HAPPY MAY THE FOURTH, YOU GUYS!!

star trek heritage post (December 20th, 2015)

To a homophobe, even the most chaste kiss on the cheek between gay people is exactly as disgusting and degenerate as a hardcore BDSM orgy hosted in the town square, so you may as well ally with the BDSM orgy enthusiasts to throw bricks at the cops who are going to try and arrest all of you together anyway.

I once held hands with my husband at an event where my wife was also present, and a concerned parent lectured me about how she didn't want us to "influence" her son. Our icky gay polyam hand holding was such a threat to this woman that she made a point to corner me away from my partners and get me on my own to lecture me about being "indecent." If she had been inclined toward violence, I would have been fucked.

Hand holding. That's all it fucking took.

So catch me at Pride in a leather harness and holding a bat, because if hand holding is all it takes, we owe it to each other to stand together.

We're here. We're queer. Get fucking used to it.

The sheer number of LGBT people who have called me a "degenerate" and a "pedophile" and an "abuse apologist" and a "homophobe" and a "woman-beater" over this post, in the less than 24 hours since I have posted it, is proof that it needs to be said.

Call me a degenerate if you want. I don't care. It has always been the degenerates protecting each other when the cops raid our bars and inspect our clothing and haul us away for being cross-dressing, family-destroying, society-polluting, tranny dyke faggot freaks.

I know who I'd rather have on my side, and it's not the self-loathing pieces of shit who would rather destroy their own people than dismantle systems of oppression.

You will never be wholesome and pure enough for the bigots, no matter how much you distance yourself from the kinksters. Once they've killed all us degenerates, they're coming for you next. And we won't be here to fight for you anymore.

I did not know this, but it makes so much sense, and it's SO good to learn fanfiction history.

Is THAT where "No [X], we die like men" comes from?????

Recently, while staring far too long at a potato chip, it occurred to me that the ridges could possibly be used to create a lenticular effect. So I got out some chip dip (and the smallest paint brush I have) to test it out. I started with a simple 2-frame illustration of a football and a basketball, then I painted a little sour cream and onion dip bird. 🥔🕊️ - via my new @brockdavisart instagram

imagine actually believing that

Why does basil smell so fucking amazing

Good points. Wait what was that first thing

Google is actively blocking Captcha on Firefox

Firefox users have noticed that captchas - both the picture kind and the click the box kind - are not resolving on Firefox. Tests on Chromium based browsers show that it works perfectly fine on them. It is also known that Chrome will be disabling all ad-blockers in June when it moves to Manifest v3, which will greatly limit what extensions can do.

If you use Firefox, there is an extension called User-Agent Switcher and it allows you to change your browser's UA to Chrome. This will allow you to bypass reCaptcha/Captcha blocks set up by Google and make them function properly.

It could be a code snafu on Google's part - but given how predatory they have been acting lately, I'm going to guess not. Don't get locked out of your websites or feel forced to use Chrome again just to browse.

On This Day: Kent State shootings leave 4 students dead!

Four Kent State University students were killed and nine were injured on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd gathered to protest the Vietnam War. The tragedy was a watershed moment for a nation divided by the conflict in Southeast Asia. In its immediate aftermath, a student-led strike forced the temporary closure of colleges and universities across the country. Some political observers believe the events of that day in northeast Ohio tilted public opinion against the war and may have contributed to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.

Students dive to the ground as the National Guard fires on faculty and students May 4, 1970, to protest the war in Vietnam. File Photo courtesy of Kent State University Archives

The Kent State Shootings

“… Give Peace a Chance (iastate.edu)

On This Day, May 4: Kent State shootings leave 4 students dead - UPI.com

That awkward moment when you break the shower wall….

I will absolutely reblog for the gif every time

presented without commentary or apology

Why OP

slam that fucking unmute button

“I know I’ve heard this before. Is this from an anime or someth-OH FUCK!”

There we go

#like...why use this baby word when you can just say how you feel about it

Found this in the original post tags and I just... SIGH

Here’s the thing, anon. Squick isn’t just ‘I don’t like this’, it’s ‘I think this is gross and it makes me deeply uncomfortable but I pass no judgement on those who enjoy it, because I acknowledge that everyone is different and those same people may have the same visceral reaction some of the things I enjoy’ and was originally made popular in the kink community.

