thr funniest part of therapy to me is when you first come in and you're exchanging niceties and they say "hello! how are you" and you say "im fine how are you :)" and then 30 seconds later they put on their therapist voice and say "so how are you doing?" and you go well lisa. believe it or not im doing Bad
pretty cool how you went on a heroic journey to gain the power needed to defeat me. unfortunately i was on a cooler, villainous journey
No you cannot fix your entire life at 2am. Go to bed.
You can fix some of it though! By going to bed.
Ever since I read a post saying "don't trust yourself after 9pm" whenever I find myself spiralling at 2am I check the time, see it's after 9pm, and remember not to trust myself and just go to sleep. Works wonders. The problems are never as bad in the morning.
Us Czechs have a saying: Ráno moudřejší Večera.
"Morning is the wiser of Evening"
And it's basically this sentiment
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
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning
Don’t fuck with flamingos
….. Didn’t know most of that
Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.
Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.
American flamingos just drink that shit
(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.
When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.
It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:
Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.
Earth is an amazing place.
pirates of the caribbean really introduced an eldritch octopus man who kills indiscriminately and torments the dead as their poster villain and then you watch the movies and it's like, "oh no, actually the worst villain in this series is a small white british man who functions as the herald of capitalism" and that was very very brave of them
I saw somebody be wrong on the internet and I didn’t respond (don’t want to get involved) and I’m being SO brave about it
I should never have made this post because now every time it gets a new note I’m reminded of how wrong that one person on the internet was.
reblog to remind them how wrong that one person on the internet was
THEY WERE SO WRONG. ON THE INTERNET.
What were they wrong about?
NO I AM BEING SO BRAVE ABOUT IT
For future reference
reblog to save a life in the (hopefully distant) future
We’re not making out of the cyberpunk dystopia huh
You guys really need to understand that this is not a fucking dog
This is such a good example of why we need to be very self aware about our fiction.
Sentient robots that deserve rights and love are fictional. We made them up in stories.
Now, it's my favorite kind of fiction. I love it. But it's not real. It's a metaphor for oppressed human beings.
Sentient AI doesn't exist. There are corporations, and maybe even someday governments, who will want to convince you that it does, now and in the future.
Replikas don't care about you and that robot dog is a military weapon.
This is ironic 'cause military and police robot "dogs" (and the other robots they build) are built to do harm to oppressed people.
Yeah, the very people that are represented metaphorically in fiction by robots and androids.
Fiction is fun, and I love fictional robots with my whole heart. But I am not about to let it make me stupid about real life. :)
These things are not your friends. They are machines that will be used to hurt you and to hurt others. Do not fall for the propaganda that these things are just fun little friends! The above articles are the reality. Sorry.
I’d put money on one of those things committing an outright massacre in a war zone within ten years.
i looked at queeringthemap today and had a good cry but these especially touched me
yeah.
No matter where you are in the world you aren't alone
hold on. I need a moment. I need a moment please hold. on please wait I need a. moment hold on
Added Generation Alpha because maybe there are some 13 year olds on this site and added Silent Generation because maybe there are some 80 year olds on here too
sobbing. i love u my jewish learning ♡
[ID: Screenshot of an instagram post. The photo shows a young man dressed in traditional Orthodox Jewish clothing- a black hat, black suit and pants, and white shirt- wraps tefillin around the arms of a person draped in the rainbow pride flag. The person in the pride flag has shoulder length hair and is wearing a large white kipah, a t shirt, and shorts. They are standing outside on pavement. It's captioned "Do a mitzvah." End ID.]
EDIT: Photo is by uri cohn
This is the world I want to live in.
(Context for gentiles: the man on the left is probably a member of Chabad. Chabad is a sort-of-Orthodox-it’s-really-complicated-please-don’t-ask-me-to-elaborate Jewish organization that does outreach involving asking Jews in the wider community if they’d like the chance to complete a mitzvah; for example, at Sukkot they’ll ask if Jews walking by would like to shake the bundle of Four Species, which they might not have the chance to do at home. This probably-a-Chabad-member has identified the queer person in the photo as a Jew and offered them the chance to wrap tefillin, which is a central part of certain Jewish blessings. Basically this very traditional man has walked up to this very untraditional man and said “hey! Have you had the chance to pray today? Would you like to?” Jewish prayer mostly revolves around the saying of blessings, not around requests, so the prayers said with tefillin are basically “it’s an awesome day and I’m glad I’m living it.” There is no “this person is wrong for their flag or orientation or gender”—it’s just “this person is a fellow Jew, I will ask if they want to perform a mitzvah.”)
