Long tailed tit bathing

little guy going beast for real

Because some people seem to have forgotten.

And just a reminder, things that are not queerbaiting:

Queerbaiting requires the intentional, contrived, and insincere teasing of possible queer representation in order to bait an LGBTQ+ audience into sticking around in the hope of it becoming canon, but the creators have no intention of ever making it canon. It's nothing more than a skeptical marketing ploy.

resources for staying safe online

always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”

feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important

note: very slightly updated, reblog this version instead

what your favourite star trek ship says about you

you guys asked for more paintings of these two dorks together so here's one xD

more gay swordfighting becauseee well i don't have a reason, i just love em xD

There's a whole lesbian love story playing out on Star Trek Discovery, and these two actresses are doing 100% of the heavy lifting.

Today is Purim! If you haven’t heard of this minor Jewish holiday, now is your chance to get in on the fun. One of just two holidays (the other is Hanukkah!) Rabbinically-decreed, as opposed to coming directly from the text of the Torah, Purim isn’t one of the most important holidays– but if we made Hanukkah reasonably well-known, we ought to do the same with one of the most fascinating stories in Jewish culture.

The Purim story covers one woman (and her uncle)’s quest to save the Jews from imminent doom. This featuring of a primary female heroine, as well as some truly iconic lines, makes it my favorite Biblical story, and a beautifully unique one.

If you’re into lesser-known mythos, niche Biblical stories, or women, you should go read it now, either on the Wikipedia link above or with this Chabad.org link which contains the original text of all ten chapters translated with commentary (”Show Rashi”.) Simple 20-minute read. You can also hear it read in the original Hebrew on YouTube.

I’d really like to give Purim a little more coverage in mainstream circles. I could go into its uniqueness all day, but we don’t have all day– so I’ll leave you with the Wikipedia and Chabad links, and you can learn what you like.

After approximately 12 months of hapless goyim reblogging this post with no awareness of when it was posted, it is in fact Purim once again! That’s right, from the eve of March 16th to the eve of March 17th, 2022, it really 100% truly is Purim, and you will finally be right for reblogging! (Love you guys. Was honestly cute to watch.)

And, of course, to all my beloved Jewish siblings: be safe, be merry, be frivolous. <3

I’m very much a proponent of “food not lawns” but I’m also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. I’ll excitedly encourage it but if people can’t or even just don’t want to then that’s FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like it’s as simple as “just grow your own food!” is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take

i watered my garden every single day it didn’t rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didn’t use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didn’t really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasn’t fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were so bitter. i didn’t harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat one–the slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.

then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.

your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.

i love gardening! it’s great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but it’s SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.

Hi, indigenous person here with good news: The food not lawn doesn’t have to be food -for humans- 

You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-

The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where I’m from:

Reblogging for excellent suggestion and recommendations for North American folks! I have a native pollinator garden and even my 3x8 (soon to be expanding) patch brings in so many different small bees and other pollinators I’d never seen before. I can confirm they need very little care, and a lot of native solitary bees are so so little and amazing.

(somewhat related note, if you are planting a non native ornamental, RESEARCH and make sure it isn’t invasive to the area! Down with Japanese honeysuckle.)

We have an apple tree in our back garden. Not sure which species but we put it in as a tiny spindly thing when I was a kid but it's big and tall and brilliant now and the bees love it. We don't have to do much for it, it just works with the environment. I do sometimes give it a bit of water if it's been real dry and I feel bad for it but it seems fine.

Come spring the bees can't get enough of it. And birds love it too. Both to eat bugs that live on it or to sit on watch. Different species of birds too.

There will be plants that work where you are without needing to artificially prop them up but the local wildlife will love. And if all you can do is one plant that's better that none. And there will be people or resources for plants that work for your area without the need for constant care (mostly, climate change).

And if you frow more human food than you know what to do with or can handle worth checking in with a local food bank or homeless soup kitchen or something.

Any UK viewers struggling to find anywhere to watch the team pairs SP from last night?

