I wish kinky sex ed wasn't so stigmatized even among left-leaning "sex positive" circles. Everyone's all "uwu I'm a sub I'll do anything you ask" okay mommy wants you to read The New Bottoming Book so you learn how to sub without hurting yourself since your sex ed up to this point is porn and your ex boyfriend Jared who liked to choke you incorrectly

I’m so glad you asked! Let me list off what I’ve got for you:

Books I personally recommend:

- The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book, by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy

If you’re having kinky sex at all, you need to read at least one of these two books. Point blank. They’ll teach you the very basics of negotiating properly (which is critical!), and help you identify what you are and aren’t into.

- Mindfucking Mindfully, by Sir Ezra Where this book really shines isn’t actually in helping you “mindfuck” people, it’s in taking a close look at how to do so ethically. It’s a great answer to the question “how do I get someone to consent to something and still surprise and shock them with it?”

- Real Service by Raven Kaldera and Joshua Tenpenny This is a slightly niche pick but there simply isn’t a better book on the subject. It’s written from a 24/7 M/s perspective, which is not what I do, but the book itself is an indispensable guide to giving and receiving service. The phrase “if the Master doesn’t want it, it isn’t service” will be burned into my psyche for quite some time. I love this book a lot. Maybe my favorite out of all of these.

- Enough To Make You Blush: Exploring Erotic Humiliation, by Princess Kali This one’s high on my reading list; I’ve heard it recommended by a number of people whose opinions on these things I trust.

- Pretty Much Anything Midori Has Ever Done Midori is a great resource for this stuff - I haven’t personally read much of her work, but she’s a well known sex educator and great at what she does. She’s known for bondage, but has a lot of range beyond that.

- This Negotiations Worksheet from Bex Talks Sex This is what I default to using a lot of the time for negotiations. Forget BDSMtest, you don’t need that, it’s no good. Just look through this worksheet’s wordbank with your partner. Big fan especially of the “how do you want to feel?” section.

Books I can kind of recommend:

- The Ultimate Guide to Kink, edited by Tristan Taormino This book is weird. There’s a lot of good info for experienced players, but some of what’s written here skeeves me out. I think if I had a top that thought the way some of the tops in here think, they would not be topping me for long. But there’s some good techniques and so on to pick up that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I liked the distinction one of the authors makes between being sadistic in the sense of inflicting pain and being sadistic in the sense of doing something your sub doesn’t “enjoy.”

- The Ritual of Dominance and Submission, by David English Man, this book fucking sucks. The writing and editing are garbage, and the fear and protocol play described need way more careful negotiation than he ever lets on, let alone recommends. This is some 50 Shades bullshit. The only time I recommend this book is to tops like me who tend to be very affirming to their partners and need a guide on how to really scare them - when their partner consents and when you negotiate it, which this book sucks at teaching you. Really good content on fear, punishment, and protocol play, really terrible presentation of the topic though. Don’t read this if you don’t already know what you’re doing.

- Paradigms of Power, by Raven Kaldera I love this book. Great book. Very focused on 24/7 M/s play though, and, being an anthology, some chapters are better than others. If you can’t read something and pick out what is and isn’t for you, don’t bother. But some really great inspiration, and generally pretty well written. Big fan of the discussion of leather throughout the book.

Hope some of these are helpful for people ^-^ for the average person reading this I recommend New Bottoming/Topping, but they’re all important parts of my library and I’ve recommended all of them to friends at some point or another.

May I also suggest Hell on Wheels and Kneeling in Spirit by Raven Kaldera, d/s companion books that address kink with a disability. They're a should read for everyone, imo. You never know when you or a partner are going to have changes in your body that affect what you can physically do. Temporary illness/injury and even just age can affect your sex life.

I just had a 20 minute conversation explaining to a customer what chicken wings were.

Did you say that they were wings from a chicken? @cheshireinthemiddle

Didnt work

I can imagine the phrase ‘BUT THEY DON’T FLY, HOW CAN THEY HAVE WINGS?!’ being used at least twice

It was worse

Can you please explain in detail how it was worse

Customer: what kind of chicken do you use for your fried chicken wings?

Me: im unsure of the brand, but i can check

Customer: no, what part of the chicken is it?

