“… sex assignment is not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be; it also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations. The infant’s future is often being imagined or desired through the act of sex assignment, so sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. That imagining comes from elsewhere, and it does not exactly stop after sex has been legally or medically determined at birth. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; and these practices of girling and boying are repeated not just by parents, but also by a range of institutions that greet the child with boxes to be checked and norms to be embodied. In a sense, sex assignment does not happen just once. It is an iterative process, repeated by different actors and institutions, and depending on where one lives, it can be reiterated in ways that are not always in conformity with one another. Sex assignment is not a mechanism, but a process.”
So I see you all are exhausted by streaming services effectively recreating cable. I see you’re all tired of ads. Pirating is a great alternative, but I have another fantastic option for you all!
I live in Seattle. And in Seattle we have America’s largest physical media store, Scarecrow Video. They are a non-profit that has pretty much any film or tv show you can imagine. Like, everything. So much so that one of our local cinemas does a program with them called “Unstreamable” where they show a film from Scarecrow’a archive that you can’t access anywhere online. It’s a bit overwhelming to go to their store, which is two levels of every program under the sun.
ANYWAY, I bring this up because they recently started a Rent-by-Mail program. It’s pretty similar to what Netflix used to do. You can rent up to six titles (barring their super rare stuff and pornos) and they will ship it to you, then you return it in the included pre-paid envelope.
Why does this rock? Sure, you still have to pay money, BUT you are supporting a non-profit that is dedicated to preserving media instead of some corporation looking for endless profit. They can also expand your palette with their vast selection. And if you have a favorite piece of media, you never have to worry about it disappearing! All their stuff is there in perpetuity.
So this is all to say, now that Scarecrow has expanded their reach beyond the Greater Seattle Area, I implore you to check them out. If you don’t want to rent right now, the could always use donations to keep them afloat.
Saw Los Campesinos tonight, left pic. They were great, and did my favorite songs early in the show so I felt pretty blessed. The crowd was a total Gen Ex/Gen Zed split, which I've never seen before. Like, Taylor Swift demographics!
Opening band Fresh in the right photo, was also great.
begging the voting population of u.s. citizens on tumblr to vote this year, and specifically to vote in the way that most practically ensures trump doesn't win, not out of a liberal centrist "don't you hate the orange man hoho" impulse, but out of love and fear for the many, many, many marginalized populations whose lives will be concretely worse under a second trump presidency, out of paranoia that the current architecture of our american quasi-democracy will not survive a new formalized attempt at dismantling it, out of having done the research that no matter what you think of biden literally every stance of trump's is noticeably more disastrous.
i hate that these are our only two practical choices right now but hating it doesn't do anything to change the fact that these are our only two practical choices right now. a trump victory will also almost certainly send the mainstream democratic politicians scrambling even closer to the center; that is historically how the democratic machine reacts to defeat! which absolutely sucks, but the best way to lay the groundwork for progressive policies in the future is to start as far from zero as we can.
i am begging you: vote biden, and then protest every fucking thing he does. make that old man's life miserable. just please, please, please don't burn down your own country to try to make a point; who materially benefits from that?
So I think I might be bi? But if I am it changes almost nothing about my life because I am happily and monogamously married. But if it doesn't really matter, why do I have so many feelings about it???? Anyways, I am asking you because it seems like there is a 50/50 chance of a delightful and pithy answer or a picture of a bird as an answer.
Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.
have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.
and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.
black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.
if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.
This is Juneteenth.
white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.