So yeah, if you want to say that every time you come across a trope or whatever you find icky then go ahead, say that every time.

Also, this term dates back to Usenet in the early nineties, so sure, go off.

This frustrates me so much because squicks and triggers are fundamentally different things and as someone with PTSD, the distinction is super useful!

Squicks are things I find personally gross but may not be gross to someone else. They don’t upset me or provoke my PTSD, they simply do not pop my corn. Example: Omegaverse. I don’t like it, it makes me uncomfortable and I’m not going to read it, but if you like it, you do you.

Triggers are things which directly provoke my PTSD. This means that my triggers may seem completely normal and innocuous to someone else, because my triggers are so personal and intrinsically linked to a specific event in my life. My reactions to these triggers can include panic attacks and flashbacks to this traumatic event. Sometimes being triggered can affect me for several hours or even days.

Describing something as either a squick or a trigger allows me easily establish the difference in my potential reaction to something without having to go into painful detail about why bodily fluids might make me back button quickly but poker games might leave me a crying wreck. 

Making this distinction, and having a specific word for something that is not your slice of pie, but also not an actual psychological trigger, is also REALLY important for making sure that the word “trigger” can retain its original, specific, purposeful, and collectively understood clinical meaning (both inside and outside online fannish communities).

If we encourage everyone to lump things that just make them slightly uncomfortable or simply aren’t to their taste in under the word “trigger”, it actually dilutes the meaning of the word. It makes it harder for us all to, for the most part, collectively agree on and understand what exactly is being described when the word gets used.

And that destruction of shared precise definitions is a problem! It is really useful to have the communal language to be able to clearly and quickly delineate between “this grosses me out, no thanks” and “this is going to set off a trauma episode, rattle my brain, and probably throw off the rest of my day/week as a result” while also maintaining your privacy, and to know that you will be understood in what you are saying. Not having it is actually detrimental to the effort of making our communities safe and navigable for people living with trauma. Which is a goal that is much more important to me, personally, than the idea of not being “cutesy” (a word which in this case which sounds a lot like it’s being used as a euphemism for “cringe”).

(Also, one has to wonder if people told Shakespeare he was being childish when he made up entirely new words that are still widely used in the English language today...... 🤔)

My understanding is that “squick” was also created to avoid using more judgmental terms like “gross” or “disturbing”--like yeah, I do find X kink gross or disturbing, but that’s my personal feeling, not an objective fact about the world, and if I’m explaining to my friend who is super into X that I’d prefer they leave it out of the story they’re writing me in the fic exchange, I want to use politer language!

“Squick” does sound silly, like onomatopoeia, but I think that’s part of its role--it’s a word that defuses if, again, you’re saying something squicks you in front of an audience that may include its connoisseurs. When I say I’m squicked, I’m clearly not getting onto a high horse of dignity and moral righteousness. At the same time I’m not being so indirect for the sake of politeness--”oh, it’s not my favorite thing, I’m not sure it works for me, I haven’t found a fic about it that clicks for me”--that someone could misunderstand how much I do not want to see it.

And, to reiterate, it is a grown up word made by grown up nerds in the 90s so if you think it was somehow born on and limited to Tumblr I'm going to need you to actually do some fandom history research before you ever speak authoritatively again about anything fandom-related or adjacent.

I love and deeply miss the term “squick” and really want to see it brought back. It allows dislike for its own sake and without judgement. It’s polite, gentle, and has an air of “you do you.” A squick is not a trigger. Triggers are related to trauma. You’re allowed to not like things and not have them related to anything other than just finding them unpleasant. And that aversion can be strong! That’s okay! I really don’t like watersports. Like, gag-reflex levels of aversion, but it’s not triggering. I just really don’t like it.  I feel like we’ve lost the right/ability to just... quietly not like things and move on with our lives. Not everything is for everyone, and you don’t need a reason to not like something. Just politely and quietly excuse yourself. No need to draw attention, and if someone asks you why you just say, “No, it squicks me out.” No judgement. No narrative necessary. 

There is a sad trend of trying to make everything you personally dislike morally reprehensible in some way to justify your dislike of it. You're allowed to just not like something for no real reason. You do not have to justify why you dislike something, and the word "squick" is perfect for that. It say "look I really really don't like this thing, but it's ok if you do" and that is useful.