I’ve managed to watch the BBC Iplayer streams of the mens any ice dance but seems to be nowhere to watch the pairs? Thank you x

Honestly I’ve just bought a discovery plus thing for a month, and I’ll cancel it after the olympics. It’s about the cost of a cup of tea and I can watch anything whenever. Not an option for all but seems to work. 

I say this as an Irish person who is very anti-British imperialism for very obvious reasons, but I think a lot of people need to think about just who they mean when they insult English people or make fun of English accents.

for a start, the English accent that is almost universally mocked is a working-class accent. light-hearted joking is fine, everyone does it, but the insinuation that the English are all uneducated, incapable of pronouncing things "correctly", or jokes about how they all have bad teeth and that's why they can't talk "right"? it's straight-up classist.

class divisions in England have not changed much since the Victorian era. a lot of it has been forced underground, but it's very much alive. people with working class accents are judged, unfairly profiled, and often lose out on job opportunities. certain fields are completely closed to them. there is an entire system within a system that ferries upper class people through private schools and elite universities, right into the highest jobs in business and government -- the ""sexy"" ~British~ accent that a lot of foreigners find preferable, and see as the "proper" English accent, is the accent of the upper class and is shockingly rare once you get out of London amd the surrounding counties. the accents being mocked are those of regular, working-class people, and historically, working-class English people have always been the first victims of British imperialist greed.

when we insult "the English", we need to be sure that we're not throwing fellow victims under the bus. working-class English people, especially from the northern counties, often live in extremely deprived areas with some of the highest poverty rates in Europe. slums are very much still alive here, and the government has zero interest in changing the class system that so benefits it. I support the English working class the same way as I'd support any other victims of oppression, prejudice, or discrimination, so I think it's probably better that everyone went back to ridiculing the royal family and the politicians and left regional dialects and accents from historically deprived areas alone.

Half the time y'all don't even know what English people sound like. The American show Reign had Adelaide Kane, an Australian actress, play Mary Queen of Scots and I've encountered several people who thought she was English because they've no idea what an English person sounds like apart from these mocked sounds that take no account of the vast variation of different sounding accents

Also like, the same yanks dragging the 'English' accent complained like mad when they couldn't understand a geordie (Cheryl Cole) and she had to be dropped from a show. Stop dragging start listening

I won’t lie, the way everyone talked about Sir Terry Pratchett made it seem like he was alive, I literally just found out he died 5 years ago. I guess the saying “memories keep people alive” was very true for Terry Pratchet. Huh.

That's rather the point. #GNU Terry Pratchett

GNU?

Bless.  GNU is something from the Discworld books that Terry came up with (I’m quoting the Guardian here): Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called “the clacks”. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called “GNU John Dearheart” to echo his name up and down the lines. “G” means that the message must be passed on, “N” means “not logged”, and “U” means the message should be turned around at the end of a line.  . .  .  The code causes Dearheart’s name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because: “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terry-pratchetts-name-lives-on-in-the-clacks-with-hidden-web-code While we GNU Terry Pratchett, he goes on infinitely.

GNU pTerry

GNU Terry Pratchett

“jealousy is so disgusting” “anger is so toxic” did u know? these are emotions every human has

I’ve always been a fan of an analogy I heard once. Your emotions are like one of the lights on your car’s dash. When one of them turns on, it means you need to check under the hood and fix them. It’s not bad that the light turned on, per se, and it doesn’t always mean something is broken. But what IS toxic, dangerous, and likely to break something, is when you let that light stay on, pretending it’s normal, until that braking fluid finally fails and you crash into someone, or your engine fails completely.

Feel jealous. Feel anger. 

Just don’t let it fester. You need to look inside of yourself, find out why you’re feeling the way you are, and bring yourself to a satisfied, stable state of mind. You can look at philosophy, meditation/introspection, religion, or actual therapy, or at least talking to someone about it. You’ll find you’re much more content and happy when you do something about those feelings, and come to some sort of conclusion or resolution.

That is a  wonderful way of looking at it, thankyou. Makes me feel better about myself when I DO feel that way.

Hmmm. Interesting post!

Anyway, I’ve seen some of my followers reblog from this freak, and I think it’s worth stating that you should probably unfollow me if you agree with them.

did he really just say “proudly-perverted” 

Yeah, that makes no sense at all.

