#<- unfortunate that our existence is political

[vioyume]

Queer Zine Archival Project (QZAP)

With all the chaos that is currently happening in the US (I'm not American), I feel that it's important to not lose hope in what we are still fighting for and to continue to express our experiences and desires when it comes to being/supporting the LGBTQ+ as a whole.

Because unfortunately, America has a very strong influence on the rest of the world.

The very least I can do is share and encourage going through the QZAP website since zines played a major role within LGBTQ history. The website has very much helped me learn the experiences of what people have been going at that time, and I believe much of it can be applied now.

But I also encourage people to create zines of their own so that we continue to stay strong remind others that our existence will not be going away.

Link to Archive

What's a Zine and how to make one?

Look through this post to find out

It also inspired me to share the archives.

Want to Donate a Zine?

Fill out this form.

Other LGBTQ+ Archives:

Assorted Early Zines by Houston LGBT History

Lesbian Herstory Archive

Digital Transgender Archive

Gale: Gender and Sexuality Research Archive

Queer.archive.work

Queer Music Heritage

Anchor Archive (They have more than lgbtq+ topics)

Queer Zine Library

[serpentface]

What's the Wardi cultural take on Akoshos sleeping with/partnering with/marrying other Akoshos?

It's not highly regulated to a degree that there are overwhelming cultural norms about it. There's a lot of societal focus on akoshos being theoretically suitable sexual partners for both men and women due to being dual-gendered, but not to an extent that relationships with One Another are stigmatized.

They also largely get to escape from the most severe concerns about penetrator/penetrated power dynamics because they're not regarded as Men (they're regarded as dual-gendered, and they're a female social class on every practical level), there's no status of manhood to Lose by receiving sexual penetration. The only real thing you see in that department is people assuming that one acts as 'the man' and one acts as 'the woman', but this is largely due to preoccupation with a notion of sex being Penetration With A Penis (and that Penetration With A Penis means that one person is in a Man's Role and one person is in a Woman's Role). But this will not be regarded as unnatural as in same-gender male relations, akoshos will Have to take up a position in this sexual dichotomy if they want to have Real Sex (Penetration With A Penis) with each other, and this is not unnatural and doesn't involve gaining or losing status since they are simultaneously male and female, not men.

So like you might see individual culture critics finding stuff to nitpick about it as their annoyance of the week or a singular Guy here or there who thinks it's weird, but this isn't a widespread norm. The vast majority of people don't give a shit about akoshos having sex with each other. The worst thing you're likely to experience Solely by virtue of being in an akoshos-akoshos relationship is someone asking you (probably with genuine curiosity) which one does the man stuff and which one does the woman stuff.

Akoshos also don't experience Hard expectations for marriage (though there are societal pressures that make marriage an attractive safety net all the same, ESPECIALLY marriage to a man) so unofficial life-partnerships between akoshos are pretty much the Only same gender partnerships between unwed people that are going to go unquestioned. ((Sworn brotherhood is technically a same gender life partnership for men that is Functionally similar to marriage (in that it's a kin-making practice between unrelated adults), but the tradition is Built upon the assumption that both parties will be married to women and that a primary goal of this kinship is to provide security for both parties' wives and children)). Marriage obligations in general are more lax in the economically secure but not Wealthy lower mercantile classes (as obligations to support and perpetuate one's family are universal, but these obligations can be filled simply by having at least One son who can get hitched, and marriages in the lower classes have no political functions and therefore there's less reason to ensure All your children are wed (there's still incentives like dowry, but this is not desperately needed when a family is economically secure)). So akoshos in this class group tend to have a Lot more freedom in terms of their life arrangements and chosen partners (though still experience the limiting frameworks of structural misogyny in other capacities).

The only thing that is out of the picture is akoshos/akoshos marriage. Marriage in this society has a predominantly reproductive function, the concept of reproductively non-viable marriages is generally considered absurd. This is not JUST this culture's form of homophobia, as marriage is a very practical arrangement at its core - both in a reproductive capacity and as bedrock for the patriarchal blood-kinship family system that forms the core social unit. The idea of same gender marriage isn't just absurd because 'ewwww weird' it's like, that Cannot work within this system, it Cannot fill core functions of what a marriage intends to do here, the ways on which marriage and kinship are BUILT makes same gender marriage practically (rather than just socially) untenable.

The sole exception to the 'marriage = reproductively viable" rule is that akoshos can be married to men (which in practice is almost always as a remarriage after a man has secured At Least an heir). This has a Little bit of internal logic here in that they perform predominantly female social roles (thus are suited to being a wife, even if they can't bear children) (and also on practical levels of them having the same legal status as women) but it's really more of a 'this is just how it's always been' kind of thing. A lot of the older pre-Wardi identity dual-gender roles that got mashed together under the 'akoshos' name would have involved marriage to a man as a second wife/concubine, in addition to his primary wife who would bear his children. Men potentially having multiple spouses has not been retained as a cultural practice, but the notion that an akoshos Can be a wife to a man has survived into modern day legal and doctrinal practices around marriage.

So like this being said, marriage as it is legally defined is only between a man and a woman, a man and an akoshos, or a woman and an akoshos. In practice the latter two are comparatively VERY rare- a man/akoshos marriage cannot provide children (though an akoshos can practically fulfill all other obligations and duties of a wife), a woman/akoshos marriage Can provide children (and while akoshos cannot function as a male heir, these children Will take their akoshos-parent's family name (though the wife retains her father's family name)), but akoshos are legally grouped with women in terms of rights and privileges (including being permanently under legal domain of their father unless they have been legally handed off to a male husband) and Cannot provide hard power patriarchal support that this family system is built upon and therefore depends upon, which makes these marriages socio-economically insecure. They can obviously still be a good partner and parent, but this is not the same as having the Legal hard power of a patriarch.

Akoshos marrying each other would be reproductively and socially nonviable, and is treated as a similarly absurd concept to a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman. It's just not a part of the marriage and kinship framework, it's not a thing that you can Do.

[ursie]

Brennan’s statement on Palestine :

[ ID: Statement from Brennan Lee Mulligan, on Instagram. It consists of three black squares with plain white text. The text reads as follows:

"I'm calling on my government officials to immediately demand a ceasefire and de-escalation in Gaza.

I applaud anyone and everyone calling for peace, with the understanding that real peace only exists if it deeply and honestly accounts for and fully ends violence in all its forms. Real peace addresses and corrects wrong-doing in the past and guards against it in the future. It goes hand in hand with justice and requires truth, restoration, reconciliation, reparation.

Peace cannot co-exist with collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and forced displacement. It cannot co-exist with blockades, embargoes, or with 2.2 million people, half of which are children, trapped with no hope of escape or political recourse. it cannot co-exist with murdered journalists, bombed hospitals, or years of protesters being shot and killed at the border. it cannot co-exist with illegal settlements, segregated roads, and the silent, imperial chill that settles over the gaps in the violence - the unspoken geopolitical consensus that a group of people need to unflinchingly accept permanent subjugation and occupation.

My hear breaks for every Israeli person who lost loved ones during the attacks of October 7th. It breaks for every Ukrainian person who has lost their loved ones. It breaks for every Congolese person who has lost their loved ones. I do not speak on behalf of Palestinians now because some lives are worth more than others. I speak on their behalf because I, and all Americans, have a responsibility to pressure our government because we are responsible for this. Some have said that this situation is complicated. The Unites States government clearly disagrees. It has definitively, categorically, militarily chosen a side, and I do not agree with that decision.

In wiring this, I have been wrestling with what I am sure many people like me wrestle with: There is a powerful narrative surrounding violence in the Middle East that asserts and ever-moving goalpost of self-education and study in order to even be qualified to have an opinion. As someone with a love of research, I have at times in my life fallen into the trap that I am not educated enough clever enough, or aware enough to have a worthwhile perspective, and that three more articles and two more lectures and one more book will do the trick. Unfortunately, democracy doesn't work that way - we, the citizens of any democracy, cannot possibly be experts on every aspect of the policies of our governments, and yet if we do not constantly weigh in an make our voices heard, the entire experiment falls apart. Not only do people constantly doubt themselves and the things they can see with their own two eyes, but old shortcuts for political action can fall apart as well: This specific issue exists along a raw, charged and unique faultline in American Politics. Nobody I grew up with has ever challenged me on my support for abortion rights, LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, none of it. The people in my country who would despise me for those positions are, for all intents and purposes, strangers to me. But there are people who I've broken bread with and shared honest affection with who will see the words I've written here and incorrectly conclude that I do not wish for the security, dignity and happiness of them and their loved ones, and that breaks my fucking heart. Full-throatedly condemning the actions of the Israeli government while battling rampant anti-semitism at home is an urgent moral necessity, and doing so is made unnecessarily challenging for the average person to navigate by the pointed obfuscations of cynical opportunists, bigots, and demagogues on all sides of the political spectrum who see some advantage in sowing that incredibly dangerous confusion.

