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I Am The Eldritch Blaster

@nerdragons-hoard

Blaster/Mushrooms
Genderfluid (they/them)
Minor
Jewish

Historically the line between trans men and lesbians has been blurry. This is true. But also I am not a lesbian by any stretch of the imagination and do not want to be categorized with them. This is also true. Some trans men and afab nb people are comfortable being grouped in with lesbians. Some are not. It’s a case by case thing.

This is a pretty simple concept and yet many people find one side of the preference or another to be a problem of some kind. Look, the transgender experience and the lesbian experience and the transgender lesbian experience are all really broad and varied things.

Trying to police how identity actually works with these labels one way or another isn’t ever going to work because everyone is going to disagree about it.

  1. "No matter how angry you get, you try and remain calm. If you raise your voice even a little — regardless of what you say or how you say it — you are instantly labeled an 'angry Black woman' and judged wrongly, even when you’re right."
  2. "My mother taught me to ALWAYS ask for a bag and receipt, no matter how small the purchase, or you can be accused of stealing."
  3. "As a Black woman in a predominantly white area, I make a point of approaching staff first in stores when I walk in. I ask an innocuous question in a friendly, high-pitched voice, even if I don't need anything. They seem to feel safer around me and do not follow me around when I do that first."
  4. "As a Black woman, I usually keep my college jacket in the car. If I have to go to the emergency room, I'll receive better treatment if doctors see that I have a higher education."
  5. "I'm from Louisiana where they still have 'sundown towns.' Avoid them at all costs, but if you have to pass through at night, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A FULL TANK OF GAS so that you don't have to stop."
  6. "I am a Black woman, relatively new to my mostly white neighborhood. When I take a walk for exercise, I always walk in the middle of the street, not too close to houses on either side. I wear reflective gear and avoid staring too closely at any of the houses. I often think of Ahmaud Arbery while I’m walking."
  7. "I was taught to be an overachiever because no one expects a Black woman to be smart and well-spoken. I’m not expected to have a voice in anything, and many are shocked when I do. They are astounded when I can verbalize my thoughts and opinions in multi-syllable words. Melanin and ovaries do not cancel out intelligence and reason."
  8. "As a Black man, my father taught me, when being pulled over by the police, to pull your insurance and registration out of the glovebox and keep it ready on your seat. That way, you do not have to reach in the glovebox when the police are at your window."
  9. "Never EVER put your hands in your pockets while walking around a store. If you don't want to give them a reason to follow you around or call the police, your hands need to be visible at all times."
  10. "As a Black man, never get into an elevator with a woman alone. Always wait for the next one."
  11. "Something I know I have to be careful of in public (as a person mixed with white and Black) is remembering which parent I'm with and how to act. This is called code-switching. I have to make sure I act okay so I'm not labelled as 'ghetto' with my mom or 'white-washed' with my dad."
  12. "No matter how cold or windy it is, my hood stays off, and my earbuds/headphones stay off my ears."
  13. "As a Black man who loves hip-hop, I often have to censor the music that I listen to so I won't be judged as a 'thug.'"
  14. "As a Black man, if there is a white woman in line, you stand back far enough so you cannot touch her by mistake or be accused of touching her."
  15. "Knowing that I’ll be followed when shopping in high-end stores, I have product-related questions prepared for when they invariably ask me if I need assistance. Replying with 'No thank you, I’m just browsing' makes their suspicion jump, and suddenly, I have an unofficial entourage. I’m a college-educated Black man about to turn 40, but I still have to play these sorts of silly games. It can be very exhausting."
  16. "As a Black woman who works a swing shift and gets off work at 11 p.m., I will not take off my badge until I get inside my garage. I need to have a layer of protection to prove I'm not up to no good in case I get pulled over."
  17. "When meeting with executives or high-ranking officials where appropriate attire would be business casual for others, I wear full business attire. I’ve found that when I dress more formally, I receive more eye contact, head-nodding, and enthusiasm during conversations. This happens consistently."
  18. "I work in the hospital. Any time I get a patient out of bed, and they ask me to move their purse, I make sure it remains in their sight as I move it. I also hope that it’s a room with a camera, just in case any discrepancy comes up."
  19. "Don’t wear any jewelry/sunglasses of the brand where you are shopping in-store. As a Black woman, I’ve had an employee rip Gucci shades off my head (they were mine) and tell me not to stretch the merchandise."
  20. "Never let your kids play with toy guns."
  21. And finally, "I find myself begging to get adequate medical care for the autoimmune disease and pain I deal with. Pain in Black folks is viewed much differently than in white people. It blows my mind how a lot of people don't realize that Black people get the short end of the stick in healthcare."