(to any people unfollowing me: please block me at the same time so I never have to deal with you again. bye and good riddance)

When did @comcastkills decide to become hot garbage to THIS degree like, damn. 

I forget the age range on this site runs only a little past the teens most of the time because nothing said here is in any way outside of LGBTQ history. 

But, you know, thats reactionary bullshit for you. Are discoursers all younger than 21 or something? Would that explain this nonsense?

The first person who welcomes me into the community as a sort of mentor proudly ID’d as a Dyke would insist that be used over lesbian or homosexual.

Comcastkills showing the same regard for people as the average school bully, I see.

It’s wild and depressing and wildly depressing for me to see this kind of stuff, because when I was a kid, any of us babygays would have literally killed to have an older queer mentor of any kind. Shockingly, there were few around, because, you know, AIDS. But now, the next generation, finally having what we lost, an older generation to teach them about their cultural history n shit… Just. Actively hates and in some cases even tries to kill them (I’ve seen kids on this hellsite try to cost grown-ass adults, sometimes parents, their jobs, kids, and lives). 

Like, I feel so old to be like “back in my day” or “when I was your age” but seriously. I always thought the younger generations would be better off for having what we lost. Instead: this. 

And we gotta call it by its name:

It’s not a generation gap. It’s not just ignorance (though that plays a part). It’s not just TERF manipulation against the word queer (though that plays a part).

We’re seeing a young generation of LGBT conservatism: kids who want their civil rights but who don’t want all the mess and scandalousness of actual liberation. Kids who want to hold on to what has been won for white middle class binary identified LG kids and don’t want to thing about what’s happening on the margins on the LGBT movement. Kids who want glamorous LGBT celebrities on tv, not homeless LGBT youth in their spaces. We have kids into gay nationalism. We have lesbians longing for the time when we didn’t include bisexuals and trans women in our communities. We have LGBT youth voting for Tories.

These kids aren’t shitting on their queer elders out of just ignorance, they actively reject our struggle against all oppression.

I’ve been thinking about this lately too.

The thing I created this blog to oppose is, ultimately, a right-wing reactionary movement, and if you scratch even a little bit at the veneer of leftism, you find bootstrap logic, xenophobia, militarism, anti-intellectualism, the veneration of retributive justice, disrespect for bodily autonomy, and other characteristics of right-wing politics underneath.

Let’s start calling it what it is.

I thought for the longest while that I was off-the-mark in mentally categorizing Tumblr Anti-X (anti ace/aro, anti kink, anti gender-fluidity/gender-spectrum, anti-labels-actual-queer-people-use, anti certain-kinds-of-fiction, etc)  Discoursers as the social conservatives of the future, but the above lines up incredibly well with my own observations.

Years ago, someone asked me to do a portrait of the social conservatism of decades to a century in the future and at the time I predicted highly limited and conditional acceptance of white, able-bodied, very gender-conforming, white-picket-fence, cis gay men and lesbians, who vote conservative. Maaaaaaybe also a limited acceptance of transgender people who medicalize and pathologize themselves out the wazoo, performing a constant show of ‘I’m just a good person who seeks the appropriate treatment for my medically-acknowledged condition, won’t you accept me, I promise not to rock the boat?’ and whose gender-presentation after transition is also very high in conformity to what the conservative mind thinks of as acceptable + again, support for conservative politics. 

Imagine how depressed I was when a large assortment of discoursers, transmedicalists and others along these lines basically confirmed a good deal of the above, here on Tumblr, decades before I thought it would ever become a thing! I started getting alarm bells in my head when I saw the vicious responses toward the concept of gender as a spectrum (and thus toward the existence of genderqueer / nonbinary, agender, genderfluid/genderfuck people), because after years of monitoring and seeking to understand social conservative communities, I knew that they consistently felt a deep, existential sense of threat from anything that challenged their rigid, binary views of gender. And here, on Tumblr, I was seeing young, so-called ‘progressives’ reacting in the same manner, as if threatened, by the concept that gender as a binary is a small and very reductive lens through which one can see the human experience. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conservatism with a gay hat’ couldn’t have been more apt.

