i was looking through medieval drawings of demons the other day and i found the demons that make you gay  

this is what an ally looks like

they’re officiating their weddings

YA books: There are 2 boys, the protagonist girl HAS to date one, but how can she choose? They are so incredibly different in every way!

The boys:

He literally has a twin brother but the implication here is much funnier

in a constant state of hysterics over how one of the founding tenents of western religion is that humans literally murdered god bc of politics

I loved the Artemis Fowl series as a kid, and it's still fun to read as an adult, but if I ever met the protagonist in real life I'd have to put every last modicum of willpower I possess into not punching his lights out on sight

Omfg actually same, Holly would also kill anybody who laid a hand on him though

Holly, Holly the elf, Holly who has canonically punched and tased him on multiple occasions?

a superhero on an intergalactic adventure trying desperately to save the world in record time so she can get back to the birthday party her wife is throwing for Jennifer, their adopted 2 year old

she travels through the universe, periodically interrupting battle scenes to remind co-workers and hostile alien entities alike that she has to be home by 5 to help her wife wrap the presents

her co-workers are unsympathetic, to the surprise of the friendly alien delegate they picked up along the way. Kr'zkex thinks it's nice the hero is supporting her wife's desire to "properly celebrate Jennifer's first year with her new family". the other heroes on her team groan every time she brings it up

in the end, she saves the world just in time. Kr'zkex gifts her with a priceless magical space orb "for Jennifer." the hero makes it home with minutes to spare, kisses her wife in greeting, and tosses the orb to Jennifer, who promptly starts batting it back and forth with her paws bc Jennifer is, in fact, an adopted 2 year old housecat.

me: .....uhm?! the mastermind author:

i am so impressed with how that turned out

Stop vilifying adults that live with their parents.

We’re still deep in one of the worst economic recessions of modern times. For many of us its not a choice but a requirement in order to survive. For many of us we have disabilities that make finding accommodation that suit our needs a lot harder and a lot more expensive.

Many of us pay into the household. Many of us are trapped in abusive households because we don’t have the means to leave. We aren’t moochers or afraid to leave the nest. The world simply isn’t built to support us anymore.

This is actually an incredibly western (and specifically American) thing. In a lot of other countries and cultures it’s NOT AT ALL uncommon for an adult to still live with their parents. As a second generation immigrant, it’s BEWILDERING to me. My cousin still lives with our grandmother; it’s important. She needs someone to watch after her, and she has the space… why wouldn’t he? This obsession with “adults” being “fully independent” of their parents is a fully American, bizarrely capitalist notion and it needs to be stomped into the ground.

Reminder that in the U.S., multigenerational households were very common (if not the outright norm) until the 1950s. Young people living at home–and being raised in large households that included grandparents and cousins–was pretty damn normal until around then.

You know what happened in the U.S. in the 1950s?

After WWII (which the U.S. managed to make an enormous profit on), suddenly the country was full of people* with credit–which meant it was up to corporations to give them a place to spend it. Throw in the Baby Boom (lots of new couples getting married & having kids), the rise of highways & automobile culture, and the desire that a lot of powerful parties had to see a return to “traditional” gender roles, and you get the uniquely American product:

It was brilliant, from a marketing and white male conservative perspective. What better way to convince all these newly lucrative consumers to part with their money than by selling them a house–and a complete set of household accoutrements to go inside it? Everything about 1950s media was aimed at convincing young couples to buy a house, buy a car, buy furniture, buy a sewing machine, buy a garage full of tools–and above all, don’t live with your parents & adult siblings, who probably already own many of these things. Don’t share resources–that’s Communism! And worse, it’s unAmerican.

Coincidentally, did Suburban Nuclear Family Culture also reenforce patriarchal power structures within the home, by isolating women in their own families & marriages (which drastically enables abuse), and giving children fewer adults (grandparents, aunts and uncles) to supervise their wellbeing? Did it cut off people who weren’t the “head” of the household from community resources? Did it enable domineering family men to control their families away from prying eyes–or encourage that sort of behavior in men who otherwise could have ended up being decent enough parents & spouses, with better cultural influences? Did it train generations of us to grow up into perfect little consumers, overworked and underpaid and struggling to afford independent households we can’t mantain? Did it permanently alter our definition of family & community in a way that decades later we have not recovered from?

Yes, but it also made a lot of businessmen very very wealthy. What’s more American than that.

Tags: #not a shitpost#long post#serious post#and when that model didn’t end up being sustainable–guess what?#many of us DID go back to living with other people.#except now it’s often with roommate and even complete strangers#or with parents with who we have an unhealthy relationship#(which is in many ways a direct inheritance of the shift to ‘traditional’ family values)#and now even those of us who of lucky enough to be living with family members we love and get along with#are constantly told to feel guilty about that bc how ‘lazy’. bc you aren’t 'contributing’.#in a society where 'contributing’ is very suspiciously synonymous with consuming andoverworking

when you perpetuate the attitude that only the “strong” survive, you are ignoring a million years of evolutionary history that screams otherwise. 

being american like “my politics are considered radical bc half my country’s wealth is controlled by like 12 people and i think that should not be the case maybe”

catboy this, catboy that, it’s nice they released new pokemon but some of us already outgrew the fandom ok

from purely purrsonal curiosity, what do you think the evolutionary tree of a catboy is

Kittenlad -> catboy -> lionking

…i would be interested in seeing the concept illustrated

I get this is probably nowhere near what you wanted/expected, buuuuut….

Oh my stars people actually made art

classic vines but they’ve been reshot hollywood style. a man stands over a cliff on a stormy night, his coat billowing in the heavy wind. rain-drenched, hair whipping about his chiseled features, he turns to the camera and–in a voice hoarse with betrayal–gasps: i can’t believe you’ve done this

Midnight. The detective bursts through a locked door to see a shadowy figure perched on the windowsill. The body of the Prime Minister sprawls on the ground, hardwood floor growing steadily darker around him. The curtains fly back as a gust of wind sweeps through the study - and in the next blink, the figure is gone.

The detective rushes to the window, but there’s no trace of the fugitive. They stare out into the shadows of London, and exclaim;

“What the f*ck, Richard?”

Well deserved rest

If you're celebrating Biden's win, consider celebrating by donating to a bail fund, planned parenthood, or the Navajo Water project.

Your action to help the marginalized shouldnt end at presidential candidates and voting.

To add some more:

Navajo/Hopi Covid Relief Fund

Critical Resistance, working to dismantle the prison industrial complex and abolish the police

The Queer Detainee Empowerment Project

National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, working to end violence against indigenous women and children and provide resources for the MMIW campaign

Sunrise Movement, a youth-led political campaign pushing the Green New Deal and climate legislation

Industrial Workers of the World. Unions.

And of course it’s always a good day to venmo, paypal, or cashapp black, indigenous and other POC in your community, or donate to your community mutual aid fund.

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

The International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund (and you can get some rad stickers and other merch from it too)

RIP Medical Debt - this one’s cool, they buy medical debt in the same way debt collectors do (for much much less than the value of the debt) and then simply forgive it. What that means is every dollar you donate erases $100 of debt. You can’t ask for a better value than that

— Clarice Lispector, from Near to the Wild Heart, tr. Alison Entrekin

friendship is when you hear the stupidest most annoying thing you've experienced in your life then immediately share it with everyone like

Unpopular Opinion but rich people shouldnt be designing things for poor people

footage of my moss ball herd in 2043 about to smash the aquarium glass with the intent of devouring a small child 

today we post everett true

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.