So, I'm calling my representatives. I'm having hard conversations with friends and family. I'm here, talking to you. I should have done it sooner. If you're Israeli and hurt by this statement, know that I want freedom, dignity, security and peace for you, and that every ounce of my political awareness believes whole-heartedly that the actions of your government are not only destroying innocent lives, but doing so to the detriment of you and your loved ones' safety. If you're American and feel lost and confused - I understand and empathize. This, the whole country, only works when we get involved. I am constantly haunted by the specter that maybe I missed some crucial piece of information on this, or any, important world event. I'll just have to make my peace with that self-doubt and trust my gut by going with Jewish Voice for Peace, Amnesty International, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, etc. And if you're Palestinian and reading this: I unreservedly support your right to life, to freedom, to happiness and human flourishing, to full enfranchisement and equal rights, to opportunity, prosperity and abundance, to the restoration of stolen property and land, and to a Free Palestine." End ID ]

[star2fishmeg]

https://www.tumblr.com/star2fishmeg/763241713597890560/i-need-luke-in-a-dainty-chain-with-my-initials-on

Can I request this with Luke please

ʀɪɢʜᴛ ʜᴇʀᴇ, ʀɪɢʜᴛ ɴᴏᴡ

[2.8k] Pairing | Luke Hughes x afab!reader Summary | Luke’s so down bad he loves watching y/n defend him, but he loves calming her down more Warnings | Suggestive w/sexual themes, slow burn-y, established relationship, a lot of making out, swearing, alcohol, arguing  Authors Note | @stayg-0ld I DID IT I COULDN’T RESIST! Me and Sim cook.

How much awkward standing would it take for the hint to be dropped? Y/n was right next to him, leaning over the bar and ordering her drink and Luke even gave glances over to her as if to present interest in her and not the women flirting with him. His mind drew a blank on words, eyes jumping around the bar hoping to find something else to focus on other than the uncomfortable situation he found himself in. His teammates were too occupied at the pool tables, his girlfriend was trying to order a drink and no awkward smile of his was working. 

“Hey, Curly? I like your chain, the little letter charm is very pretty, especially under these lights.” Their giggles suffocated his personal space.

“Yeah, they sparkle like your eyes.” Another chimed in, pressing her shoulder into his arm. He knew very well that his eyes were not sparkling under the red neon lights, he knew his sweat across his forehead and temples was though. 

Luke’s fingers fiddled with the necklace, backing impossibly closer to y/n figure, “Thanks, they’re for, um, someone really important to me, my girlfriend actually. It was an anniversary present.”

He would’ve been fine with shooing the women away normally. Usually, he would be with the guys, but these women had been following him like flies most of the night and his excuses were wearing thin, haggard to be precise. The only card he had left was the girlfriend card and even that wasn’t steering them away. 

“Awe, sweet. We don’t bite, why don’t you join our table? We’d love to get to know you.” One of them batted her eyelashes, not that Luke thought anything of it. 

“Um, no thanks. I’m all right, I’m with my girlfriend so I’m happy here.” He replied, lips pulling into a straight line, breathing heavily and hoping the bartender would serve y/n her goddamn drink already. It took everything in him not to shoot out some snarky comment that awaited on the tip of his tongue. 

Y/n heard everything, ears perking up the second her stomach twisted sick at the nickname given to him. The same nickname she’d been listening to them throw around amongst each other the whole night as if she didn’t exist at all. She knew he was crying for help, his back couldn’t have been more pressed into hers, so close it screamed desperation through the sweat soaking his polo shirt. She knew he was sick of ushering them away, politely and now she finally had her drink, she could have her fun. She didn’t enjoy her boyfriend being followed, but she did enjoy watching flies scatter. 

She turned around, her drink to her chest and tucked herself into his side, Luke wrapping his arm around her waist and hand on her hip firmly, thumb rubbing the fabric in comfort. 

“Lu, who the fuck are they?” she asked her smile as fake as her polite tone, calling it more passive-aggressive. Her eyes scanned both women, especially the one pressed into his side, but quickly backed up when Luke pulled y/n into him. Of course, the woman knew she’d overstepped a boundary, she wouldn’t have backed up if she didn’t think so, but her friend had a fire in her eyes that y/n knew all too well. 

"I dunno, babe. They said my chain was pretty and then I tried explaining how pretty your initial look on it.” He replied, his muscles relaxing with her presence and his gaze softening on her. He pressed a gentle kiss to her head, heart slowing.

The woman fueled by fire scoffed, her nasal voice unfortunately audible over the bar’s buzz, “Nice try, you don’t need to save Curly over here, we weren’t gonna do anything except maybe get a number.”

Y/n exhaled deeply, she wasn’t jealous, no, she trusted Luke entirely and knew he wouldn’t even think about any other woman but her. The chain around his neck said so, the chain with the charm he kissed before every game, the charm he fiddled with for comfort, the charm with the letter of her first name. This feeling, this feeling was fuelled with adrenaline, the energy rushing through her system, and she ran her tongue over her top teeth.

“All right, come here.” Y/n wagged her finger, “I’ve had enough of you bitches.” 

She led them away from the bar, towards a table in the middle of the place but in her defence, it was crowded and any chance of trying to find somewhere more secluded was thin. Luke leaned against the counter, Dawson appearing next to him with an almost empty glass clutched in his hand, just as intrigued as Luke when they both watched her figure take both the women away.

Inaudible words spat from y/n’s mouth, the liquid in her drink sloshing with every hand gesture thrown as the three of them argued, the music and buzz of the bar just muffling them. Luke’s lips pulled into a lovesick grin, watching the way she chewed the women out, his eyes catching the recipients of her irritation and finding amusement in the way their faces dropped in shock, realisation hitting them that he really was in love with her, deeply, like he had two big heart eyes fixed on y/n. Did she need to be that aggressive with them? Possibly not, but y/n had enough of being followed, disregarded and heard their comments bite at her, watching them try and hover around Luke after he’d told them to go away. 

A warm, fuzzy feeling swirled in Luke’s stomach, he never admitted it out loud often, but y/n’s possessive nature made heat rush up the back of his neck, goosebumps along his arms. Her knitted brows, witty sentences and every time she held his arm or glared at anyone who dared even to try and shoot something such as a flirty look had his heart skipping beats and a crude, rousing feeling tingling over him. Maybe he liked feeling like he belonged to someone, maybe he was just slightly submissive like that and liked the necklace showing he was claimed, or perhaps the dominance in her tone just hit all the right places. His jeans tightened, hands sliding into the pockets subtly to rearrange himself for decency, he couldn’t help but let himself be a loser for her. 

“Is that…y/n?” Dawson leaned over to Luke; eyebrow raised at what he was watching. One of the girls, the one with the nasal voice, poked her finger towards y/n harshly and Dawson could just make out the words ‘fucking puck bunny’ leave her lips. His eyes jumped to Luke’s face, but all the twenty-one-year-old offered was a shit-eating grin with eyes directly forward. “You’re enjoying this? Luke, people are starting to stare.” 

He knew he should’ve stepped in a while ago, but the whole situation had his stomach flipping up a storm of butterflies and contorting his lips into a smug smirk. He knew he didn’t need to save her, she was fighting her battle proudly, running his dainty chain along his thumb while he remained watching her like a hawk. His eyes followed the way a bit of her drink swirled up the side of her glass and plummeted to the floor, splashing over one of the women’s shoes. He pressed the charm to his lips, taking it between his lips as the pad of his thumb continued to slide along the metal, his eyes becoming half-lidded and his chest fizzling in excitement. 

He nudged Dawson gently, both men watching y/n toss the rest of her drink over the nasal-voiced woman, "That's my girl…all mine." 

“She’s a keeper, all right.” Dawson chuckled, eyebrows raised at her fire and amused with how one of the women made eye contact with Luke as if asking for help.

Luke just grinned, the charm still toying in his fingertips as the three women argued with voices raising, and it was amusing until y/n was shoved backwards slightly, harshly, as a threat. Y/n breathed heavily, running her tongue over her teeth. She really hadn’t meant for her firm word to last this long and end in an argument and the loss of her drink, but some people just couldn’t seem to get the hint that not every man they meet at a bar wants them, and they were still persistent in that Luke was interested despite the way he looked at her. She was shoved again as if to be provoked and on reflex y/n’s arm raised, palm flat and adrenaline burning, the nasal-voiced woman’s face was in perfect distance, and she drew back her arm.

But the hit never landed. Luke jolted from his position, chain dropping from his lips and pushing off the bar, snaking through the bodies and sweeping her over his shoulder in almost one clean motion, “Luke! Put me down, we’re in public! I was in the middle of something!”

“Oh, baby, I know, and as hot as it was, I think you made your point.” He grinned, weaving his way to an empty corner at the other end of the bar, the area nearest the wall where nobody favoured due to how gloomy the lighting was. Sliding her body off his shoulder, he sat her on a bar stool, hands secured on her cheeks, thumbs soothing her cheekbones to reassure her that he was with her through and through until the end of time and no woman could replace her. 

Luke tilted her head to look up at him, a comforting quietness to where they were, the music significantly louder in the distance than in the abandoned corner. He broke the silence, voice low but lips twitched into a smile, “Fuck babe, you’re so hot when you’re angry, have I ever told you that? Had me in a trance back there.”

"Not angry, some people just need to keep their hands to themselves and your name out their mouths." She grumbled, her fingers wrapping gently around his wrists and thumbs rubbing over his skin in return, swinging her legs with knitted brows.

"They weren't touching me, though." He quipped, his grin morphing into his smirk, eyebrows raising slightly as his chuckle rumbled in his chest. 

"They would though, it's always the arm, squeeze the bicep. Then they lean into you like they can't use their own legs, laugh at everything, use their eyes to flirt, say that you're strong and have pretty eyes and men are so easy, so it works." She rallied, rolling her eyes at him. One thing Luke fell in love with was her stubbornness, even when it rivalled his. Y/n was a winner in everything; she always tried despite slim chances. 

"But you didn't do that?" He nudged her legs apart, standing between them and closer to her and finding a sweetness to her huffing.

