#I'm not stopping

[lastoneout]

I thought about growing my hair out again, to protect myself, you know? Cuz yeah I'm white and live in a pretty liberal area, but this is still Arizona and I've absolutely had people scream slurs at me just for having short hair and "god hates fags" is graffitied on a light post at my usual grocery store, so yeah. Nerves for sure. I picked a bad time to come out as bigender and butch.

But today I shaved it again. And I felt just as happy as I did the first time I did it. Comfortable in the knowledge that this, this is the real me. I got to look into the mirror again today and see myself. And it helped.

That's it really. I don't have a big message. I shaved my head again. I clipped my stupid carabiner to my belt loop. Wore my jeans and boots. I kept my "that's mr. dyke to you" button on my bag, right next to my "punch nazis" one.

I don't know what's going to happen to people like me. I still think I'm pretty safe, all things considered, I'm white and dating a cis man and live in a liberal city in an increasingly liberal state, and I can go full girl mode without it making me want to die too badly so if I have to hide I can, if I have to flee to a safer state California is literally right there, and I am thankful for that. But I'm still scared, too. Scared enough that I almost didn't cut my hair the way I like it. Scared enough I almost took the buttons off, kept my keys in my bag, switched my men's button-downs for girl-cut t-shirts, my boots for gender neutral sneakers.

But idk. I don't feel like letting the world win this one. I'm not a huge target, not by a long shot, but I won't stop being visibly queer. Not today.

[anachronistic-falsehood]

badly editing qcellbit into homestuck until he comes home: day 12

>Cellbit: Read note in chest.

Note? What note? There’s no note in the oh hey there is in fact a note in the chest you opened earlier. You guess you forgot about it because you were so busy looking for your KNIFE. The note reads: "NOTE TO SELF: DO NOT LEAVE CHARLIE UNSUPERVISED. - PHILZA" Phil must have written this and accidentally left it here. You were kind of hoping for something else, maybe a note he’d pre-emptively written to you for some reason or another, filled with fatherly-ish words of encouragement. He’s not here for that now.

[before-it-felt-like-a-sin]

Miss my wife 💔

[mrdinoart]

JIN KEISUKE STOP MAKING ME DO ELABORATE PIECES FOR U CHALLENGE

[alex-turners-world]

Just one performance together tonight, boys🙏😭

[mossy-thing]

Guys. GUYS.

It's not about the fucking egg. I couldn't care less about the fucking egg. It's about the way the chicken is treated in factory farming so y'all can get the egg. If I had a farm with chickens I would probably eat their eggs. Why? Because I wouldn't treat a living, breathing thing like a fucking machine for me to abuse. Look me into the eyes and tell me again that I care more for the motherfucking egg, the product that came out of the fucking horror show that is factory farming, than about the chicken that gets abused in said horror show.

LOOK AT THIS AND TELL ME AGAIN THAT IT IS ABOUT THE FUCKING EGG.

If people have less demand for eggs, then factory farming will go down. That is what this is about. I am not a pro-lifer about fucking chicken eggs.

anti-egg vegans are always a hoot. like, she’s not using it. it’s not fertilized. it’s going to rot and attract predators. you want me to just throw it in the trash??

[asoftspotforangels]

some of my favorite woven tapestries, by Cecilia Blomberg:

Point Defiance Steps

Mates

Rising Tides

Vashon Steps

[gongyussy]

good thing from jp twitter this week is queen of old man yaoi michiru sonoo discovering the term old man yaoi

update: somehow it got impossibly more wholesome

quick translation: おかえり: welcome home あ 終わった 終わった: ahhh, it's over! it's done! コーヒー? お茶?: coffee? tea? コ~ヒ~ ありがと: coffee, thank you~ ネクタイレア★★ ネクタイ取るレア★★★★: seeing him with a tie on, rarity level ★★, seeing him take a tie off, rarity level ★★★★ にあうな~: it suits him~

also please do follow: AraigumaSha: sensei's twitter account marureviere: maru, who does such valuable work highlighting bl manga for an international audience

[beif0ngs]

Over the Garden Wall 10th Anniversary stop motion short by creator Patrick McHale and Aardman Animations

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[soaptaculart]

The cat and the dad she said she "didn't want"

[trainwreck-pumpkin-pie]

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-1996) / Mouthwashing (2024)

inspired by this post

[monsoon-of-art]

[lazylittledragon]

can't believe we're all adults being forced into the club penguin level of censorship in 2024

[captainjonnitkessler]

Sometimes I wish we would start calling out the performative radicalism on this site for the poser bullshit it is. "Remember, it's always morally correct to kill a cop!" "Don't forget to firebomb your local government office!" "Wow, it sure would be a shame if these instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail got spread around!"

Okay. But you're not killing cops or firebombing government offices. You are posting on a dying microblogging website to a carefully-curated echo chamber that has radicalized itself into thinking that taking the absolute most extreme position on any subject is praxis but that anyone discussing the most practical way to effect actual change is your sworn enemy. You do not have the street cred OR the activist cred to be talking about killing cops, babe.

[bogus-cowboy-yeehaw]

Day 40 of my war with temu. I keep getting the ads. It doesn't matter how many I block, there's always more. I won't give up, one day it'll be over for you, temu.