A perfectly triangular lake has 3 kingdoms on its 3 sides

The first kingdom is rich and powerful, filled with wealthy, prosperous people, the second is humbler, but has its fair share of wealth and power. The third kingdom is struggling and poor, and barely has an army.

The kingdoms eventually go to war over control of the lake, as it’s a valuable resource to have. The first kingdom sends 100 of its finest knights, clad in the best armour and each with their own personal squire. The second kingdom sends 50 knights, with fine leather armour and a few dozen squires of their own. The third kingdom sends their one and only knight, an elderly warrior who has long since passed his prime, with his own personal squire.

The night before the big battle, the knights in the first kingdom drink and party into the late hours of the night. The knights in the second kingdom aren’t as well off, but have their own supply of grog and drink well into the night.

In the third camp, the faithful squire gets a rope and swings it over the branch of a tall tree, making a noose, and hangs a pot from it. He fills the pot with stew and has a humble dinner with the old knight.

The next morning, the knights in the first two kingdoms are hungover and unable to fight, while the knight in the third kingdom is old weary, unable to get up.

In place of the knights, the squires from all three kingdoms go and fight. The battle lasts long into the night but by the time the dust settled, only one squire was left standing - the squire from the third kingdom.

And it just goes to show you that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.

Different from the Others/Anders als die Andern (1919, dir. Richard Oswald)

The very first gay-themed film, made in the Weimar Republic when censorship was forbidden. Surviving the Nazi era, it is one of the biggest landmarks in LGBTQ film history.

Pssst

Hey, are you an artist or writer with WIPs?

Come here… I got a secret for you pssst come ‘ere

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waiting in deep suspense

Psst you ready here comes the secret

Here it comes

I am also very curious about this secret

Your time spent enjoying the creative process is infinitely more valuable that any final project you create. So stop putting yourself down for never finishing or posting those WIPs because every moment you spent creating something you loved is a moment not wasted. Your progress and talent is measured by your passion not your number of posts.

This post went from 3k to 7k overnight and that just goes to show how many of you need to hear this so make sure you don’t ever forget it

people who experience psychosis and anger issues and paranoia and delusions and intrusive thoughts and addiction and dissociation and other “ugly” non-romanticized mental health issues i love you and i believe you and you are not a bad person

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y’know as much as self-sacrifice gets made out to be super noble and shit in a lot of fiction, i am. very much more in favor of the message “you can live. you can want to live. it is a good thing to want to live, and it is a good thing that you are alive. you don’t have to feel guilty for being alive.”

idk it’s what i really needed to hear when shit got bad and honestly it’s what i still need to hear sometimes and it’s what i want the people i care about to believe about themselves.

tastyresippys

Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years

Quick correction bc I see this myth everywhere.

People drank beer & fruit wine 25/8 because it was high in calories and also tasty and pretty cheap/easy to make in bulk.

IT WAS NOT USED TO REPLACE OR SANITIZE WATER! THEIR WATER WAS NOT BAD!

The alcohol content in beer/wine back then was too low to actually sanitize anything effectively, and beer/wine only lasts for 6 months (usually less) even while still sealed in a cask, due to oxidization. Oxidation turns fermented liquids into vinegar. Wine and beer wasn’t meant for long-term storage.

