The funny thing about human beings is having such a clear, yet vague list of instructions of what you were meant to do. Okay, you are alive, and as a living thing you have the urge to perpetuate life. But there's no real pressure to have your own offspring, oh no. Some people have that urge, a pressing urge to personally breed that won't be satisfied any other way, but many can be happy without it.
Humans survive in colonies where each individual support each other, and if you're happy to just babysit your sister's kids every once in a while, you're fulfilling your duty to the clan and helping it survive, because human parents weren't meant to manage 100% alone. Whatever you can teach your niblings, you were meant to teach.
Look at your hands. Especially, look at your fingers. Every single one of them moves individually, to wherever you wish to place them. Nature does not put energy into things that aren't used or needed, you need to have ten digits to... Yes, what? A bear's paw is only one slab of meat and claws, designed to walk on and slap things to death. What do you have all these individual wigglers for?
You could hold a needle, and sew clothing. You could place them in different locations on a musical instrument. You can do that thing with your finger that makes the love of your life orgasm so hard they go blind for a few seconds. You could hold a brush and paint a picture of the land you call home, or write laws of a land that deserves to be called "home".
Your legs and feet, yes, they were made with only one task in mind. They were made for running. You were built to run. Many things in nature were built to run, really, but those things were made to run hard, and fast. You are not like them. You were built to run and never stop. Your run is slow, it is not agile, it is not even graceful, but it is unyielding. Nothing else on this planet is designed like that, and that is why your ancestors - and their loving aunts and uncles - survived through you, by being unstoppable.
If you look up any instruction manual online, on "how to survive an [animal] attack", it will tell you, do not run. You are not fast enough to escape them. You were not built to outrun things. You were built to chase things, and that is your key. Once you have chosen a target, death by you is inevitable.
Nature is no fairy godmother that hands out frivolous gifts. Nature is the hard-budget shift supervisor that gives you the exact tools - the only tools, but nothing but these tools - that you must use to survive. Your yearning for a community to provide for - a found family, if your biological one happened to be shit. Your hands, to make things with, and an abstract mind to create things to make. And an unstoppable determination to do things.
You were given nothing frivolous. Everything in your arsenal are tools that you not only can, but must use. Do your duty as a living thing.
Actual things that happen in the 1897 Dracula novel, without context:
A character has ominous nightmares and attributes them to eating too much paprika
Dracula first appears wearing a fake beard
The person he was trying to fool with the fake beard immediately realizes Dracula and Beard Guy are the same man, due to both having really firm handshakes
We are told parrots are immortal unless fatally wounded
A Texan cowboy opens fire on a bat flitting around a window, and lodges a bullet in the wall of an occupied room
A woman is called a polyandrist for receiving blood transfusions from multiple men
An incorrectly addressed telegram leads to two deaths, multiple druggings, and several children being assaulted
Dracula, while trying to maintain a low profile, takes a lovely trip to the zoo and freaks out the animals so badly that he gets mentioned in a newspaper article
The one character who knows anything about vampires spends a good two-thirds of the book refusing to talk about vampires
Dracula went to Satan's Witchcraft Academy and somehow this is only brought up in two throwaway lines
A character gets stuck inside a circle of communion wafer crumbs
A major plot point of the book is Dracula (who was said to be a brilliant scholar and has the strength of twenty mortal men) realizing he can move boxes without human help
Someone is referred to as "manifestly a prig of the first water"
Two characters have a hobby of reading train schedules
A hospital lets a mental patient escape to see what will happen
A character starts vomiting up feathers from eating whole birds
A doctor refuses to give a medical diagnosis and instead makes a speech about growing corn
Dracula impersonates another character just by wearing the same clothes, despite being taller and visibly much older. This deception is successful.
A character "cleans" a room by eating all the insects in it
Suddenly: rats. Thousands of them.
The heroes progress in their efforts through "the wonderful power of money," i.e., bribery
Dracula has three other vampires in his castle. Their relation to him is never explained, nor are any of them named.
A character insists his salvation depends on having a pet cat
Dracula is thwarted by flowers on more than one occasion
A group of vampires stand in the hall outside a man's bedroom, talking loudly about their plans to eat him. When he comes to the door to confront them, they run away laughing
Dracula wears an unfashionable hat and gets roasted for it
A group of Romanians encounter a disheveled, shouting man and, "seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they [give] him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither that the train reached."
A boat crashes due to Dracula having the munchies
A wolf is thrown through a window and immediately runs off, confused and covered in glass
Dracula makes a bed
okay people who have been fighting to unwhitewash the clones, now is your time to help māori!!
What’s happening
- 182.41 hectares of our ancestral land in Wairarapa has come up for sale.
- This whenua backs onto our maunga Tararua, our awa, Waiohine and is near our whānau urupā, Te Uru o Tāneroa.
- The tender price is between $1.2-1.5 million.
- Our whānau are trying to raise money to meet the tender price.
- Our iwi has not settled, so we have no collective financial base.
- Our whānau want to buy back our whenua and establish papakāinga and sustainable business to bring our people home to Wairarapa.
If the tender is unsuccessful they will keep all donations for the next bit of land that comes up
(information has been copied from @/amscraig on twitter, who is a member of the iwi attempting to reclaim their land)
it is so disappointing that this is the only option to reclaim illegally stolen land for the iwi, but the government wont work towards settlement with many iwi so we have no other choice
if you have any money avaliable to donate please do, anything would be appreciated!
Calvin and Hobbes was magic--and sometimes a little creepy--when it embraced surrealism. And this was in the funny papers alongside goofiness like Garfield and The Family Circus.
yeah why not
my goal for today is no instagram reels & read 20 pages of my book. no consequences if i don’t do that because you cannot hate yourself into becoming who you are
Save me wolf359 women, save me
In regards of the Trump government scraping all trans inclusion in its queer information portion of its websites I have made this thing. Spread the word. Don't let them pretend we never existed.
P.S: Don't like! Reblog! <3
people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them
Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.
It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.
On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.
I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"
That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.
Never.
These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.
And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.
Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.
You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.
But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.
That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.
It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.
Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.
Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.
Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.
They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.
But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.
I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."
(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.
Fucker.)
But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.
I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.
But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.
The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.
That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.
The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.
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