Saying that man and woman are the only genders is actually LESS nuanced than saying that earth, water, air, and fire are the only elements.
Our flags mean death
image description: a tweet from [strawberry] Aisling [strawberry] (@ DiscoDeerDiary), timestamped 7:22 AM on 6/2/22
I wish fewer people would see pride flags as nations with borders and laws, and see them more like pirate flags, as a declaration that we’re here to fuck shit up
Matthew Hodson: “ 20 years ago, 2 years after the arrival of combination therapy that effectively treated #HIV, the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s LGBT newspaper ran ‘No Obits’ as its headline. It was the first edition not to report an AIDS death in almost 15 years.”
Y'all need to appreciate that this was practically fucking *yesterday*.
as of today: june 1, 2023, that headline is 2 ½ months shy of being old enough to rent a car
for everyone bad at math, like me lol: the original print date was August 13th, 1998
ANTI-CAPITALIST AFFIRMATIONS
- i am allowed to spend my time creating things, even if they are not beautiful.
- there is no such thing as a "real job." all forms of work are real and valid.
- there is nothing that i need to accomplish to be worthy. i am already worthy.
- doing nothing is good for my soul.
- i am not defined by what i produce.
- my worth cannot be measured by my paycheck, my job title, or a list of professional or academic achievements.
- i do not need to monetize my hobbies, it is enough to spend time doing something i love.
- i will not let society decide what success looks like. i can define what successful life looks like for me.
I’m very tired. you probably heard that Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam to slow Ukraine’s counter offensive. here’s something I didn’t quite realize: since this February, the Russians operated the dam in juuuuust the right way so that as much water would build up as possible when the snow melted and spring showers started. and then they blew the whole thing up.
40,000 people may need to be evacuated. I don’t really have the energy to say anything else right now.
Hospitallers Medical Battalion: actual angels can confirm. they’re combat-zone medical services - you know how humanitarian groups like MFS and Red Cross have to pause operations due to the Russians fucking shooting at humanitarian zones? yeah, these guys don’t pause for bullets, they fucking walk into them and they bring out anyone they can.
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation: you can choose from a number of various fundraiser projects here, if you’re feeling particularly picky. for those of you who balk at the idea of supporting anything military just please remember that things like vehicles and drones aren’t just for military use, they’re also for evacuation and finding the wounded and they’re fucking vital.
KSE Foundation: similar to the above, KSE has multiple projects you can choose from to donate to. looking at it right now, one of the projects with the lowest amounts of money raised thus far - despite being started in April - is Seeds for Ukraine, which will help Ukraine recover from the ecological devastation Russia has been wreaking (and with Ukraine, the countries that rely on Ukraine’s grain exports that Russia keeps trying to steal).
Come Back Alive: do these guys even need the introduction? they’re Come Back Alive. I’m kissing all of them.
United24: Zelenskyy’s brain child, and the official fundraising platform of Ukraine. Mark Hamill recommends the fundraisers for drones in particular.
UAnimals: Nova Kakhovka’s zoo got… pretty much completely swept away. all zoo residents except the birds have drowned. UAnimals has tried throughout the occupation to keep the animals safe, and they’ve been reporting on the status of the zoo. I don’t really know what to say except that I hope they’re able to save the pets and strays in the towns along the river.
- Ukrainian FireFighters Foundation
- Helping To Leave
- VOSTOK SOS
And another good list, every name here will put your money to good use.
@copperbadge, this is the general “help for Ukraine for ppl that don’t know where to donate outside of Ukraine”.
Had a rare request to reblog outside of RFM and the issue seemed urgent enough I wanted to do so. This is post two of two; thanks for notifying me and collecting these resources!
"i have some really amazing trans friends. they're incredibly powerful, beautiful, and important in the world. and that's who i know trans people to be."
/Sonya Renee Taylor, in response to a transphobic coment, The Body Is Not An Apology 2nd edition
A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory.
“We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.”
Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory.
Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school. As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules:
“Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifth.
“I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”
In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint.
“It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.”
Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one.
“To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”
Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. “Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!”
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar nightmare...
I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint.
“Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!”
After class I spoke with the teacher. “So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I asked.
“Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations— dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters— the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards— they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.”
“Um, these high school classes you mentioned...”
“You mean Paint-by-Numbers? We’re seeing much higher enrollments lately. I think it’s mostly coming from parents wanting to make sure their kid gets into a good college. Nothing looks better than Advanced Paint-by-Numbers on a high school transcript.”
“Why do colleges care if you can fill in numbered regions with the corresponding color?”
“Oh, well, you know, it shows clear-headed logical thinking. And of course if a student is planning to major in one of the visual sciences, like fashion or interior decorating, then it’s really a good idea to get your painting requirements out of the way in high school.”
“I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?”
“You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in Painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board.”
Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong.
The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.
—Introduction to "A Mathematician's Lament" by mathematics educator Paul Lockhart. Full essay here:
L with the T 💖
edit: OP is a trans inclusive intersectional feminist. this post is not for “the overlap between trans men and lesbians” (quote from a terf who reblogged this). this post is for trans lesbians, and solidarity between lesbians and trans people. TERFs and other radfems dont reblog or interact.
hey please reblog this version instead so radfems know they are not allowed on this post!
happy pride month to lgbt people who are really boring. we deserve love too
"i just don't like masculine women" literally i'm so sorry for you loss. i hope you get well soon
shouting “DERIVATIVE!” at an art school kid just walking down the street from a moving vehicle, they break down and sob
okay but if i, a guy driving a car, yell that at somebody walking on the sidewalk, that’s not really an insult, that’s just what they are
I read the first part of the post and thought OP was just scaring art students with calculus
it’s very disorienting that rod serling narrated jacques cousteau’s nature documentaries because you start watching and his voice hoves in and youre like IS SOMETHING CREEPY GOING TO HAPPEN TO THE MANATEES but then nothing creepy happens
