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Clog With A Blog

@recycling-friend

Hi! I'm Chloe! 21, She/they pronouns, writer, artist, fan of many things (though generally not a direct fan of whatever my icon is at any given time, I’m just matching with @officialjamesflint .) I talk about art and poetry and wizards over at @wizard-studies. On this blog, we love and respect puns. [ID: [Icon: Gethin from Pride (2014), looking pensive in his bookshop. Background: a colorful abstract painting.]

One wild thing about Universal cutting up all those trees is I first heard about tree law like, maybe a month ago. One of my mutuals reblogged that one comic and my reaction was sort of mildly amused, but also a little confused as to why tree law seemed to be so popular of all things

It really feels like some great karmic entity leaned down and said hey here’s the set up to a joke that won’t get a punchline for a little while. But when it does you’re gonna love it

So Universal Pictures may have just intentionally over-pruned all of the city owned trees in front of their LA corporate office in an effort to fuck with the WGA/SAG-AFTRA picketers during what is predicted to be the hottest week of the year so far:

And the LA City Controller is looking into it:

Once again it looks like it's time for:

Implicit storytelling in two tweets:

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Yeah. They did that. I bet the ‘clarification’ came as a result of some strong legal threats.

So be aware in the coming weeks that if your favorite actor reportedly says something shitty about the strike that makes your blood boil? Check the sources. There’s going to be a lot of uh, spin in the news.

The thing about "parents' rights" and "protect the children [from hearing that other ways of life than ours are possible and okay]" is that it is literally, in the purest sense of the word, patriarchy.

The word literally means "rule by the fathers". We're generally used to hearing it describe how adult women can be dominated by adult men. However, that's not where patriarchy ends; feminists have been less eager to address how within that system, women can exercise power and domination of their own through the traditional gender roles of motherhood. Their maternal rights to power and dominance may have traditionally been lesser than paternal ones, but they were never less than their minor children's. Even single-mother or female-only families can be, in this sense, patriarchal.

Patriarchal families are a complex system that grants parents complete legal and practical control over nearly every aspect of their children's lives. The patriarchal family controls where the child lives, who takes care of them, what rules they have to follow, how they are educated, who they associate with, what healthcare they receive, what religion they practice, and whether they can work or control any money they earn or that is given to or for them.

Normally discussions of patriarchy are a lot more abstract. But right now it's very concrete and real: we are fighting to limit the family's control over children on issues where we can observe that families sometimes tend to make decisions that are bad for the children's welfare or that disrespect their human rights.

Whether a minor child can get an abortion. Whether they can receive gender-affirming care. Whether it's okay to lie or coerce your child to ensure they follow your religion. Whether they deserve to be educated about factual histories or scientific theories that are necessary to understanding the world around them. Whether they deserve to learn accurate, age-appropriate information about consent, setting boundaries, how their bodies and the bodies of other people work, what a normal range of gender and sexual identities look like, what healthy or unhealthy relationships look like, and what sex is, how it works, what its positives and negatives are, and how they might navigate the world, whether or not they ever want to have it.

Hell, on some levels we're still arguing about whether it's okay to hit your kids, or whether children have the right, similar to the rights adults have, not to be assaulted or abused.

Because there are a LOT of people who say: No. Parents should have 100% control over any or all of those issues. If the parent says no, the child is not allowed to do or have any of those things, and nobody else should be allowed to interfere and provide them to the child without their parents' consent.

Pointing this out often results in parents saying, "Oh, so you want just ANYONE to be able to go up and talk sex with kids? You want kids to be able to decide to jump off cliffs with nobody stopping them???" As though parents are the single protective force in the universe, the only thing standing between their child and the ravages of absolute chaos.

On the contrary: most of the time the argument is for children to receive care and guidance from adults who are monitored to ensure they treat children in safe and appropriate ways, who have spent many years studying the best and most rigorously tested of our collective understanding of how to prepare children for happy, healthy lives.

And we are arguing against people who believe that the only important qualification needed to refuse children that kind of care is to be ranked above them in their family hierarchy.

In conclusion...

Fuck the patriarchy. Children have human rights too.

And speaking of scurvy, I am eternally amused by the thing where some ancient form of healing that was born in a time where people didn't know exactly how the human body works, or what causes it to stop working sometimes, that still somehow worked. Like how so many old folk medicinal plants were listed as a cure for various ailments that - from a modern view - are clearly just symptoms of scurvy, and the plant itself is rich in vitamin C.

I recall reading some story, no recollection of the exact time or place, where the king of a large empire suffered from constant horrible headaches and was incapable of falling asleep unless drugged or blackout drunk. Sick of taking temporary fixes to dull the pain and having to be sedated every night, he called up some old sage healer who was said to know how to fix things nobody else could explain, and the healer heard his symptoms and went

"Hmm. You spend too much time being a king. Your skull is packed so full of kingly thoughts that they don't all fit in there and that's why your head is in pain. You need to spend time not being a king." And prescribed him to schedule three days every month where he must go to a peasant village where nobody knows he's the king, live with a family there under a fake name and identity, work in the rice fields with them, eating the same food and sleeping on the same mats. Absolutely nobody is allowed to address him as the king, speak to him of any royal or political matters, and he himself is not allowed to think any kingly thoughts or think of himself as the king.

And naturally, this worked. Taking a regular scheduled break from a highly stressful office desk job to completely decompress, paired with physical exercise in the form of hard but simple physical labour, plain and simple food and Just Not Thinking About Your Fucking Job All The Time does help chronic stress, which here was worded as "spending too much time being a king clogs your brain."

Sometimes you do have ghosts in your blood, though I'm not entirely sure whether you should do cocaine about it.

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i love pitting classically trained magic users against self-taught magic users in sci-fi/fantasy but it shouldn’t be snobbish disdain for them it should be terror

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“WHO TAUGHT YOU LIGHTNING BEFORE BASIC TELEKINESIS. LOSING MY MIND WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU JUST DID IT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAST WITH YOUR BARE HANDS

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WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT YOU’VE ‘HACKED’ MANA DRAIN

WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘DRINK SOME JUICE’

WHAT IS ‘LOW BLOOD SUGAR’

WHY IS THIS WORKING

I HATE YOU SO MUCH

Okay but other direction can ALSO be a lot of fun

“What do you mean I don’t have to burn half my blood to create a fireball?”

“Why can you teleport more than once without vomiting? WTF is ‘quantum displacement awareness’???”

“You know HOW many spells? HOW? ... What do you mean ‘my spell book’?”

“Ooooh, you’re just summoning water portions from the Plane of Water... Lol I thought I HAD to combine hydrogen and oxygen molecules to generate water in small amounts. That’s so much easier then what I was doing!”

I know I've been over this but man HRT is good stuff. I wanna shake the hand of whoever invented it. It's a crime that I don't know who that is actually. They're more important than Einstein

id also been really curious about the history of hrt so i had some tabs open:

The first hrt treatments were mostly estrogen extracted during pregnancies to be used for menopause symptoms, but the first usage of those medicines for trans women is credited to the world's first Trans Clinic, opened in pre-WW2 Germany by Magnus Hirschfield, a gay jewish man.

Oh he looks delightful

Thank you grandpa

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The comparasion to Einstein was actually made at the time too! He was commonly refered to as “the Einstein of sex”, to which he supposedly once replied that he would rather Einstein be called “the Hirschfeld of physics” lmao

Oh my god

Oh the other man with him in the photo is Li Shiu Tong, his boyfriend and fellow researcher! He's a really fascinating figure too, and rescued some of their findings and papers from the clutches of the Nazis!