touching grass isn't enough some of y'all need to drive out to the countryside and look at the stars
this post was aimed at the discourse-addled and terminally online, but i'm glad it's reaching an audience of people who are just excited about stargazing in general
I got very loudly deadnamed and misgendered multiple times at the doctors office today. This new receptionist ignored the preferred name on my profile to deadname and misgender me loudly, louder than she talked about anyone else in the waiting room. My birth certificate says "F" nex to sex, my medical documentation reflects this, and I was still deadnamed and misgendered.
And the saving grace was a woman and her child. I wear cat-ears and the child too young to speak loved them, and kept pointing and looking at me. I'm assuming her mother kept saying "yeah, she's wearing cat-ears", "yeah, that woman has cute cat-ears", and the like. Her child was enamoured with them, and that woman didn't misgender me once. And each time my very obviously masculine deadname name came up, she looked upset at the receptionist, but not once did she give me a bad look.
It doesn't have to be much. You don't need to be a knight in shining armour, or in someones face. Simply a quiet refusal to play along with someone elses bullshit is enough. It was enough to turn a trying and tiring moment into something that put a smile on my face and joy back into my life. It wasn't a lot but it mattered to me.
Tony Hawk
learning that self deprecation isnt cool and just makes the people around you uncomfortable unironically improved my mental health a lot. like if you just stop saying negative shit about yourself you will genuinely like yourself more and other people wont be repulsed by your attitude and you will have more friends. it's true.
still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt
i promise you, a man can be fem to the point of being in danger while wearing literally exactly the same thing as a hypermasculine guy. a boring basic black suit. a t shirt and jeans. a UNIFORM. gender conformity is not only about what you wear
None of you have watched that heartbreaking scene in The Birdcage where Albert gives up wearing everything he likes to try and blend in for their son’s conservative prospective in-laws and is so awkward and uncomfortable that no one says much until finally he says, defeated, “I know what you’re thinking - dressed like this, I’m even more obvious, aren’t I?” and it shows.
Here, have your queer heart broken:
This is what I’m talking about. This is still literally how it is in most places in the Midwest if you’re trying to “pass” for straight/cis/whatever.
I cannot begin to describe how hard I cried when I saw this scene the first time and how confused my conservative family was as to why I was crying.
It’s so funny how literally the way a man holds his wrists is an indication of femininity but also people think it’s all about makeup and clothing. But we’re also at a point that if you have a suit that is any color other than black, dark grey, or navy, it’s flamboyant.
Men’s sartorial stylings are so rigidly controlled it’s painful. Tim Gunn here is at the very absolute bleeding edge of “acceptably masculine” here for most cishet men, just for some noticible stripes, patterns, and purple, and that’s before he even moves. This is how restricted it is.
But Trixie Mattel (out of drag here) wearing standard masculine garb is could still be deemed unacceptably feminine for body language alone.
This is why we talk about “toxic masculinity” – the idea that any expression of emotion besides anger or even wearing colorful clothes is non-masculine and therefore restricted is horrifying. It sucks! Men should be allowed to express themselves outside of a tiny box of acceptable behavior, because they’re, y'know, people, and people have a wide range of expression in the way they like to look and move and act. I honestly feel like it’s gotten worse over the last couple decades, too. If you look at men’s fashions from the 70s and even into the 80s, there’s a lot of style choices that look pretty cringe to us, but…. you also see a lot more color and pattern in suits than you do now. I’m not sure when this started to shift, or if it’s tied in to the increasing lack of color in all consumer products, but it sucks.
there's like 10,0000,0 accounts with names like "Best Heritage Posts" and "Tumblr Hall Of Fame Posts" and "So Funny Hellsite Posts" but where's the shitty posts accounts. where's the hall of fail accounts. i want to see the worst of the worst
heritage post
come on man
Because I'm only seeing other Jews posting about this, non-Jews I need you to be aware that for the past month or two there has been a wave of bomb threats and swattings at synagogues all across the US. They usually do it when services are being livestreamed. I haven't seen a single non-Jew talking about this. High holidays are coming up in a few weeks, which is when most attacks happen against our communities. We're worried, and we need people to know what's happening to us.
