Dragon Age Origins: *Archdemon slain and Thedas saved*

Dragon Age II: *Chantry explodes*

Dragon Age Inquisition: *Breach appears*

The Warden:

Me, a humble draugr, quietly minding my own business in my barrow tomb, doing my daily chores (lighting the candles, taking the frostbite spider for a walk, making the large swinging axes swing in the corridor of large swinging axes), having a sleepover with the lads in the deathlord’s chamber

YOU, loud, alive, obnoxious, barging into our tomb eating an entire wheel of cheese, making a mess, plundering my life savings from my burial urn, setting fire to frosty (the frostbite spider), re-killing me and the lads, WAKING the deathlord

(x)

why you should not dismiss research unless you rly truly mean it

Internet, I am a queer researcher of queer health and I have something to say.

A few weeks back, a study went viral about the relationship between marriage equality policy and queer teen suicide rates, and a lot of people reacted thusly: “queer mental health is better when we’re not discriminated against! BREAKING: SKY IS BLUE, WATER IS WET”

This happens a lot. People see research about a thing ~Everyone Already Knows~ and they mock it. Now I want to make two things really clear:

1. Everyone does not already know.

2. This shit can lose these projects their funding.

Did you know that media coverage is a crucial factor in funding allocation? When we submit our application for grant renewal, we have to provide a list of news articles about our research so they can decide whether the public cares enough about us to let us keep doing our work. And most research doesn’t get all that much coverage, so individual reactions can really matter. If the primary reaction to our publications is eyerolling, we legitimately might not be able to continue.

I’ve seen some frustration from people who believe this research funding would be better put to use “actually helping” the affected populations instead of–I don’t know, pinning them under microscopes or whatever it is they think we do. But funding for policy initiatives is driven by research. I know you wish politicians would listen to individual voices telling them where the problems are, but that’s honestly not a smart way to direct limited resources. We need solid evidence. And a lot of the areas that need the most attention aren’t obvious–who knew bisexual people are at a much higher risk for physical and mental health disparities than gay and lesbian people? Who would have guessed that transgender folks are more likely than any other group (including straight people) to be military veterans, but overwhelmingly don’t claim their benefits? I’m sure some people noticed these patterns, but they definitely weren’t common knowledge within the queer communities I’ve grown up around, and those findings are leading to direct action as we speak.

I get that it can be frustrating to feel like your identity is being reduced to facts and figures for the benefit of red tape. But trust me, the researchers aren’t your enemy here. Most of us are queer too. All of us are just as frustrated by this crap as you are. We are doing our best, and I swear to you this work really is making a difference. Please don’t sabotage it.

I’m reblogging this because it only has 9 notes, and it should really, REALLY have a lot more.

Also, given the current US administration’s plan to stop collecting data on LGBTQ identities as part of the census, we are in need of accurate, useful data now more than ever.

Plus the ability to cite peer-reviewed evidence of these sorts of things and quantify the extent of “obvious” effects can be pretty important to researchers who are working in adjacent fields that don’t produce the sorts of headline soundbites that get mocked on social media.

And often headlines and summaries are misleading and reductive- a study about wage gaps across a variety of demographics might get headlined “Women Still Make Less Than Men, New Study Shows” when the bulk of the paper is about the intersection of race and gender identity, and I’ve seen people on Tumblr mocking a study about the flavor compounds in food across the Indian subcontinent, conducted by Indian scientists at an Indian university, as “LOL white people don’t know how to cook.”

And to add to this– it’s also important to be able to point to something and say, no, the problem is not that these people aren’t straight. Being able to point to actual science that says, “no, it’s not us, it’s you and how you treat us”– well, that’s a a good thing.

There are a lot of people out there who genuinely believe that being any flavour of queer is intrinsically harmful to you. That unhappiness is a natural result of being gay, that to be trans is to be mentally ill, that bisexuals are confused and troubled. There are people who believe that you cannot be happy or well if you’re queer, and not all of those people are bad people. Some of them have what they perceive to be your best interests at heart, and they want you to be happy, to be well, to be physically, emotionally and mentally safe. And they still act in a way that causes harm, that damages lives, isolates kids and tells them that pain is what they should expect for being who they are.

It’s important to be able to say, “these policies kill kids”, to say, “no, this wouldn’t have happened anyway”, to say, “yes, it does matter what you do.”

A thought I have had: 

A lot of the “IN OTHER NEWS WATER IS WET/etc” comes from that sense of frustration that this is in fact Shit We Know (because it’s our lives) and it is in fact frustrating to have these things treated like a revelation. 

It’s useful to turn that frustration around into shapes that are less likely to get research shut down. Like “FUCKING FINALLY SOMEONE DID THE FUCKING RESEARCH”. Or “AT LAST. SOMETHING TO THROW AT THE STRAIGHTS.” or “WE HAVE SCIENCED THE THING NOW WILL YOU BELIEVE US?!” 

Know that the researchers are, as OP notes, probably on your side! They have fought to get this stuff in order to have Data to back shit up. 

Additionally, everything everyone else has said, and ALSO that even when we study things we’re Pretty Sure Of we more often than not discover that there was at least some aspect that we were wrong about, or had under(or over)estimated, or whatever, or a contributing factor nobody had considered, so it is actually important to Do The Damn Research in order to make sure we can do the BIGGER research. 

