fleshisfun

[fleshisfun]

WITH MY KEY I (LOCK IT)

[fleshisfun]

Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now

[fleshisfun]

listen. i honestly do try my best to not be bitchy about stuff. but if you not-joking-joked that you wanted to watch a video essay from hbomb on the kendrick-drake rap beef. i think that you are obligated to watch fd signifier's 3 hour video essay. i KNOW the watch time is not the issue.

[fleshisfun]

f is for friends who do stuff together-

—

for a ko-fi request!

[fleshisfun]

If you are trans: do not apply for asylum in Canada YET.

The appropriate changes are in the works, but not official yet. You will most likely be denied.

If you are denied for asylum once, you can not reapply. EVER.

Things could change quickly, so you need to keep that option open. Now is the time to prepare, not act. Unless you are in immediately, and direct danger right now (not pending a court case, not that the social climate for our community is bad, immediate danger to you as an individual), you need to wait until something changes, sadly.

[fleshisfun]

Tumblr Code.

[fleshisfun]

Do you have a "favourite" physical trait to give to your OCs? If so, what is it?

[fleshisfun]

My first work on canvas(with acrylics) that i started all the way back in September. Then i came back from uni and finished it. Well, as much as you can finish a work related anyhow to the lynchian lore.

I love how in the first days of inspiration i was able to capture Dale’s face so well! There can be a lot done yet, but i like the ambiguity of the piece, so i decidedly leave it at that. Acrylics also made some fun textures for me, shout out to the acrylics.

[fleshisfun]

first art of 2025 ✨ inspired by this post because it speaks directly to my soul

[fleshisfun]

Remember, everyone, we still have a system in place and the Constitution still exists. We are not in a full dictatorship, yet. We can not give in to despair at every single thing this new administration does, because those checks still exist.

And until they don't - and that's a big if - we must keep our heads about us. Do not panic. Do not fall into apathy. Do not do anything irreversible.

The system will not save us, but it can protect us from the worst possible outcome for now.

And we will continue to fight even once it can't or won't.

[fleshisfun]

Bunnytash >:]

[fleshisfun]

Somewhat on the vibe of "your glorious revolution doesn't exist," I want to talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

That's an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer (~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department. Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs. insurance calculation to make sure they couldn't expell me from the program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.

[fleshisfun]

A Crash Course to Kendrick's Super Bowl Performance, from a Black Woman

Note: this does NOT go in depth into all of the song's lyrics. I don't have time to recount two decades of his discography. This is just a summary of the performance itself.

Let's start with the first visual we get:

UNCLE SAM - most notably recognized from WWII American wartime propaganda, Uncle Sam is the personification of American patriotism and freedom. The term "uncle" is also evocative of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist book that aided in inciting the Civil War. Uncle is also a very common term (both endearment and derogatory) towards Black men (eg. "unc"). Samuel L Jackson was fantastic.

Uncle Sam also resembles a circus ringleader, notable for my next point:

THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME - no, not Super Bowl. The GAG is us the people being pitted against each other: through late-stage capitalism, through the culture war, through class warfare, through being built of the backs of slaves. We are all players in the GAG because none of us on this site were the oligarchs seated at the inauguration.

This is also seen as Kendrick's stage was a Play Station controller. Not only did it remind of circus rings visually, but it was a game battle stage. The Great American Game is a battle royale of the commoners for the amusement of the rich whites.

Remember the foods / Them color was tin and brown / But now they 100 and blue - For this I'll just say, look what the last election said about lowering the price of eggs... and look at the prices now.

The revolution about to be televised / You picked the right time / But the wrong guy - Election 2024 once more.

THE FLAG DANCERS - yes, the dancers formed the US flag... off of the backs of Black people. Not a single white person in sight, and that's true of the cotton pickers in the fields. Plantations are part of how the US came to economic prominence after being a "backwater" colony. Remember tobacco? Cotton? Our bloodlines do.

The red and blue dancers are also notable for representing the Crips and Bloods, two infamous street gangs. The dance in Not Like Us is the Crip Walk. I recommend researching more on your own time about them, but just know they are a large part of the stereotype of Black people being "ghetto."

TOO LOUD, TOO RECKLESS, TOO GHETTO. Do you really know how to play the game? - This is exactly what Black people, especially Black men, get told all the time. It's why we change our names on resumes if they sound "too Black." It's why we codeswitch in non-Black company. This is especially rich considering how non-Black people love our culture and love to make money off of us, as the latter part of the quote points to. And it's even more profound during the Super Bowl-- the NFL is majority Black players.

