At Target this lady told her son he couldn’t have a Wonder Woman doll because “that’s for girls” and then bought her daughter the same one. It got me thinking about how often I see people bar young boys from appreciating girls/women as protagonists and heroes, and my own experience with it as a kid.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others of the Day: Hint: It’s the one with the cover story about how it’s completely okay, if not beneficial, to feel unease about future uncertainties, as opposed to, say, riot in the streets until sh*t gets done.

Sadly, this is a fairly common occurrence.

[@ggreenwald.]

Wow…this says a lot.

This seems relevant today as well.

Calm Before the Storm © Julie Fletcher

The 2016 College Rapist Calendar!

It’s finally here!! It’s the all new 2016 College Rapist calendar!! This year we’ve got all your favorite hunky college bros who have also raped! Get to know each and every one of these guys’ likes and dislikes- such as who eats peanut butter and who doesn’t! Learn about their guilty pleasures that may or may not involve your favorite wine! Find out about what people are saying such as “HELP!!!” It’s all here ladies!!! This calendar has all the steamy pin ups you need to get you through the hottest days of August and the coldest days of December. We’ve got everyone from Brock Turner to the faceless men who have been protected by their oh-so-bored universities. Best of all, the proceeds go to a good cause- the defense of more of these fabulous hotties!!!! Enjoy!!!!

Good cause: The rapists are seen by many as athletes or good students

Looking Good: Cap and gown balance out rape look

Unity: They can’t help but love themselves 

Posing: The men were chosen for their grossness

Special: The money will help victims of rape accusations 

Welcome to the space age, ladies and gentlemen

HELL YEA HELL YEA

White dudes: I don’t know who’s worse: Hillary or Trump.

LGBTQ people: Trump is.

Black people: Trump is.

Undocumented immigrants: Trump.

Muslims: It’s Trump.

Women: Trump duh.

White dudes: *shoves head deeper into ass* I just… don’t… know…

A particularly timely portion of Neil Gaiman’s wholly terrific wisdom on why we read and what books do for the human experience. 

I believe this as much as when I wrote it. Perhaps more, if that is possible.

Wow, I had no idea Satan was so knowledgeable and generous with his time.

#TeamSatan

Can satan come teach a class at my school

Amusingly, among the Western European demon-conjuring cults of the 16th Century, many demons were greatly valued for their skill as teachers, often to the point that grimoires would place greater emphasis on the subjects each demon was qualified to teach than on their supernatural powers.

For example, this guy?

Teaches moral philosophy.

And this creepy dude?

He’s your astronomy professor.

Seriously, look this stuff up some time - it’s wild.

I now want a comic or cartoon series about demon teachers and their human students. Not sure if it should be college or high school.

“Aw, man - I got Professor Lionwheel. I hear if you fail his exams, he eats your legs.”

“Yeah, but he’s supposed to be really good about keeping regular office hours.”

“Huh. Sort of a trade-off, really.”

awweee, that long legged owl is so cuteeee!

#mswl

Dear Donald Trump,

I’m a firm believer that politics should be kept out of our military and that our military should be kept out of politics. However, over the last week, a line was crossed not just between politics and our military but between personal ideology and human decency.

You recently told a crowd of your supporters, upon receiving a replica Purple Heart, that you’d, “always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.”

Mr. Trump, I’m not a campaign manager. I can’t tell you how to run this race. But I say this as someone who knows you. I’ve met you before and you seemed as though you genuinely cared about my service and sacrifice. I wonder which version is the real you.

I am a proud post-9/11 U.S. Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient. When I first joined the military, like many other service members, I had dreams of serving valiantly and one day receiving many military accolades in service of our great nation.

In April 2003, the humvee I was driving outside of Karbala, Iraq, ran over a roadside bomb. The passengers were immediately ejected as a result of the blast, but I was trapped inside the burning vehicle for five minutes. I can tell you without equivocation that the one award I did not want to receive was a Purple Heart, but I got one anyway. And I’ll tell you now, I didn’t get mine the easy way.

I came home to my mother with third-degree burns over 33% of my body. I have had 30-plus surgeries to repair the skin grafts and tissue expanders since 2003. I came home a Purple Heart recipient, but my mother knew that we were only a few heartbeats away from giving her a new designation — a Gold Star.

So far you seem to have denigrated a prisoner of war, disparaged a four-star general who devoted his life to service, and disrespected the faith and the grief of a Gold Star family.  Any one of these actions alone would otherwise disqualify a person auditioning for the role of our commander in chief.

I cannot understand why you have continually attempted to dishonor the memory of Army Captain Humayun Khan. You have repeatedly attempted to link him and his family to radical Islamic terrorism by even bringing their names up in the same sentence.

You say that you support our military, but your actions tell a different story. You assert that you have made sacrifices on par with the Khan family. I must ask you; do you truly understand the fundamental difference between investments and sacrifice?

Your reaction to his family’s emotional statement has shown me two things: First, you have a difficult time picking your battles. In the military, this is an important lesson that soldiers learn. You attended a military academy in your childhood and you are a businessman, so I know you understand this strategy.

