Glad To Be Gay

Curses, Inc. and Other Stories Vivian Vande Velde

I would like to humbly request that more artist redo marginalia in their preferred style, please.

they’re literally so stupid like

2020 Commemorative custom Blueberry guitar for Aurelio Voltaire

"please buy crabs so that Tumblr doesn't have to implement changes we hate to become profitable" right, let me explain something about capitalism.

Tumblr didn't change course because they need the cash and are down on their luck. they did it because corporations want growth.

and that desire for growth is gonna be the same whether they have negative infinity money or positive infinity money. a corporation seeks money and growth.

if Tumblr suddenly became profitable after announcing these changes, it's not even that it would send the wrong message, although it would.

it's that Tumblr wouldn't be taking care of us better if only it weren't for the cruel realities of the world. it's a subsidiary of a corporation. it doesn't care.

it's still going to keep the changes that it thinks are profitable, and ignore changes it thinks won't be. Tumblr is not our friend, it is a website we use, and it wants to profit from us regardless of if that's in our best interest and regardless of if it has "enough" money. that is the relationship. don't get it twisted.

I don’t get it, man. why. why do we have to homogenize everything. why does every product have to look and behave and feel the exact same way. why can’t tumblr maintain its individuality? why can’t it lean into the things that make it a unique and refreshing offering instead of scrambling to make it a carbon copy of twitter? sucks, man. sucks.

i keep loling thinking about how tumblr thinks

everyone's saying it but yeah the new tumblr desktop layout is complete garbage lmao

yknow what i really can't fucking stand. how every social media now feels like it's designed for mobile first but then subsequently there is NO design for desktop and they just kinda slap a mobile interface onto a widescreen canvas and fill it with a solid color. like why is what feels like 60% of my dashboard just negative space on a 16:9 monitor. the entire thing is so fucking claustrophobic and just bunched together. use the space!!!! why are the timeline switcher tabs at the top of the screen getting cut off!!! you could fit all of them!!!

This Google Drive AI scraping bullshit actually makes me want to cry. My entire life is packed into Google Drive. All of my writing over the years, all of my academic documents, everything.

I’m just so overwhelmed with all the shit I’m going to have to move. I’m lucky to have Scrivener, but online data storage has been super important as I’ve had so many shitty computers, and the only reason I haven’t lost work is because Google Drive has been my backup storage unit.

My partner has recommended gitlab to move my files to - it seems useful, and I can try and explain more about what it is and how it works when I get more familiar with it. I’m unsure if it’s a text editor, or can work that way. He was explaining something about the version history that I don’t quite understand right now but might later. I’m just super overwhelmed and frustrated that this is the dystopia we live in right now.

Welcome to the future, where you don’t own anything and the stuff you rent stops working once your phone has no signal.

App powered car? 🤦‍♀️

I wish people remembered the age old wisdom that if something doesn’t absolutely require an Internet connection to function, it shouldn’t be connected to the internet - same goes for apps.

WHY IS A CATFOOD DISPENSER CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET

Sometimes I’m glad that I’m too poor for my “cool future stuff” monkey brain to be set loose to buy stupid shit like this.

please please please do not buy into the Internet of Things. Digital displays for appliances are one thing, but you shouldn’t need the fucking internet to do your laundry or use the fridge.

On harm reduction and understanding NSSI! Many autistic folk have normalised harmful behaviours as coping mechanisms in our daily lives and this comic is meant to help people recognise their self injuring behaviours and (hopefully) begin to see pathways to reducing their frequency.

I'd really love a version of "The Menu" from Judith Light's character's perspective.

She's just going about her business, going to dinner with her shitty husband again. There's a girl there that kind of looks like her daughter and she is like, "Doesn't she look like Claire?" and the husband shuts her down, so it's back to eating in silence.

Then the toritllas delicioso (should it be 'a?) come. And she realizes that very girl she thought looked like her daughter? Is an escort. And her husband cheated on her with this escort.

Who looks like their daughter.

We see Erin/Margot tell Chef about how the Husband (I refuse to learn his name) rattled her, by making her pretend to be the daughter.

But we never see the realization really, in the Wife about how gross he is. How much does she guess?