I was already here, but I’m taking a closer look at this image and I think there’s another important thing to add:
Especially because this is a Pride event, there is a much higher than usual greater-than-zero chance this person is either nonbinary or a trans man.
Wrapping tefillin is a male mitzvah. That’s to say, women aren’t obligated to do it, and many traditionalists say women shouldn’t do it. And it’s also considered an act of modesty for men not to touch women outside of their own family.
The probably-a-Chabad-member is wrapping tefillin (a male mitzvah), which involves touching someone he’s not related to (forbidden between sexes), on someone who may not be a cisgender man and, if he is, presents as GNC.
So in addition to everything I said above: this is a very traditional man looking at a very untraditional person-who-may-not-meet-his-own-definition-of-“man” and saying “you are a man to yourself in the eyes of G-d, therefore you’re a man to me. Have you had the chance to pray today? Would you like to?”
can we like…get rid of the so-called leather and rubber “pride flags” ? it’s honestly ridiculous and offensive to the lgbtq community. those aren’t pride flags.
dead-dyke
The leather pride flag is the second oldest pride flag. It has been at almost every single US pride parade and protest in history.
It’s older then you are, it’s older then I am. The leather community is responsible for pride. Leather daddies were the ones chasing away cops when they tried to arrest us for being queer in public back when Pride Parades were illegal in the US. They are still the ones chasing away cops and corporations from smaller pride events and those that aren’t sanctioned by Wells Fargo. The leather community is essential to the queer community and has a long and rich history.
Please fuck off if you’re not going to learn the actual history of pride.
And don’t fucking out your hate in our tags, asshole.
budgiesmuggled
The leather pride flag represents an expression of self which is inherently queer, and a community which has been around for generations. It is not offensive to the LGBT+ community in any way. I have seen cis gay and bisexual men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with trans men, all of them united by their leather community roots. The leather community is more diverse and nuanced than you perhaps know, but that is no reason for you to shit on a community you don’t understand.
Here is a photograph from 1998, displaying the leather pride flag, the bear gay pride flag, and the rainbow flag. This is our history.
Here is a photograph from 1987: three queer women entering into the Ms. National Leather Association Contest, or simply gathering as spectators.
A flyer from 1989, rallying the leather community to march in a Stonewall anniversary protest.
A photograph from 1988: Tony Deblase, the creator of the leather pride flag, and a gay man, embracing a fellow member of the leather community. Over his shoulder is Judy Tallwing McCarthy, a Native American woman who was part of the leather community from 1959. She co-founded the first lesbian BDSM group in Portland, along with her partner, Sashie Hyatt.
Just because you don’t know the history, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Be humble, and always assume you have more to learn. Hatred, and outright dismissal of communities you know nothing about, is the most aggressively anti-LGBT thing I can imagine.
The leather community has always included trans people, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. The leather community is global and nuanced. The leather community is where many of us encounter our found families, and our lovers. For you to dismiss that is cold-hearted and ignorant. Just because queer sex is involved, doesn’t make the community dirty or bad.
Do you have any. Any idea. Any god damn clue. How kink intersects with LGBT and queer community. Queer history. Do you know why the community pushed for, and against, closing the bathhouses during the 80s? Do you know who organized awareness campaigns about HIV, even way back when it was still called GIRD. Do you know who created the safe sex pamphlets, the classes, who pushed for disclosing your health history to partners, who distributed contraceptives and condoms and dental dams at parties and meetings and baths? Do you even know where the safe sex education we have now comes from? Do you know where a bulk of the language about consent came from? Do you have any good god damn idea what the kink communities have done for us, and continue to do for us?
