am i… a plot device?

i'm regularly astounded by the cognitive dissonance some of yall have to accept that gender is a social construct with infinite possibilities with the capacity to be deeply personal and individual but still think there's a list of like 4 acceptable sexual orientations and if you go outside of that list or mix entries on that list or relate to them in a non-traditional way not only are you Breaking The Rules you're personally directly harming people who follow them

I'd like to add:

the people who accept that gender is a social construct with infinite possibilities with the capacity to be deeply personal and individual, except for the Bad genders who either do gender wrong or are associated with the Bad Thing. to believe that gender is a construct but Also believe that someone can cause direct harm by presenting as themselves or creating something that represent people like them

Horrible fact of the day: Chevron just released a new boat fuel that WILL give you cancer.

Not "might", not "could", WILL. It has a cancer ratio of 1:1, as in, in a group of 10 people, ALL 10 would contract CANCER.

The EPA's safety limit is 1:1,000,000 as in 1 in a million people get cancer.

The EPA approved it anyways. I am not joking. The EPA approved a boat fuel that has a near 100% chance of giving someone cancer. It has such a good chance of giving someone cancer that if you DIDN'T get cancer YOU WOULD BE AN OUTLIER.

Fuck the oil industries.

going through my old .psd files

an under-discussed feature of chronic illness + pain is how fucking boring it is. Like I know that I will get better and stop hurting if I lie down with my eyes closed in a quiet dark room but holy fucking shit if I do that for five more minutes today I’m going to totally lose my marbles.

Having chronic illness/pain, a poor immune system, and ADHD is an absolutely nightmare.

flatid planthopper nymph, Singapore. hemipterans (true bugs) like these have mastered the art of covering oneself in weird waxy filaments, which are shed along with their last juvenile molt, revealing a sleek, gossamer-winged adult

Sometimes I feel we do a disservice to trans people by framing their journey as some esoteric battle to escape their gender assigned at birth, rather than a very profound story of self-love and self-actualization. Many people feel they can’t relate to the desire to “become another gender” and thus don’t really “get” transgenderism.. but almost everyone can relate to the thrill and fulfillment of letting yourself be true.

So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.

Basically they realized hey no one's cleaning this shit up, it's polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there's a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?

They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it's in a painting, if it's in your home, it's not poisoning wildlife.

anyway its cool as shit, please support tf out of these people https://gamblinstore.com/reclaimed-earth-colors-set/

Trash into treasure. I can get behind that.

I get the hesitancy to claim a label when you're not completely sure of it yourself. This is especially prevalent in the aro and ace communities because how do you prove a negative? Maybe you will meet someone in twenty years and feel that proverbial spark. But here's the truth: it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if it's a phase!! You are living in this body, in this moment, in this label right now. Who you are now matters just as much as who you might be.

blood being frequently described as having a "coppery smell" in fiction is kind of funny considering that there is a metallic component to blood and it's not copper

in fact if your blood smells or tastes like copper you probably have more urgent things to worry about than it being outside your body. it's probably better that it's not inside you anymore actually.

story where blood is described as smelling or tasting "coppery" and it's actually early foreshadowing that all the characters are suffering from heavy metal poisoning

"Butch women being treated poorly is evidence of anti masculinity" that is literally misogyny. It's just misogyny. Women being hated for being masculine is part and parcel of the misogynistic systems of domination that keep women oppressed.

In before I start seeing people bitching about rainbow capitalism MY favorite rainbow capitalism story is about Subaru. Yes the Japanese car company.

In the nineties, they were struggling. They were competing with a dozen other companies targeting the main demographic at the time: white men ages 18-35, especially after a failed luxury car launch with a new ad agency. “What we need is to focus on niche demographics,” they decided, and then focused on people who enjoyed the outdoors. The Subaru was excellent at driving on dirt roads that many other vehicles couldn’t at the time, so it was perfect for all those off-road campers; they started making all-wheel drive standard in all their cars to help with that. And the people who wanted cars to go do outdoor stuff? Lesbians.