And the thing is, this isn’t exactly something new for the community, the only thing that’s truly different is that an entire generation is now in the thrall of reactionary politics. Seeing sneers at queer people daring to (gasp!) describe ourselves as ‘proudly perverted’, as highly sexual beings, as kinky and unapologetic, reminds me what a massive impact radfems have had in shaping the Tumblr social environment and what a net contributor they’ve been to the aforementioned reactionary politics. Whenever I look at the notes of popular radfem posts, it’s always the same exceedingly telling image: usernames along the lines of ‘empress-vulvalini’ or ‘uter-person’ routinely interspersed with ‘tradcatholicnationalist’ or ‘jesus-is-my-savior’ (looking at the latter kind of blogs reveals that they’re Fundamentalist Christians to a one and I say this as a progressive Christian, lest someone accuse me of bigotry. It’s not the Christianity that’s my issue here, it’s the fundamentalism and the deep conservatism that comes with it). In the most darkly hilarious situations, I’ve found posts made by actual religious fundies (’sexual promiscuity and behavior characterized as ‘kink’ damages the inherent dignity of the person’, for one example) with the notes filled with radfems liking, reblogging and lauding the content.

It’s been noted ad-nauseam that radfems and conservative politicians have been good allies on several fronts, starting with the 1970s, but even something as simple as a Tumblr post can show how radfems share idea-space with fundamentalists. Radfems, in this case, have been the social-vector through which LGBT teens on Tumblr have been introduced to and influenced by fundamentalist thought, giving us the incredibly baffling sight of queer youngsters reacting with knee-jerky viciousness to non-normative sexual practices that hardly warranted the batting of an eye-lash in queer-dominated spaces, ten years ago.

Can we please also remember that there is literally a generation gap because of how many people were killed (literally by HIV/AIDS, poverty, drug use, hate crimes, as well as metaphorically closeted because of same, as well as actively silenced in the media) in the late 70s/80s?  There’s a good 15 years where the loudest, proudest people who were queer are now just… gone.

It was right before citizen journalism and internet publications and the like became a big deal again.  One of the biggest reasons that a lot of these kids don’t have queer mentors or a sense of history is that the biggest surviving group of activists from that era are well-meaning straight allies who could fit into a heteronormative culture.

We really are missing a lot of voices that should’ve shaped modern discussion of LGBT identities. 

OK, so I’m never going to deny the horrendous effects of the AIDS crisis, but there are a lot of awesome queer women who a) nursed a lot of those men through their deaths when no one else would go near them and b) have been living their lives as awesome queer mentors ever since.

Please stop erasing those women from your queer history.

Something to add to this:

1. I totally agree with you. We are erasing women by not listening to the voices of older queer women. Look at the leaders of LGBT communities and there is an overwhelming amount of (middle class white) older gay men and (middle class white) ‘inspiration youths’. Older queer women in leadership positions and as the visible faces of movements? Very rare. Older queer women as voices of aids activism? Even rarer.

2. We are erasing women by defaulting to the well known ‘nursing’ stories when we speak of women in aids activism. Women had so many more roles than that. Women organized protests, women blocked roads, women fought cops, women did the research to call medical officials on their bullshit, women were a big part of every aspect of aids activism.

3. We are erasing women by not speaking enough of women who died of aids. A lot of women died during the AIDS crisis. Women still live with AIDS. Very hard hit were trans women and queer women who did sex work. Women also faced unique challenges. Women often had no access to health insurance and the health care it paid for. HIV positive women often went undiagnosed for far longer because doctors and the general public considered AIDS a ‘gay men’s’ disease. HIV positive women often died from untreated symptoms and were not diagnosed with AIDS because the symptoms that were recognized were based on how men got sick. Women were often denied benefits and told they were ‘not sick yet’ until the last days of their lives because their symptoms were not recognized.

United in Anger. A History of Act Up, (GREAT documentary) features a lot of women and goes into detail on the campaign for women from 58:00 onwards, I really recommend watching it.