"Didn't need to, I had you the moment we met.” She kissed his palm, looking up at him through her lashes, watching his breathing deepen.

Luke, coming closer to losing this battle to calm her down, ran the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip, "Yeah well, it didn’t and wouldn’t work on me anyway, unless it was you..."

"Yeah, you're whipped, I know, Lu." 

It took everything in him not to slide his thumb into her mouth, have her fumble from this venom-spitting spree and watch her eyes roll to the back of her head while words melted into deep moans. 

"Can't blame me for falling for a pretty girl who knows how to fight." He removed his hands from her face briefly to brush loose hairs out of her eyes, her gaze igniting a rising heat up his neck and to his face, flushing his cheeks pink. His hands returned to her cheeks, cupping them again with a gentle touch.

"Well, I would have fought if you’d let me. I just don’t get how they couldn’t comprehend in their feeble brains that-"

With a low chuckle, Luke dipped down, firmly and abruptly pulling her into a bruising, open-mouthed kiss, almost knocking the air from her lungs and pushing her back to the edge of the bar counter, asking no permission, just his tongue finding hers to ask her into a rhythm and hearing her moan softly, her muscles relaxing into him. Their tongues lapped against each other’s, saliva building and wetting their lips with her grip around his wrists loosening to soothe up and down his forearms. A fizzling pleasure swirled in the pit of her stomach, warm and pooling into her underwear. She couldn’t stay disgruntled, not when Luke kissed her stupid, head numbing into a dizzy spinning the longer and more eager he latched his mouth to hers, his groans rumbling from his throat. For the sake of her peace of mind, he hoped the women from before could see them and watch them make out until drool trickled down their chins and they gasped for air at the corner of the bar while they sipped cocktails and moved on to his teammates. 

He was the one to pull back gradually, eyes locking with her wide, glossy ones as her mouth quivered to speak but he’d swallowed her words entirely. With his fingers on the bottom of her jaw, keeping her head tilted up at him, he asked her one simple question that had her melting into the floor,

"Gonna be a good girl f'me now and calm down?" He rasped, gaze steadying on hers, stroking her cheek with his thumb. She nodded, stunned and focusing on his lips moving, how the corners of his mouth had a slight upturn in the corners, and how spit glistened when it caught the red lights. “God, I am so fucking happy I’m yours, fucking beautiful.” 

She’d never been so shocked in her life, heart pounding in her chest but now for reasons of her boyfriend proving his ability to calm her down. She was surprised at herself too, how easily it was to calm her down and all it took was a kiss to shut her up from her useless rambling and release all the frustration. It was pointless rambling, after all, she knew she was Luke’s and Luke was hers, the adrenaline was just potent, and she needed something to clear her head. With his arms around her, holding her like she was a diamond, with that endearing, lovesick puppy look of his, nothing else mattered anymore and all she wanted was to dive back into him. 

Y/n’s hands clasped his shirt collar, balling the fabric in her fists as she yanked him back down, reconnecting their mouths and tangling tongues once again, desperately, humming loudly as her legs wrapped around the back of his knees to hold him in. Her teeth tugged on his bottom lip, catching him whine and glide his hands to her waist, squeezing until she licked back into his mouth.

“Love you,” she mumbled against his lips, hands sliding from his collar over his shoulders and to the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in his curls and tugging, “Lu. Please don’t stop.”

He didn’t care where he was anymore, or who was watching. One hand moved from her waist to lean against the edge of the counter, pushing her body further back and his kiss was so dizzying, that she ignored that ache from the wood in her spine. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach, the atmosphere silent the harder he kissed her, lips stinging slightly and panting every time they briefly disconnected for air. 

Millimetres apart, their breaths fanned cheeks and foreheads pressed together. Luke brought his hand off the counter, settling on the back of her neck, goosebumps running along her skin.

"Gonna kick off more if it means you kiss me like that." She giggled airily, pulling away and looking up at him, nails brushing his scalp.

He relished her voice like it was his next drink, letting it soak into his system and release all the weight from his body, “Mmm, do that more and I might just eat you out instead, get you screaming about something else.”

“Is that a standing offer? Because if you’re gonna use your tongue like that I know other places that need attention.” She batted her eyelashes, giving him large, wet eyes with fingers trailing down his chest and stomach, arousing his craving until they hooked around his belt loops. 

He loved the height difference, looking down at those captivating eyes he adored and the way they softened for him, how they widened ever so slightly when she looked at him, how her lips unconsciously curled upwards and how the way one look had him turning into mush. His lips perked up, a lazy smile on his face, wanting nothing but to be kissing her like that all day. Y/n didn’t do that for anyone else and even though she told him that she loved him every day, Luke always got butterflies when she’d give him the heart eyes.

Luke bit his lip slightly, nodding and taking her hands in his own before letting her hop off the barstool. Kissing the top of her head, his arm wound around her shoulders, guiding her through the bar, past his friends and the women from before, to the main door, his chain with her initial glistening the whole way.

nhl wags | @bunbunbl0gs (To be added to taglists, just comment or ask via ‘pass me the puck!’) [Masterlist] [Requests CLOSED]

2024 © STAR2FISHMEG All rights reserved - do not plagiarise/copy, translate, or repost any of my works. Please let me know if you notice that any of these have been done to my work.

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[starsintheskyandtheeye]

Respect for the Dead

By Lois Lane and Clark Kent

1,436 words

By now most of the world has been shaken by the news.

Ghosts are real! And ghosts are in danger! The original publication written by Lois Lane can be found here but we are not here to follow that well trodden avenue of discussion.

Here at the Daily Planet we have elected to focus on speaking to the ghosts themselves, rather than debate their existence alongside our fellow papers. During the hunt for the new source of Kryptonite that sparked this discovery Lois Lane made contact with one Danny Phantom. Originally he chose to anonymous but since the outpouring of support from much of the world he has since chosen to come forward publicly.

Given that the ghostly teenager is operating as a hero similar to our own Superman much of his personal history could not be shared. What was safe to share however was very different from what this reporting team had been expecting.

We had gone in prepared to hear the story of what caused a ghost that looks like a schoolboy to lead a life of ghostly vigilantism.

What we got was sweetly sarcastic individual giving us amusing anecdotes of his start as a hero, descriptions of the stranger habits he's gained since his death, and many many tips on how to politely interact with a ghost. At our confusion (who knew there were so many different types of ghost!) Phantom went on to explain and correct several common misconceptions about ghosts. So without further ado; here are the highlights of that discussion.

We begin with what was given to us as the number one rule of human/ghost etiquette. Never ask the individual, be they glowing werewolf, ghostly lunch-lady, or undead rock star, about the circumstances of their death.

It seems simple does it not? A matter of everyday politeness, and yet that is the number one reason for communication breakdowns between ectoplasmic entities and still living humans. Fortunately for the health of the interview this reporting team did not make that mistake. Phantom did not explain the nature of the offense but did not need to. It was clear that the, until then, friendly conversation would have ended abruptly if we had gone any farther down that path.

What we were encouraged (and warned) to talk to a ghost about was their obsession. As Phantom explained, "It's what drives a ghost, why we are still here, or why we formed at all."

When asked about his own obsession Phantom laughed a bit and said, "I'm a bit young for a ghost, so I don't really have one yet, I bounce around a lot. My doctor, he's a yeti, says it's normal for me though! The options are all over the place though. I know one ghost that haunts the high school to prevent bullying, a really nice guy. Another just wants to have her music heard by the world. Unfortunately her music brainwashes people to love her so we aren't super close. Or another that is all about granting wishes, but not in a singing blue genie way, in a fairy tale way, it's a mess whenever she gets over here."

That seems to be a common theme in ghostly/human interaction. Ghosts largely mean no harm but the pursuit of their own obsessions can have devastating effects on any that stand between them and their goal. Something to keep in mind if you're ordering pizza when the Box Ghost is at large.

Hoping it wouldn't cross into the realm of ghostly faux pas we went on to ask how old Phantom is. Once again Phantom seemed somewhat awkward although no more than what seemed to be his baseline when talking to (self claimed) famous reporters, saying only, "Time works differently in the realms. It can be really weird sometimes, you'll be talking to someone that looks like a toddler only to learn that they were last in a human world during the 1400s or something."

As Phantom continued to share however, the everlasting aspect seemed to be the least interesting part of the Infinite Realms, or the Ghost Zone as the Doctors Fenton, previously mentioned as ghostly experts here, call the place where the vast majority of ghosts dwell.

Ghostly yetis practicing medicine, while certainly not the least of the inhabitants were just the start. Phantom went on to share with us a sampling of the being he has encountered in his travels, medieval women moonlighting as temperamental dragons, the very concept of time, a warden of any ghosts that cross his path, and of course the ubiquitous creepy toddler so often featured on the silver screen.

According to Phantom up until extremely recently (whether by ghostly or human terms we were unable to determine) the Infinite Realms was closed off from our own home except for the occasional haunting. Which was explained to us by the telling of what was, to Phantom, a very funny joke about pop culture influencing ghost culture as people died and brought it over with them. From this we can glean several things. That the realms of the living and the dead have never been so far apart as it would have seemed to the living. That the near future will hold many changes as major religions, governments, and the common people hear what the dead have to say as they weigh in on what respect for the dead really means. And that while many things do translate, ghostly humor is not one of them.

Although of course that may be that, despite his real age being possibly many times our own - combined, Phantom is still eternally a teenager. And a teenagers jokes are often incomprehensible to any who do not share that state.

