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Samuel Delany, masked visionary.

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them: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST MEANS HUMANS MUST BE INDIVIDUALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT AND COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT

biologist:

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I was able to read it without an account (on desktop), but it’s available at the Internet Archive, too.

It looks like you have to sign up for a ‘free account’ if you want to read anything at the New York Times’ website now. I’ll keep an eye out for a text/accessible version of this article. Anyway - the Times writes about Delany!

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‘One of the questions I have been asked so many times I’ve forgotten what my stock answer to it is, “Since science fiction is a marginal form of writing, do you think it makes it easier to deal with marginal people?” Which—no! Why should it be any easier? Dealing with the marginal is always a matter of dealing with the marginal. If anything, science fiction as a marginal genre is more rigid, far more rigid than literature. There are more examples of gay writing in literature than there are in science fiction.’

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@whatsdifferentincanada has long run out of content and is mostly boring, but it still occasionally produces offensive bullshit like this. It’s been just over a week since country-wide protests against the unsurprising-but-revealing verdict in the case against the killer of Colten Boushie, but the blog is content to paint Canada as some cutesy naïve backwater. Just STFU, already.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about safer sex recently, how tricky it is when it seems easy. I just read a friend’s Facebook page where she talked about how being undetectable meant you can’t transmit HIV (the CDC just released a statement about this–link is a .pdf), and immediately people glommed on and were like, “Well, there’s still a risk and I’m not having sex with anyone with AIDS.” (WTF) I also just talked with some folks at Bagel Hour about how technically I can’t give blood, but I just lie and get tested regularly when it’s needed. 

I’ve also been rereading one of my favorite books, Comfort and Joy (which features Jim Grimsley’s signature stock character–a femme southern bottom with childhood trauma). The couple in this book is a mixed-status couple having sex before PrEP. I’ve been noticing on this reread that a lot of the book focuses on the tension of navigating a mixed status sex life, and what you think you have to risk and accept.

After describing their highly codified sex life (when and how they use condoms, who gets to do what to whom), and after arguing about getting tested (the negative partner says, “For all your know I’ve been tested every month. If I get the test, and I think I need to tell you something about it, I’ll let you know.”), Grimsley narrates:

It was safe sex because they agreed it was so. Yet it never quite felt safe. So they closed their eyes to any danger, and never, or rarely, spoke about it.

This line has been sticking with me a lot today. I don’t have much to say about it right now.

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TAG THAT FUCKING KKKLOWNS SHIT WITH A TRIGGER WARNING GODDAMMIT. SOME PEOPLE OUT HERE TRYING NOT TO SEE KLAN OUTFITS OR SIMULATED LYNCHING!

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Fucking fuck the fucking homonationalism and smugness of Canada ugh ugh gag 

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The second link was broken for me but I believe I found it here

petition Beyoncé to divorce Jay-Z already and/or make him read Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White and The Price of the Ticket (preferably both, in reverse order)

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I hate straight people

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oh my god I was literally writing a rambling post on this exact phenomenon (except it was about Azis, not Marija) when I came across this article (well worth reading btw) and can I just say, the media narrative pushed around Conchita’s win was total and utter hypocritical bullshit

Sestre, Slovenia’s 2002 gay drag queen entry to the Eurovision? SLEPT ON

the fact that the EBU introduced a 5-second delay in 2003 so it could censor t.A.T.u. in case they kissed on stage and threatened to ban Russia from the 2004 contest if they did? SLEPT ON

Bulgaria’s 2006 entry that featured a gay Roma man? SLEPT ON

Marija Šerifović, a lesbian, representing Serbia in 2007 and winning the entire damn thing? NOT ONLY SLEPT ON, BUT ALSO ACCUSED OF ONLY HAVING WON DUE TO BLOC VOTING

any number of Eastern European artists with obviously queer aesthetics? HAHAHA LOOK AT THAT SIDESHOW

Conchita breathes? A VOTE FOR CONCHITA IS A VOTE AGAINST EASTERN EUROPEAN HOMOPHOBIA

Conchita‘s win can be praised as a win against homophobia because there’s an obvious East/West narrative involved but Azis performs, LGBT activists in the region want to play respectability politics and scoff at his music being low-brow, like, get the fuck over yourselves

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Reblog if you're black tumblr.

You don’t have to be black, it just means you support us, you stand by us and you’re for us.

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If fascism could be defeated in debate, I assure you that it would never have happened, neither in Germany, nor in Italy, nor anywhere else. Those who recognised its threat at the time and tried to stop it were, I assume, also called “a mob”. Regrettably too many “fair-minded” people didn’t either try, or want to stop it, and, as I witnessed myself during the war, accommodated themselves when it took over … People who witnessed fascism at its height are dying out, but the ideology is still here, and its apologists are working hard at a comeback. Past experience should teach us that fascism must be stopped before it takes hold again of too many minds, and becomes useful once again to some powerful interests

Franz Frison, Holocaust survivor, 12th December, 1988, as quoted in AFA Ireland’s statement on the routing of Pegida in Dublin on 6th February 2016. (via antifainternational)

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Samuel R. Delany deserves a Nobel in literature if we’re honest.

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We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

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As an affluent, self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by technology, particular sensibilities spread, and these small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another, as Schwarzmann discovered: the coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers.

This confluence of style is being accelerated by companies that foster a sense of placelessness, using technology to break down geography. Airbnb is a prominent example. Even as it markets unique places as consumable goods, it helps its users travel without actually having to change their environment, or leave the warm embrace of AirSpace.

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surely you