And there's that great moment where they cut off his finger and then give her his ring back, like this is totally normal. What does she do with the ring? Does she wear it? Put it in her purse?

The moment when all the women get to sit around the table togetehr to wait for the men? She tries to make the sous chef feel better when she cries and is like "I don't usually like... foam." I don't know if that is genuine sympathy or her trying to ingratiate herself, but it's not as obviously about trying to save herself as the food writer's ploy.

We know by the end that she has given up fighting it. She says "thank you" when Chef lights the fire to "make them clean."

But I want to know when she bought into it. Was like, "Well, this is happening."

I also, and I've said this before, really like that she gives Margot a "shoo" motion with her hand. She doesn't hold the cheating against the service worker, and that's the opposite of how a lot of women respond. Maybe she knows her husband is gross. Maybe she does see her daughter in Margot ("that same faraway face") and is happy that she played the game well enough that she can escape.

Or maybe she just knows that they were all invited there for a reason except Margot, who is just a victim of Tyler, and sees how unfair that is to punish her for the sins of a man who hired her.

I've never been so surprised a piece of media avoided cannibalism

The menu was fun 

I keep seeing Takes about how recent media like Glass Onion and The Menu aren’t taking “eat the rich” seriously enough to launch real change or revolution and like?? yeah??? popular crowd-pleasing entertainment where horrible rich people Suffer A Comeuppance for the pleasure of an audience is one of the oldest tropes in all of human history???? It is a crowd pleaser! It is the bread (ha) and butter of the Western canon! It is in Chaucer it is in Dante it is in Shakespeare it is the stuff of Dickens and 95% of Agatha Christie and almost every teen movie ever made??????? “look at these horrible rich idiots and hypocrites…and now enjoy their DESTRUCTION” transcends time and space and historical moments! It is so strange to be surprised that Hollywood returns to this well without any intention of seeking anything more transgressive than an audience having a hearty chuckle lmao

One of my favorite scenes in The Menu is when the chef reveals he only invited the actor because on his only day off he watched the actor's movie and it was one of the worst things he ever watched and it wasted his entire day.

I never related to a character more.

THE MENU (2022) + letterboxd reviews

Do you write music with the view of being politically active and delivering a message or does it just happen and the rest follows? 

#this is a perspective I’ve only seen from people who truly think broadly and sympathetically about life#like he’s literally right I’m sorry and people who aren’t white or cis or straight learn so so SO early that your existence is political#not inherently but because white cishet men have crafted society in a way it’s impossible for it not to be#and ignoring that isn’t going to make you ascend above it god I’m so tired of having to explain that to people#I’m tired of people’s experiences in both places of privilege and place of oppression being used to scapegoat what we all can see#like look at his example!#‘going out for a dance on a Saturday night’ means something different if you’re poor if you’re gay if you’re a racial minority#’walking into a shop’ who owns it how often do you go is it a big box store or a small owned business is it walkable#there’s pOLitiCs in all of that! in ever aspect of your life!#ESPECIALLY if you take your life experiences and turn them into art of any form (via @twentyfour-mp3)

Friendly reminder that Hozier’s first music video, in 2013, involved him literally taking his life savings and using it to make a protest video about anti-gay actions in Chechnya. This was not a popular position at the time, to the point that damn near every interviewer asked “so, are you gay?” because they literally could not figure out why he cared so much.

Incidentally, after the first few times of saying “no, I’m straight but it’s important,” he started saying “you can think that if you want.” ALSO not a popular position at the time. Adam Lambert’s entire career had been derailed only four years before because he dared to be openly gay and sexual about it.

He literally came out swinging like Muhammad Ali and has not stopped. And he finds it odd that people find it odd! Like he was asked if he was aware of his “lesbian cult following” and seemed genuinely puzzled why he has a lesbian cult following (and, later, just a massive queer following in general) and it’s like. Honey. You loved us first. You loved us more and harder than most people were willing to. When it was unpopular to even whisper about how maybe queer people shouldn’t be seen as inhuman actually, you grabbed a megaphone and screamed. You risked not just losing a career, but never having one at all, to stand by us. You loved us. We’re just loving you back.