When asked about the sudden ghostly interest in our own living Earth Phantom had this to say, "Lots of ghosts want to go to the lands of the living. Especially anyone that used to be alive themselves. And anyone that didn't is curious what the fuss is about. Earth is so different from the ghost zone but it's still where a lot of us came from. If someone gets a chance to hop through the portal they'll go, to see how things have changed, or to keep things from changing, or just to stretch their obsessions. Really it's a chance to go home, just for a little while," he said, reminding us that for all they look like aliens ghosts are just as human as you or I.

With a few caveats.

The portal Phantom spoke of is an invention by the Doctors Fenton, Ectobiologists. Up until recently Jack and Maddie Fenton had been the worlds foremost ghostly experts, building a portal to the "Ghost Zone" in order to study what up until recently had been considered to be a non-sentient classification of emotional ectoplasmic imprintation.

We spoke to the researchers after our interview with Phantom, at his request. Despite the recent evidence come to light the couple remain the foremost (living) human scientists in the field. When asked about the setback to their work they had this to say, "We were devastated of course. To learn that we won't be able to study spooks -" Jack Fenton broke off there, at an extremely well executed elbow jab from Maddie Fenton who then said. "We got an extreme tunnel vision, a hazard of obsessive science. We were told we were wrong about the existence of ghosts for so long that we forgot to check that we were correct about their nature. We look forward to pivoting to ghostly anthropology and human/ghost interaction technology."

Ultimately we did not learn any groundbreaking secrets, but then if a ghost willing to go on record ( a written record at least, our recorded transcript of the conversation was near unusable due to static) you sit down and listen. We can never anticipate what a reader will take from an article but if we could make a suggestion? In this reporting teams opinion, the balance of ghost and human realms is not unlike the inversion of a mirror. We are reflections of one another. Opposite, yes, and dangerous to one another for it, but ultimately we are all the same. After all what is a ghost but emotion and ectoplasm (according to current science)? And for all that we try to rise above it, what is a human but emotion and flesh?

Fin.

Coming Soon!

Keep an eye out for top ten tips on ghostly interaction and interviews with the Justice League on diplomatic efforts with GHOSTLY ROYALTY!!

[drdemonprince]

what are your thoughts on people drawing a correlation between kink and trauma?

People like to make satisfying narratives out of things. Our brains often look for patterns automatically. Also, many people feel obligated to explain where their kinks come from, as if they've got to justify their existence.

In the book The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris describes how gay BDSM practitioners in the 80s and 90s took to describing kink practices using therapeutic language, in hopes of sanitizing kink's reputation among the public and winning greater social approval. This had the unfortunate effect of only feeding in to the respectability politics that had already tainted conversations about kink -- suddenly it felt obligatory to prove that a person's kink practices made them healthier, happier, more effective, productive, and sane, rather than allowing kink to just exist for the sake of pleasure.

This pressure is very much still with us today. Many kinksters now lean on a traumatic history to explain why they really need kink, instead of feeling free to just say that they like it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s new phones can’t stop phoning home

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

One of the most brazen lies of Big Tech is that people like commercial surveillance, a fact you can verify for yourself by simply observing how many people end up using products that spy on them. If they didn't like spying, they wouldn't opt into being spied on.

This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech's surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would ever permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau's gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/11/sxsw-facial-recognition-biometrics-surveillance-panel

The agent insisted that the FBI had acquired all those faces through legitimate means, by accessing public sources of people's faces. In other words, we'd all opted in to FBI facial recognition surveillance. "Sure," I said, "to opt out, just don't have a face."

This pathology is endemic to neoliberal thinking, which insists that all our political matters can be reduced to economic ones, specifically, the kind of economic questions that can be mathematically modeled and empirically tested. It would be great if all our thorniest problems could be solved like mathematical equations.

Unfortunately, there are key elements of these systems that can't be reliably quantified and turned into mathematical operators, especially power. The fact that someone did something tells you nothing about whether they chose to do so – to understand whether someone was coerced or made a free choice, you have to consider the power relationships involved.

Conservatives hate this idea. They want to live in a neat world of "revealed preferences," where the fact that you're working in a job where you're regularly exposed to carcinogens, or that you've stayed with a spouse who beats the shit out of you, or that you're homeless, or that you're addicted to Oxy, is a matter of choice. Monopolies exist because we all love the monopolist's product best, not because they've got monopoly power. Jobs that pay starvation wages exist because people want to work full time for so little money that they need food-stamps just to survive. Intervening in any of these situations is "woke paternalism," where the government thinks it knows better than you and intervenes to take away your right to consume unsafe products, get maimed at work, or have your jaw broken by your husband.

Which is why neoliberals insist that politics should be reduced to economics, and that economics should be carried out as if power didn't exist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five

Nowhere is this stupid trick more visible than in the surveillance fight. For example, Google claims that it tracks your location because you asked it to, by using Google products that make use of your location without clicking an opt out button.

In reality, Google has the power to simply ignore your preferences about location tracking. In 2021, the Arizona Attorney General's privacy case against Google yielded a bunch of internal memos, including memos from Google's senior product manager for location services Jen Chai complaining that she had turned off location tracking in three places and was still being tracked:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog

Multiple googlers complained about this: they'd gone through dozens of preference screens, hunting for "don't track my location" checkboxes, and still they found that they were being tracked. These were people who worked under Chai on the location services team. If the head of that team, and her subordinates, couldn't figure out how to opt out of location tracking, what chance did you have?

Despite all this, I've found myself continuing to use stock Google Pixel phones running stock Google Android. There were three reasons for this:

First and most importantly: security. While I worry about Google tracking me, I am as worried (or more) about foreign governments, random hackers, and dedicated attackers gaining access to my phone. Google's appetite for my personal data knows no bounds, but at least the company is serious about patching defects in the Pixel line.

Second: coercion. There are a lot of apps that I need to run – to pay for parking, say, or to access my credit union or control my rooftop solar – that either won't run on jailbroken Android phones or require constant tweaking to keep running.

Finally: time. I already have the equivalent of three full time jobs and struggle every day to complete my essential tasks, including managing complex health issues and being there for my family. The time I take out of my schedule to actively manage a de-Googled Android would come at the expense of either my professional or personal life.

And despite Google's enshittificatory impulses, the Pixels are reliably high-quality, robust phones that get the hell out of the way and let me do my job. The Pixels are Google's flagship electronic products, and the company acts like it.

Until now.

A new report from Cybernews reveals just how much data the next generation Pixel 9 phones collect and transmit to Google, without any user intervention, and in defiance of the owner's express preferences to the contrary:

https://cybernews.com/security/google-pixel-9-phone-beams-data-and-awaits-commands/

The Pixel 9 phones home every 15 minutes, even when it's not in use, sharing "location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry." Additionally, every 40 minutes, the new Pixels transmit "firmware version, whether connected to WiFi or using mobile data, the SIM card Carrier, and the user’s email address." Even further, even if you've never opened Google Photos, the phone contacts Google Photos’ Face Grouping API at regular intervals. Another process periodically contacts Google's Voice Search servers, even if you never use Voice Search, transmitting "the number of times the device was restarted, the time elapsed since powering on, and a list of apps installed on the device, including the sideloaded ones."

All of this is without any consent. Or rather, without any consent beyond the "revealed preference" of just buying a phone from Google ("to opt out, don't have a face").

What's more, the Cybernews report probably undercounts the amount of passive surveillance the Pixel 9 undertakes. To monitor their testbench phone, Cybernews had to root it and install Magisk, a monitoring tool. In order to do that, they had to disable the AI features that Google touts as the centerpiece of Pixel 9. AI is, of course, notoriously data-hungry and privacy invasive, and all the above represents the data collection the Pixel 9 undertakes without any of its AI nonsense.

It just gets worse. The Pixel 9 also routinely connects to a "CloudDPC" server run by Google. Normally, this is a server that an enterprise customer would connect its employees' devices to, allowing the company to push updates to employees' phones without any action on their part. But Google has designed the Pixel 9 so that privately owned phones do the same thing with Google, allowing for zero-click, no-notification software changes on devices that you own.

This is the kind of measure that works well, but fails badly. It assumes that the risk of Pixel owners failing to download a patch outweighs the risk of a Google insider pushing out a malicious update. Why would Google do that? Well, perhaps a rogue employee wants to spy on his ex-girlfriend:

https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/

Or maybe a Google executive wins an internal power struggle and decrees that Google's products should be made shittier so you need to take more steps to solve your problems, which generates more chances to serve ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Or maybe Google capitulates to an authoritarian government who orders them to install a malicious update to facilitate a campaign of oppressive spying and control:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

Indeed, merely by installing a feature that can be abused this way, Google encourages bad actors to abuse it. It's a lot harder for a government or an asshole executive to demand a malicious downgrade of a Google product if users have to accept that downgrade before it takes effect. By removing that choice, Google has greased the skids for malicious downgrades, from both internal and external sources.

Google will insist that these anti-features – both the spying and the permissionless updating – are essential, that it's literally impossible to imagine building a phone that doesn't do these things. This is one of Big Tech's stupidest gambits. It's the same ruse that Zuck deploys when he says that it's impossible to chat with a friend or plan a potluck dinner without letting Facebook spy on you. It's Tim Cook's insistence that there's no way to have a safe, easy to use, secure computing environment without giving Apple a veto over what software you can run and who can fix your device – and that this veto must come with a 30% rake from every dollar you spend on your phone.

The thing is, we know it's possible to separate these things, because they used to be separate. Facebook used to sell itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace, where they would never spy on you (not coincidentally, this is also the best period in Facebook's history, from a user perspective):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

And we know it's possible to make a Pixel that doesn't do all this nonsense because Google makes other Pixel phones that don't do all this nonsense, like the Pixel 8 that's in my pocket as I type these words.

