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The Dungeons & Dragons paladin is objectively the funniest class because at first glance it seems like an artefact of an earlier age of the fantasy genre for which contemporary inspirations are thin on the ground, but then you dig into its thematic core and realise there are contemporary popular media characters who almost perfectly fit the mould, but like 80% of them are deeply unwell teenage lesbians.

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once again a promising erotic story ruins the sexiness by concentrating on sex, the least sexy part of sex.

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just saw that the supreme court voted nine-zip to uphold the court order to "facilitate the return of" kilmar garcia back to the states. do you have any idea how bad you gotta fuck up to get these nine people in particular to all agree you fucked up???

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A hero without a cape

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YouGov did a whole official poll on Americans' views of the middle ages and I’m obsessed

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and if I said I stayed up til the ungodly hours of the morning to draw fanart for a tv show scrubbed from existence?

details and flats under the cut!

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On April 8 we celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher, and remember all the lives she destroyed.

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Something that I have noticed is I know almost nobody my age that goes to a food pantry. I know people who regularly run out of money for food and in general have to eat an unsuitable diet because that’s what they can afford and they still don’t go to a food bank, im not sure if it’s because they’re embarrassed or maybe if you didn’t grow up going you don’t know much about it but if you’re financially struggling I really recommend it. And look into other options for food assistance too like community fridges and gardens and other programs that can assist you, where I live Salvation Army pays for an allotted amount of grocery delivery for low income people every month, in the summer farmers take excess produce to the library to be taken by anyone who needs it, etc. There are a LOT of resources for free food that you can look into especially if you are literally not eating because of your financial situation

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I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

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Mouse Armor by Jeff De Boer

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the fact that sex played such a huge role in Mickey 17 isn't just a fun hot little addition to a good movie about antifascism - it's intrinsic.

They want your sexuality repressed unless you're procreating the "right kind" of babies.

Nasha wants Mickey to be able to grow old with her so that she can suck him off for the rest of her god damned life. Nasha wants to know the name of every sexual position so intimately that her sopping wet boyfriend and her can use the names as a secret code in public. Nasha wants to have sex to feel ALIVE and full of joy. Nasha is going to break federal law to have a threesome with her boyfriend and his clone and she's gonna be high as a fucking kite when she does it. Sexual expression IS resisting fascism because the joy of fucking connects us and gives us something to fight for. Nasha is a hero and her sexuality is intrinsic to it.

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?????? rich people are losing it

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I don't see people talking about this so today is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in where the factory owners locked working women and girls inside to "eliminate the risk of theft" (in reality it was too keep them from taking breaks), which resulted in the gruesome deaths of 123 mostly immigrant women and girls and 23 men, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor either in a panicked attempt to escape or in order to die quickly. There were reports that some of the workers were on fire already as they jumped.

The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.

The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.

This tragedy is a reminder that has been forgotten in the 110 years since: every safety regulation-- every scrap of paperwork contributing to the hundreds of pages of red tape people like to complain about--every word of it was written in the blood of a laborer.

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"Why does Group A deserve human rights if Group B doesn't have them?"

Both groups deserve human rights. That's how human rights work.

Anyone who convinces you to barter one group's rights against another is not interested in giving them to either group.

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Things that leveled me up as a Dyke Pt. 2

When I had dyke sex in the parking lot of the fire and brimstone church I grew up in

When a girl drew protective sigils on my arm for weeks after she overheard me tearing apart her old roommate for saying transphobic shit about her

When the sleep study doctor told me I have a medically large tongue and my wife shouted "I KNEW IT"

When the butch at the hardware store told me the shelf cutting machine broke and we spent 20min cutting shelves with bolt cutters for my wife's closet.

At the RenFaire, my wife tried the knife throwing but couldn't get it, then got huffy when I told her how to do it. She handed me the last knife and told me it's not that easy. I did not tell her I threw knives a lot as a kid, so with all her bags and jewelry balanced in one arm, I flipped the knife a couple times and sunk it into the wooden target guy. Felt like a damn hallmark movie and I loved it.

When an Aussie woman in a hotel lobby asked me to please please keep talking because she was fascinated by my american southern accent. I called her darlin and she blushed.

When my wife's grandfather was fine with her being a lesbian largely because I was such a big help with the cattle

When I moved an iron bedframe into the garden for my wife's coworker and she asked how long we'd been together. The answer was that morning. We'd been going steady for about an hour.

When I taught my wife how to waltz