But if you’re having that sense of ARGH WHY IS THIS EVEN IN QUESTION, like: this is fair! But it’s also pretty crucial to reframe the direction of the argh, to provide impetus for MORE of this kind of evidence-seeking, rather than less. 

Another thing! Even if you are LGBTQ+ yourself, there’s tons of things you can learn from these studies. Like, for example, school bullying.

For a paper I was writing, I needed a statistic that basically said “LGBTQ+ teens get discriminated against and makes them mentally ill.” This was something I knew, and my LGBTQ+ friends knew. Obviously, right?

But the study also said the following:

Of course, yeah, if you asked an LGBTQ+ person if they would have felt less terrible if their parents were accepting, they would say yes. But the study revealed that, due to the threat of homelessness, as well as acceptance making it easier for students to cope with the stress of school bullying, parental education would have way more impact than school bullying programs. Also, because LGBTQ+ kids face unique challenges of often being forced into independent living, then the LGBTQ+ political movement should be working together with youth activism.

And this is just one example. So it’s important to read these studies if you have access to them, because it’s not just obvious stuff! If you’re open to learning things to spite Straight people, because copying down statistics with proper citations is delightful, you can also better guide your own activism to be more effective.

And I mean. Isn’t the entire field of science basically just “water is wet” anyway? That’s what scientific research is.

Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954): Protector. Reformer. Lawyer.

Full entry here. Books here. Patreon here. More behind the cut!

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a spring bouquet~

What a STUD !!!!!!! 😍😍😍 I love my GIRLFRIEND!!!

HEAVEN WILL BE MINE IS OUT NOW

Heaven Will Be Mine is a queer science fiction visual novel from the creators of queer cult horror visual novel We Know The Devil, about joyriding mecha, kissing your enemies, and fighting for a new future. A send-up of 1980s giant robot anime and 70s queer science fiction, Heaven Will Be Mine puts players in the cockpits of three women fighting on opposite sides of an interstellar war to decide who they’ll get to furiously make out with the very fate of humanity in space! A game about messy twentysomething lesbian dating and dying science fiction dreams that players will explore from three unique perspectives in missions across the solar system, leading to three different endings.

Features:

•Multiple Playable Protagonists: Watch the narrative unfold from the perspective of one of the three main characters.

•A Battle For The Fate Of Space: Your choices determine which of three factions will emerge victorious and determine the fate of space, as well as the messy arguments, makeouts, and love stories of three lesbian mecha pilots.

•A Rich World To Explore: Look through chat logs and emails to understand the rise and fall of an alternate universe’s 1980s space program, and the end of its dream for humanity’s future.

Available now on Steam and Itch.io, with the soundtrack on Steam and Bandcamp!

I forget where it was but I saw jeans for sale and like they were labeled as “girlfriend cut” instead of ‘boyfriend’ and like the irony to me is that the term “boyfriend style jeans” was originally done as this weird way to heterosexualize the dangerous idea of women wearing slightly loose pants so you knew you weren’t a dyke but like apparently the use of the term “boyfriend” was like too much of a gender confusion crisis for the buyer so they had to change it *again* as opposed to just calling it “loose fitting” to begin w and now it has fully no-homo’d itself into a corner and it just sounds like yr stealing yr jeans from some butch girl yr dating

My fave quirk w boyfriend jeans is that time the gap didn’t realize that having jeans that were “boyfriend” cut and “pegged” style would turn out greater than the sum of its parts

so I just spoiled myself on all the Halloween items coming to Target this September, and....

Sarah Biffin (1784-1850): The Artist Who Painted With Her Mouth

Full entry here. Patreon here. Books here – yes, the second book is out!. 

And if you’re around HeroesCon in North Carolina this weekend, I’ll be there at Artist Alley table AA-1924! Come say hi! 

Art notes after the cut.

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an apparition appears before me. “what are you?” i ask, frightened.

“the ghost of hyperfixations past”

would you feel like it was the end of the world if you had to take antibiotics for an ear infection?

then why do you feel like it would be the end of the world if you got chlamydia?

getting an infection through sex is no worse than getting an infection of similar severity any other way. it doesn’t say anything bad about you. sex is nothing to be ashamed of, and neither is an STI.

stigma, shame and fear make both prevention and treatment harder. replace them with knowledge, compassion and confidence and make the choices that are right for you.

theres no mixed races in skyrim. you trying to tell me that two elves never fucked? like wood elves and high elves can look fairly similar sometimes so even if theyre both racist they may not know. “oh shit we made some kinda high wood elf. some sorta weed elf”

hi is anyone here good at photoshop and can make a version of leonardo da vincis st john the baptist where hes flipping the bird

this is incredibly important

how’s this?

god bless

every motherfucker on this post:

I KNOW!!! I KNOW AND SO DOES WEIRD AL!!!

look i’m not saying that children shouldn’t be allowed to play video games or anything like that but the fact that kids as young as EIGHT are using misogynistic, homophobic and racial slurs in casual conversations because they heard their favorite streamer or opponent on a video game say it is something that urgently needs addressing

ancient greek word of the day: αἰγίλιψ, “devoid of goats; hence, incredibly steep, to the point that not even goats can climb it”

goatforsaken