Some things just so y’all are clear:

Whelp, let me dust off the ol' Tumblr since this is going around. Speaking as one of FOUR people who got the cease and desist from Anne Rice (we're still around, folks! you can just ask us!) let me clear up a few things here:

I'm only here because a friend gave me a heads up about this so any replies I'm not going to see. But if you want to follow me around the internet I do have a newsletter so hey, come see me talk about things including probably the IWTV show once I get around to watching it!

https://www.tbqtalks.com/

one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you’re going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you’ll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you’ll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar’s history, you’ll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as “guys” and “boys”, you’ll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have “he / him” painted on his chest, and you’ll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you’ll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how “problematic” it all was and it’s honestly tragic

Once, back when I worked in an LGBTQIA dungeon, I encountered a significantly older person who remarked to me that they hadn’t been to “this type of place” in decades. They struck up a conversation with me and told me how amazing it was to see an openly transexual youth such as myself. I asked them about their experiences with gender and they said “oh, well, I’m a bit male and a bit female. Men’s and women’s clothes, sometimes makeup in a suit, sometime fresh faced in a dress when I’m at home. You know, bisexual” Obv this puzzled me at first until I realized this person was using bisexual in a very, very, literal and old fashioned sense, as in, dual-sexed. Non-binary.

Y’all gotta understand there are generation gaps in the language we use and you open yourself up to a LOT of very interesting stories if you stop blocking off the past.

My Goddamn TFATWS Essay

CW: This essay is about about trauma, including everything Bucky was subjected to, as well as mentions of interpersonal trauma, sexual assault, and incest. It also discusses victim-blaming at length. SPOILERS ABOUND.

I was already planning to write my opinions about Bucky in TFATWS, and then a lovely anon sent me the article by Rotem Rusak, “How Falcon and The Winter Soldier Villainizes Trauma.” So I figured I’d comment on the article and offer other opinions in a huge-ass essay that maybe five people will actually read. 

I have real respect for Rusak, especially this essay on Stucky, much of which I agree with. I think Rusak’s most recent essay was well composed in many ways, and it seems like it was quite moving for some folks. I get where she’s coming from, I really do, and I can see why reading the show this way would be extremely upsetting. I respect this essay and its place in an ongoing conversation about the show. I also strongly disagree with pretty much her entire premise. 

I’d like to offer a completely different interpretation of TFATWS where Bucky is not fragilized, is an agent of his own healing, and does not need to be the subject of our own interpretation of what his healing has to be. I’ll also attempt to make the argument that assuming his fragility and diminishing his many, many acts of meaningful agency in TFATWS is a disservice to this character. 

THIS. ALL OF IT. EVERY FUCKING WORD. THANK YOU.

I read this article, got homesick to the point of actual nausea, and worked out my feelings via a scribbling:

I'm from Louisiana and grew up Mississippi. You want to write stuff set in the south, hit me up.

The fan art is sending me. <3 <3 <3

The Witch’s Cat Pins and Stickers

Aurigae Art on Etsy

@rob-anybody

celebrities that get it

this is SO cute my heart is convulsing

incredible!!!!!!!

These are all great stories but as a heads-up Indya’s pronouns are they/them. Don’t let that article about them mislead you.

Unpopular but true: a large reason why grocery store are empty now isn’t just because there’s a bunch of greedy, awful people panic everything in sight to spite others. Sure, there’s some hoarding assholes, but a lot of it is people realizing they will now need over a month’s worth of groceries in one go when they might usually only buy enough to last them a week, maybe two, and people who can no longer supplement with going out, people who are now eating three meals at home when usually their kids eat lunch at school and they have lunch at the office… that’s a hell of a lot more food than most families need to have on hand, including people who normally never cook and just grubhub everything. The food supply chains will hopefully stabilize a bit in the coming weeks - just wanted to point out it’s not all malicious and people aren’t as awful as is being said. I’m under self imposed quarantine, social distancing, working from home and staying away from others. Hoping all of you guys are safe and feeling ok.

just about every person coming through my line at the grocery store is just buying what they’d usually buy when they buy groceries.  They’re just buying MORE of it than they’d usually buy.  Because they’re needing more than they’d usually need.  I lost count of how many times I was asked if we had any more eggs simply because people told me they were cooking sit down breakfasts for their kids now instead of ‘something they can send them out the door on the way to school with’.  We’re not sold out of milk because we’ve got milk hoarders stalking up their garage for the next five months with milk.  We’re out of milk because everyone’s home now and drinking more of it.  Same with bread.  Our cake mixes aren’t flying off the shelves because people are worried about dessert shortages.  It’s because people are home and doing baking with their free time.  So - yeah - there are some assholes out there hoarding shit.  But its not that simple.  It’s rarely that simple.  Beware of people that tell you its that simple.

should also point out that my store, and most others, have, for a couple weeks now, had a limit on how much of a certain thing people can buy.  So no, even when we do get trucks in, no one’s walking out of our store with two cartloads full of toilet paper.  And I’ve only had to turn away two people that tried to overbuy in the past two weeks as well.

Huh. Hadn’t thought about it like that before

#we should all try to be critical and thoughtful when encountering narratives that suggest that humanity is inherently selfish #or promotes the perspective of viewing your community as a hoard that you’re separate from#cause these beliefs really do limit your ability to trust in your neighbors and establish mutual aid networks &#make you more susceptible to eugenics propaganda#criticize individuals behaving badly or even specific behavior that is widespread- but when it comes to criticizing ‘humanity’ or whatever#be careful and think about what you actually mean#I saw someone criticizing getting 3 months of meds & like I normally get my meds in 3 month batches as of like a year ago#cause I’ve been consistently on the same meds for like half a decade#and also I don’t know if I’ll even be able to see my psychiatrist in the coming months (via @closet-keys​)

It’s lovely that people want to help and that Christian Siriano has moved to producing masks (and gowns), but unfortunately they are not effective. 

