The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.

#this is a good post #also I need an example of hopepunk #bc the name #resonates with me #and I need it #please #if you don’t mind (via @lavender-starling)

So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.” Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.”  YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion. 

Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts. 

Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.

Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.) 

And THIS, this is hopepunk: 

(EDIT: If you are coming to this post from an article elsewhere on the internet, please note that I wrote an article about hopepunk which you can read here if you want to know more: “One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives”)

A lot of heavier people with eating disorders have trouble seeing that they’re restricting bc they’re holding onto a tenuous weight suppression, or the hope of it, and they think that they can’t possibly eat freely bc their natural body size, or weight set point, is too big. It’s not!! It simply occupies a place on the human body size spectrum that has been culturally stigmatized. I say “simply” but in reality this is an extremely difficult obstacle to overcome. It CAN be overcome tho, and people of all sizes can learn to be intuitive eaters. The key is clarifying in which direction the pursuit of health lies, and that is toward accepting one’s natural size, even (especially!) if it’s way over on the right end of the bullshit BMI curve

“While we recognize that there are a lot of crowdfunding campaigns for Indigenous relief funds, we thought it necessary to establish this emergency fund specifically for radical Indigenous Mutual Aid projects and individuals.

We don’t want to see endless fundraisers and non-profit industrial cooptation get in the way of necessary work on the ground. We want to ensure critical resources get directly into the hands of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial organizers that either may not have access to those sources or don’t want to engage with them. No strings or branding attached here.”

Covid 19 Support for Indigenous Communities

Hi everyone. Native communities are particularly vulnerable in this time of crisis and if you’re able to, please consider making and sending masks or donating money.

Mask Donations: 

Zuni Pueblo Covid 19 Relief: Send PPE, food, and hygiene products to this address.

Zuni Relief House #81, Silt Road Zuni, 87327 

Mask Drive through Seeding Sovereignty

Rosebud Sioux Disaster Relief Fund (taking both money and physical donations)

Monetary Donations: 

Havasupai Tribe Covid19 Relief Fund

Kinalani/Flagstaff Mutual Aid

Southern AZ Urban Native Relief fund

Protect Native Elders

Northern Cheyenne Covid Relief

Navajo/Hopi Covid Relief

Pueblo Relief Fund

 Indigenous Mutual Aid

Please let me know if there’s any more places to donate, and I will add them to the list! 

Thank you. 

Ok so there’s these tidal islands in Northern Germany that are connected by little tiny trains that you have to drive yourself, which is already delightfully ghibli-esque.

But then I found out UNTIL THE 196OS, THE TRAINS HAD LITTLE SAILS AND WERE WIND-POWERED?

THAT’S THE MOST GHIBLI THING TO EVER EXIST ON THIS PLANET, BRING IT BACK YOU MONSTERS.

@pea-green

“Calling for “more mental health services” starts to look somewhat questionable when one looks at a number of other facts. In the 1970s, WHO conducted a global five-year study in which they found that those diagnosed with schizophrenia —usually considered the most debilitating of all mental disorders— fared better in developing countries than in the U.S. In three of the developing countries in the study —India, Colombia, and Nigeria— only 16% were on antipsychotics, the first line of treatment for schizophrenia cases in the US and Europe. In a repeat of this study, they found the same results, and concluded that living in a developed country was a “strong predictor” that a person would never fully recover. A number of follow-up studies found that patients who had weaned themselves off the antipsychotics, which were said to “fix their brains by correcting an imbalance” had actually fared better than those who continued to take them. When faced with this second set of facts, the idea of mental health treatments being a human rights issue starts to break down.

How do we examine or compare such facts? Do we examine them in relation to all the studies that have been done on psychotropic medication, on hospitalization, and on therapy and simply choose to fund the means with the highest number of “recovered patients” at the end? A number of questions get lost in such an analysis, questions beyond the scope of these studies, questions which perhaps trouble the foundation and presuppositions of the studies themselves. For example: how does one get diagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar? This isn’t a question about symptoms, but about power. Who does the diagnosing? With what tools? How are these tools legitimated? Against what standard is mental or emotional pathology measured? How did the person getting diagnosed end up in their position? What does it mean to recover from such conditions? And, most importantly in my eyes, what is the concrete experience of the mad person in these relationships?”

— Sasha Durakov, “Beyond Psychiatry and Self-Care: Approaching New Pathways in Mental Health“

The left has a huge problem with antisemitism and we won’t be able to do anything about that until we admit it and inspect it. But some of y’all don’t even seem to think antisemitism exists

The amount of people refusing to believe this is sickening and proves that this is even more of an issue than I realized

Yes, Jewish people are a vulnerable and marginalized group that deserves to be accepted and protected. Yes, antisemitism is still a thing, including on the left. Yes, they have repeatedly pointed out this problem, and we should believe them and do something about it. No, this accusation doesn’t only come from Zionists. No, being an atheist doesn’t give you free rein to shit on marginalized people’s culture and faith. No, this isn’t some kind of fucking conspiracy where all Jewish people are trying to divide the left or avoid accountability or win sympathy or whatever other shit by fabricating claims of antisemitism or bringing it up whenever they’re criticized, and if you’re genuinely willing to believe that shit then you’re part of the problem. Yes, antisemitism is just as dangerous as any other flavor of bigotry and it’s not something we can just brush aside. It deserves to be deplatformed and ostracized like the fascistic ideology it is

Keep saying clown shit, y’all. I’ll make a fucking blocklist. It’s time this shit was violently kicked out of this community so our Jewish comrades can feel safe

People forget that Quechua, Nahuatl and the Mayan Languages aren’t just cool relics of past civilisations but still living languages that millions of people love, worry, talk to their children in. People live their lives through the medium of these languages and that shouldn’t be forgotten!