This doesn't stop Big Tech from gaslighting* us and insisting that demanding a Pixel that doesn't phone home four times an hour is like demanding water that isn't wet.

*pronounced "jass-lighting"

Even before I read this report, I was thinking about what I would do when I broke my current phone (I'm a klutz and I travel a lot, so my gadgets break pretty frequently). Google's latest OS updates have already crammed a bunch of AI bullshit into my Pixel 8 (and Google puts the "invoke AI bullshit" button in the spot where the "do something useful" button used to be, meaning I accidentally pull up the AI bullshit screen several times/day).

Assuming no catastrophic phone disasters, I've got a little while before my next phone, but I reckon when it's time to upgrade, I'll be switching to a phone from the @calyxinstitute@mastodon.social. Calyx is an incredible, privacy-focused nonprofit whose founder, Nicholas Merrill, was the first person to successfully resist one of the Patriot Act's "sneek-and-peek" warrants, spending 11 years defending his users' privacy from secret – and, ultimately, unconstitutional – surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/depth-judge-illstons-remarkable-order-striking-down-nsl-statute

Merrill and Calyx have tapped into various obscure corners of US wireless spectrum licenses that require major carriers to give ultra-cheap access to nonprofits, allowing them to offer unlimited, surveillance-free, Net Neutrality respecting wireless data packages:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/22/i-have-found-a-secret-tunnel-that-runs-underneath-the-phone-companies-and-emerges-in-paradise/

I've been a very happy Calyx user in years gone by, but ultimately, I slipped into the default of using stock Pixel handsets with Google's Fi service.

But even as I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of Google's Android and Pixel programs, I've grown increasingly impressed with Calyx's offerings. The company has graduated from selling mobile hotspots with unlimited data SIMs to selling jailbroken, de-Googled Pixel phones that have all the hardware reliability of a Pixel, coupled with an alternative app suite and your choice of a Calyx SIM and/or a Calyx hotspot:

https://calyxinstitute.org/

Every time I see what Calyx is up to, I think, dammit, it's really time to de-Google my phone. With the Pixel 9 descending to new depths of enshittification, that decision just got a lot easier. When my current phone croaks, I'll be talking to Calyx.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[five-thousand-loaves-of-bread]

never stop deal with this so this your periodic reminder that

⬇️

!! if you see someone write different online. unless they explicitly tell you something different. leave them alone. don’t comment on their write. don’t do anything unprompted to “help” without ask. it rude annoying we heard it million times promise. !!

⬆️

some people with language disorders. agrammatism. cognitive struggles. or write with symbol base AAC that not support grammar inflections.

yes we will sometimes write different than you use to.

yes it not “correct grammar,” you so observant (sarcasm).

no it not for fun, no it not choice, no it not writing quirk.

whatever you want say, we probably heard it million times. yes even if it friendly joke - n we appreciate you friendly. but please

great that it “actually help you read/understand better than full grammar.” some people may like you tell them that. but personally not want hear it too - my way write my disability, it about me n it not on purpose it out of my control. would rather you talk about how way break down concept (something can actually control n try really hard at) as easy understand.

“this just gave stroke/seizure/whatever ‘funny’ ‘edgy’ disability” joke. not that anyone make it would listen but. shut up. it not funny to me it not funny to stroke survivors or to seizure havers.

decide stop apologize for exist if it hard read. even if you have receptive language / comprehension / reading / cognitive / etc disability - it unfortunate but conflicting accessibility exist. (yes, do understand actually, because speak from experience.)

if you want know what am say please at least put in some effort to read it.

if after genuine try, still struggle, do what you do when you see tumblr post in “perfect grammar” you don’t understand - polite ask for explain or rephrase or summarize.

it still english, or whatever language person use. unless you actual look for it be turn different language, it still english, no you not need “translate.” (no don’t care that “translate” okay in writing quirk community because again. not writing quirk)

not “fix.”

and. understand sometimes we can’t rephrase in different way, even if that different way include still write different.

personally am allow other people answer “can you rephrase” questions without go through me first, for now, because of this. - but understand this is reluctant compromise. because:

understand sometimes we still sensitive to other people rewrite explain in perfect grammar. because have long history of people refuse put effort in read our stuff but instead always give more attention to people who write perfect, even if their writing not any less complicated than ours. because have long history of be charity case n get unsolicit “help” “translate” when we never ask.

because have long history of be forcibly spoken for n be misunderstood. because people who answer may (& many times do) get it wrong & we then have to spend more effort chase down n correct when we already struggle with communication, n that other version always spread faster than our correction.

so know other people who write different, don’t allow people rephrase at all unless go through them first. please also respect that even if inconvenient.

n on that note.

unless we give you explicit permission to you (like “you specifically can do it” or like above “can do it if someone ask,” or “anyone can do it all times”). don’t. don’t rewrite what we write into correct grammar, into perfect grammar.

don’t give random disabled person unsolicited help. it not friendly it not helpful it rude n annoying. not your charity case. who even are you. no one asked.

none. of. your. business.

not need your fix. get off moral high ground.

n like everything. there some jokes n comments that *some* people who write different may be okay with if they friend with that person make it - sometimes opposite of what this post say. if you not friend with that person then. maybe don’t.

people who write different not all same. sometimes okay or not okay with different things. but. this general see.

the first time you hear about [stuff am tell you in post] probably 456737th time we re-explain it. excuse us for be exhausted n done n our time be tired n angry n impatient.

this been a PSA.

[punkpandapatrixk]

🌟Blessings Rolling In throughout 2025 ♦︎ Timeless Pick A Card

Labyrinthia: When a government begins to falter, its people descend to pitiful depths… Perhaps this is what the fall of a nation looks like from ground level.

Clarissa: They’re as much victim as anyone else… Victims of the twisted chaos in this kingdom…

— conversation after defeating a band of bandits at Fallen Fowl Swamp; Wild Arms XF

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

The whole world right now, apparently, is going through a massive Dark Nights of the Soul. It is apocalyptic for a lot of people…but… It is ideal. The Apocalypse essentially denotes the end times for the ruling class ha ha and indicates a new era of liberation for Mankind. Well, in reality it's a bit more complicated than that...but let this perspective suffice for the time being. Normal peeps shouldn’t fear the end times, but uhm, not—not saying this with a religious spirit🙃

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Charlton: Force can destroy a nation, but it doesn’t make building one any easier, much less maintaining order once it’s built.

Rupert: Is that so?

Charlton: It is the ability of the princess mediums to connect with the Guardians that keeps Elesius stable and strong. The very existence of that power sends an unmistakable message to the people about who is the ruler, and who is being ruled. Clear stratification based on one’s inherited gifts is a tradition that has preserved Elesius since the time of our forefathers.

Edna: But now that system is breaking down.

— conversation about the importance of princess mediums (pssst High Priestesses) of the Kingdom of Elesius; Wild Arms XF

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

An Apocalypse is happening for the ruling class, but unfortunately—and hopefully soon enough you understand this—such a destruction is just the very thing they want to happen; all so they can build anew upon the ashes of the deconstructed establishment. In reality, it’s an ugly Hyper Game of which rules most peeps can’t even begin to comprehend.

But then…if the normal peeps are losing either way, what’s the Game Plan? Is there even one? There is something you can try to comprehend for the time being: to make apolitical of every decision you make in this world.

The problem with Gen Z (Sagittarius Pluto generation, which is 9th House aenergy, which is the House of Philosophical Foundations for Politics) and every other wokist from every generation, is that you make politic of every single thing that you do or think. You think it's the right thing to be this much politically awake in today's world, but with most people's level of exposure (or lack thereof) to real truths of Mankind's history... this is actually how you become a most effective generative pawn to the ruling class.

What if the most effective way to ‘dissolve the Matrix’ is to ignore its social engineering? ha ha

This year, what if you chose to live fully in your own Zero Point Awareness? From a plane of consciousness that feels most natural to you, when you're most in your element, true heartfelt Creation begins. Before you can save somebody else, you gotta make sure your bed is comfy and all the time tidy. Let the blessings roll up like tidal waves to pamper you this year, babe. You've survived too much all on your own~♦︎

This year, it's about YOU~\`★_★`/ Commence the personal miracle~!!

mind barricade: Apocalyptic Survivor Subliminal by DrVirtual7

evolution: Your Consciousness Can CHANGE Your Genetics by Dr Bruce Lipton

deck-bottom: I The Magician, Silver Astrologer (John Dee), Priestess of Success

[PAC Masterlist] [Patreon] [Paid Readings] [buymeaboba]

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 1 – Prosperity Abound, Beauty All Around

field: ★Green Aventurine Frequency★(Luck, Money, Wealth, Joy, Good Fortune, Abundance) by Quadible Integrity

direction of sounds – V The Hierophant

First of all, do you have a strong Saturnian/Capricorn placement? Or maybe you’re right in the middle of a Saturn Return period upon reading this? Or, it could be that you’re freshly out of a heartbreaking, bone breaking Saturn Return moment that almost killed you! Yeah, whichever the case, with The Hierophant being here, and it being a major arcana, know that whatever hardship is or has transpired in your Life was sorta…designed that way to strengthen the foundation of your incarnation this time.

