Today is the last day of Pride Month, and what better way to mark it than a colourful rainbow of hounds in a rainbow wildflower garden! 🌸 Us Greyhounds come in all colours and sizes, and we don’t care who our humans love as long as they love us too! There’s no room for hate or bigotry in our Rescue Hound Pack (unless it’s hating Greyhound Racing of course! ❌)!

We hope everyone had a joyous Pride Month! Stay Loud and Proud 🌈

#ImageDescription: Robert the Greyhound (fawn/blonde) stands beside Molly (brindle) and Ned (Black) the Greyhounds wearing anti-racing vests and rainbow bandanas in a wildflower garden.

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

this is so well-written I hesitate to even add something, but if you want a direct example of exactly this--exactly the fact that someone can know you and claim to love you and then not do anything at all to help you, here it is, from February 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/comments/10yxa2b/file_this_under_posts_that_make_me_lose_all/

Holy shit. That Reddit post walked up to me and personally slapped me in the fucking mouth.

I made a Worf motivational poster

No means No, even if it's a big name author with tons of lawyers behind them. When they say "please don't show me fan fic," that's enough, and, if they give more detail about why, you don't get to judge whether you think they're telling the truth or not

To clarify: I saw a post where someone said they didn't believe that Big Name Authors were genuinely afraid of being sued, but that instead they were just snobs who hated fanfic and thought saying "oh no I could get sued" was more polite than sharing their true feelings

Another author shared a detailed, eloquent explanation of what a bad take that was, and all of the points were 100% valid

but

No Means No

and I was just so baffled that the OP was more willing to spin a tale of authors all agreeing to the same lie about not wanting to get sued so they could hide their disdain for their fans, than just respecting the requests not to do it

Authors who hate fanfic are not afraid to say so.

Authors who love fanfic are not afraid to say so.

We are not collectively in the business of lying for free. We get paid for that. So no, we're not running a mass conspiracy to lie to you about our feelings.

Sorry to everyone who’s enjoyed the last 130 years of science and culture journalism, but Disney needs the money to fund Toy Story 9

We've decided to upgrade our cookie production by substituting the premium high quality fair trade chocolate chips with various types of chocolate sourced from random people's snack drawers all around the globe. Any insinuation that these changes could negatively impact the consistently delicious taste of our cookies is simply incorrect.

Legally Blonde (2001) dir. Robert Luketic

Independent kitty doesn’t need human

You know, when I see fictional characters who repress all their emotions, they're usually aloof and very blunt about keeping people at a distance, sometimes to an edgy degree—but what I don't see nearly enough are the emotionally repressed characters who are just…mellow.

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

…they've never actually told you anything about themselves.

Adding onto this: characters who are so deeply repressed that they don't even realize they're not fine, or at the very least not supposed to be fine. Characters who do tell you about a situation they're in that should be bad, but instantly laugh it off saying they can handle it (spoiler: they can, in fact, not handle it). Characters who laugh with you and listen to all your woes and much later you learn that they were actually going through something at least equally bad at the time, but they wave it off and don't want to speak of it. Characters whose main coping mechanism seems to be "don't think about it" on endless loop.

Basically, the fictional embodiment of the "this is fine" dog.

"characters" who do this.

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.

Reblogging because it’s a damn potato and I want to encourage people to assume potatoes are magical.

Reblogging because I'm Irish. And I live in the home of these potatoes. And they are magical.

This is what they look like before midnight. But come that magic hour, when the Potato Fairy (great Queen Solanacea herself) visits them and imbues the worthy ones with her power, they take on the true golden gleam and hue that shows forth their goodness to the world.

Only for the hours between midnight and dawn (or when they cross your dash) may they bend the forces of the world to their finders' benefit. After that they conceal their virtue under mere vitamin content and their quality as chips. Yet they are always golden at heart.

So respect the Golden Potato.

delyla’s owner sent me this. this is what she does every time they pull up to my house. 😂

"So YoU'rE sAyInG mEn HaTe OtHeR mEn?"

Yes. Yes I am. And you can ask literally any marginalized man and they will tell you American Patriarchy hates them, too, specifically because they are being men in the "wrong way".

Like fuck, this is feminism 101.

Edit: it's non-radfem feminism 101.

Just look at the way that manosphere wierdos talk in reference to other men: they are competitors to be dominated either socially or with explicit violence. The whole grift is built on selling men the idea that they can climb their way to the top of the pile

^^^ This. It's like a pyramid scheme of abuse. "If you throw fifteen men under the bus and convince five of your friends to throw fifteen other men under the bus, you can Win at Patriarchy, we promise!"

I can't agree enough with this, and it's something more and more men are speaking up about, even if our voices aren't being heard.

Man box culture, as some call it, starts when we're young. It's pervasive - the competition to be a real "man" as defined by violence, dominance, and this absolutely fucked up concept of emotional detachment. It's a raw struggle to not appear weak, and it starts with how adult men treat male children - the toxic values they instill, sometimes with words and sometimes with fists. And even if you grow up in a less toxic and more loving environment, you're never really free from it. Your male role models, male adults like teachers and such, but especially male friends who are your age, all get caught up in this toxic system of abuse. And "real men" don't have emotions, right? So you have to bottle all that up rather than understanding any of it because it's *weakness.* All of that tends to come out in the one emotional state that men allow each other to display: anger. Shit, by the time most boys reach high school, they've been struggling against each other for years. All that hate, that anger, that uncontrollable rage? That's been taught to them long before teenage testosterone hits. And by that time, it's gotten worse because the patriarchy has defined how "real men" see and treat women. Underneath everything is this deep, deep fear of failing and becoming the weak punching bag. There's so much shame to it all.