I think the biggest problem is that a lot of these kids are VERY into the whole fandom purity culture thing, so they actually DO want to make it out to be morally reprehensible, and they DON'T think it's ok that other ppl might be into it.

Cheerfully using “squick” since 1992, because it means a specific thing and other words do not mean that thing.

Very much SAME.

Eyes on the Condé union 👀

Condé Nast runs publications like Vogue and Vanity Fair. Striking at the Met Gala is no small threat.

They held a work stoppage in January and Anne Hathaway walked out of a photo shoot when she was informed of the stoppage. This could be really big.

what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”

That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?

Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food

I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.

(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)

Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.

I LOVE learning about stuff like this :D

that corned beef and cabbage thing you hear abou irish americans is actually from a similar situation but because they weren’t allowed to eat that stuff due to that artificial famine

<3 FOOD HISTORY <3

Everyone knows Korean barbecue, right? It looks like this, right?

Well, this is called a “flanken cut” and was actually unheard of in traditional Korean cooking. In traditional galbi, the bone is cut about two inches long, separated into individual bones, and the meat is butterflied into a long, thin ribbon, like this:

In fact, the style of galbi with the bones cut short across the length is called “LA Galbi,” as in “Los Angeles-style.” So the “traditional Korean barbecue” is actually a Korean-American dish.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. You see, flanken-cut ribs aren’t actually all that popular in American cooking either. Where they are often used however, is in Mexican cooking, for tablitas.

So you have to imagine these Korean-American immigrants in 1970s Los Angeles getting a hankering for their traditional barbecue. Perhaps they end up going to a corner butcher shop to buy short ribs. Perhaps that butcher shop is owned by a Mexican family. Perhaps they end up buying flanken-cut short ribs for tablitas because that’s what’s available. Perhaps they get slightly weirded out by the way the bones are cut so short, but give it a chance anyway. “Holy crap this is delicious, and you can use the bones as a little handle too, so now galbi is finger food!” Soon, they actually come to prefer the flanken cut over the traditional cut: it’s easier to cook, easier to serve, and delicious, to boot! 

Time goes on, Asian fusion becomes popular, and suddenly the flanken cut short rib becomes better known as “Korean BBQ,” when it actually originated as a Korean-Mexican fusion dish!

I don’t know that it actually happened this way, but I like to think it did.

Corned beef and cabbage as we know it today? That came to the Irish immigrants via their Jewish neighbors at kosher delis.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/

The Irish immigrants almost solely bought their meat from kosher butchers. And what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish corned beef thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes. The Jewish population in New York City at the time were relatively new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe. The corned beef they made was from brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow. Since brisket is a tougher cut, the salting and cooking processes transformed the meat into the extremely tender, flavorful corned beef we know of today.

The Irish may have been drawn to settling near Jewish neighborhoods and shopping at Jewish butchers because their cultures had many parallels. Both groups were scattered across the globe to escape oppression, had a sacred lost homeland, discriminated against in the US, and had a love for the arts. There was an understanding between the two groups, which was a comfort to the newly arriving immigrants. This relationship can be seen in Irish, Irish-American and Jewish-American folklore. It is not a coincidence that James Joyce made the main character of his masterpiece Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a man born to Jewish and Irish parents. 

Ahh, similar origin to fish and chips in the UK then.

That meal came about either in London or the North of England where Jewish immigrant fried fish venders decided to team up with the Irish cooked potato sellers to produce the meal everyone associates with the UK.

Because while a bunch of stuff from the UK was lifted and adapted from folks we colonised (Mulligatawny soup for example, was an adaptation of a soup recipe found in India and which British chefs tried to approximate back home), some of it was made by folks who actively moved here (like tikka masala, that originated in a restaurant up in Scotland).

Super interesting.

And that’s BEFORE we get into replacing a staple crop! So in the Southern US, you have two groups of people, one who used oats and one who used plantains, and they BOTH replace their staples with corn. And then you get Southern food.

For those interested in a really deep dive on Chinese food in the United States, I cannot over-recommend Jennifer 8 Lee’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

#Happy Labor Day to Shrek I guess

Not all venom fans are monster fuckers 😞 some of us are just aroace disasters who like the idea of a platonic soulmate who likes to murder annoying people for you, is that so bad?

Guys I’m part of the club 🥺

monsterqueerplatonic

We got you, OP.

#sex is weird as fuck might as well add tentacles