Hey, do you live in WA and aren’t homophobic? I need you to do something:
EMAIL THE LABOR GOVERNMENT AND TELL THEM TO HURRY UP AND ABOLISH THE GENDER REASSIGNMENT BOARD AND BAN CONVERSION THERAPY!!!!
Labor promised BACK IN 2017 that it would take action to help LGBTQIA+ people and yet conversion therapy IS STILL LEGAL IN WA. The Gender Reassignment Board is also a legal obstacle for trans people to be legally recognised as their gender - and so Labor said it would abolish it to make it easier (other states have already done with) yet STILL has not delivered on this. Queer people are being screwed over by Labor’s inaction and indifference to something they promised NEARLY 7 YEARS AGO!
NOW WA Labor has said it won’t commit to these actions until after the 2025 election - EVEN THOUGH IT HAS A DOUBLE MAJORITY AND CAN PASS ANY LEGISLATION IT WANTS TO WITHOUT THE LIBERALS/NATIONALS BEING ABLE TO STOP THEM AND WATER IT DOWN!!
THEN directly message at least 5 other people you know to tell them to do the same and make a post on whatever social media platform you want to encourage others to do the same.
THEN set a calendar reminder to repeat this process mid-February when parliament resumes so MPs know you haven’t forgotten.
THEN set a calendar reminder to repeat this process mid-March so MPs know you haven’t forgotten.
Basically contact them once a month, and tell everyone else to do so once a month, until it becomes apparent this isn’t just a passing fad - this is a requirement. This is non-negotiable. It WILL happen. The LGBTQIA+ community DESERVES to be treated with dignity and governments should do what they promised to do.
Also follow Queer Liberation Boorloo on Facebook and Instagram to get some updates from their campaign and help out by attending demonstrations/protests.
2024 is the last year the government really has to introduce anything it wants to get done before the 2025 election in March. So let’s make sure this is in the forefront of their minds until they follow through with it.
the us and uk are apparently launching airstrikes on yemen tonight. may god beat their swords into ploughshares, may god walk with every life and body who will suffer because of these regimes, may we never learn war anymore.
it’s fucking me up how tv shows, movies, and even video games can’t be “niche” content anymore
like nothing can be underrated anymore. it HAS to be a success. cartoons have to either be spongebob level successes with immediate marketing or they’re shelved a season or two in.
Movies have such inflated budgets that they NEED to break a billion in the box office just to make back what they cost. Anything less than a blockbuster smash is turned into a tax write-off.
a single triple A video game can destroy an entire studio if it doesn’t meet expectations, which are already lofty enough as it is.
and everything has to appeal to the widest demographic possible, which can mean sterilizing anything creative about the work so it becomes as palatable as possible.
Establish dominance by declaring an Elf a “Man-friend” before they declare you an “Elf-friend”
The title of Orc-Friend is rarely given. Not because orcs are secretive or especially hard to befriend; they love to find like-minded people to ride the winds or tinker on crystal matrices with. But there is a spark of chaos in orcish society, and the suggestion that someone ought to be recognized as an ally to the whole of orc-kind is an easy way to start an argument. Even Tanusk the Fellbearer, a human who saved three orc villages from a monstrous chimera, was not granted any respect outside of those villages.
However, there are exceptions, and Flannery Rillrise is one of the most notable. A halfling scholar and magical merchant, she traveled between the orc communities of the Shielded Lands, trading chalk and minerals and artifacts but also helping share ideas between rivals. Without her help, Darzakh and Ofthang could have never collaborated enough to invent the Mnemonic Enhancer spell! Through decades of meetings, friendships, and innovations, Flannery Rillrise became a trusted figure across all of the Shielded Lands. When an unexpected inheritance made her the heir to a noble house in Teosinte, the politically inexperienced halfling ended up with more allies than she knew what to do with! To this day, the Rillrise family has strong ties to the orc villages… but only Flannery was named Orc-Friend.
not sure if this is up your alley at all— if it isn’t i’m sorry— but i got my blood drawn a few years ago and was a little uncomfy about it. lady doing it was super nice and sweet and understanding until i was about to stand up and she almost pushed me back into the chair, wiggled the vials of blood in my face, and said “it’s you juice!!” with the scariest smile i’ve ever seen. and then she just cackled and left. i walked out of that room dazed and confused and terribly scared
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
re-reblogging and thinking about when i have another collection agency calling that i can just do this
I’m about to make a new rule that if you think something is bait, you have to explain why, with support and reasoning, you think that it is bait, and if you go “well it just is” or “it feels fake” I’m going to come to your house and soak all your socks
Some of y'all never got past that toddler stage of not being able to understand that other people have different bases of knowledge and experience than you do and it shows
Honestly? On this blog and everywhere else online, if you genuinely think something is bait, the best thing to do is ignore it! Do not react to it, because if you’re correct, the thing that the poster wants is a reaction. The only way to win is by starving them of the attention and engagement they crave.
