this genuinely took me so long but i needed to explore my ship dynamics with ramzi and his bishops! more details under the cut if you want to know more- warning this post is LONG!!!:
“what’s your dream job??” Uhh to have 17 weird little hobbies that I don’t have to be good at and hang out with friends. I get money via being the world’s specialist little princess
One time a friend told me that if she wanted to have a chill night she would come to me and ask for tea and a book to read. I didn’t like tea at the time, but I always made sure my cupboards had them in case she needed a quiet night. One time I told my boss that I loved oranges, but couldn’t peel them because of my nails. For a year he made sure to peel me one at least once a week. Once my friends gave me a made up superlative of “most likely to have a pen they could borrow” and ever since I’ve made sure I always carry a pen with me. A long time ago, my high school librarian told me that no one would care what my grade in my sophomore chemistry class was if I’m bringing them doughnuts and asking them about their day.
Sometimes friendship is about carrying pens and peeling oranges. But the point is, surrounding yourself with people who you want to do the little things for. The point of it all is bringing in the doughnuts because you’ve found the people who deserve the doughnuts.
And I’m so fucking lucky, and I don’t always say it or even think it. Because I have friends who send me letters and who told me when the cafeteria at work had chopped tomatoes and who want to watch Scream with me and it just hits me sometimes that this world can do the ugliest things to people, but as long as I still have a friend who will point out dogs on the sidewalks to me then I have something amazing to live for. And as long as I have pals who I want to make peppermint bark for, then I have a reason to keep pushing this world to be better.
WHY ARE SO MANY ADULTS IN POSITIONS OF POWER DEMANDING THAT SCHOOLS INSPECT CHILDREN’S GENITALS?? FOR SPORTS??? ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SPORTS????? IT’S FUCKING WEIRD!! IT’S NOT NORMAL FOR ADULTS TO CARE THIS MUCH ABOUT RANDOM SCHOOL CHILDREN’S GENITALS OK?? it’s not about safety or fairness in sports it’s about control and treating kids like property instead of people
i feel like im going fucking crazy why are the same people who always scream ‘think of the children’ always the ones going out of their way to hurt them
It’s because when many conservatives bring this point up, they’re talking about a hypothetical idea of a child, a magic symbol of innocence.
Actual children are messy and imperfect and depending on which conservative you ask, some of them think it’s okay to beat them up for acting the way children usually do. I have yet to see a conservative actually advocate for proper youth rights.
There’s a reason conservatives raise a stink over pedophilia and abortion but do the exact opposite of what will help. They don’t like it when the victims they advocate for actually speak up and say, “please end child marriage” or “spanking just makes kids grow up afraid” or “the person who did this to me was a religious elder and not a drag queen”.
They’ve managed to get a powerful confirmation bias into their constituents that draws on years of transphobia and even antisemitic conspiracy. And of course, there’s racism too. Some conservatives will not see a child of color as a child at all.
The child further right conservatives want to protect becomes less and less real by the day.
And when they talk about this to moderates, more rational conservatives, liberals, and even leftists? They say “think of the children” and most people assume they’re talking about actual children.
Everyone wants to protect the children, but when it means a fake child instead of actual children, it means people can use it to support whatever they want, instead of taking a step back.
genuinely would rather have two thousand people add a cringe ass comment on my post than everyone silently reblogging aside from queue tags and content warnings
2024 tumblr is so fuckin silent, man. nobody’s contributing to bits. nobody rambles in the notes. everyone is saving their jokes for either original posts or discord dms.
if i were going for a funnyman approach on this post i would say some shit like “reply guys are faced with extinction in the modern poster’s economy despite being crucial to stability” but no. im just genuinely sad over the silence.
genuinely would rather have two thousand people add a cringe ass comment on my post than everyone silently reblogging aside from queue tags and content warnings
2024 tumblr is so fuckin silent, man. nobody’s contributing to bits. nobody rambles in the notes. everyone is saving their jokes for either original posts or discord dms.
if i were going for a funnyman approach on this post i would say some shit like “reply guys are faced with extinction in the modern poster’s economy despite being crucial to stability” but no. im just genuinely sad over the silence.
most young queer people/progressives online can’t understand the difference/nuance between fetishization and appreciation/attraction and when you tell them that some marginalized people actually feel represented and celebrated in kink art/kink spaces their brain short circuits. lol.
I’ve seen more appreciation and love for my body type and gender identity in kink heavy spaces than the other. lmao
anyway this is why I refuse to sanitize the sexual and intimate themes of my art because I’m not here to make stuff palatable to people who throw kinksters and horny transfems under the bus. 👍🏾
the people who overly sanitize their own experiences to avoid being part of “those” queers think that they’re in some sort of “respectable part” of the queer community and dont realize that the people who they’re trying to signal to that they’re “not a freak” still think of them as a freak. they genuinely believe that pandering to people who want them dead is enough to save their own skin. sad, really.
