We’re winning.

I found his bio on societyofpresidentialdescendants.org and it was so delightful I had to copy paste the whole thing:

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”

And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:

Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.

“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know ... they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.

I see tumblr is trying everything in their power to reclaim their old reputation as "the website for porn"

whenever my program freezes

i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i've seen people saying things like "well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it" and it's like, that's not the point. it's that companies /shouldn't/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i'm still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn't have to begin with though?

I’m getting really tired of the wise serene pacifist trope in fiction. Every committed pacifist, prison abolitionist, antiwar activist, etc I’ve ever met in real life has been vibrating with compressed rage at all times. Do you know what it’s like to believe deeply in your heart that doing harm to others is wrong and the goal of society should be to alleviate suffering for all people and live in the United States of America? IT’S NOT FUN. Show Us The Pissed-Off Pacifists. 

Dude there might be a word for the emotion that is forged when someone’s deep abiding love and compassion for all people and living things welds itself into decades of built-up foaming fury at how those people been treated their whole life by those in power to create a sort of alloyed super-commitment to a set of ethical principles but i promise you “tranquility” is not that fucking word

I think saying “oh fantasy fiction is all kinds of reactionary because people didn’t get the right lessons from Tolkien” is kinda putting a little too much emphasis on Tolkien. like, it’s probably more due to the influence of Romanticism, right? that incredibly influential ideological and aesthetic movement that straight-up said “the middle ages were better because it was an innocent time before science and reason and secularism,” I feel like that was probably a bigger part of this discussion than a singular dork

dark science beyond belief

So the United States Military is recruiting directly on 4chan now.

They must be REAL desperate.

so many social justicey arguments really do seem like they were invented in a lab to be a saw trap for people with obsessive compulsive tendencies

one of the examples i was thinking of is the idea you are Morally Obligated to tag any potential triggers, despite that being a category that theoretically includes literally everything. maybe the implication/way most people interpret it is "if you have a decent following, its best practice to tag common ones plus requests from followers" but i dont think it should be difficult to understand why trying to figure out which ones people will get mad at you about is a saw trap. esp on platforms more like twitter where providing content warnings in the first place is a logistical nightmare

Op's tags:

august please be good to all the friends in my phone. thank you

Patreon done goofed.

If you haven't been made aware, Patreon shat the bed at the start of this billing cycle:

I had quite a few Patrons knocked off the roll this time around. If you got declined or a fraud warning or something, please be patient and try to stay on top of it.

Considering Grady's health issues, this comes at a really bad time. Pitching in would be appreciated.

An update:

For some reason, Patreon appears to have moved its payment processor to Ireland. This is causing some American banks to see payments routed internationally and they're flagging the charges as fraudulent.

Just a giant damn mess.

Magical Being: Link... you are the chosen one destined to defeat the evil polluting Hyrule

Link, born inexplicably strong and with a gift for swordsmanship that borders on supernatural: Me??? :o

Zelda Heritage Post

#a graveyard of broken ships surrounds the small isle the princesses 'tower' stands on #for what guards her is no dragon of the skies #how funny. a lighthouse to warn sailors of the cliffs and rocks #and a princess stranded on the isle to lure them in despite it #is she really trapped. or is she the perfect willing bait.

Welcome to art group! We are an inclusive online space for all artists. We are here to learn and grow and most of all support one another!

Here are the rules

-no nudity ever including bare nipples. No not even if it's a Greek statue or an ancient hieroglyph. Nipples and nudity are not art.

-no violence or depictions of weapons or blood. Will this rule extend to photos of generic white people holding spears in their play-pretend pseudo native American garb? Probably not.

-nothing too political, this is art group not debate group! Everyone knows art is only ever aesthetic and carries no political baggage. Don't make people think too hard and for the love of GOD Don't challenge any preconceived notions.

-never ever hint that anything you make could possibly be available for sale, ever. Yes I know this group is about supporting artists but we didn't mean like. Physically in any way.

-No art that makes mod Steve sad :(

-if your art is ugly tag it with a trigger warning

-have fun!

My good people, I give you: Amatonormativity.

people in westeros are always like. your fortifications and ramparts are no match for human rights violations gerald and his dirty boys. and every time it is true

we need a specific term for when someone has immersed themselves in a real or imagined counterculture and lost all awareness whatsoever of mainstream culture and so end up saying extremely popular and normative positions like they're being rebellious

"let men be masculine" / "let women be feminine" / "it's okay to be a trans woman who wants to pass" / "it's okay to listen to taylor swift" / etc. -- things said by people who should look out the window some time

i've had people on this website accuse me of being a marxist-leninist for clout. babygirl what fucking clout???