None of the major news outlets are running it. I had to Google it. Everyone is so distracted by the rest of the nation’s fuckery right now.
99.99% of rap haters have never even listened to rap. or if they have it's like one gangsta rap song & they treat the genre as a monolith and act like it's representative of every rap song ever. and well of course they are also just racist
first & last line still stand even if rap was a monolith and all rap was gangsta rap. btw
Rap is great! Everyone knows the worst genre of music is country
99.99% of country haters have never even listened to country. or if they have it's like one post-9/11 pop country song by a rich poser & they treat the genre as a monolith and act like it's representative of every country song ever. and well of course they are also just classist
i would lecture you about the importance of jazz in US history and african american history and music history but you're a swiftie so there is no hope for you
oh no hun I'm sorry, we not doing gospel slander in my house
couldnt leave this in the tags
calling the cops on someone else in america for drug use is the most comically evil action i can think of that you can still admit to in public and (unfortunately) not be shunned/exiled/physically attacked for. you're very explicitly saying that your sheltered discomfort with seeing someone do drugs is worth ruining that person's entire life over (even though you could get the same effect by just continuing to walk past the drug user until you never see them again). 18th century dauphin mindset. "papá! papá! i espied that peasant over yonder partaking of a snuffbox! throw him in the dungeon, lest my delicate morals be corrupted any further!" kill yourself perhaps
LOVE WINS TODAY!!!!!!!!!
LOVE WINSSSS
learning to cheerfully dislike other people is I think a critical component of getting along with people who don't like you. Like as soon as I got a solid grasp on the fact that there is a wide swath of humanity that gets on my nerves and that it's my problem, not theirs, it got easier to be around people I find annoying. Once that's settled, it's easy to flip the reasoning around and conclude that if someone doesn't like me, that's a quirk of their own strange and arbitrary tastes, not a judgment upon either of us as a person. You can't like everyone. Not everyone will like you. It's fine. It's not a personal attack in either direction. We can exchange cordial nods across the room and then go on with our lives
I’m really enamored with the dynamic of two characters who work perfectly in tandem, like pacific rim drift compatible level, but they don’t like each other. It’s not even as strong an emotion as hate it’s just a very neutral-negative dislike, but they still act in perfect concert and their individual abilities are fully complementary
Canadian commercial actors say American actors are crossing the border and the picket line in the middle of a major US entertainment industry strike and filling the jobs of Canadian actors who have been locked out for over a year.
Thousands of unionized commercial actors in Canada have been locked out since April 2022 while The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) has been negotiating with commercial agencies to try and get a fair deal.
Now, as a result of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA actors and WGA writers strikes that have shut down TV and film productions in the United States, some Hollywood actors have travelled north of the border in search of non-union commercial work in Canada.
“Over the last year there’s been a lot of American commercials shooting up in Canada doing everything non union because they can walk around it,” one ACTRA member who requested to be anonymous told PressProgress. [...]
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
if you want to support ACTRA members who have been locked out for 16 months you can donate to the AFC here
ACTRA has also called for a boycott of Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, Rogers, Wendy's, Sleep Country, and H&R Block
They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….
Nobody else has any excuse.
Look we all want a robo dog but if you kill someone with a sledgehammer to steal theirs, they are going to find you. There's no way a 75k$ dog doesn't have gps
its not a dog, its a machine used and designed for police surveillance and the entire reason they made it dog shaped is so idiots like you would go "awwww robot dog how precious" instead of seeing them as the oppressive tools they are.
we're killing the fucking dog
That's not a robot dog.
It's a four-legged robot spider.