It's because you have a massive, very important mission with your incarnation—what with having two major arcana back-to-back. You, are, intended to be very powerful and abundant in this lifetime. Some of you reading this are probably on your way to becoming some kind of a public figure. It could be anything, really. Influencer or thought leader or celebrity of some sort. You’ve known it since you were a wee kid that you were meant for something much, much, much bigger than the mundane Reality you were born into~♪

And when you consider that, maybe, just maybe, your path was that much harder, that much more restricted, because the Universe needed to test your innate goodness—whether or not you’d fall victim to the world’s greed and evil whatsoever. But you being YOU~ My gosh, you proved yourself, didn’t you? That in spite of everything, you’ve remained pure of heart and intent. I see you’ve devoted so much of yourself to the service of Love and Light. You know you were put here to make the world a better place with whatever natural talents you were bestowed with~ \`★_★`/

lights of intent – III The Empress

And so, what’s next? What’s in store this year for all of you powerful Souls in the world? If you’ve been around, maybe you’ve heard or read other readers say: ‘You’ve shifted paradigm!’ Or something along the lines of: ‘You’ve jumped timelines!’ Yes, all of this is very much true for you! I get this feeling that you may have felt ‘different’ in the sense that your manifestations are trickling in more effortlessly. The way that you work; the way that you walk; the way that you engage in your day-to-day tasks; even the way that you breathe and how your body feels…somehow everything is more aligned, effortless, and you feel safe.

You have manifested a world of your own design, babe~ All this time, all these painful years, you were building a world of your own ideal, brick by brick, with what little guidance you heard from your Higher Self and team of Spirit Guides. Within your Team and Crew are your Cosmic Ancestors who are making sure that none of that devotion goes to waste. You have to have your abundance and happy ending lest it beats the purpose of you being born. Got it~? Where your abundance and financial security are concerned, this quote sums it best for you this year:

‘I know why most people never get rich. They put the money ahead of the job. If you just think of the job, the money will automatically follow. This never fails.’ – Hedy La Marr

Your greatest blessing this year, if we could sum it up with this major arcana, is the freedom to engage in whatever creative pursuit is aligned with your Highest Intended Destiny. With The Hierophant accompanying this Pile, I’m sure you’re amongst those who’ve worked for a very long time for the manifestation of this great blessing. With that said, know with every single cell of your body that you deserve the peace and ease you’ll be swimming in this year~★

Highest Intended Action – 7 of Pentacles

I know that you know in your heart of hearts that this calm period is at best temporary—and that’s exactly why it’s exciting~☆ Where you are right now upon finding this reading, you’re already this wee close to a BIGGER manifestation what will propel you into the spotlight (do you see the lights shining upon this man in the card?) and with that, some rest period is needed just because you DESERVE it!! Do you have any idea the load of your spiritual work that’s given birth to this new timeline for a chunk of Mankind? I don’t even think you give yourself enough credit, boo!♥︎

This year, you’re being prepared for a call or an opportunity that could be classified as your main Soul Mission—if there ever was such a thing ha ha Souls usually carry a multitude of missions with their incarnations, especially the very, very advanced Souls. But anyway~

Of all the piles, this one is the most varied in terms of what kinds of blessings are rolling in for you. This is because your blessings are highly individually specific to the spiritual work you’ve done on your terms. What’s certain though, is that an element of destined orchestration is huge at play for you. So that’s literally saying that there’s practically nothing you need to do at this point in your Life. All that’s left for you to do is enjoy your peace, abundance and creativity~\`★_★`/

PROMISES FROM THE UNIVERSE🔻❤️

catching the Future Express – Green Magus (John Dee)

on my way to Destiny – Priestess of Contemplation

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 2 – All Shackles Dissolved, an Uncontrollable Revenge Glow-Up!

field: ★"The Elite" Mind Control Detox★ 264.377 GHz + 439.3920 MHz + 1111Hz + 139.6Hz by Quadible Integrity

direction of sounds – Ace of Pentacles

Ow yeah, baby~! Of all the piles, yours indicates the strongest a real physical glow-up~★~ This could be in the form of a beauty glow-up, but for many of you it also involves financial/career glow-up, house/apartment glow-up, country/city glow-up, and many other forms of real-living improvements that I feel you’ve been manifesting for quite a while! Honestly, you’ve worked so hard on this, practically all by yourself, with a tonne of shadow work!

Some of you probably resonate with having ghosted so many people so as not to get distracted by their low-quality frequencies and opinions. You hustled in secret, and you hustled motherfuckingly hard. Your health—mental and physical—is returning and improving this year! That’s the number one blessing you’re totally receiving this 2025~\`★_★`/

I’m hearing: when your finances and living situations get better, it would be wise to start ‘investing’ in higher-quality produce and eat cleanly and healthily. What is healthy for you may differ from the common narrative, so you may need to R&D yourself the ‘healthy dietary habits’ that work for you by reading and learning a lot! Naturally, as your diet gets cleaner and ‘healthier’ for you, it’s only a given that your physical beauty and energy improve as well. Babe, that’s just logic~😉

lights of intent – XV The Devil

If this is your main pile and you resonate with having struggled with health in some way—be it mental, physical, emotional or spiritual or all at once—this would do you good to acknowledge that some bad spells had been sent your way by some demonic entities. I really mean demonic as in the intents—the negative thought forms—were so bad, so evil, they sought to (possibly) even murder you.

This could’ve been done by an ex-lover, ex-fake ass friend, even relatives and ‘family’ members. Yeah, we don’t call those ‘family’ in this household but you know what rings true for you~♦︎ There’s also a possibility of an envious ex-worker or even…some of you will know this for yourself if this is your message…you could’ve been specifically targeted by some negatively-polarised e.l.i.t.e groups, yeah? Whichever the case may be for you, this year is all about a much deeper purging of the layers of negative effects from all this karmic trauma bullshit.

You’re guided to further separate your Reality from those who’d burn in the 3D-hell version of Earth, aight? Closing karmic cycles comes in…cycles LOL I feel that so much of your karmic burden wasn’t even yours to begin with. But your Soul may simply have volunteered to be born under such circumstances to end all forms of curses and break bloodline chains for many Humans in this world. It is a great, noble sacrifice, so your Cosmic Ancestors would like you to acknowledge that~!

Highest Intended Action – 6 of Cups Rx

You may want to check out other piles or readings on this blog if you want to truly get a sense of what kinds of ‘blessing’ or ‘action’ are available to you at the time you’re reading this, but for the most part, if this is your main pile, I’m getting the sense that you’re being guided more towards protection and the shedding of past karmic ties before you can even jump to your next chapter of Life~\`★_★`/

Any possession that you’ve had for a long time, if it doesn’t aenergetically feel good anymore to be wearing/using it, get rid of it. We’re Kondo Marie-ing shit in this household this year! Where it’s possible, get rid of old things that have some emotional or karmic ties to your Old Reality—they have no place in your superfluously abundant future, OK? If the items/gadgets are still good enough to be used by someone else, try this ‘burning ritual’ so you don’t accidentally pass on negative aenergy to the next recipient:

Imagine the item(s) burning in Violet Flame and make a clear intent to never have any connection to any past person or place tied to that item(s). If you’re burning a memory or a place, burn that motherfucking bridge, burn the whole city or house in your mind’s eye. This way, you will never be pulled to that bandwidth of Reality anymore~♥︎ Honestly, you can do whichever ‘cleansing ritual’ you know of that works for you—the intent is the KEY~★

PROMISES FROM THE UNIVERSE🔻💚

catching the Future Express – Gold Physician (Hippocrates)

on my way to Destiny – Priestess of Ritual

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 3 – They All Knew You’d be This Big, That’s Why They Cursed

field: ★Leadership Gene rs4950★ [Advanced Genetics] by Quadible Integrity

direction of sounds – XIX The Sun

When I tap into your aenergy, there’s this notion that dings clearest as a crystal: Child of Light~★ You are an Ancient Soul with immaculate purity and massive powers. Many individuals within your ‘family unit’ knew of this since your birth. Maybe there were unusual—cursed or miraculous—happenings and events surrounding your birth. Immediately, you already had opps since you were practically a wee baby. There were individuals who saw your ancientness and instantly felt threatened by your immense wisdom.

It could be that the ‘family unit’ you were born into dabbled in black magick or some underground criminal shit of sort, and they knew that one day, one way or another, you were going to discover and uncover their bullshit—effectively disintegrating their entire ‘empire’ made of pure manure. There’s some dark shit in that sick family unit like maybe there was an ancestor who went mad or there was somebody who was a serial killer or a drug dealer, what have you. The aenergy not only is bleak but incredibly dark and evil.

It's unbelievable that a Soul as pure as you would sacrifice your Light by integrating into a bloodline like this tsk tsk… Are you a Blue Ray Starseed? he he you could be. Anyway, some fucks within that insane family unit knew that one day, a power—and beauty, and intelligence, and purity—as witnessed exuded by you would make you VERY big and important on a community scale, even world scale. They hated that. They wanted that for themselves ugh…

lights of intent – King of Wands Rx

Do you daydream a lot, luv? If you feel that you often drown in fantasies, like excessively to a point where you find it hard to even cope with physical Reality, I’d like you to understand that it’s only an effect of never truly living a Life of your ideals. Your Heart is yearning to dwell in the Higher Timeline you know deep, deep down you’re meant to traverse along~♦︎ And yes, you’re absolutely capable of living the life you can’t stop thinking about. Aaand…that’s where your opps came in, right?

