#our grandmothers

[kellymrichman]

Guest Essay: “Oh, My Dark Children”: Seeing the Holy Mothers of the Harlem Renaissance in the Art of John Biggers

Click here to read my guest essay for New World Symphony, written for their 2024 I Dream a World: Mary Lou's Harlem Festival.

[arachnerd-8-legs]

really disappointing that bunjywunjy had to be pestered twice just to quietly remove their reblog after using their huge platform to encourage garbage like raving about the lesbian estonian soviet flag and how 'new pride flag just dropped' so people could go 'ooh pretty' about a flag that was forced onto us by ppl who wanted our culture gone and oppressed us for about a century in total if not more.

to say nothing or not show anything of the truth about that flag and quietly remove the reblog felt more like it was done out of obligation (and you didn't agree) rather than care for the subject matter that is still a fresh wound in our country's memory. it's only been 33 years since it ended.

I'd rather you make the mistake about something you didn't know (eastern european history is easy for westeners to overlook, because we're not a big country like them, we're not england or france or spain or germany) and admit/apologize for said mistake or even just outright state that you don't actually care rather than say nothing and quietly remove something so that people would stop talking about it

[why-bless-your-heart]

Low-risk drinking is no more than 14 drinks a week for men, 7 drinks a week for women. 1-2 drinks in one sitting is recommended for women, 1-4 for men. It’s also best to drink for no more than three days consecutively and to abstain for several days in a row to allow your liver time to recover.

If you drink more heavily or more frequently than this, it’s most likely time to re-evaluate your relationship with alcohol.

[zkretchy]

It's 2am and I can't sleep, have this silly doodle

[mawrblaidddrwg]

Drawing inspired by this hilarious post by @fabuloustrash05 based off of Mulan.

[spookberry]

This isnt done but I really wanted to share it in case I dont finish it

[slavicafire]

i can be your angel

or your debil .

[heckyeahponyscans]

50% of sales proceeds of these adorable Care Bears will go to the PCRF (Palestinian Children's Relief Fund), donated directly by eBay as soon as you purchase

please take a look :)

>>>eBay link<;<<

[bookshelfdreams]

do it. gimme the Izzy straight-coded meta 👀

I feel like I need to preface this by saying that Actually, Izzy Is Straightcoded would be the inflammatory clickbait title I'd give this if it were written to draw traffic & ad revenue to my shitty website. So don't take that term too seriously.

There has been a lot of ink spilled about Izzy thinking he's in a story where one can only be subtextually queer. Some even by yours truly, but the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. What would be the purpose of queercoding Izzy?

In general, villains* aren't queercoded to show that men being attracted to other men is bad. It's often the outcome; but it's not why the trope exists. It exists because cishet people tend to be (and are encouraged to be) profoundly uncomfortable with gender nonconformity, and so, making a character gnc becomes a quick and easy way to make him appear twisted and untrustworthy. If he** can't even obey the fundamental rules of his own gender (rules that are inherent and unchangeable!) what other rules does he disobey?

Or: If a man is insufficiently masculine, he can't be trusted to have morals. The villain isn't gnc because that's an evil trait to have; rather, the gender nonconformity is a symptom of his evilness. Being evil is what enables him to embrace his feminine side, and embracing his feminine side is what others him and marks him as a villain.

This only really works when he's contrasted with a hero (or heroine) who is Doing Gender Correctly. The villain is foul to highlight how good the hero is. The Hero will be honest and straightforward, brave, physically powerful; the Queercoded Villain treacherous, cowardly, and physically weak. The hero is a Proper Man, a Good Person. The villain an Improper Man, and therefore, a Bad Person.

Of course ofmd fundamentally rejects this. The shorthand wouldn't work, because ofmd simply doesn't think effeminacy is creepy. It's uninterested in moralizing self-expression; it just lets people be how they are. There's a wide range of expressions of masculinity on this show, and none of it is inherently bad. People are allowed to be hypermasculine, flamboyant, and anything inbetween, can express their gender in whatever manner they want, and it's all fine - as long as they are authentic about it. Be however you are, but be yourself, and this is what Izzy fails at. The repression marks him as a villain. The strict adherence to what he thinks a Real Man Pirate ought to be like. He's very preoccupied with enforcing a traditional (and toxic) masculinity on himself and others. It's no coincidence the characters he antagonizes the most - Stede and Lucius - are also the most effeminate ones. And I know, I know anglophones have a much more casual relationship to twat and cunt, those don't nearly feel as uncomfortable for y'all as they do for me, so I don't want to assign too much significance here, but he is the only character who constantly uses this kind of language, and also the one who uses the most gender&sexuality based slurs (as far as I remember).

All of this while being clearly, obviously queer himself! I do not feel like I need to explain this; his flustered reaction when Lucius asks him if he's ever been sketched speaks for itself. The fact that he meets Stede and immediately slices his shirt off of him, speaks for itself. And so on.