FWIW Christian’s masks aren’t being made for people who are on the front lines of dealing with the virus (aka those who need the N95s). They’re for the people a few layers removed from that (per the article: “receptionists, social workers, and medical coders and billers.”) I’ve seen this as well in various articles about hospitals directly requesting cloth masks. Obviously I can’t speak for every hospital but in the research I’ve done this seems to be the plan.

Basically the idea is that yes, proper PPE is best but given that we’re in a situation where PPE is severely limited, the cloth masks are intended to be a stop-gap solution to help free up the proper PPE for those actually treating patients.

The cloth masks are also being designed to be like the cloth masks which were used by medical personnel before current disposable masks were the norm (link is just one example of these requests directly from hospitals). Which of course isn’t to say that this makes them totally fine, there’s a reason why the disposable masks became the standard. But for people who normally wouldn’t be wearing any masks as part of their job the thought is that using old school PPE is again better than nothing and leaves more PPE available for those who need it for patient care.

It is important to remember that the cloth masks are not a replacement for proper PPE, and people who want to help by making cloth masks should coordinate with their local medical facilities to see what they need and how they should be made, if at all.

things i learned from captain marvel

5. You should always respect a cat’s personal space(extremely true)

It’s two am and I tried not to laugh

If this isn’t accurate, I don’t know what is.

Okay I’m gonna get my nerd on here for a minute because one of the things I love about history is what people did at home. Forget your huge wars and royals and whatnot, how did they handle feeding themselves and going to bed?

World War II is a great time for studying this sort of thing because of the need for rationing. Britain in particular had a time of it because once you cut off access to, yanno, the entire world it becomes a very tiny island without a lot of resources to self-sustain. There’s no orange groves in Britain, for instance. Plus global trade meant relying on things from other countries. For example, Britain grew its own cereal crops (eg. wheat, barley, etc) for centuries but then it was cheaper to import them from America so farms turned away from that to focus on things like meat and dairy production. To give an idea of scale, in 1939 Britain imported something in the neighborhood of 20 MILLION tons of food.

So the start of World War II meant not only having to figure out where in the ever loving fuck the food was going to come from, but having to completely revamp farming as the nation understood and was set up for it. Many of us know the West Wing quote about how during WWII FDR said the US would produce 50,000 airplanes and instead managed 100,000. Britain had to do the exact same thing with food.*

(*Note: other countries did as well, of course, such as the US which is where this artwork is from. I’m focusing on Britain to keep this simple though.)

The way you make up for that 20 million tons of food is both by making more and using less.

Making more is a fascinating study on the topic of how farming was changed forever in Britain. But the key takeaway for the purpose of this discussion is what also ties in with using less: People had to pitch in.

These days we think of WWII and we know the stories of victory gardens, Make Do and Mend, ration books, and so on. We remember how people during this time dug in, found inner strength, and did what they needed to do.

But the thing is that didn’t happen automatically.

At the start of WWII preparations went into place. People were taught about blackout curtains and preparing for gas attacks (a reasonable worry after WWI) and so on, but the war didn’t hit them on the home front right away. This led to a period of time of people basically looking around and going huh, we did all this for nothing. Whole buncha hype for no reason.

It was only with time that the danger started to get close, and the need for the extra food came into play. And even then it wasn’t as though ration books were handed out and people went whelp, guess that’s goodbye to meat and sugar for this week! People still had to be brought on board with the concept.

Hence the need for artwork like at the top of this post. “A Fair Share” was a key phrase at the time. It was used to remind people and teach them that they and their neighbors were all in this together. Heck, not just them but their loved ones on the front lines: if you hoarded food, for example, that meant more food was needed, more work for everyone else, more that might have to take the risk of being imported, more chance that ships might get shot down by Germany bringing those supplies to you. You had to do your fair share and thus get your fair share.

Mind you it also helped that leaders stepped in and did the same. Now granted it’s propaganda of a sort but even so the royal family used ration books. Queen Elizabeth 2 (then only a princess) famously used them to get enough cloth for her wedding dress. Of course the royal family had resources the average person did not, not the least of which was their own farm, but even so they understood the importance of showing that they were doing their part.

The other thing about rationing that people don’t realize is that it didn’t stop when the war ended. Most know that rationing got harder and tighter over the duration of the war but it’s not like VE Day suddenly made the food appear. World War II ended on September 2, 1945. Rationing ended July 4, 1954.

(That wedding dress I mentioned earlier? She got married in 1947. Still using ration books.)

So when you look at the above picture, realize that it’s more than just a quick comment about a single concept. Know that it was about a people who were told of a danger, had the knowledge to prepare but thought the requests for it were exaggerated, were hit hard once the danger arrived, may or may not have had exemplary guidance from those in charge on what to do, even so had to dig deep and learn how to work with their neighbors and countrymen to embrace entirely new ways of living so that they all could survive, and who had to keep working and sacrificing for that survival long after the active danger had passed.

...which of course is COMPLETELY unlike any situation we find ourselves in today.

Ahem.

Ferret shows the owner her babies.

I’m straight up CRYING

Excuse YOU I said my children need WARMTH and LOVE!