Me: im sorry?

Customer: like what is it made out of?

Me: they are chicken wings.

Customer: i dont think you understand my question. Is it chicken thigh, or chicken breast?

Me: it is made with chicken wings.

Customer: okay, you arent hearing me. Chicken is sold in different parts. What oart are you selling?

Me: chicken wings. The dish is fried chicken wings. Are you perhaps asking if they are boneless? They arent. They are actual bone in wings.

Customer: Im asking what *type* of chicken it is. You are making this way more difficult than it has to be.

Me: here, our menu has a picture of the dish. These are the chicken wings available today.

Customer: how can i tell what kind of chicken it is if it is covered in brown crunchies?

Me: brown…crunchies? These are certainly chicken wings. You can see the bone here.

Customer: can i speak to the manager? You dont know what youre talking about.

Me: actually i am acting manager until we get a new hire.

Customer: all i want to know is what kind of chicken you are serving.

Me: fried chicken wings.

This went on for 20 whole minutes. She didnt even order the meal.

This is the most frustrating thing I’ve ever read

what the fuck

dude even as i was reading this i kept looking into the camera like it was the office. idk how you stay calm in situations like these, i don’t have the emotional wherewithal to deal with this level of stupidity. 

After reblogging this five hours ago, I finally realize they were asking about the “tenderness type” that meat is sometimes divided into. “Is it tender or tough?” would be the question they were trying to get to.

Yay miscommunication.

No, it turned out that…

She thought the bottoms ones were chicken wings, and the top ones were baby chicken legs, and she wanted me to “confess”.

How did this go from 5k notes to 19k in one night?

each time you reblog a chicken gets its wings

You don't want a parrot- you want domestic pigeons. Quieter, friendlier, untraumatized by mere human existence, less likely to remove a finger, can find their own way home if they get out, thousands of years of domestication in your favor, did I mention quieter?

On this Shabbos and as Hanukkah draws near (Dec 7th), I'd like to share this article, one of the only guides I've been able to find on where to buy candles for Shabbos/Hanukkah/etc that don't support the Jewish National Fund. For those unfamiliar with the JNF, it is a Zionist organization formed in 1901 to buy land for Jewish settlement, and among other things has been responsible for much of the ecological "development" (read: colonialism) of Palestine. One of its main efforts is in soliciting money from diaspora Jews to fund the Zionist project, and many of the larger brands of Judicia donate a portion of their proceeds to it. As Hanukkah candles begin appearing in stores, you might check the box and note a JNF logo on the side.

This is a list of candle companies that specifically do not donate a part of their proceeds to the JNF, one of the only articles of its kind I've never been able to find. The companies listed aren't all necessarily anti-Zionist or don't donate to Israel in other ways - I'd recommend researching bigger names like Manischewitz, for example - but Narrow Bridges Candles IS anti-zionist and explicitly supports and promotes BDS. I've bought from them before, they make beautiful beeswax candles of all kinds, and would highly recommend you get your holiday candles here if it's financially doable.

Good Shabbos and have a safe and beautiful Hanukkah, when you remember the miracle of the eight nights remember also the people of Gaza and the scarcity there.

I love when people are like “I can’t believe you reblogged that despite their user name, icon, bio, and last twenty posts” bc to me my dash is the only part of this website and I’m not slowing down to look at urls you could all be the same person

#spiritual successor is people being like why didnt you read my pinned before you reblogged!!!#dude i am not. i am not vetting every blog#i am here to backread for 45mins and rb 30 posts in a row and disappear#tumblr life

Holy shit I think I just cracked the code of why people think you can’t sell things on Tumblr 😭

I was reading one of the Substacks I subscribe to, talking about how they promote their publication and their various sources of traffic, when I came across this paragraph:

Now I happen to also run a fairly popular Substack (about gay vampires). One whose readers are almost entirely Tumblr users. And Tumblr clicks have just never shown up in my stats, I’m used to it. Naturally I had to comment:

It’s not just Substack’s tracking that doesn’t work on here. NO tracking works on here. Tumblr is just one of the last platforms left that completely obscures its users’ data!

That’s why there’s this persistent myth that you can’t advertise on Tumblr. It's not that you can't sell things here, it's that you can't use the invasive methods that are standard everywhere else.