Izzy isn't straightcoded in the sense that the story wants us to believe he's exclusively attracted to women. Much like a queercoded villain doesn't need to be shown to be attracted to men (and can even be shown to be attracted exclusively to women!) to still be queercoded. He's straightcoded in the sense that he's a stand-in for restrictive and toxic gender roles that society enforces on people. He buys into the idea that there's a way of Doing Gender Wrong, and this is presented as a tragic character flaw. Something he has to overcome to be able to do the thing that actually marks a hero in this show: express himself authentically.

Part of why I found his death so moving is because it enables him to set right the toxicity he spread. His rehabilitation arc was about himself; about finally allowing himself to be, accepting love, accepting community. His death was about taking responsibility. About fully recognizing the hurt he caused. Looking death in the face enables him to finally abandon the last shreds of that toxicity, to apologize and be granted forgiveness. In the end, he was not beyond saving, and the harm he has done will be healed.

*Izzy is introduced as an antagonist to both Stede and the central romance of this romcom. I'm not gonna debate this; if you disagree, fine, but you clearly have such a fundamentally wrong different view of the show that it's pointless for us to try and convince each other.

**of course Queercoded Female Villains exist s well, but they are a whole different can of worms and less relevant to this discussion

[menlove]

one crazy thing about the "male loneliness epidemic" to me is that romantic/sexual love and companionship is not the be all end all. for many women, straight & queer, their friendships with other women are the most important ones in their lives. and yet somehow men not being able to make friends they can open up with and find emotional fulfillment from is women's fault lmfao. like no I'm sorry that you're lonely, but there's a lot at play here including the way men treat male friendships. go figure yourselves out and treat each other better before whining and stomping your foot that you're not getting pussy like cmon man 😭

[motherhenna]

YALL I'M A HOMEOWNER!!!

[she-is-ovarit]

Elders, seniors, old people, the aged... they are usually the first to advocate for children and emphasize that children are important and to take care of them because they are the future. And we can do better to advocate for old people and respect that they are important too, and to take care of them because they have lived through human history we have never experienced. Children are the future and elders are our history.

[wildbasil]

not contacting my mother on her birthday has, i think, finally hammered home to her that i was serious about going no contact. after all, sulking and ignoring is one of her favourite tactics, so i suppose it's normal she'd assume that's what i was doing.

but now that she's realised i'm serious, she's started getting relatives to contact me to say she's seriously ill. it's very predictable.

[ljbrary]

You absolute dunce. Either wake up, or stop trying to pretend you care about what’s happening on Gaza. It’s not a “war,” and it’s not a “conflict.” It’s a full-fledged genocide. A war or conflict can only occur between two free nations, who are more or less standing on equal ground. That is NOT what is happening between Palestine and Izrahell. In what kind of a conflict/war does one side control the water, electricity, food, aid etc going into the other side? None. It’snotreal is a parasitic, violent occupation, and the Palestinian people have every right to resist. You have literal Holocaust survivors begging for ceasefire and calling it a genocide, not wanting it to continue. But of course, zios are just modern-day nazis and don’t care about what even the actual Jews, the living Holocaust survivors have to say.

omg my first antisemitic anon hate!! thank you!!!!

Anyone who I actually care about knows who I am as a person and how I feel about the sanctity of human life, so I don't really care about your opinion of me, and especially don't feel the need to indulge in a litmus test on geopolitical politics from you of all people, hope this helps!!

Anyway, I hope you take constructive criticism.

Your review:

Delivery: 6/10.

You get points for decent grammar and sentence structure. It was easy to read, and I like how you used quotation marks correctly, so bonus points for that. First sentence was a good hook, but the incorrect use of commas at the end kinda threw me off a little :/

Creativity: 1/10.

Literally, did you even try?? Not one single independent thought was expressed. Boring. Seen it before. Try harder, please. If you're going to try to play with words, make sure you actually know what they mean; you semantically can't do that to the word "Israel," sorry. It's a Hebrew word, so butchering it in English just feels really juvenile. Would like to have seen better effort with that.

Word choice: 0/10.

You would have gotten points for the words "dunce," because I haven't heard that word since like the 1930s, and "parasitic," because I thought that was an interesting use of the word, but unfortunately you got points taken off for using a KKK slur :/

Literary devices: -17/10.

The Holocaust inversion was not part of the rubric, so I had to take extra points off for that, and unfortunately it went into the negatives. Sorry :/ (I would have given you points for the use of irony, when you equated a KKK slur for Jews to the entity responsible for the worst genocide of Jews in history, but I'm absolutely sure that you did not use it on purpose, so the points were voided.)

Other notes:

The choice to be a coward (anonymous) really added to the ambiance of the message, but unfortunately I don't see a spot on the rubric for that, so no points were awarded.

Overall: -10/40 = -25%. Congrats, you failed! Disrespectfully, go fuck yourself!

.עם ישראל חי

[drakonovisny]

i only did it twice in my life: once as a kid about 6 years of age and once while drinking on meds i was not supposed to drink on. curious to hear y'all stories 👀

[phayz]

would love to know why or why not