Okay. Of course it wasn’t only lesbians buying Subarus. They’re on the list with educators, health-care professionals, and IT people. But the point is, this Japanese car company interviewed this strange demographic (single, female head of household) and realized one important factor: They were lesbians. They liked to be able to use the cars to go do outdoorsy stuff, and they liked that they could use the cars to haul stuff rather than a big truck or van. Subaru had a choice to make then. They had four other demographics they could market to, after all–the educators, the health-care professionals, IT professionals, and straight outdoorsy couples. Their company didn’t hinge on this one “problematic” demographic.

And they decided “fuck it,” and marketed to lesbians anyway. This included offering benefits to American gay and lesbian employees for their domestic partners, so it didn’t look like a cash grab. (This was not a problem. They already offered those in Canada.)

Yes, there was some backlash. They got letters from a grassroots group accusing them of promoting homosexuality, and every letter said they’d no longer be buying from Subaru. “You didn’t buy from us before, either,” Subaru realized, and ignored them. It helped that the team really cared about the plan, and that they had many straight allies to back them up. There was also some initial backlash when Subaru hired women to play a lesbian couple in the commercial, but they quickly found that lesbians preferred more subtlety; “XENA LVR” on a license plate, or bumper stickers with the names of popular LGBTQ+ destinations, or taglines of “Get out. Stay out.” that could be used for the outdoors–or the closet.

Subaru said “We see you. We support you.” They sponsored Pride parades and partnered with Rainbow Card and hired Martina Navratilova as spokeswoman. They put their money where their mouth is and went into it whole hog. In a time where companies did not want to take our money, Subaru said, “Why not? They’re people who drive.” And that was groundbreaking.

It wasn’t blatant, it was cheeky and pretty low key, but really really effective. It played into the “if you know you know” vibe in exactly the right way.

Oh THAT’S why lesbians love Subarus

Not the only gay car

this isn’t a personal dig at anyone, but i personally find it kinda unhelpful when ppl say the best solution to for the ways transmisogyny makes us feel shit about ourselves is to make friends with more tgirls irl. cos personally i have really struggled to make more irl transfem friends and have spent some time beating myself up about it like, is there something wrong with me? and actually only relatively recently i thought to myself like, ive always struggled to make friends irl, i struggle to read people and to work out how to talk to them unless i already know what we have in common (then if anything im too chatty!). and over the past 8 months or so ive become disabled to the point that i mostly cant leave the house except for work, so making new friends irl is just. largely not an option for me.

stepping away from myself for a sec, i think we do have to make sure we’re thinking of disabled transfems, of transfems who dont live in urban centres with significant trans communities, for transfems trapped in endless work or with controlling families or social networks, etc etc - there’s a whole range of people for whom online ties are actually some of the most important in our lives, and there’s no reason to contrast irl and online as if.. this isn’t also real, we can really know each other here as much as anywhere else. and like we’ve all talked about before, the processes of social isolation that transmisogyny and structural violence more broadly put in effect are the same on here as they are irl. probably a lot of people do find irl socialising easier, and more power to them. but its not all there is and i hope no one else is beating themselves up like i did

Not to be controversial B U T. I think 3rd/2nd shift public buses should be a thing. If you work the graveyard or a 2nd shift with weird hours you deserve to be able to get home regardless if you have a car or not.

I also think that there needs to be (a) bus line(s) to and from the cities to the rural areas. Yes this also means “rural” as in those ‘southern gothic aesthetic’ rural areas.

People should not have to be locked in the cities or in rural areas, they should have the freedom to be able to move around. If you’re low income, older, disabled, or can’t afford a car (bc it’s car + insurance + gas $$) then you’re kind of stuck where you’re at and this is coming from real life experience.

And also the bus drivers who drive those routes should have a union that gets them a million dollars per hour pay

HELP

— Mark Bray, Antifa, pg 153