"It doesn't have to be like this. We could have it so much better"
Calligraffiti in Chicago, Illinois
latinumbi-deactivated20210509
Everyone needs a picture of J. G. Hertzler (Martok) holding a gay bat'leth on their dash
Chancellor Martok said gay rights, rb if u agree
Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?
Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.
All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)
But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.
But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.
I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?
It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.
Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.
Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, my Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler selling Pride merch
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler selling new genders
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler splashing stripes of paint onto cheap white flags and trying to sell them at a premium because they’re new, exclusive genders, made only 5 minutes ago by a gay council on a mountain somewhere
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler offering to sell portions of his own gender in a time-share type situation to people who can’t afford a whole gender
He's just checking his email.
New coupons for a cheezburger came in
LOL [source]
From the thumbnnail I thought that it was just a jacket thrown over a box that the kitty had made himself comfortable on. I was NOT expecting the tiny little defeated voice to emerge.
The slight hand raised in surrender at the end
1. A type of turtle called a Coastal plain cooter (Pseudemys floridana) is hit by a car near my apartment
2. The injured turtle is brought to my veterinary school for medical care while I am on rotation in the wildlife ward
3. The turtle is assigned to my classmate (not someone I know terribly well) as a patient
4. The turtle is treated for a minor shell fracture and my classmate spends two weeks taking care of the animal (in addition to a box turtle)
5. The turtle with the shell fracture recovers very well and is cleared for release into the wild, in a pond near where it was found
6. While birding at the pond some time later I see a turtle of this species out sunning itself and am excited to think it is my classmate’s former patient
7. Next time I see my classmate I say, at full volume in front of people, “hey I think I saw your cooter!”
If it's any consolation, when my aunt was getting her equine medicine degree, she had an anatomy professor that called his weekly tests "Quizzies".
The first time my aunt had one of these weekly tests, she found it unexpectedly difficult, and upon completion of the "Quizzie", walked up to the front of the class, slapped the paper down and loudly announced "If this is one of your "Quizzies" I dread seeing your "Testies"!"
A thing that bothers me about wizard schools in popular media – outside of the magic-grade-school stuff, anyway – is that they're typically depicted as being basically magic universities, but their actual curricula and pedagogical approaches look much more like those of a technical institution. Like, buddy, that's not a wizard university, that's a wizard trade school. You can't just slap university student culture on top of trade school pedagogy. It doesn't work like that – the one emerges from the other!
"Well ACTUALLY wizards are" wizards are made up. They can be analogous to whatever real-world class or vocation the author wants. Wizard-school-as-university and wizard-school-as-technical-institute are both perfectly fine; what I am grumping about is wizard-school media that doesn't seem to have a clear picture of how different sorts of educational institutions actually operate.
Okay but now I really want to know what a Wizard technician would look like. Would he wear magical overalls with all kinds of reagents and magic tools sticking out of his numerous pockets?
A guy like that walks into your tower with a toothpick in his mouth, takes one look at your summoning circle and goes
“I see yer problem. You used chalk B12 instead of S3. B12 is only for transmutation circles. Gimme a sec I think I have a piece somewhere here.”
He fixes your circle, test summons an imp and goes.
“There ya go. Fit as a fiddle.”
“It’s the chalk.”
“The chalk? I always use that chalk, it’s never been a problem.”
“Ah - yes. This stuff will work just fine for most circles, but, uh - here, take a look with my loupe. You see the off-color flecks? Can’t hardly see them with the naked eye, but those are impurities. Silicates, might even be some iron in here, to be honest. Usually won’t cause a problem, but - you said you hadn’t tried this particular summons before?”
“First time trying a 5th level, yeah.”
“Those silicates will make your scribing a little fuzzy when viewed from the astral plane. You see, for example, these three fine lines here? With this chalk, on the astral that looks like one thick line with fuzzy edges. They can’t tell exactly what you want, and they’re picky lil’ critters so they just won’t do anything in response.”
“Really? Oh. I always thought the expensive chalk was just fancy to be fancy.”