Not sure if you’re aware of this yourself at this point in time but all of the passion and intelligence that you are, those are the very things they never wanted you to nourish. But goddam, silly them—they underestimated your sheer willpower! Your opps are insanely illogical; as much as they wanted your power for themselves, they didn’t want you to ever realise your true potential. It’s such petty envy, all things considered. But hey, all of this is in the past if you’re tuning into this aenergy as your main pile~★

You’ve uprooted yourself from that false Reality where your Light wasn’t loved. But you were just doing your Lightwork there akin to training at a military camp. And you survived, goddamn hoe, you’re a Dark Feminine Goddess. This year, or whenever you find this reading, you’re fully grown and ready for your greatest Soul Purpose for being born at this passage of time~ Know that this whole blueprint was created by not only your Higher Self but also all of the Cosmic Ancestors who wanted to bring down this dark bloodline. In the grand scheme of everything, hoe is you da VIRUS within their System LMAO

Highest Intended Action – 10 of Cups Rx

The family unit you were part of, whether you were born or brought into it, operates like a cult. This is an entirely ‘insane family unit’—yes, it’s a thing. I see feminine figures akin to the members of Bene Gesserit from DUNE. These were most likely femcel mothers, aunts or grandmas that were operating like cult leaders. Before we continue, try to understand that we’re talking about ‘femcel psychology’ from a sociology perspective, which can be an entirely different discussion from ‘girls that ain’t getting laid’ XD

Check out Exoticals United on YouTube to learn valuable gems of societal observations~\`★_★`/

Anyway, these dusty ass femcel fucks loved power with a sick mind and when they saw your birth, they couldn’t stand the potential of THE FUTURE LEADER THAT YOU ARE DESTINED TO BECOME. They saw and knew that when you grow up, you’d have the natural talent to attract a large audience—babe, if this is your main pile, I KNOW you’re gorgeous for daaays~♥︎ The way you attract attention by your natural beauty and sweetness, my gosh, they sought to destroy that very thing which they covet: people’s admiration!

It was apparent to them since your birth or at least from when your puberty started, that your greatness comes from the ‘other side’ of the bloodline. By that alone, they knew they could never be what your Ancestors were preparing you to become. Your superior DNA from the ‘other side’ appeared like bright wings from heavens which they knew would overshadow their ‘cult-like’ influences on everything good and harmonious which they sought to destroy!

PROMISES FROM THE UNIVERSE🔻💙

catching the Future Express – Green Astronomer (Nicolaus Copernicus)

on my way to Destiny – Priestess of Prosperity

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

[PAC Masterlist] [Patreon] [Paid Readings] [buymeaboba]

[fairuzfan]

"And so when one begins to write or speak about Palestine, it is tempting to look at loss and only loss, and to find in this loss a plea for survival. We have suffered a lot, we say to those who will listen, we have suffered enough. Too often our suffering is reported without a culprit, our anguished cries exist outside of history and politics. We have no national aspirations, no land to cultivate. Our existence is purely mechanistic — we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die. And in our deterministic march to the grave, we encounter each other as unlucky strangers, frail and futureless.

But there is — and always has been — more to our reality. We are, without a doubt, subjects of conquest and colonization, products of circumstance, but we are also so much more than that. At every turn of our bloodied history, we have been brutalized, bereaved, dispossessed, exiled, starved, slaughtered and imprisoned, but we have, to the world’s dismay, refused to submit. For every massacre and invasion, there have been and there are now men and women who pick up their weapons, makeshift and sophisticated — Molotovs, rifles, slingshots, rockets — to fight. There has always been struggle, there has always been jasmine."

[thinking-emoji]

I'm seeing your 2024 predictions and they're so fun, I wanted to join in! Here's what I absolutely believe will happen in 2024:

- Both Dan and Phil expand their presence here on Tumblr. Tumblr phannies panic.

- Twitter phannies cancel dnp for being on Tumblr. After all, people on Tumblr are all problematic!

- Dnp let us decide via a poll which game should become a series on dnpg. Dragon City wins unexpectedly.

- Tier list video on dnpg: Ranking Phan Conspiracy Theories! It turns out that the theories are mostly post-hiatus, and we do not recognise the majority of them.

- Dating app sponsorship with similar levels of credibility as the old tinder sponsorships, just gay this time

- Phil posts about another medical experience and gets armchair diagnosed by phannies with some rare disease. Further research shows that this "disease" does not actually exist in the medical literature.

- Cornelia/Martyn break up rumours

- They take a 4 month summer break and we lose our fucking minds

- WAD is released for streaming. Shortly after, the streaming platform it's released on is exposed to have very unfortunate political affiliations.

- Phil changes his hair again. And again. And again! He's discovered that he can change his hair after all these years with the fringe. Now he's unstoppable!

- Dan announces a live show - in Mexico City! In order to, his words, "make up for the II clusterfuck". At last minute, the show is cancelled.

- Conversely, dnp go on a holiday to Iceland, where the one Icelandic person who watches them meets them by pure chance at a bar in Reykjavik.

- The Christmas tree delivery guy finally wears a kilt this year! Phil takes a celebratory selfie with him (and the tree) at their front door, posts it, a casual new viewer submits the picture to one of those geoguessr youtubers, who then outs dnp's address to their surprisingly large audience.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for not letting my partner meet my parents?

I (26 “F” (closeted nonbinary passing as cis for safety reasons)) am queer, formerly out as a lesbian which my parents knew about for the past 10 or so years. They didn’t accept me at first and it caused serious issues, but around 3 years ago they begrudgingly decided I wasn’t literal satan spawn and don’t need to go to conversion therapy.

The thing is, they’re still very viciously transphobic, and my partner (26M) is a trans man. I never updated my parents on my labels because I don’t talk to them often, and I know they will throw a hissy fit about the mere existance of a transgender person instead of judging him as a person after meeting him. My mom spouts all sorts of transphobic rhetoric whenever I see her because she’s been keeping up with our state’s politics, and she also posts it on facebook all the time. She’s more against trans women than trans men but she still says awful things about both. She’s a bigot.

We’ve been together for a year now. His parents are supportive of him and our relationship and I’ve had dinner with them about 6 times. Unfortunately, his parents have started seriously pressuring him into meeting my parents, which I’ve always shut down in conversation. They apparently told him that it’s a “red flag” that I won’t let him meet my family.

So he asked me why he can’t meet my parents and I said it’s because they’re bigots. It’s true, they will actually say offensive stuff TO RANDOM TRANS PEOPLE they see just existing and minding their own business in public. I don’t want to expose my partner to that. He says he can handle it, but I told him the idea of my parents saying awful things to him makes me angry and uncomfortable, to which he shifted the blame to “me being embarrassed to be with him”. He then brought up that my parents initially rejected me but then came around years later.

I then told him that my parents are physically abusive, when things get bad at home in arguments I often get things thrown at me / hit with stuff. Yes, I’m an adult, I know it’s fucked up and why I don’t visit them if I can help it. He didn’t understand and said to just “call the police” on them if they got physical.

Part of me feels like maybe I should just bite the bullet and bring him to meet my parents and then deal with the shitstorm that will follow, but it’s really avoidable stress that I don’t want to deal with so I stood my ground. My partner keeps warping it into a “trust” thing and refuses to see my side of the situation.

Adding this as INFO bc I feel like people would ask, my partner is visibly a trans man and cannot pass as a cis man or a cis woman in a way that my parents would be “fooled” by, nor would I ever ask him to do something like that for me.

[genderkoolaid]

Wait to the previous anon- havent gay men used the term "butch" since forever as well? I remember Clark Henley's The Butch Manual being all about gay men being masc in a queer way. From that it would seem like since the start the term has meant being masc in a gnc/queer way regardless of the person's gender/sexuality.

You're exactly right.

Unfortunately, the crypto-radfeminism that's pervasive in (especially online) queer spaces encourages the belief that "butch" and "femme" are terms which can only exist in the context of woman (who are non-men) who exclusively date other women (who are non-men), and anyone else who uses these terms is Stealing From Lesbians.

in general there's a lot of "lesbians are The Most Oppressed in the queer community because everyone is constantly Stealing From Us, and all our terms are the mostest specialest BECAUSE we are Women who reject all associations with Men, which both makes us Special and also makes everyone steal from us and invade our community." but don't worry, they have "terfs DNI" in their bio so clearly this had NOTHING to do with radical feminism or political lesbianism.

[robertreich]

5 Crises Republicans Made up to Distract You

Here are five totally made-up “crises” Republicans have invented to distract from the real crises facing Americans today: the growing concentration of wealth, the worsening climate crisis, and the undermining of our democracy.

Fake crisis #1:  Anything they claim is “woke.”

Although Republicans struggle to define what “woke” even means, they’re constantly using it as a weapon to combat anything that seeks to foster tolerance and acceptance.

Pride flags? Woke!

Books about Rosa Parks? Woke!

Green M&M’s? The wokest!

Fortunately, most Americans think being informed and aware of social injustice…which is what being “woke” really means... is a good thing.

Fake crisis #2: The panic over trans people.

Trans people just want the right to exist safely as their true selves, like everyone else. And despite the lies spewed by some Republicans, there’s not a shred of evidence that they are a threat to anyone. But they’ve become easy scapegoats for the GOP, who vilify them and threaten to criminalize their very existence.

Fake crisis #3: Critical race theory

In reality, critical race theory is mostly taught in universities — like quantum physics or philosophy. It's really not taught in K-12, nor is it dangerous.

It’s merely a framework to understand the role that race and racism have played in shaping America’s laws and institutions. But Republicans have deliberately turned this obscure academic phrase into a weapon to silence any discussion of race they don't like.

Unfortunately, this includes teaching many basic historical facts.

Fake crisis #4: “Couch potatoes.”

