this is a poem

i couldn’t not draw this

the rat poem is too powerful that’s why they don’t talk about it

Watching yall say "trans rights" in ya bio but still talk about buying Hogwarts Legacy

Not letting this get buried as well as this

oh my fucking god it doesn’t matter if there’s a trans character in the blood libel harry potter game because the profits from that game are going to be used to further the eradication of trans rights in the uk im literally begging people to use their brains for once

‘ohhh let people enjoy things’ look at me. look me in the eyes. the money you have spent is going to go to an influential transphobe. she is a major part of the anti-trans movement in the uk. by giving her money you are giving her more power and more influence that she will use to to further her transphobic agenda.

‘ohhh but i pirated it :)’ yeah i still don’t trust you. the game is antisemitic as hell and this has been public knowledge for months. i don’t much care for your support of trans people if you’re cool with antisemitism.

‘you’re blowing this way out of proportion’ nah i don’t think i am. i think you’ve made a choice and you’re not comfortable with the consequences of it. but unfortunately for you you can’t play Antisemitism: The Game made by the World’s Most Famous Transphobe and expect jewish people, trans people or their allies to like you.

not spending sixty quid on the Antisemitic Game That Funds Transphobia is literally the bare fucking minimum in allyship and some of you can’t even manage that

Pirate it, dweebs.

Why do you want to play the blood libel game so fucking badly?

ʕ♡˙ᴥ˙♡ʔ

@pictures-of-dogs <3

[Image Description: a painting of two bears partially submerged in a river holding each other tightly in a hug. End Description]

Additional description: the emoji underneath is a simple representation of a bear’s face with hearts on its cheeks /end

A snake in Thailand spent enough time sitting still in the water to grow moss and turn into a dragon, apparently.

More video at the source account!

While snakes can sit still a very long time, this is some kind of hair algae (not moss!) many species of which grow in n fast moving streams, so the snake could have been fairly active and still grow an algae coat, which it will lose next time it sheds or if environmental conditions (like seasonal temps) change too much for this algae's liking :)

furry snake furry snake

How I feel everytime I have to be a customer

On a lighter + adjacent note i love dis tweet + these QRTs of it ^_^... literally...

@hopepunk-humanity

new chess rules:

-the queens cannot kill eachother because they are lesbians having an affair -you have to pick two pieces to be secretly in love and they cant kill eachother either -you have to make horse noises whenever you move the knight -the pawns have a union and if you sacrifice too many of them they will revolt -you have to have gay sex when youre done playing

the homies are melancholic and despondent and their sleep is troubled by visions

Beware!

Avoid sci-hub too👀

From Ask for PDFs from People with Institutional Access

If you want to read an academic article that's behind a paywall just email the author and ask politely if they will send you the article. Most academics will be thrilled that you want to read their work and will gladly send it to you.

Do you ever think about how Tolkien’s vision of the greatest evil in the universe was something he referred to as “The Machine” which was his way of talking about accelerated industrialism and mass surveillance and he wrote multiple books where the main villains were a dragon who sits on a huge pile of treasure that he never intends to use but incinerates anyone who comes near it, a man in a giant tower who’s wrecking the environment with his factories, and an evil being who uses what’s essentially a listening device to control the citizens of middle earth. And now Amazon is making a Tolkien show. Do you ever think about that.

Youngman, Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

[ID: excerpt from the diary. first two sentences are underlined in pencil. text reads:

“Surely his face is God’s. I look into his eyes + I feel that I have seen God. And then he’ll meet my eyes + smile, taking me even higher.”

/end ID]

The reason wizards wear lots of jewelry is for self defense.

I shoot a beam at my wizard nemesis but it reflects flawlessly off of his Claire accessories clip on earrings, killing me instantly.

Pigeons are doves. They are rock doves, and I wonder if we began to call them that if people would hesitate to hate them, as doves have that history as messengers of peace. It is true that in my neighborhood nobody hates the mourning doves, dusky and elegant with wings that squeak as if they flap on rusty hinges. They roost on the wires like little Audrey Hepburns, while the pigeons troll the ground, tough and fat, some of them look like they should be smoking cigarettes. They look poor and banged up, like they could kick the mourning doves’ asses but are wise to the divide-and-conquer tactics we use on one another, so they coo wearily at the mourning doves and waddle forth in search of scavenged delights. What you may not know is when you call a pigeon “a rat with wings” you have given it a compliment. The only thing a rat lacks is a pair of wings to lift it, so you have named the pigeon perfectly. When you say to me, “I hate pigeons,” I want to ask you who else you hate. It makes me suspicious.