*me, owning a strange boutique housegoods/book store selling a variety of mystic, occult objects but no one realizes I live there, this is literally my living room*
How much for this stick I can shake at God?
10 bucks
can i get these three backscratchers with a bundle discount
15% discount for 3 or more
How bout this book? I think it’s look cool with a cosplay I’m planning
40 bucks but never attempt to read or open it
How much is the doll?
Oh that? Just take it. Take it far far away and do not allow it to return
How about this?
$29.99. Just be careful not to leave the candles burning at night, the gremlin comes alive and likes to wander around and go through your stuff
Hey this chair looks cool, how much?
the chair chooses its owner. sit down and see if it likes you
How bout this
Excuse me that’s my great-uncle, he is family
What about this?
that’s not a sale item, that’s my dang lunch
How much is this neat tea set?
OH GODS YOU’VE SET THEM LOOSE
What about this super creepy cool chair?
that’s Lionel. they’re sleeping and I suggest you do NOT wake them
How much for this dandy fellow?
YOU WOKE IT UPWHY DID YOU WAKE IT UP???
How much for the guy that claims to be my childhood friend but remembers things slightly differently than they happened?
The state of gay rights in the early aughts was not good; criminal penalties for homosexuality were rarely enforced but were on the books in many places, there was no right to marriage, and the morality of homosexuality was hotly contested in public. Big culture war issue. In that environment, where substantive protections were lacking, Democrats could be tepid on gay rights without actively giving anything up—if, like Obama in 2008, you didn’t support gay marriage, you could still be seen (correctly) as advocating for an overall better situation for gay people, or at least one that was no worse, in contrast to your right wing opponents.
Trans rights are not in the same position. Before the big trans rights backlash started, access to gender affirming care was pretty widespread, was everywhere legal, and was a matter for private concern only. Trans people could play in school sports subject to whatever their league’s rules were, and the idea of trying to make it illegal to cross dress in public was absurd. The conservative position since has become one of an explicit rollback of rights: revoke access to gender affirming care, create new criminal sanctions to punish trans people, make it illegal for them to participate in school sports, etc.
In that environment, tacking to the right on trans issues means deciding which elements of trans rights you are willing to concede to this project of actually rolling back trans rights. The only thing comparable from the gay rights fight is maybe state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, or DOMA—all of which were, IIRC, passed despite gay marriage not being legal in affected jurisdictions. Their enactment, while deplorable, had no material negative affect; gay people already couldn’t get married.
And that this project of rolling back trans rights is not a particular fetish of the religious right is more worrying. Plenty of liberals and liberal institutions are pretty transphobic. Britain has been working to export its flavor of (Moderate, Sensible, Secular) transphobia to other countries in Europe and the Anglosphere. Transphobes winning these fights isn’t a status quo situation—it’s a sharp increase in repression of trans people.
In light of that, I regard calls to “moderate” on trans issues with at best scorn. I think the party of civil rights condoning the rollback of citizens’ civil rights is really bad for its brand, won’t win it more votes, and may sufficiently alienate members of the base—who are invested in the party specifically because of its historic support for civil rights—that they simply don’t bother to show up in elections.
it’s really not possible to infringe on trans rights without infringing on individual human rights in general: the right to wear what you want, decide your own presentation in society, choose your own name, pretty basic stuff!
ALT
it’s really not possible to have trans rights without infringing on human rights in general, either: the right to speak freely, the right to freedom of association, the right to not touch genitals you don’t like, pretty basic stuff!
(for those unfamiliar with “wax my balls”: a transwoman showed up to several female beauticians offering services to women, said “I’m a woman, you must wax my balls” and sued them for discrimination if they didn’t want to touch male genitalia.)
I would think the exact opposite actually: a strictly traditionalist view of gender would make it discriminatory not to wax balls if only men have them, but now that men and women can have balls it’s no longer discriminatory to refuse to wax them, case closed
I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.
And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.”
So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)
It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful.
It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons.
There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:
The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.
You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!
But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.
You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking
I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.
And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.”
So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)
It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful.
It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons.
There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:
The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.
You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!
But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.
You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking
Alex Jones is livestreaming rn and for the first and only time in my life it’s appointment viewing. He got evicted from his studio mid-stream and they had to cover for him when he popped up in his “satellite studio” (a room in his house I assume) devoid of the Infowars branding. He’s talking about how “tens of millions” of people have watched his final broadcast & you can literally see he has far less than a million viewers in the bottom corner (and this is on Twitter, which inflates views of videos ever since Elon had to convince people anyway gives a shit about Tucker Carlson’s livestreams). He’s currently whining that they chose not to sell his site back to him at auction, so he could keep doing the crimes that are why he was selling his website.