Happy Lesbian day of visibility

Here are some of my favorite femme looks!!!

🌸💐🏵🌸💐🏵🌸💐🏵🌸💐🏵🌸💐🏵🌸💐

Not shaving and not wearing make up are literally nonbehaviors. They’re a complete lack of action. But doing nothing is considered masculine because women are not allowed to just be. this goes double for trans women.

reblog this version because transmisogynists don’t know how to fuck off.

There are prisons, and borders and camps, but the starts are beautiful tonight The climate is collapsing, but the kittens are playing There is so much death in the world, and the taste of hummus

Am I a bad anarchist because I spend more time finding joy in stars and kittens and hummus than feeling sadness and rage for injustice and suffering? I don’t think so.

I think it is joy that lights up our anarchism into action. Surely we do not fight to survive, but to live? We fight not just for an absence of suffering but for joy? for stars and dancing and roses?

Would we break down prisons walls if there were no stars or other joys outside it? Do we protect our planet just for the sake of it, or to play on it and raise kittens? Don’t we fight for life to taste it?

The moment I started denying myself joy would be the moment my strength to keep fighting would begin to wane.

I don’t hate the concept of ebooks per se but what bothers me is how our society is shifting from actually owning entertainment in tangible forms like books and CDs and DVDs and game discs, to having to download everything so basically we’ll get to the point where everything is intangible and all of our property can be taken away by a website crash.

#yeah this is mostly the problem#and stuff like. ebooks that can only be read on one companys app#music that can only be streamed from one place and doesnt let you actually download the files#stuff like that#like sometimes its like you cant tangibly have anything even your own digital file#idk where i was going with this but yeah its capitalism (via @ouidamforeman)

I’m sure that someone already said this in the notes, but you guys are aware that you don’t actually own e-books, e-movies, etc. Right? What you’re purchasing is a license to have that file on your device. Not the actual object. 

I’ve also posted about it multiple times.

Plus, Amazon, Google, Kobo, B&N are all explicit in their user agreements that they have the right to terminate your account, seize your library, and delete anything and everything off of your account at any time, for any reason, without giving you anything in return, including paying you back. 

Like, it super scary that they not only can do that, but are legally allowed to. 

I’ve seen people suggesting using the program called Calibre  to transfer and  convert your files from whatever program you purchase them on, so that if one of those companies do decide to be a dick, you will retain your e-copies safe and sound on your hard drive. Just don’t be an asshole and post those copies to pirate sites. 

So read your content agreements and digital ownership laws cause they’re not great. 

Paper books still have their uses.

And that very fact, my friends, is why products like Epubor Ultimate DRM removal tool (my personal choice) are legal to write and sell and use. 

https://www.epubor.com/drm-removal-tools.html

Because yes, the terms of service sure say that. But every time they’ve /tried/ on a significant scale, they’ve been challenged and backed down. And every time they tried to stop DRM removal tools from being made and sold, they’ve failed. What they’re doing relies on keeping off enough toes that a significant bloc never gets pissed enough to push through a class action suit.

So, yes, absolutely, know this and, if you (like me) have book-gasms over having my library of 2000 books always at my fingertips to read whatever I like, get Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) and then get one of the DRM removal applications. Jailbreak your library, back it up in at least three locations, and then pass this tip on in the joyful knowledge that all the major distributors are praying you don’t tell anyone else how easy this is.

We are absolutely aware digital content is a use liscense rather than owning the product and that is 100% the thing we have a problem with because it removes our ability to own products and be secure in that ownership.

tiktok feels like gentrified vine. ive only ever seen teens on there with like really nice bedrooms covered in led strip lights and tyler the creator posters

i was right

it gets worse than the title suggests, emphases mine:

hi just wondering if i were an otter and you were an otter and we were sleeping would you hold my paw so we wouldn't drift away from each other. just wondering

Sokka is simultaneously a complete idiot and the smartest member of the Gaang and I love him

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”

thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy

Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?

Oh heck yeah.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.

They died of AIDS because

Picture from 1993:

We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.

As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.

This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

AIDS is not just history.  Neither is homophobia.

Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

Hey, if you're against using the R-slur you should also be against using "delusional" "psychotic" and "schizo" as insults. Care about us too. Respect those of us with psychosis.

genuine question, no offense meant: Is “delusional” a reference to a mental illness? I’ve never heard it used in that context

So delusions are a symptom of psychosis and psychotic disorders. Which makes it ableist to use as an insult. Unfortunately I see it a lot even in leftist circles which makes it really hard to exist in a space that's supposedly meant to include you.

i dont know how many times we have to say it but perisex people you really need to stop getting involved in intracommunity discussions. honestly a lot of intersex people don’t even fucking care about stuff like “is intersex lgbtq” or “should we include the i” because there’s so many more important things like addressing igm and medical abuse and getting legal rights and proividng adqueaute trauma care to intersex people so like. if you’re intersex and you have a lot of opinions about issues like is intersex lgbtq that’s totally awesome and i love and respect you. 

but if you’re perisex Fuck Off like if u want to support intersex people fucking support our activism