STREET LIGHT A CAPELLA -- "thug" stereotype dancers to counteract the a capella connotations, with Uncle Sam then saying that Kendrick figured out "bringing other street guys around being a culture cheat code." Yes, this is a direct hit at Drake (listen to "Not Like Us") but also politically. Look up "model minority". Notably I would point to Candace Owens, or the Miami Venezuelan political group that's been in the news recently, especially as this directly led to Kendrick being surrounded by...

DANCERS IN WHITE -- it's white America. That's... that's the allegory.

NOT LIKE US TEASER -- Kendrick says "Not Like Us" is "their favorite song." -> he means white people specifically here. It comes after he's surrounded by all white dancers, the women around him who are his call and response are also in white (my opinion, they represent the industry). He's saying "Not Like Us" is the favorite of yts because it is about BLACK MEN FIGHTING. This again is reflected in the video game stage and ringleader Uncle Sam.

SZA -- instead of giving what they want, we see SZA. She's one of Drake's exes and Kendrick has always supported her.

ALL THE STARS -- This was in the first Black Panther movie, which I recommend you watch. Rest in Power Chadwick. Notably, this movie was incredibly mainstream as a major Marvel movie, and then we have Uncle Sam say...

"THAT'S WHAT AMERICA WANTS: NICE AND CALM. DON'T MESS THIS UP" -- translation: Marvel (the industry, America, etc.) wanted a safe, semi-pop song because white American likes safe pop songs, not Kendrick's usual heavy rap style about his life as a Black man! Don't mess up what you've got going mainstream for having this "Black rap feud" with Drake, who is an R&B model minority to white people because he's safe.

So what does Kendrick say?

IT'S A CULTURAL DIVIDE / IMMA GET IT ON THE FLOOR -- He was warned not to be political or apologetically Black for this Super Bowl performance, but he is using this big stage opportunity to speak out.

40 ACRES AND A MULE / THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE MUSIC -- 40 acres and a mule are what the freed slaves were promised. Instead, this land went to white sharecroppers. Research Jim Crow laws.

THEY TRIED TO RIG THE GAME / BUT YOU CAN'T FAKE INFLUENCE -- rig the election, rig the industry like with model minority Drake, rig the Great American Game with culture war to distract from active class warfare.

NOT LIKE US -- the only thing I'll mention because it made me holler is Serena Williams crip walking on Drake's metaphorical grave. She's another one of his exes.

TURN THE TV OFF -- exactly like he said! The TV is a distraction, the Super Bowl is a distraction, the mainstream news is often a distraction. Turn it off and get with your people!

GAME OVER — could not see this on my stream but at the end of the performance, the lights in the stadium spelled this out. The world is watching, America…

In conclusion, Kendrick Lamar is a visionary and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[fleshisfun]

A reminder to the "the American government wouldn't..." crowd. They have. They have made their own internment camps before. They have rounded up innocent citizens and immigrants before. The victims of which are still alive to this day and trying to share their stories with the world, they have been trying to warn us for a long time. George Takei (as seen above) is a famous example of this. He has written about his experiences time and time again, even publishing a book talking about his time in these camps. He may be famous now, but at the time he was just another kid forced from his home. To this day he still firmly dedicates himself to trying to educate and inform people, trying to spread awareness with his platform. The American Government can and will do terrible things. Do not let anyone convince you otherwise.

[fleshisfun]

You laugh and I agree

That this thing got the best of me

(Malmo- Mook)

[fleshisfun]

To everyone in red states where book bans are likely to take place soon, here’s some lists for you <3

As a history student going into library science, people way under hype how crazy book banning is

Multiple lists of books already banned in schools/libraries or ones that likely will be:

Banned Books Week 2024: 100 of the Most Challenged Books

Banned Book List

Colorado Banned Book List

The Complete List of Banned & Challenged Books by State

Banned Books from the University of Pennsylvia Online Books Page

Top 10 Most Challenged Books in 2023

PEN America Index Of School Book Bans – 2023-2024

Challenged and Banned Books

Places to order books other than Amazon:

Internet Archive (free)

Libby (free with library card)

Thrift Books

Book Outlet

BookBub

Abe Books

Half Price Books

Barnes & Noble

Better World Books

PangoBooks

Book Finder

Goodwillbooks

Alibris

Places to support that fight against book banning:

American Library Association

Unite Against Banned Books

National Coalition Against Censorship

PEN America

There’s a reason politicians fight so hard to limit knowledge and it should scare you.

Some recs below based on reviews I’ve seen

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson

Melissa by Alex Gino

Looking for Alaska by John Green

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

All Boys Aren't Blue by George Matthew Johnson