I didn’t see this personally but he’s apparently read out the Onion’s announcement, which is a fake article by a fake corporation, out loud several times as if it was real. Anyway it should be noted how screwed he is, bc…
…while he can livestream under his own name, they own his warehouses of dubious supplements. He has nothing to sell but t-shirts protesting that his show is going down. Since Infowars was, first and foremost, a lifestyle brand, this leaves him, scientifically speaking, “totally fucked”. He doesn’t have ads, that’s the only way he makes money
He just promised that he will “win the information war” which. You were sued into oblivion for lying about the parents of murdered children & lost your platform so hard you don’t even have a studio anymore & your brand was seized by a rival to make fun of you. I didn’t think the Infowar was a real thing you could lose, but I’m not sure there’s a more definitive way to lose the information war. Anyway he’s now ranting about fluoride
biologists will be like this is a very simplified diagram of a mammalian cell
chemists will be like this is a molecule
okay but this is what the best render of a human cell looks like
They are not kidding
We are full of so many fuckign guys
This is actually a full on interactive map! You can put your cursor over any structure to focus on it and see its name, you can focus on all the structures that are part of a specific pathway and, when you click on proteins, you open it up on PhosphoSitePlus, which is a curated database of proteins and their post-translational modifications. It has a helpful description and summary for each protein!
This is a HUGE complementary resource for learning molecular biology! It really helps to make sense of each individual pathway and it puts everything into perspective. It only focuses on human, rat and certain other animal cells, so it won’t have all the pathways one would wish to see… But for the pathways it does include, consider opening the image and accompanying it as you learn or revise them!
oh wow, thank you for the additional information, i had no idea, that’s so much cooler than just the flat picture.
biologists will be like this is a very simplified diagram of a mammalian cell
chemists will be like this is a molecule
okay but this is what the best render of a human cell looks like
They are not kidding
We are full of so many fuckign guys
This is actually a full on interactive map! You can put your cursor over any structure to focus on it and see its name, you can focus on all the structures that are part of a specific pathway and, when you click on proteins, you open it up on PhosphoSitePlus, which is a curated database of proteins and their post-translational modifications. It has a helpful description and summary for each protein!
This is a HUGE complementary resource for learning molecular biology! It really helps to make sense of each individual pathway and it puts everything into perspective. It only focuses on human, rat and certain other animal cells, so it won’t have all the pathways one would wish to see… But for the pathways it does include, consider opening the image and accompanying it as you learn or revise them!
oh wow, thank you for the additional information, i had no idea, that’s so much cooler than just the flat picture.
do terfs send their gfs nudes or is that still like. “evil male gaze pornography” or whatever
post canceled let’s talk about this instead
It’s always morbidly fascinating how TERFs somehow managed to twist feminism in such a way they arrive back at literally medieval concepts of “women are pure innocent maidens with zero sexual desire who must be protected from men”
this isn’t even horseshoe theory this is the entire horse
this isn’t even
horseshoe theory this is
the entire horse
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
The way that exclusionists treat ace and aro people often reminds me of how the average person would treat me when I started being open as non-binary. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times, we are not enemies. Our experiences do not oppose each other, they are intertwined. If you’re ace, if you’re aromantic, if you’re any variation thereupon; your home is here. You belong here, too. You are beautiful, and powerful; and you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. You are a valued part of this community.
saying ao3 needs to censor certain content is like saying a museum can’t have still life art that includes strawberries because you don’t like them.
these are not real strawberries. you do not have to, and in fact cannot, eat them. no one with a strawberry allergy will be harmed by looking at them. no migrant workers were exploited in the picking of these strawberries. there were no questionable farming practices or negative environmental impacts from growing or transporting them.
because - and i cannot stress this enough - they are not real strawberries.
if you don’t like strawberries, you don’t have to look at the paintings. in fact, you can get a map of the museum that lists what works are in what rooms and just. not go in there. if you see one by mistake, you can look away. just keep walking. there’s plenty of other stuff to see.
yes, real strawberries can cause real quantifiable harm to real people.
but again. these are not real strawberries.
you may have whatever feelings you like about strawberries, and so can i. you can draw and write about whatever fruit floats your boat, and so can i, even if that happens to be strawberries. and we can hang our art side by side in the same gallery, provided you understand that my strawberries are not about you (and your kumquats are, shocker, not about me) and that - and this is true - neither are real.
and when the fascists break down the doors and grab all the strawberry paintings and heap them in the street and set them on fire, please know that they are coming for your kumquats next.
so if you want a place where you can show off your beautiful kumquat art safely, you’re gonna have to tolerate having some strawberries in the next room.
and that’s okay. because the strawberries aren’t real.
interrogation scene in a movey where the guy refuses to cooperate and he’s like “fuck you” and spits blood and the people interrogating him are like “what the fuck. nobody’s even hit you yet. where did you get all that blood from”
ALT
ALT