If your response to this family had simply been to acknowledge their ultimate sacrifice and to say that as Americans, they are constitutionally entitled to their opinions, that would have been enough. You chose a different tactic. You chose to stay in the news cycle with your increasingly outrageous statements of condemnation of a family who, by all accounts, should absolutely be off limits.

How can we trust our military in the hands of a commander in chief who we can’t even trust to comfort the parents of a fallen soldier?

Second, your reaction also tells me that since you have difficulty dealing with the opinions of a private citizen of this country, you will almost certainly have a harder time in the world of global politics.  

My 4-year-old daughter has a better sense of human empathy around this subject. When I take her to the park and other children stare at the scars that cover my face and arms, she takes my hand and encourages me to talk to those young children and explain why I look the way I look.

My hope is that your actions and words do not continue to erode our civil discourse. I pray that good people in this country continue to be shocked by your rhetoric because that means they agree that your words and actions have no place in society, much less in the Oval Office.

You have stated that all press is good press. It’s an interesting strategy that has thus far worked for you. But this, the memory of our fallen soldiers, their families, former POWs, and the proud recipients of the Purple Heart honor. This is not the position from which you should be getting your press. This is off-limits.

Please remember that the people you are speaking about, our brave men and women of the armed forces make up less than 1% of the population. However, if you become commander in chief, they will be the people who are going to fight for you regardless of personal politics. These are the people who will defend you. These are their families you are talking about. These are not the people you want to continue to carry out your petty grievances and personal attacks with.

I respectfully suggest you get a primer on the word sacrifice, as well as a lesson in human decency.

- J.R. Martinez (x) | follow @the-movemnt

it’s long, but please read this

“Every kid deserves to be the hero of their own story.” 

WNDB is so proud to present this video of Young Adult authors talking about why they write and who they write for.

Kilvin and Kvothe, The Name of the Wind, p.496 (via hummelhimmel)

WHOA

Surreal Monochromatic GIFs by Carl Burton

When you make an animated film, you end up making A TON of drawings.  A lot of those drawings are just to help describe how something is constructed or how it should move.  Those drawings can get boring.  So to keep it fun, the Zootopia drawings got weirder and weirder.  Here’s some mildly weird ones.

My buddy @thecommaspace and I did a collab! He did the rough animation and I painted every frame. Went for the#tonkohouse feel. It seemed right with the character design. Be on the lookout for more from this little guy.

Warren Keelan

Important information.

@neil-gaiman and amanda are the reason i didn’t attempt suicide three years ago. i was quite seriously contemplating going through with it, asked neil– being an inappropriate teen that i was–, he told me it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. here i am a few years later. went to see a therapist in december. it’s slowly getting better

I’m so glad.

Landthropologic, Earthworks In Motion: Stunning Animated Land Art Experiments by Paul Johnson

If you explain how disabled people are important by focusing on what they can do then you’re missing the fucking point

Forgive me for asking, but...what /is/ the point?

people have no idea what its like to be 14 and have everyone telling you that you’re faking and pretending to be ill for attention or to skip art class and the doctor’s telling you you’re ‘just being a teenager’ when you actually had a serious kidney disease

if someone hadn’t eventually listened to me i would have died

Please, please support self-diagnosed teenagers, don’t pretend they’re not really disabled, don’t belittle or mock them, don’t exclude them from disabled spaces and for the love of god don’t pretend you know more about them than they do

i am disabled to this day because when i was a teenage girl, my doctors didn’t take me seriously. when i said i was in extreme pain, they said i just wasn’t trying hard enough at physical therapy to repair a broken ankle. turns out they’d fucked up the surgery to fix it, and their neglect of my months of complaints meant it was damaged beyond repair. i still have mobility issues 8 years later, will have pain and require surgeries throughout my life and will, always, be disabled. because of them. because of the silencing of girls’ voices, in all spheres. because doctors do not value the voices of teenaged girls.

When I was twelve, the knee specialist I had finally convinced my mom to take me to (after years of begging) told me that my knees hurt because of my hips widening.

“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I can’t walk when it happens, it hurts so bad. It’s been since I was a little kid.”

“It might twinge a bit, sure,” he told me. “Go to physical therapy for a few weeks.” I burst into tears.

My mom then refused to take me to physical therapy, because it was a long drive and the doctor said it wasn’t serious, so why should she bother? That was the start of her not listening to any complaint about my joints I ever had.

As it turns out, my knees were dislocating every couple of days. She and my doctors ignored and taught me to ignore sprains, fractures, cartilage tears, and dislocations until I moved out and learned that it wasn’t normal. I missed out on years of my life because of my doctor not only discounting the experience of a young girl, but fully blaming my pain on the fact of my being a young girl.

Listen to children when they tell you something is wrong with their bodies.

I had stomach pains for years as a kid. Almost daily. I was blamed as a faker. 

I have Celiac.

People know what the hell is going on with their own bodies. If they don’t think something is right fucking listen to them.

In their study, “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” researchers Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian documented the degree to which girl’s and women’s pain is routinely dismissed as the “not real,” “emotional,” response of “fragile” females. Not only are girls and women who experience pain less likely to be taken seriously when they describe it, but they are less likely to be treated by medical professionals.