sunflowertaters

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Transfeminine erasure is so strong that people will act like you're a hysterical attention seeker if you even bring it up.

Like, what else am I supposed to call it when everyone, even other queer people, insist that trans women are a modern Western invention? And insist that any person or group that shares incredible similarity to myself and other trans women are anything but?

What else am I supposed to call it when a highly popular Youtube channel supposedly comitted to diversity makes a video about HRT without consulting any transfeminine people (even though they did think to consult a trans man) and spreads dangerous misinformation about transfeminine HRT as a result? Especially since this is the common state of affairs when it comes to transfeminine HRT.

What else am I supposed to call it when multiple fiction anthologies claiming to represent all trans people consistently exclude transfeminine authors?

What else am I supposed to call it when everyone is considered more of an authority on the transfeminine experience than actual trans women and transfems?

What else am I supposed to call it when everyone, from straight up fascists to 'progressives', from cishets to other trans people, will constantly deny that trans women face intense violence for being trans women. Even as they subject us to that violence everyday, even as the statistics show again and again that transfeminine people face more overall violence than any other gender group, cis or trans.

The denial of this erasure is part of it, and I wish so badly that people would see this.

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When people say, “nature is my religion” are they talking about flies that feed on shit, maggots in decomposing corpses, lionesses with stained teeth and mouths full of blood? Are they talking about floods and fires and things from which we should always run? Are they talking about carcasses, rot, death?

Or do they just mean “this particular copse of benign trees is my religion”

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roxy’s Great Big Mutual Aid Masterpost

So, this isn’t the first post ever made like this, but I’m trying to do something a little different than just posting a bunch of links. I’m only gonna include resources that are international, common, displayed either as a map or as a geographically-sorted list, and easy to participate in, to make this masterpost as accessible as I possibly can. If you’re reading this post you’re probably an English-speaker with an internet connection, and so with that in mind my goal here is that any given link you click will have a decent chance of having something near you, and there will almost certainly be at least one link on this list with something you can plug into

Groups

Mutual Aid Wiki - A map of mutual aid groups of all kinds, largely (but not exclusively) ones started in response to the pandemic

Food Not Bombs - A map of free public meals from rescued food waste. Can be a little outdated

Buy Nothing Project - A list of hyper-local gift economy groups

Trash Nothing - A list of local groups where people give and request things that would otherwise be thrown away

Transition Network - A map of local groups seeking to build sustainable circular economies from the ground up, for people, not profits

Industrial Workers of the World - One big labor union for everybody, with local chapters across much of the world

It’s Going Down’s Upcoming Events Page - A partial list of radical actions taking place in the near future, updated frequently

Locations

Slingshot Collective’s Radical Contact List - An international catch-all list of projects

Intentional Community Directory - A map of communes, housing coops, land trusts, eco-villages, and similar communal living projects

Repair Cafés - A map of spaces where you can show up and have your broken items repaired for free (or volunteer to do so for others)

Sharing Cities - Maps of the commons in various cities across the world

Sharing Spaces

Little Free Library’s Sharing Box Map - A map of little free libraries that have been converted into sharing spaces for food, personal care, or hygiene items

Freedges - A map of community refrigerators for sharing food

Little Free Pantries - A map of sharing boxes for non-perishable food

Can’t Find Anything?

None of these lists are comprehensive, and these aren’t the only resources available either. Try using a search engine or looking on social media with keywords like “[your location] mutual aid”

Maybe you could start something yourself! Here are some resources: How to Form an Affinity Group, How to Share from Shareable, Small Town Organizing for Anarchists, resources for mutual aid groups from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, seven steps to starting a Food Not Bombs group

If you don’t have even a single accomplice to start an affinity group with, there are still actions you can take on your own! Check out my #practical tag for ideas

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Since people seem to like my pride outfit!

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Happy Birthday to the GOAT Ursula K Le Guin, who would've been 95 today.

She was one of the great American writers, along with a great feminist, anarchist, and daoist. If you've never read any of her work, I highly recommend reading The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. It's short at 5 pages, and is a great sample of her exceptional prose and ideas:

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

If you want to read one of her great novels, The Dispossessed is my favorites

The last thing I will recommend is Margaret Killjoy's eulogy for her:

https://crimethinc.com/2018/01/25/we-will-remember-freedom-why-it-matters-that-ursula-k-le-guin-was-an-anarchist

[sunflowertaters]

Hail to the Rainbow is a narrative-driven dark Sci-Fi adventure in post-apocalyptic wastelands inspired by the artwork of Simon Stålenhag!

Read More & Play The Beta Demo (Steam)

Gameplay Video:

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do you ever think about all the girls who's corpses are placed beside portraits of dissociated, dead eyed boys? do you think of all the girls who had their hair cropped short and their bodies stuffed into ill fitting old suits before being put in their caskets? do you ever think of all the parents crying over dead boys they made up in their heads because they were too proud to love their daughters? do you ever think of all the girls being mourned in whispers to keep from offending those same parents? do you ever think of all the girls who are killed a second time, their memory sacrificed in service of a convenient fiction of an inexplicably sad boy who took his own life for no real reason?

do you ever think about them?

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the dubious philosophy of salmon

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Anyway have a mulled cider recipe, share it with someone you love against the cold. That would make me happy

1 gallon good quality apple cider

3 sticks cinnamon

6 cloves (eyeball it)

8 allspice berries (eyeball it)

1/4 brown sugar

Pinch of salt

1 whole navel orange slices into rounds

1.5-2 inch ginger sliced into rounds

(Optional) handful of cranberries

Simmer on low for 2 or 3 hours or heat in crockpot for 4 or so. If it comes out too strong for your taste it's easy to water down. Sometimes I'll cook it down for a long time (I'd exclude the cranberries) and use it more as a concentrate to mix with water.

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That day I woke up crying

Inspired by this article, which caught in my throat for a good while.

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this is so mean but sometimes i see published writing and suddenly no longer feel insecure about my own writing ability. like well okay that got published so im guessing i dont have much to worry about

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Ignore me, just saving this

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Pirate all your favorite shows, movies, and games while you still have the chance.

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Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.

The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.

When it came to humans and their appetites, Hardin assumed that all was predestined. Ostrom showed that all was possible, but nothing was guaranteed. ‘We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies nor free of moral responsibility,’ she told an audience of fellow political scientists in 1997.

Despite the evidence gathered by Ostrom and her colleagues, it seems, many are still all too willing to believe the worst of their fellow humans – to the detriment of conservation efforts worldwide. Like Hardin, many conservationists assume that humans can only be destructive, not constructive, and that meaningful conservation can be achieved only through total privatisation or total government control. Those assumptions, whether conscious or unconscious, close off an entire universe of alternatives.

[sunflowertaters]

Extremely nitpicky but I hate white wedding gowns in fantasy, especially when they make absolutely no sense in the setting. No, that culture in the far north that prioritizes function over form and mostly wears heavy furs would not have the means, ability, or desire to make a sleeveless ivory silk gown with a semi-sweetheart neckline. Please be sensible about this and use your creativity instead of just slapping a Kleinfeld wedding gown into a medieval fantasy setting.