This is great, because vinegar is the great preserver! VINEGAR is what people used to store their foods long-term, along with SALT and DRYING and SMOKING.

“Pickling” can be done with pure vinegar if you don’t have any expensive salt around, and vinegar can be made by fermenting any fruit or grain with wild yeast! If you’re lucky, you can also get wine/beer treats out of it on the way.

Circling back around: beer/wine was NEVER a replacement for water. Humans have been drinking from ground springs, wells, rainwater, and clear running water since our ape ancestors got the instinct to avoid stagnant pools.

If you didn’t have immediate access to a source of clean water, you didn’t fucking build a town there!

That’s a big reason why, WORLDWIDE, settlements are ALL historically clustered around sources of water like springs, wells, and rivers. (Or utilized rainwater catchment & storage) And why “the town well is poisoned/dried up!” Is a huge and terrible thing that comes up in a ton of old stories. Losing your source of freshwater means everyone has to move somewhere else, or die.

Even in huge cities, you’d be surprised at how sophisticated freshwater delivery systems were in the middle-ages. London had the “great conduit.” - a man-made, underground channel that moved water directly from a freshwater spring to fill a water tank in the Cheapside marketplace, accessible to the public. This conduit was built in 1245.

Mesopotamians in the BRONZE AGE built clay pipes for sewage removal, and other pipes for rain water collection, and wells. In 4,000 BC.

Building Aqueducts to move spring water into towns was first attributed to the Minoans, who lived in 2,000 BC.

Sanskrit texts from 2,000 BC also detail how to purify water you’re not sure about: expose it to Sunlight, filter it through Charcoal, dip a piece of copper in it at least 7 times, and filter it again. (UV treatment kills bacteria, Charcoal catches many poisons and heavy metal, copper is also antibacterial) <- even if they didn’t know what germs were, prehistoric humans were great at recognizing patterns, and noticing when people DIDNT die.

Persians in 700 BC used ‘qanat’, or tunnels dug into hillsides to let gravity move (CLEAN!) groundwater to nearby towns + for agriculture irrigation. Qanats were still the main water supply for the entire Iranian capitol city until about 1933.

The Roman Empire (312 BC) also built aqueducts to move spring and groundwater across miles and miles.

The Incas (1450) built wondrous examples of hydraulic engineering. Their “stairway of fountains” supplied the entire city of Machu Picchu with fresh spring water from a pair of rain-fed springs atop the mountain. The fountain canals could carry about 80 gallons a minute.

Getting clean drinking water was just not an issue for normal people in MOST long-term settlements. They may not understand germ theory, but they knew clean water was important and would kick up a BIG fuss if those water sources were sabotaged.

In conclusion: people absolutely drank beer and wine with breakfast. They also drank water. It was not a replacement.

Miíyu miíyu. It is Speak Your Language day. However, thanks to Colonization and “extermination” and other genocide methods, I only speak a few words of what should have been my first language.

When we think about languages it is important to know of and support the ones that Colonial Imperialism has done its best to eradicate.

This includes not mocking them as silly,

not saying they sound like nonsense,

not joking about their spelling, the look of their alphabet,

not joking about how they sound

as “making no sense” to you just because you speak a Majority language. You are not more comprehensible or correct than their words are just because you can’t understand them.

That is Colonizer rhetoric.

Respecting a language actual people speak is part of not being bigoted.

 Yes, this includes languages spoken by “white” people, like Irish, Scots Gaelic and Scots dialect, Breton, Welsh, Cornish, and so on.

These few words you see me use are Chamteéla, one of the languages formerly common in what is now called California, USA.

Noó$un Loóviq

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All of this

And also, please, if a minority language is really close to a dominant language, don’t dismiss it as an “improper/incorrect” version of that language

Scots isn’t “improper English”

Occitan isn’t “improper French”

Corsican isn’t “improper Italian”

Frisian isn’t “improper Dutch”

and so on