#thank you for this op

[tinalbion]

Leslie Vernon edit—Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

[thatoneperson747]

I love this so much

People said that Tumblr isn't a great place to post original art that isn't fanart, but I'm doing it anyway because I haven't got the motivation to draw anything else

Happy pride month lads! 🧡💛🤍💙

from an aroace potato :)

[jude-us]

I’m not exaggerating when I say this post changed my life. Seeing this as a terrified self hating 17 year old was like finding a fresh water lake in the middle of the Sahara.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for lying to my dog about food being 'spicy?'

A while back I taught my dog what spicy foods are (by letting her sniff them and saying "Uh oh! Spicy!") and she figured out that it means it'll smell/taste bad and she immediately loses interest. It was initially an accident but it became really handy in getting her to leave food alone if it might hurt her.

Recently though I've started saying "Uh oh! Spicy!" about any food I don't want her to eat. If she's sitting and staring at me eating a regular non-spicy snack and I don't want to share, I'll tell her it's spicy so she'll stop begging for it. She believes me 100% of the time. She does have a 'leave it' command that she obeys as well, but she always acts so sad whenever I tell her to 'leave it' and it's something she wants.

I feel a little bad because she's an older dog (10y/o) and maybe I SHOULD be sharing my snacks with her, but sometimes a man's gotta enjoy his food in peace without a little creature gazing longingly at him the entire time and crying like the world's soggiest beast.

Included is a picture of her making her very best begging face so that everyone can accurately judge how evil I am for lying to her.

What are these acronyms?

[thunderon]

so i sent my friend’s mother a thank you card and for whatever reason her mother sent me back a “thank you for the thank you card” card and GIFT. so i sent back a “thank you for the thank you, thank you card” card. because im not about to be out-thanked.

well today i open up my mail and see that she sent me YET ANOTHER card in retaliation and so now i’m about to go buy stamps in bulk because this means WAR

[hedgewyse]

All Of This - just every single bit of it

and this?

“I’m disgusted by a standard-issue human body part” is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of

exactly. I am weirded out by straight people vehemently claiming this disgust, to hear queers try it is just gross, grow up

but especially for me, this bit;

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

this is the reason it annoys me so much when people question why I don't want to go home, why I'm so done with my family when they are so nice on the surface, why I can't just be the bigger man and have a little tolerance in their old age, why I need to be in another country, just far away. because their dining table is still this place, and in fact it's even more right wing and hate-filled than ever, and it hurts (and has always hurt) to have my love and my life shredded and cast aside in this way by people who raised me, so no, I do not want to spend time there and I don't owe anyone that

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I’ve been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don’t even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you’re somehow owed information about my sexual history. You’re not! No one—and I can’t reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don’t feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you’re traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can’t sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can’t talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that’s good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don’t have to justify yourself. You don’t have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don’t have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don’t owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They’re yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they’re probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There’s a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren’t failed lesbians. They’re not somehow less good or less valid because they’re attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I’ve checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who’ve had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I’m sorry to report that “I’m disgusted by a standard-issue human body part” is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I’m a dyke and I don’t especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don’t have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn’t make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There’s so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven’t noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there’s a whole pandemic thing that’s been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you’re worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people’s genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it’s always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to “solicit homosexual or lesbian activity”, which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn’t have to recognize them if they didn’t want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who’s older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn’t be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that’s worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You’ve capitalized it, like it’s Weighty and Important, but it’s not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don’t have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

[ato-dato]

Post-timeskip fem usopp!!!

[vaimetanyx]

There is no stopping a star from burning itself out of the night sky

Words taken from - you can love him, but you can’t keep him (Sylvie j.p.)

[charminglyantiquated]

Hi, guys. I try to keep my personal life off of here for the most part, but my partner and I have experienced a pretty bad blow, and I don't know what else to do. On Friday a private yacht backed into our sailboat, the Nautilus, with enough force to move the concrete dock we were tied to. The main mast was snapped in half, and we're still waiting to learn how bad the damage to the hull is.

We've worked on the Nautilus for years now as her crew, and this spring we put every cent we've been able to save over the last decade into buying her. All of our time has gone into sailing and maintaining her, and running our charter business - and now she's out of commission for the foreseeable future. Insurance will hopefully help, but we don't know anything concrete yet. The best case scenario is that with 8-9 months of work, we can have Nautilus sailing again by next summer - but in the meantime we still have the vessel's loan payments, and our own living expenses, and no source of income, let alone the repairs we'll need to begin sooner rather than later if we can hope to get her seaworthy by next summer.

I know things are hard for everyone right now, and I know we are incredibly lucky no one was hurt. One way or another Crow and I will get through this, and be okay, so please don't feel guilty for passing this by. But if you are inclined to help us get through the next few months, by donating or by sharing our fundraiser, I would be more grateful than I can express. I will be posting updates, photos, etc. on our Instagram page at nautilusmaine as we learn more, if anyone would like to follow along with what is hopefully the journey to rebuild her.

[featherlesswings]

Realizing you actually are a whole separate person from your kids, and are allowed to experience life outside of your relationship with them.

Reconnecting with things you loved or wanted or were interested in growing up, but either your parents couldn’t afford or refused to allow them because of religion/superstition/“it’s just a fad.”

Learning to love the body you have, instead of spending all your time trying all the new products to make it look 22 and tiny forever.

That post about 30 year old coming of age stories?

I’ve been thinking about it all morning. What would the plot points be for that? What makes a 30 year old coming of age story?

Old folks sound off in the comments

[tremordusk]

Lilia: oh fuck

Rio, slinging an arm over her shoulder: Lilia and I go way back~

Jen, surprised: What’s your guys history?

*The history in question*

Lilia, fighting Dracula in the woods: *slaps him in the face*

Rio, watching from afar behind a tree: You are sick-

Lilia stabs him with a stake

Rio: I’m in love with you, I’m in love with you, I love you

Lilia, gets bitten but tosses him off her

Rio: You feel nothing you’re just dead inside

Lilia, going in with the RKO move

Rio: I love you, I love you, I just love you

Lilia, standing triumphantly over Dracula’s dead body

Rio, breathily: Take me, I love you…take me, birth me inside of you and pull me out—

[ichigoginchan]

liking swordsmen is a family thing omg

[deathricedrawn]

i'm ready to try

[t0tally-n0t-3m0]

Printing this out and putting it on my wall. Absolutely brilliant.

jon sims the archivist character of all time. canonically does not fuck and has no interest in fucking yet still manages to have intense verbal sadomasochistic hatesex with nearly every other character in the podcast.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Loss.

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[punchable-panda]

Your art inspired me to draw again, and it feels so good, I'm so grateful to you. <3 Sometimes, artists don't realise just how much their work can silently help someone else. I want to remind you of that!

Im sorry I didn't get to this sooner but I'm so happy you started drawing again! that's wonderful 💞💞💞