Republicans are whipping up anger over welfare recipients supposedly abusing the system.

The reality is most people who collect benefits already hold jobs and work exceedingly hard.

Like Ronald Reagan’s claim about so-called “welfare queens”, the “couch potato” myth is a cruel racial dog whistle. In fact, the vast majority of Americans who receive government benefits are white.

We should be asking why so many jobs pay such low wages that workers need government help to get by?

Fake crisis #5: “Out of control government spending.”

Another lie. Apart from mandatory spending like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, government spending has actually fallen more than 30% in the past 50 years as a percentage of our total economy.

[9.6% in 1973  vs. 6.6% in 2022, a decrease of  31.25%]

Yes, the national debt is a problem, but in recent years, among its biggest drivers have been the Bush and Trump tax cuts, which have added nearly $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment.

All five of these so-called crises have been manufactured by the GOP. They’re entirely made up.

Why? To deflect attention from the near record share of the nation’s income and wealth now going to the richest Americans.

As the wealthy pour money into politics — largely into the GOP — they don’t want the rest of America to notice they’re rigging the economy for their own benefit, that their greed is worsening the climate crisis, and they’re undermining our democracy.

So the game of the Republican Party and their major donors is to deflect attention — to use fake crises to disguise what’s really going on.

Don’t let them get away with it.

[unveiling-unguarding]

Let's fix the story of Dragon Age: The Veilguard pt. 1 - Prologue

I have spent the last week-ish just stewing and thinking about all the things that bugged me about Veilguard's story. Things I knew would bug me going in, having seen the gameplay reveal of the intro mission, but thought would fade as the game got over the hump of an awkward start. Nope.

This game, unfortunately, has such massive structural problems that I need to try to rework the basic skeleton of the narrative for my own sanity. So while my first instinct would quite frankly be to scrap the whole premise of what we got, I'll stick to doing some amateur developmental editing.

First things first, Bioware seems to not understand why people have wanted origins back in Dragon Age and are content to give lip service to various backstories without implementing the real reason people loved them - they mattered narratively, were intrinsic to the plot and various subplots, and provided solid character motivation at the very beginning of the story. For example, the human noble origin starts your warden's story off with the betrayal and murder of your parents at the hands of supposed close friend Arl Howe. So now you have very personal motivations to leave your home, become a Grey Warden, and be an active participant in the political landscape of Ferelden. Same goes for each of the origins you can play, each of which introduces the player to subcultures and subplots important to the setting.

Like Veilguard, Inquisition didn't do well with this, but it was fine since the real narrative hook for why the player's character becomes the protagonist is them gaining the anchor and stepping out of the fade in the wake of a world-altering calamity under uncertain circumstances. And most importantly, the game allows you to roleplay how your character feels about the whole thing. Rook, on the other hand (heh), is a character who only gets a short paragraph, functionally identical no matter the faction, about pissing off their higher ups before being recruited by Varric. Supposedly, Rook travels with Varric and Harding for the better part of a year before the game takes place, a timeframe we only learn a couple hours into the game.

This is all coupled with some painterly cutscenes where Varric gives us the lowdown on Solas and his plans. Which is fine, but does the bare minimum and gives our player character no personal stake in the story. We are left to infer our pre existing relationship with Varric (and Harding) and our Rook's reasons for stopping Solas. You can kind of define those reasons later on, but they are rather shallow and the game does not give them their due emphasis. Not to mention this comes at a point in the story I'd argue is way too late.

What should have happened to start the game was a mission that allows us to both define Rook's relationship with Varric and their stake in the story. You could conceivably come up with any number of specifics for this prologue mission, so I'll forgo getting too into the weeds, except to say that it should in some capacity involve Solas' agents that were seen and hinted at during Trespasser. Since the game insists on allowing Rook to be from one of six factions (a seeming holdover from the pivot away from a live service model for the game), the game should start off with a mission about narrowing Solas' ritual location down. Allow us to banter with Varric about the months leading up to that moment. Allow us to elucidate our feelings on what Solas plans and our taking leave from our faction. This would provide a great opportunity for have race or faction reactivity upon learning he was last seen in Minrathous, whether you're an elf or qunari hesitant to go to place that is generally hostile toward people like you or a shadow dragon eager to return home.

This would be a perfect lead in to contacting Neve Gallus for help and the existing opening mission, if you absolutely have to keep it in the game. I am still annoyed about John Epler stating that they wanted the beginning of this game to feel like the ending of a previous game. Why? That's the opposite of how a story should start. A story should start at the beginning, especially when one of their stated goals was to onboard new players to Dragon Age. It hamstrung them into leaving our main character's connection to Varric and the plot nebulous and undefined while they felt the need to shove in extremely awkward and on the nose exposition to tell the player about the veil, Solas, and ancient Elvhenan. Let the beginning of your story breathe, goddamn it.

Next up we'll talk about how the story handles Varric and why it's such a stupid fucking plot twist.

[marxistlesbianist]

How do I stop getting more and more terrified of the upcoming Trump administration. I know on a material level Harris would not be much better but every new cabinet pick and headline makes the liberal in me scream and cry, I'm a trans woman just starting her transition and I'm scared I will never become the person I want to be. I'm scared it's too late for me. I need a Marxist perspective, what do I do?

Unfortunately marxism cannot provide you with any way to avoid fear as such, but this does not mean it is useless here. Marxism as an analytical method helps us to see the social/economic mechanisms affecting our lives as they really are, rather than as the quasi-divine forces which liberalism supposes them to be. I and many others have found that looking at the world in this more grounded manner has the effect of lessening our anxiety, but how you react to this vision of material reality is still up to you.

That being said, here is a rough outline of a marxist outlook on the US political economy to–day, which might help you to ground through the anxiety of the election results:

The US empire is an empire in decline. This is not the fault of any single politician, but of the inherently unstable ground on which capitalist economies are built. Capitalism necessitates constant market growth, and with nearly the whole world already captured by the US economic order, this is an increasingly impossible demand to meet. As climate change worsens the third world countries exploited by the US are pushed to either drown under ceaseless natural disasters, or revolt against the economic system distroying their ecology—in both cases the US hegemony is weakened and our great empire dies by a thousand cuts. The only way to avoid economic crisis is to move away from the capitalist mode of production all together, but bourgeois politicians will only ever offer us incomplete solutions to the problems they have created.

Fascism is the liberal response to economic crisis. Throughout the history of the 20th century, we have seen that even the most socially progressive liberal “democracies” have morphed into fascist monstrocities when the capitalist economy is threatened. Voting in ostensibly progressive candidates without seriously challenging the political economy won't save us--as the people of Germany learned when the liberal chancellor Hindenburg appointed Hitler as the head of state after beating him in the election. This happens because fascism is at its heart the imperialist system turned inwards; when the German bourgeoisie were no longer able to sustain their economy by exploiting colonized countries like Namibia, they revitalized their economy by building a more advanced version of the Namibian colonial state at home.

Because the system is already collapsing in on itself, the primary task for us to organize toward is not challenging the system as it is, but building something better in its place. Of course, the task of defending our movement will necessarily bring us into conflict with the current bourgeois state, but we must remember that the point is not to oppose our enemies but to defend our friends. Even if a socialist president were elected to the white house, their dictates would only mean anything if there existed an organized body of workers prepared to exicute the plan inspite of bourgeois sabatage. Conversely, a sufficiantly large and well organized body of workers would be capable of building socialism in the US no matter what Washington says.

For trans women, the state of affairs following Trump's election is fundamentally no different than it was before November 6th. For 250 years the US government has been hostile to our existence, and yet there are more of us living out of the closet now than there ever have been in this country's history. The liberties which the republican party now threatens to deprive us of were not given to us by liberal politicians, but won inspite of them by the masses of our trans elders fighting tirelessly for themselves and their children—and for so long as we continue the struggle we have inherited, the bourgeois state will never be able to defeat us. Of course, much of this history of struggle has been obscured by the liberal order trying to co-opt our movement, but it is still there to be discovered. (If you only know about Stonewall, I highly recommend you read about the history of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), an organization founded by some of the trans women who lead that riot.)

Of course, none of this is to say that the situation isn’t terrifying; just that it is also manageable. You may not be able to live the life you wanted, but that doesn't mean you can't still lead a life worth living! The liberal in you screams and cries because she sees that things are bad, but doesn't see how you as an individual can make it right. Adopting a marxist perspective to see not just that things are bad but also how and why, and organizing with your class allies instead of working on your own will silence your inner liberal’s tears as she becomes obsolete. Individual Trump staff picks don’t mean much for us in our project of building a socialist movement. Regardless of who sits in office, the work before us is the same. So let’s get to work—for the revolution of the world!

Lastly, because I always found it annoying when people would tell me to "join an org" without elaborating, here is a brief rundown of some organizations you could look into:

PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) has the widest reach of any nominally communist party in the US. Their top leadership are largely opportunists insofar as I can tell, but the local chapters vary enough that some of them are involved in genuinely productive work.

FRSO (Freedom Road Socialist Organization) is a lot smaller, but with more genuine leadership and a strong ideological line. They are growing, and tend to be much more active in the few areas where they are organized.

DSA and CPUSA (Democratic Socialists of America, and Communist Party of the USA) are both useless as organizations, but you might still find some people there you can organize with—especially of there aren’t any better orgs in your area.

SALT (Socialist ALTernative) basically encompass the worst of all worlds in my experience, but individual experience may vary.

Even if there are no active organizations in your area, joining one and sitting in on zoom meetings is still a worthwhile step forward!