Keep their names out of your mouths because you clearly don’t know what the hell you’re talking about
If there is one thing I could say to young queer folks, especially young queer folks in the U.S. who are coming of age in a world that is more accepting than the one I knew growing up, it’s this:
Don’t be so quick to sanitize your queerness and make it corporate pride daytime TV-friendly. Don’t be so quick to jump on the purity bandwagon. Don’t be so quick to speak on what your community should look like before you’ve actually learned the history of your community, and always be aware that there are things you probably don’t yet know.
These things will not protect you. They never have. And all you’re doing is isolating yourself from community, from support, from the strength we all have when we stand together in a world that would gladly pick us off one by one.
Queerness isn’t as hidden or embattled now (in some places) as it once was, but make no mistake: when our existence was illegal everywhere the people you have this knee-jerk “hide the weirdos” reaction to are the very ones who would’ve had your back against the cops and the gay-bashers.
The people who made me feel safe to come out in my 20s flew the rubber and leather flags alongside the rainbow flag and often the trans flag as well. You don’t get to tell any of them they don’t belong anymore just because you don’t understand.
Rip this from my cold, dead hands
I always want to be clear when reblogging this that OP no longer holds this opinion.
Twitter discourse is exhausting most of the time but that one time it was discovered someone known for giving people shit for every random perceived transgression was actually working a high paying job at Raytheon was genuinely very funny
i come home from work at the exploding orphans factory. i see a post on my tl where someone is recommending a ya book where an iffy exchange happened on page 234. my eyes pop out of my head like a loony tunes character and i start tweeting up a storm in between my posts begging for money to feed my starving cats that live in my 4 bedroom mansion. i heal the world one keystroke at a time
What a day, what a day
The fact that he works at the war crimes factory gets a lot of attention but it should not go unstated that his constant shit-starting was also in essence a job. He very directly made money by harassing people and inciting others to harass them.
Most online harassment campaigns aren't spontaneous and self-organizing. Pretty much every time if you dig through the mud and the blood and the posts you will find that one or more moderate-to-large accounts pushed the snowball down the hill. This is true, for example, of the social murder of Isabel Fall, which Mardoll was an aggressive participant in. It was a relatively limited internet brush fire until a few big name authors including NK Jemisin (who specifically knew who Fall was, and had pre-existing beef with her) massively boosted its exposure.
The more cases you dig into, the more you see the same names cropping up over and over as the people who throw the first stone in each community. And when you see the same people consistently engaging in a socially harmful activity, it should be a tip-off to any good materialist that someone is making money from it. How, exactly, varies a lot, but the thing to understand is that the value being extracted here is always through the boost in visibility you're afforded by casting the first stone. It's a sort of clout-gravity-assist—if you have a big enough platform already to cast a big enough stone, throwing it will get a lot more eyeballs on your account. At that point, anything that converts views proportionally into money is a viable option for cashing out; most people use a mixture. Boosting your own work in the same field is an option. Some people literally just set up a Patreon. One of the most common and easily the most insidious one is just to have constant rotating donation drives for your various agonies.
While this business model is incredibly common across our big beautiful Online, right now on Twitter it is worse than it has ever been anywhere else. Mardoll was far from the worst offender—as already mentioned, many of his personal enemies were doing likewise. There are also just roving gangs of freaks who will put a price on the head of anyone they cross paths with (including recently, the grieving trans girlfriend of a trans woman murdered by her parents) in the name of protecting marginalized people, somehow. And of course the more banal example of the Twitter Main Character, which runs on this same model, and happens so much it's become a joke and even a point of pride.
Mardoll ran an incredibly common grift and he ran it because it worked. He was a constant fixture in any discourse to do with queer media, very transparently directing hate towards other queer authors on a regular basis, and he made money doing it. Obviously the war crimes thing is more important as well as more dramatic. But I would argue that the two are not unrelated, in the sense that harassing other queer and marginalized people for money and lying about being unemployed when you secretly have a job at the murder robot company both require a truly bottomless kind of cravenness and self-absorption, and betray a complete disinterest in any kind of politics based in solidarity. Both are the kind of thing you can only justify to yourself if you understand your marginalization entirely as a barrier to You Getting Yours, rather than something that has drafted you from birth into a shared struggle for liberation.