponry info can be found under the tag “medieval weaponry” on my tumblr.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Owl House (Cartoon) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: King Clawthorne & Raine Whispers Characters: Raine Whispers, King Clawthorne (The Owl House) Additional Tags: During Timeskip in Episode: s03e03 Watching and Dreaming (The Owl House), Plushies, Families of Choice, Bonding, Spies & Secret Agents Summary:

King gets Raine introduced to the rest of the household.

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One way to be an ally to disabled queer people:

If you want to attend a pride event, ask about their accessibility plans and policies.

Ask about their covid policies. Ask if they are accessible to mobility aid users. Ask if they will have strobe lights, if there will be bathrooms, if there is water. Make the event planners consider who they may have left out, even if the person being left out isn't you. Have your friends ask as well. Help create a demand. Help get conversations started. Help people see where things could be more accessible.

Because when we, the disabled, ask these questions? We're much more likely to get ignored, and much less likely to be heard when we raise hell.

So help us raise hell when we need it. Demand to know why your local Pride event isn't requiring masks, or is charging for water, or doesn't have wheelchair ramps, or whatever other accessibility issue you catch.

Stop leaving us behind. We need your fucking help.

Asking about captioning and interpretive services. Ask about visual or auditory aids. Ask about safe spaces for those with services animals. Ask about accommodations for those with sensory issues.

Ask about if they’re doing other events that might be more accessible for those of us who get anxious at the thought of being around so many people, so much sensory information, for so much time.

Ask about if breaks are planned and if there’s designated spaces for us to exist within the event while taking care of ourselves.

Ask if there’s ways to learn more about the event, it’s schedule, who’s gonna be there, that isn’t just a social media platform that may be inaccessible or just unadvertised.

Ask about who at the event can be called upon to help negotiate or mediate accessibility concerns when they arise, or who can help advocate for us on behalf of the event itself.

I don’t think you can fully understand transmisogyny without understanding how it’s weaponized against cis Black women.

When you find a transmisogynist you’ve found a racist who will use their ideals of the “normative female body” to demean and denigrate Black women. For years it was a popular right wing rumor/conspiracy/dick move to refer to Michelle Obama as a “tranny” and more recently sports organizations have repeatedly excluded cis Black women for not having “normative” hormone levels. Transmisogyny and antiblackness go hand in hand.

Happy Pride. Less Love is Love, more stomping on fascists and “you are not going to destroy us, you motherfuckers.” Featuring everyone’s favorite queer witches. (Reuploaded, because the size I had uploaded before wasn’t working well for tumblr banners and I didn’t like how it cut off the left side of the progress flag in some of the edits, so I added one. Hopefully the blank one makes it easy for folks to add in whatever flags they need <3 )

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me, to the kids i worked with last week: welcome to medieval camp everyone! can anyone think of any fun medieval activities we might do here at camp this week?

kid: well, they used to do this thing where they would take your body and make it into four pieces and i think it was called quartering.

me: that’s called torture! we will not in fact be participating in torture this week! …anyone else?

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listen there are too many of you saying i should have let them participate in torture

TV Executives: “if the strike goes on, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”

Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.

Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.

And the thot plickens….

HOLY FUCK

SAG-AFTRA = Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists

More info:

- The actors walk off at the end of June if the studios don’t sit down with the writers

- Rumor is directors will follow. This will grind everything to a halt.

- Nobody is asking for a boycott. Neil Gaiman has pointed out that making Good Omens S2 a huge hit actually puts more pressure on Amazon to negotiate with the writers

- This implies it’s okay to catch up on old streaming content without breaking the line too

- This is a screenwriter strike; books will keep coming out.

- Movies already made will keep coming out for months. Again, actors have not called for a boycott; you aren’t breaking the line if you go see a movie.

- I don’t know where this puts podcasts but none of them have studio funding or platforms so they’ll probably keep going.

- Substack/Tumblr book club are all public domain works and will keep going. In addition to Dracula Daily there’s Whale Weekly, Dickens Daily, My Dear Wormwood (The Screwtape Letters), Letters from Watson (Sherlock Holmes) and more.

- Your local library always needs love. With the Libby app you don’t even need to physically go there.

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[ID: Second post is a tweet from Ian Scott McGregor  @ianscottmecgregor.bsky.social. Included is a screencap from a SAG-AFTRA email McGregor received on June 5 saying that,

“SAG-AFTRA Members Approve Strike Authorization with 97.91% Yes Vote.”

The tweet reiterates that, commenting:

“SAG-AFTRA members have voted 97.91% in favor of a strike authorization.” /id]

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the cornell university library has digitized its really incredible 2022 exhibition “radical desire: making on our backs magazine”––cannot recommend strongly enough taking a look at the fascinating and funny and sexy and bittersweet collection of materials curated here 

On Our Backs magazine launched in San Francisco in 1984 promising, per the tagline on the cover, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.” The photographic images on the cover and throughout were central to its mandate to deliver sexual content for lesbians. The photography also created the greatest difficulties for the magazine’s circulation at a moment when many feminist leaders decried pornographic photographs and film as a form of violence against women. This exhibition presents original photographs created for On Our Backs during its first decade. Made by staffers and freelancers, professionals and amateurs, members of the magazine’s inner circle and its far-flung readership, they convey the fantasies, imagination, humor, rigor, radicalism, political engagement, and ethos of community-building and inclusion that defined On Our Backs and made it a touchstone in the queer press. Additional photographs and documents elucidate the political and erotic contexts into which the magazine emerged, the women behind it, and their business practices and strategies. All materials are drawn from Cornell Library’s Human Sexuality Collection.
Exhibition curators: Kate Addleman-Frankel, Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, Johnson Museum of Art, and Brenda Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Owl House (Cartoon) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Eda Clawthorne/Raine Whispers Characters: Raine Whispers, Eda Clawthorne Additional Tags: Dom/sub Play, Sex, Post-Episode: s03e03 Watching and Dreaming (The Owl House), Office Sex, Dorks in Love, Harpy Eda Clawthorne Summary:

Eda suggests a new game, and isn't prepared for Raine.

I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”

You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.

And ONE MORE THING—listen. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factors—factors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollution—there is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studied—and many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. You’re not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeister’s work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) You’re fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they don’t care if you die.

So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Don’t wait until you’re thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) it’s okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.

Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.

Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.

We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Owl House (Cartoon) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Eda Clawthorne/Raine Whispers Characters: Raine Whispers, Eda Clawthorne, Background & Cameo Characters Additional Tags: During Timeskip in Episode: s03e03 Watching and Dreaming (The Owl House), Established Relationship Summary:

Raine loves Eda, and the connections they're growing.