I’ve seen SO many people reblog posts to go “#umm this is obviously bait” and I’m like! What are you doing! If this is bait, you are taking it! In your quest to seem un-gullible you have been thoroughly gulled! The art of not feeding the trolls got lost somewhere and we need to find it again
You’d think that something as historic as South Africa holding the Israeli government accountable for their war crimes would be on every single news channel.
Except it wasn’t, most western media outlets flat out refused to broadcast the International Court Hearing. But they were more than willing to broadcast the Israeli government’s response.
Because fuck forbid western audiences hear something other than “Israel has a right to defend itself.” or “Hamas. October 7th.”
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW
op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
God I’m not okay about it
Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.
I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3
Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:
I mean, will you LOOK at this:
This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:
There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.
A Very Short “Essay” On Why They Should Teach Philosophy in School (and Why You Should Learn It Anyway)
Something I’ve realized formally studying philosophy now is that holy mother of all gods, this stuff would be super useful to teach in school. Why? What are Plato, Aristotle, and even modern philosophers going to teach us that’s useful for adulting as many people are concerned about now when it comes to high school? Philosophy boils down to how to live a good life, a civic one at that in many cases! It’s how to be a good person and how to have direction in life. Honestly, that’s something I think a lot of people need right now. There’s no one philosophy either, there’s so many schools of thought, so you can find the one that fits for your life.
Other than this though, philosophy also helps deal with a few other surprising things: misinformation and being a fudging a**hole. Misinformation is rampant in online spaces, HBomberguy even highlighted how misinformation from James Somerton led to it being accepted as fact by some people. Philosophy is a counter to this. It asks to think critically of life, of the things we encounter in it, and how we accept it. Misinformation thrives on either willful ignorance, or a simple laziness to not fact check what you’re hearing. Sometimes that’s understandable, like with the case with James, people trusted him and the information he shared. However, spreading something like that like fact yourself requires you to first confirm the information, often from an additional source (always have multiple sources for information, it’s a life saver). Philosophy itself as a subject is the art of critical thinking, and this is exactly what critical thinking teaches us, to never trust the words of just one person. Get different views, look into it yourself! Teaching philosophy can reinforce this idea and help folks avoid falling down rabbit holed that lead to social isolation in the cases of things like flat earth and climate change denial.
I also mentioned preventing a**holes. A**holes are a pretty common problem. Just look at Elon Musk, Trump, or rich guy YouTubers like Logan Paul. Why does this happen? It can be a mix of social pressure, how they were raised, and even the very institutions of our world that can lead to it. A**holes: A Theory, by Aaron James, is a great way to learn more about this, but to put it plainly, a**holes often exist because they feel an entrenched and high sense of entitlement. They won’t apologize for their actions in a meaningful way, and they certainly don’t see you as having the same moral standing to them. They’re a bane to a cooperative society. So, how do we deal with this? James suggested a few ways, landing on that there’s an understanding that life kind of sucks. However, if we, as cooperative people, unite, we can life a little less sucky, and by virtue, better. Philosophy comes into play here yet again. It teaches social values, how to be a good person, how to be a civil person. Being a civil person means we can meet that call, we can make society less sucky, and make it better. If we understand our civic duties to one another, learn critical thought, and have meaning in this turbulent boat of world, we can be better people, we can live better lives! Teaching philosophy does that.
In the end, life sucks, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, I’d say there’s hope. I know some schools (especially in the States, I’m Canadian myself) already teach philosophy. Does it help? I can’t quite say. I can tell you it’s helped me when I learned it just as an interest by myself, but my peers who did go to schools with it often share that they were the better for it when I ask them about it. So, give it a try. Explore philosophy a bit! It can truly be a delight.
Of All the threats posed by Twitter since it fell under sketchy new management in October, one of them doubles as a promise. Twitter will devolve into pornography.
Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It’s a mega-genre, something the poet-philosopher Timothy Morton might call a hyperobject, ungraspable in its ubiquity and scale. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt.
Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost immediately. OnlyFans, which began in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos, now consists mostly of porn created by sex workers.
But most companies aim to marginalize porn. While OnlyFans has surrendered, Chatroulette and Tumblr appear to take a firmer stand than ever against it. Facebook and YouTube conscript armies of algorithms and humans to banish porn in deference to advertisers who don’t want brands debased by unwholesome adjacencies. Alone among the big social media services, Twitter allows users to post what it calls “intimate media.” But the platform also permanently suspends users who post upskirts, creepshots, revenge porn, nonconsensual erotica, images shot with hidden cameras, or media accompanied by incitements to violence. Pornographic images, which make up about 13 percent of all tweets, cannot yet be directly sold.
Porn in its place may be bankable, in other words, but too much of it in a venue styled as PG can scare off much bigger revenue streams.