This honestly made me a little angry and I don't know why.

COVER YOUR ANKLES YOU HUSSY

HAVE PEOPLE NOT HEARD OF LIBRARIES??????? They are 100% cheaper than AMAZON

@certifiedlibraryposts

Certified Oh My God Please Use Libraries If You Can Post

I beg of you, use the damn library instead. You can still order them from Amazon after you've browsed, if you must (why tho?), but if you leave the books you've browsed out to be reshelved, you are also helping the library with their usage counts! And you won't have been a giant asshole to poor retail workers.

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

My biggest frustration with the left has always been the inability/unwillingness to work on making progress inside of the system while advocating for greater change.

I remember the first time I came to this realization.

I was nineteen, pregnant. We couldn’t afford to heat the house because we couldn’t afford the deposit to turn the gas on. It was miserably cold. The duplex we were renting was old and rickety and drafty. The window frames were messed up and there were cracks you could stick your finger through that were open to the elements.

Just, like, to give you an idea where we were financially. And this was better than we’d been doing before!

Anyway, I had recently started going to DSA meetings. And that month, they were talking about how a moderate democrat had successfully gotten a small increase in WIC benefits monthly. It came out to, like, $10 a month.

The members talking—mostly male, almost all doing decent—were scornful. The democrat should have pushed harder and gotten more, refused to accept anything until everyone else caved to their demands. I remember sitting there, quietly drinking the latte in the smallest size they had that I had bought with scrounged quarters, listening. Wishing it wasn’t held in an indie coffee shop because it was a luxury I really couldn’t afford, but it would be rude not to. Enjoying the coffee anyway.

I was one of the lucky ones who was getting that additional $10 a month through WIC. Even more exciting, we were now getting a voucher for the farmers’ market. I casually mentioned that WIC recipients would now be getting farmers’ market vouchers, too.

The guy who organized the meetings was a hard worker, passionate guy. Did something in tech.

He was like, “That’s the thing! These people don’t want farmers market vouchers. They want—” and he went on to describe a bunch of pie in the sky desires. That, yeah, sounded good.

But one. I was one of those people! A lot if the tamiles were super excited about it, myself included.

I had never been to a farmers’ market before. I tried arugula for the first time, a piece pulled from a bunch by the grower as he explained the flavor difference. I hadn’t known before then that different lettuce greens had different flavors, that it was more than just the texture and shape. I tried pesto, which delighted me. Goat cheese. I got three full pounds of strawberries for two dollars, since they were closing soon and the old man selling the berries got a kick out of me.

Anyway. It was like, you have a decent life. Not great but decent! The things that are life changing for me, for us… you already have.

The ten dollars at the grocery store made the difference between a meal of broken-noodles-with-some-half-horrible-pantry-scraps and a meal. It kept me full and healthy! And the additional farmers’ market voucher was world changing for me.

The democrat who worked for those things barely got them through. And it was means tested to hell and back. They weren’t able to get everything they wanted. But what they got made such a huge difference for me, for people like me.

What a year this week has been.

It’s Monday.

It sure as hell is.

The earlier in the day Monday you reblog the funnier this gets

A brief appreciation of Peter Falk in Columbo, by Joe Dator in The New Yorker

(In case it's unclear, disintegrating quickly in the ocean is a good thing!)

there are a lot of posts out there that are positive and healthy coping mechanisms for handling the holidays. this is not one of them :)

OP’s tags 😂🫂

Reblog to inject more comedy into holiday obligations

I think you mean objectively GREAT advice

This is real parents' choice, not the BS “Parents choice for mine AND yours” that Mommy Fascism League supports.

The 51 kids should not dictate what books/media the other 29,949 have access.

Gonna be singing this (and this) all night.

Diver convince octopus to trade his plastic cup for a seashell

imagine if a fuckin……. giant alien just showed up and stuck a huge hand in front of your face and then proceeded to offer you three different houses and wouldn’t stop until you moved out of your old shitty apartment and then helped you fuckin move

and then just left

I first saw this on twitter and COULD NOT get over these comments:

Twitter link

The Voice in the Night

(Part 1)

Good lord, this picked up traction out of nowhere.

For anyone interested, this was the introduction to the story in the book I found it in: