it is. so weird to me that I'm having to say this again after a real-life cartoon supervillian already once ran for president on a platform of hatred & fascism and won, but.
it's November, please fucking vote
One for the lads
The scene in Shrek 2 when the Fairy Godmother sings I need a Hero when the giant gingerbread man attacks the castle is still the greatest scene in cinema of all times
Trans women will never be free until people stop having strong emotions about penises. Like we, as a society, have got to stop caring about dicks! Dicks have to stop symbolizing maleness, obviously, but they also have to stop symbolizing power, dominance, sexual agency and aggression, violence, and even sex itself. Like trans women can’t be free if the very conceptual presence of a penis represents an intrusion(!) of unwanted(!) sexuality(!) in public life. Like that’s why trans women are abhorrent to both male chauvinists and radical feminists, because both groups have extremely strong feelings about what a penis *represents*, and find the conceptual and actual presence of a woman with a penis to be simultaneously vile and nonsensical because they’ve loaded so much symbolic baggage onto both women and penises.
Anyway dicks are totally neutral body parts and seeing a dick, or a bulge in a swimsuit, or simply knowing that there’s a dick somewhere in the same bathroom as you isn’t harmful or violent
If you’re reading this I’m wishing you a very “discovering a new song that tingles your brain” in the near future.
I am a chronic turn signaller. People will be like “there’s no cars around.” Wrong, I’m
1. letting pedestrians know.
2. I’m doing this in case I missed a car or person somewhere, or
2b. I’m gonna be stuck at this intersection til a car or person shows up
3. It makes it a habit
Lately I've been thinking about the ways that families, and society, just aren't taught to celebrate queer people.
Probably the most significant life change that my sister experienced as a young adult was getting married to her husband. They are both lovely people, and their marriage was celebrated by an expensive formal ceremony surrounded by friends and family. There was catering and beautiful clothing and a hired band and dancing and photographers. My sister and her husband were surrounded by people who loved them, and were expressing their love and their joy. It was considered normal and natural for the occasion to be marked, and marked well.
The most significant life change I've experienced to this point in adulthood has been coming out as trans. Like my sister, I bought outfits for the occasion (but wardrobe essentials rather than a wedding dress). Also like my sister, I filled out paperwork to change my legal name (although the process was significantly longer and more expensive in my case, and the change was met with confusion and annoyance rather than congratulations). The similarities ended there. There was no party. No one congratulated me. There was no sense of celebration. Just the relief of "Thank hell the paperwork's over with," and the exhaustion of having to repeatedly remind disinterested relatives about names and pronouns and Gender Studies 101. Years later, most of my family still misgenders me behind my back, and frequently to my face. Not "on purpose." They just don't care enough to learn.
But hot damn, coming out means something, motherfucker. Queer self-discovery is hard and it is long, and it is an achievement. It deserves to be recognized, and to be celebrated.
Looking back, I wish I had celebrated. I wish I had dressed up and insisted on a family dinner at a nice restaurant. I wish I had told people to send me congratulatory greeting cards. I wish I had demanded to be celebrated. But it didn't occur to me, much less to my family members. That's the extent to which we are taught to ignore the significance of queer experiences. I went through a journey that transformed my life, and it didn't even occur to me to celebrate.
And even if it had, I would have had to celebrate alone, at least in spirit. Because the same people who were so excited to show up and celebrate my sister's marriage, this major milestone of her adulthood, just fundamentally did not care about the milestone I had reached. They barely acknowledged it; it didn't match their own experiences, and so they didn't recognize its importance. Crucially: they didn't offer me congratulations or celebration, because they were never taught to. And that's a pile of rubbish. All this to say:
every time I do a web search, right at the top I have AI info dumping on me
just give me the top result please
its been p common knowledge for decades that light pollution can be massively reduced by just putting shades on streetlamps, and that doing that would save energy, help wildlife, and let us see the stars better, but are society says if u wanna change any minor little tiny thing u gotta dedicate ur whole life to campaigning for it and this is a good ways down the list of priorities for most ppl, so instead i gotta walk past newly-installed streetlamps that are just dumb glass globes that use half their electricity to blast half their light directly into the sky where it does only bad things for no reason and think "we should overthrow the government"
might i remind everyone sokka is the plan guy? he was on par with the best strategic minds in the war....