Or so popular wisdom has it. Twitter’s new management, as usual, dissents. The volatile Chief Twit, Elon Musk, has torn down guardrails, eliminated moderators, and alienated advertisers all on his own with tiresome shitposting and hospitality to hate speech. Musk, whose personal fortune fell by $100 billion in 2022, pretends to insouciance about money in a way that’s unconvincing and hard to watch. When General Mills, General Motors, Pfizer, Ford, and Mondeléz International (the august maker of Oreos) stopped advertising on Twitter last fall, Musk lashed out at corporate America for its failure to respect the wishes of the founding fathers, who presciently mandated advertising on Twitter in 1789. Unchastened, half of the platform’s top 100 advertisers were gone in Musk’s first month.
Without moderators or advertisers, swaths of Twitter are now mangy empty lots crawling with vandals, lechers, con men, and swastikas. The time is perhaps right for porn, then. Porn abhors a vacuum. Especially where it can be ennobled as constitutional duty.
How in the world is this good news? I’ll tell you why it’s good news to me. Not only will it make Twitter2 easily quittable, but it’s pleasing to see things become what they deep down are. Twitter has slouched toward porn for years. “Slipping into DMs” is only one salacious meme in what long ago became an orgy of hyperstimulation, with people baring their souls, posting thirst traps, coyly subtweeting, and of course negging and prodding and simultaneously secreting dopamine and cortisol and God knows what other precious bodily fluids.
“I am mad for it to be in contact with me,” Walt Whitman wrote, of what he called “life’s atmosphere.” No doubt he also meant contact with the bodies of the many people he cruised and desired. Likewise, Twitter seems to offer contact with everyone, and the interface exists to make users mad for contact as it conjures life’s atmosphere of abrasiveness streaked with sweetness. The real Twitter was the friends we made along the way, as someone has surely tweeted.
That’s gone now. When the chief rolls in with tryhard trolling that misses the mark of humor, squealing in annoying feedback loops from his Wall of Sound, the warm chatter among the regulars goes silent. A pall falls. When Musk tweeted some horror fiction alleging that the spouse of a prominent elected official might have been perversely complicit in cracking his own skull with a hammer, something at the heart of Twitter seemed to die. Later, when he bellowed that Twitter in 2020 had abridged the constitutional right of trolls to post a Hunter Biden dick pic, another influx of refugees poured into Mastodon, which presents itself as a more normal haven for people fleeing Twitter.
“The Internet Is for Porn” was the catchiest song from Avenue Q, which debuted 20 years ago. That was before broadband, before social media, before the hijack of information space by influence operations and strongman solo acts like GOP trinity Kanye, Elon, and Trump. It was axiomatic back then. Porn was the internet’s reason for being, its prime directive. And it would have stayed that way had web information not been domesticated by corporations that wanted to hack our worldviews and pick our pockets for data, attention, and mobile payments.
But through all this, Twitter has retained the spirit of porn. Like porn, Twitter is not a family affair; for many, it’s also a shameful habit that they’re forever trying to quit. Since 2007, I’ve turned to Twitter to—the only word I can think of is learn. But I know its traps well. Users of Twitter, like consumers of porn, find themselves amused and stimulated, and then scroll compulsively, chasing the dragon of human connection, only to find themselves scrolling through doom, and finally scrolling for doom.
Information may or may not want to be free, but it often wants to be porn. What Musk has considered doing, according to various reports, is introduce paywalled video that would allow performers to get paid while Twitter takes a cut. Sound at all familiar? It’s the OnlyFans model, complete with a rip-off of the OnlyFans interface. The performers it’s tailor-made for are not, as it happens, cellists or mimes. They’re sex workers. And for discerning high rollers who prefer the backroom to the club, Musk has floated the idea of offering paid DMs—to be slipped into as usual, but for a fee. The online-porn business demands extreme discipline to keep it from turning criminal and leaves room for little else, but edgelord Musk is likely to fare better in the demimonde than he is on the main stage.
At the very end of 2022, NSFW content was the fastest-growing sector of English-language Twitter. It’s the way of the world, especially without diligent moderation. At the same time, the new louche Twitter comes with a harum-scarum idea of “free speech” as singularly applicable to obscene provocateurs like Jordan Peterson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, formerly banned figures who were warmly welcomed back to the site in November. “This is a battle for the future of civilization,” the Chief Twit tweeted. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”
If Twitter is going to prey on users with hyper-arousing material and the illusion of intimacy, why not go all the way? Twitter should admit what it’s up to, tell risk-averse advertisers to go blow if they’re prudes, and turn full red-light district. It might scare away the squares, but Twitter can charge a mint for spank-bank material, and a premium for the kind that somehow prevents tyranny.
My 14 year old brother just took a drink of hot chocolate and hissed like he’d knocked back a shot of vodka then set it down and went “ah… that’s the good stuff.”
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