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Like a new friend!

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I'm so sad in such a strange way to hear about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting officially shutting down. It's a weird feeling. Most of it is the intellectual level of "oh this is SO fucking bad and terrifying that we'll no longer have federally supported public information channels anymore, it will ALL be through the private market, not to mention the stark reminder of the US government's continued descent into anti-intellectualism and fascism," all of which makes my stomach sink.

But on a smaller level it is the disappearance of something that was so ubiquitous to American childhood. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Americans can hear the exact intonation of this phrase in their head: "This program made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by viewers like you. Thank you."

There is a lot more that could be said about the likely repercussions of this. In addition to being sad, I am also exceedingly furious. I wish despair upon all the Republicans who helped kill the CBP just because it took its mission seriously and refused to broadcast overt right-wing propaganda as news.

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Me: I wonder where my brother is

The Greek chorus hogging the entire couch: How quickly this one forgets where his brother has gone to go cycling. How quickly he forgets all things. We wonder what the gods will think of this indiscression. If they think anything at all.

Me: Do you guys ever take those masks off?

The Greek chorus hogging the entire couch: No. It’s a sex thing.

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bro is it parasocial to experience art

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[video by mr.tomtotoro. no caption]

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remember kids, the moral of "Irish and Italians weren't even considered White yet!" isn't "because in those times people were so ignorant they didn't think the Irish were white". the moral is "because white is an unreal category created to justify slavery and ongoing hoarding of power and wealth". It's not that you know better about Italians. It's that the boundaries of the higher caste have changed.

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“Chapter 2 of this book goes over West Papua”

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I love this picture so much! Post it whenever I come across it.

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The left image as a rug and the right image as a ceiling poster

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look. here’s the thing. If you have a relative or family friend or some such who does a craft/hobby/skill that you’ve “always wanted to learn” you should ask them about it. Your grandma does embroidery and you want to learn? Sit down one day, or call her, or write a letter, or something, and say “I am interested in learning this craft.” There’s basically zero chance that Uncle Francis is gonna refuse to teach you about his model ships. Grandma is THRILLED to show you her quilting. Ms Barbara from the church bake sale WILL teach you how to make the fudge that made her second husband propose.

your friends and contemporaries are also a tremendous resource, and you should ask them too! But there’s just no replacement for the expertise of someone who has been knitting for sixty years. Part of this, also, is that older crafters can often give you materials to help you start, and your broke millennial friends usually can’t. My mom has more wool than she will ever use in her life, and she knows it. When one of my friends wanted to start knitting, my mom just gave her this gorgeous silver handspun yarn she’d made but wasn’t attached to. Yarn like that is expensive! Handspun yarn from someone who has been spinning for thirty years doesn’t often happen to beginners! And starting with good materials is better than starting with bad, because it helps you develop taste and a sense of quality more quickly.

Experienced crafters are often able to help you avoid learning bad or damaging habits—as a teenager, my sewing teacher spent a lot of time teaching me how to do things so that I didn’t get repetitive stress injuries (like she did). They’re going to be able to lend you books, send you ancient angelfire html pages with the most exacting instructions on earth, show you the good places to get crafting supplies that aren’t am*zon.

But you have to ask. Do not wait until these people are dead, and then say “I wish I knew.” You have to do it now, while you can.

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I am constantly hurt by the callousness with which people dismiss the harm of restricting adult content and porn, only concerned about the knock-on effects for queer people and radical political groups. Sex workers ourselves matter just as much as non sex working queer people and leftists.

We are not canaries in the coal mine whose deaths you can dismiss while you frame groups you actually care about as the sole human casualties of these policies. I need you to care that laws like the Online Safety Act lead sex workers to have to return to abusive third parties to find clients or to work in brothels we hate or to such poverty that we starve. I need you to care about payment processors refusing to pay out for adult content because it means sex workers cannot rely on online work when selling sex in-person becomes too much for our bodies or too risky.

Please care about sex workers' suffering, rather than only the fact your favourite queer game was de-listed from itch.io and that you have to use a VPN to access adult subreddits without giving your ID now.