I once met a girl who was so proud to have hit such a bird on her bicycle, I swear, I thought that it was me she hit. I felt her handlebars in my stomach and now it is your job to feel it also. The pigeons are birds, they are doves. They are the nature of the city and the ones who no one loves. When people say they hate pigeons, I want to ask them if they hate themselves, too. Does it prick the well of your loathing? Do they make you feel dirty and ashamed? Are you embarrassed about how little or how much you have, for how you have had to hustle? Being dirty is not a problem for the pigeon. You can ask it, “How do you feel about having the city coating your feathers, having the streets gunked up in the crease of your eye?” and the pigeon would say, “Not a problem.” You will now stop blaming the pigeon. It is not the pigeon’s fault. The pigeon was once a dove, and then we built our filthy empire up around it, came to hate it for simply thriving in the midst our decay, came to hate it for not dying. The pigeon is your ally. They are chameleons, gray as the concrete they troll for scraps, at night they huddle and sing like cats. Their necks are glistening, iridescent as an oil-slick rainbow, they mate for life, and they fly.

happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.

Non-Natives reblogging this are great and wonderful

Please remember that "land back" does not mean "indigenous people are mystical elves with innate epigenetic wisdom of land stewardship and they don't belong in big cities," nor does it mean "non-indigenous people can't be farmers." What it DOES mean is that "non-indigenous farmers should be paying the equivalent of property taxes to the native governments their land was stolen from." It means, "there's a great deal of indigenous scholarship on sustainable agricultural practices that farmers should be taking into account, because indigenous agriculture was more advanced than European agriculture at the time Europe invaded the Americas and western agriculture *still* hasn't caught up in terms of figuring out how to produce equivalently high crop yields without compromising the ecosystem." It means, "non-indigenous farmers should be in an intellectual discourse with indigenous agricultural scientists and indigenous peoples that still do traditional farming, figuring how to repair the damage western farming practices have done to the ecosystem."

It also means Indigenous people have some degree of self-determination and sovereignty in these lands. It's also about political control to enable Indigenous people to thrive in their traditional ways through revitalizing and/or maintaining their intimate relationships with the natural world.

So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.

Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.

That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.

It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.

Did you just say emotional straight men are qu*er? Did you deadass just say that cishet men are part of the lgbt community? And y’all wonder why so many people hate it?

(sigh) I’ll repeat myself:

For everyone who’s like “Whoa, I was with you until you threw straight men in there”:

Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”

It’s the same way that men aren’t the primary intended beneficiaries of feminism, but part of the work of feminism is addressing and changing toxic masculinity. If you’re effective enough at changing the system, you change it for everyone.

(more discussion here)

To reiterate: One way that toxic masculinity is kept as the default pattern of behavior for straight men is that they are punished, quickly and efficiently, for any show of vulnerability. Dismantling the structures that enforce traditional gender roles is one way to ensure that LGBT people are welcomed in society. 

The world would be much more accepting if Joe Cishet didn’t feel the need to correct every single deviation from the toxic behaviors he believes are required.

The curb cut effect is good y’all. Not bad.

I’m stuck on “the great queering project”

Queer theory uses “to queer” to mean “to interpret in a way that causes something to depart from cisheteronormative societal standards” or “to interpret as queer”. It originated in literary and cultural criticism, but it can be used to describe the tangible social inroads LGBTQ+ people have made in dismantling cisheteronormativity itself.

Once again:

Queer is a coalition, not a demographic.

The purpose of the queer coalition is to end the practice of, “you must have [X list of traits] to participate in these parts of society.”

Can cishet men be queer?

Why does it matter?

Being queer isn’t about what specific identity or traits you have. It’s about saying, “HEY! Average isn’t the pinnacle of human existence! We didn’t build this world so everyone could strive to be just like their neighbors! People can be different and we can celebrate that difference, not shun it!”

Can a cishet man “be queer?” I dunno. I don’t think that’s important.

Can a cishet man “live a queer life?” Hell yes he can.

Can a cishet woman “be queer?” Wrong question.

Can a cishet woman “live a queer life?” Hell yes.

These aren’t “straight people appropriating queer culture.” They’re not taking it away from us, not picking and choosing bits of it to share with their cis het friends. These are people joining queer culture.

They’re not part of the LGBT community. They ARE part of the queer community.

this is a long-ish, text-heavy post but please read it, especially the last addition ^

^ This is why allies are part of the broader queer community while lesbian TERFs, exclusionists, etc. aren’t.

My mom’s friend who corrects anyone who gets my sibling’s pronouns wrong, who actively supports queer kids in her classroom, who welcomed her daughter’s trans girlfriend into her family? She is part of the queer community regardless of her sexuality, and anyone who says she can’t be needs to think about their definition of community. And by the same definition, TERFs aren’t part of the community because they choose not to be, because trying to control other people and justify their own bitterness and bigotry is more important to them.