It isn't always like this for every boy growing up, but no one is left unaware of its existence. And the only true way to stop it begins when we are young.

This is fucking heartbreaking.

One of my friends in law school once opened up to me and a few other people in our mixed-gender friend group that he didn't really have friends before he knew us, even though he thought he did. We sort of nodded like, yeah man, we're glad you're our friend too, sorry people back in your home town were shitty – and he stopped us like, no, you don't understand. He told us that he thought he had friends, and that those people thought that they were his friends – but that his all-male small-town social circle constantly hurled abuse at each other, and that they all thought that that was normal. He told us that he used to go out partying with them, and whereas when we'd go out, we'd talk each other up – like, man, nice shirt, love what you did with your hair, I bet chicks are gonna dig it, etc. – back in his old circle of friends? All they'd ever do before going out was talk each other down. You're dressed worse than your friends? You look like trash. You're dressed better than your friends? Why do you care so much about you're appearance, are you gay? You're dressed exactly the same as your friends? Wow, look at this loser copying other people's look. You could never win, you could never even break even, and you were expected to not only put up with this, but to participate, because that sort of normalized constant stream of verbal abuse was the main way that you and other men your age socialized. He literally did not realize that men could have actual, real friendships – with women, sure, but also with other men – until he met us, because to him, the act of hanging out with people who you weren't dating was so deeply intertwined with toxic competitive expectations that he flat out didn't know that there was a different way to be until he moved halfway across the country for law school in his late 20s.

It's incredibly fucked up, and men should be able to talk about what a patriarchal culture like that does to them without being silenced.

In case no one told you growing up

To all the kids whose parents couldn’t help you with this kind of stuff

This post literally had me going “Oh shit! My bras are outside!” out loud, so I would add “Take your laundry in after line drying it so that it doesn’t get spiders.”

(I don’t know if there are spiders in my bras. This is now my spouse’s job to find out.)

Was reading this with great enjoyment, and then hit the about airing out your house and misread “silverfish” as “shellfish”. And (on the wings of the mental image the phrase then provoked) did a doubletake that nearly gave me whiplash; then laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe for about thirty seconds.

Thank you, OP. That was blessedly cathartic. :)

Also: I need new glasses AGAIN. (sigh)

which emo origin story is the least realistic

-sixteen year old boys being kicked out and running off with chicago hardcore king to spray mace on their assholes and eat pastries out of butts and also play shows with a band that doesnt have a name -teenage boys, one of which went to catholic school and the another whos a mormon, being kicked out and contacting the now-famous chicago hardcore king telling him he sucks and to check out their band, then having a record label created to sign them and produce their record about the sanctity of marriage and prostitution and drugs and alcoholism despite the lead singer never having stayed up past his bedtime, never had caffiene, and skipped band practice to go to church -the bassist of a band going off into the desert, doing drugs, getting bitten by a snake, and hallucinating that the snake is telling him that he needs to start a band thats synthpop with angels, made an obnoxious cover of hollaback girl, which went viral and caught the attention of ex chicago hardcore king who now had a record label

-disillusioned ex-catholic cartoon network employee has life-changing epiphany, develops punk rock messiah complex, recruits long-suffering little brother, disembodied afro, microscopic pothead and amorphous mass of drummers for star wars, drugs and rock n roll. accusations of cult leadership ensue.

Color has been disappearing from the world.

A new research group used machine learning to track color changes in common materials and items, below is their findings for all color changes over time, they used 7000+ items from the 1800s to now to determine color changes in the most common items.

Below are the colors of cars by year, notice how the majority of cars are grey, white, or black compared to twenty years ago.

These aren't data points, but they are comparisons between the 'modern' homes of the 70s and 80s compared to the modern homes of today.

Carpets have equally had the same treatment of grey added to them! The most common color of carpet is now grey or beige.

Even locations that used to scream with color for decades have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) personality-less locations.

The world is becoming colorless, why?

source paper

you can look at any folk culture around the world, past or present, and find the use of the entire color spectrum. humans are drawn to color, it holds emotional symbolism but it also reflects the land we live off of. I consider it like a celebration of life and our place in it

the problem is that we aren’t actually allowed to belong to the places we live. houses and entire towns are shells meant to be as plain as possible for the next renter, buyer, or investor. the more generic it is, the more consumers it can be sold to. And when you have a country that’s biggest population doesn’t have a distinct sense of cultural identity it will be reflected and mass produced without much complaint

people getting joy from the minimalist gray aesthetic is not the same as the estrangement this country is making between people and place, one of the most fundamental relationships humans need to survive (and be happy while doing it)

Films depict middle ages as devoid of color but it's the other way around.

you gotta include this photo

ağlıycam

This is it. The internet has come full circle. You can all go home now. We’re done.

not sure if this will make sense to anyone besides me but: the antidote to negativity is not positivity, its warmth

positivity tells a sad person that there is no reason to be sad. warmth asks the sad person if they want to go get some ice cream

Been a moment since I saw this. Glad it’s back on my dash when I needed it.