“Making pure chalk is difficult, you need a dedicated production line or dust gets in the finished product. To be honest, you don’t need to bother with it for most things, but 5th and up, 5th level and up, it actually is necessary. Anything with lines within about two millimeters of each other.”
“So I need to start over?”
“Unfortunately yes. You’ll have to erase all this, but with some good chalk it should work just fine. Next new moon your summons should go off without a hitch.”
“Dang. At least it’s not my sigils, I was worried it was my sigils.”
“Nah Your sigils look good. Even and balanced. You know what you’re doing, it’s just an equipment problem.”
“Thanks for the help, sorry to make you come all the way out here.”
“No problem! It’s my job.”
AI generated art depicting history and archaeology is actively spreading ignorance
Follow real archaeologists and historians and creators sharing real stuff, not this fake crap that looks nice and pretends to be authentic but gets everything wrong
My plan for the public transit system is to make bus drivers into a sort of holyman whose role is cherished in society. Then we give them access to all the ecstasy they want and they're expected to take it on the job.
just fucking look at this thing. this is a Divine Machine. look at its Glands and Appendages
speak your truth sister
Rocky Horror is turning 50 next month and people still act like being gay was invented by Ellen in 1997
But honestly! Renowned French poet Théophile de Viau wrote the poetic ode to King James titled "The Duke of Buckingham," containing the immortal lines "One man fucks Monsieur le Grand de Bellegarde/Another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre/And it is well known that the King of England/Fucks the Duke of Buckingham" exactly 400 years ago and people still act like being gay was invented by Oscar Wilde in 1890
Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were buried together in the 25th century BC and people still act like being gay was invented by renowned French poet Théophile de Viau 400 years ago
Gilgamesh and Enkidu "loved each other like man and wife" in 2700 BC and ppl STILL act like being gay was invented by Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in the 25th century BC
The worst thing filmmaker’s ever did was decide that because it’s called “Dracula” it must be because it’s about the actual guy Dracula and his melancholic woes and alluring world of darkness and seduction and not the fact that every single character in the book hates him. Every single worker he comes across cusses him out and tells him he’s ugly and his vibes are rancid. Jonathan Harker wants to chop him up with a machete Quincy wants to shoot him so bad Renfield wants to crush his windpipe Van Helsing and Seward and Arthur and Mina and everyone else want him dead by impalement and decapitation. It’s called “Dracula” because every single character wants a piece of that bastard.
So fun fact: At some point in my life I got it into my head I wanted to make a Highly Ambitious Sci-Fi Simulation Murder Mystery Game, where all the characters in it were fully simulated and had their little simulated goals and ANY of them could have done it and it was up to you to piece together the clues they’d naturally leave behind in the wake of their nefarious deeds to decide who actually had the means and opportunity as you slowly realized EVERYONE present had motive. Obviously, it would be a riff on Murder on the Orient Express, but that’s not important. But, when I realized that I wanted to have a SINGLE person be the target of all that aggression, I realized in my heart of hearts that person had to be Dracula. And BOY did the plot of the game write itself out at that point. So many various reasons people could want this bastard dead.
Ultimately, the ambitiousness of the simulation was its undoing: I wasn’t yet in a point in my programmer skill tree where I knew how to properly debug AI, so it ended up unfinished (and for a platform I no longer have access to, alas). HOWEVER let me leave you with my very favorite bug: Because I needed lots of reasons for characters to be constantly moving around and not just holing up in their space-train cars, they had various bodily needs, like hunger and thirst and the need to go to the bathroom, you know, normal things. Imagine my horror and delight when I was running a test game to figure out why Dracula kept Not Getting Murdered only to discover he was *LOCKING HIMSELF IN THE BATHROOM AND PISSING ETERNALLY*. Turns out I had a bug where you just...wouldn’t stop. I ALSO had a bug with the locking mechanism and people could let themselves IN but not out, so eventually the entire cast ended up there in the Infinite Piss room, unable to leave, and unwilling to murder because of all the witnesses. Hell is real and its a buggy simulation game.
Op I’ve been laughing at this for 5 minutes. Literally have tears streaming down my face.
Y... you're OP.