It is not a dog, a spider, a chicken, a horse, a fish, a tick, a mosquito, a tapeworm or a baby
It is a weapon
There is nothing morally wrong about breaking weapons that are hurting people for any reason other than to prevent those people from hurting others worse
the dog robots are fully capable of hurting people, and badly. failsafes that would prevent that have not been installed. the police are deploying a thing out in public that can maim anyone who touches it wrong.
look, when i was a kid i was passionately in love with the idea of robots--that humans would one day create another sort of intelligence to share our world with-- and believed very firmly that we should respect and protect all our robot friends from the start, so there would be no violent humans-against-robots revolution or anything.
anyway it turns out that the people trying to keep end-stage capitalism running are really banking on us feeling more love for the robots than for the kind of people they're going to be using the robots to oppress.
so like. maybe lets all agree right now that if a robot is being used to hurt a person, you need to smash the fucking robot. they're going to make the robots really cute. they're going to show us so many movies about how much robots need to be loved. and then they are going to use robots to hurt people.
let's try not to fall for it, okay?
And don't forget that scary af episode of Black Mirror, Metalhead. Robot dogs can fuck right off.
They created a weapon, told you to call it a friend and watched as your empathy became their trap and tool.
Real life dogs are oftentimes weapons as well
People who exploit animals will often exploit humans too. They’re exploiting the cuteness of animals to manipulate you and the potential danger of dogs to control you.
So if we’re being intersectional about this, also be cautious about people who use animals as tools.
If it ain’t three laws safe, it ain’t friend shaped.
Bludgeon it.
Sooooo the company I work for works with law enforcement. As in, they're our main customers. (Which I'm actually all for, because the amount of accountability we're loading into the back end while "making their jobs easier" is ASTONISHING. My very leftist old hippy Dad is excited about me working here.)
Anyway, I have seen these robot dogs in person at a conference, and it took under a minute for my brain to go "Doggo! Friend shaped!" When I stepped back and thought about it, it was unnerving as HELL.
So yeah. Go buy that hammer. Bet you can find similar ones at thrift stores, too.
I spend a lot of time keeping track of right wing media figures for work, and to be perfectly honest I'm cautiously optimistic. The Limbaugh era was turbo-charged by a combination of organized evangelical voting blocks, post-9/11 patriotism, and once-in-a-generation media personalities, that are all running on fumes now. They've got momentum, but it's coasting.
While on the other hand, the resurgence of union power is seeing people actually working with their community to materially improve their lives. That's the concrete for a strong foundation.
I don't really have a point here, I'm just sharing some guarded optimism.
I was thinking about that post arguing that Moby-Dick is one of the principal forerunners of the cosmic horror literature of the early 20th Century again, and it just occurred to me that both of the major scenes in the book where Captain Ahab performs arguably supernatural feats, the forging of the lodestone and holding lightning in his hand, specifically involve electricity and magnetism – which is also a recurring motif for inhuman characters in early literary cosmic horror.
There's probably an essay lurking in that, if I had the time or the energy to chase it down.
you know you're good at your job when every single person tells you "thank god you're back"
Boss makes a dollar You make a dime You read unsanitary pirate slash On company time
Look if you read fanfic on the clock and everyone is still relieved that you're back you must just be that got-dang good at your job
Fam, some jobs are like being a firefighter. 90% of the time you're not doing anything that important, but by golly, when they need you, they need you.
Some jobs, you can fuck around for six hours a day, but you know what you're doing so well that the work you do in two hours would take somebody else ten.
Some jobs, you spend those two hours preventing other people from making mistakes that would take 100 hours to fix if you weren't there to steer them right.
So don't buy into the idea that if you're not working 480 minutes a day, you're not doing enough to get paid a day's wages. That's the capitalism talking.
You're a better employee when you keep your morale up, and sometimes you do that by reading fanfiction on the clock in between putting out your little fires.
Losing my goddamn fucking mind over how Batman 1966 gave Catwoman a sidekick in one episode and named her Pussycat.
that’s the legendary Jewish lesbian singer Lesley Gore btw, so I have an inkling they knew what they were doing
i love headcanoning old men as ftm. like considering fandom loves to equate being transmasc to being young no one will probably agree with me but i look into his eyes and see the wisdom only a post-menopausal man could provide
