who is doing it like them

i cannot be the first person to post this here but i am going so fucking insane about the gaia music collective's one day choir singing wait for me. the opening harmonies are you KIDDING me

mostly posting this so i can be sure @haunthouse sees it tbh

boygenius, the line between friendship and complete devotion

coupdemain x // boygenius without you without them // boygenius Leonard Cohen // Rolling Stone x // New York Times Magazine x // boygenius true blue // loud and quiet x // New York Times Magazine x // boygenius true blue // boygenius Leonard Cohen // boygenius we're in love // the guardian x // boygenius we're in love // Lucy Dacus please stay // the guardian x // Phoebe Bridgers Graceland too // the guardian x // Phoebe Bridgers Graceland too // boygenius we're in love // Julien Baker favor // variety x // Rolling Stone x // Rolling Stone x

"Friends don't look at friends that way" coward. You don't look at your friends with awe and adoration in your eyes? You don't look at your friends and think "this incredible human being has chosen to listen to me ramble about my hyperfixation"? You don't look at your friends and think "I want them to keep laughing forever"? Why the fuck not

Listening to the Fallout 4 soundtrack and.... LYNDA FUCKING CARTER?!?!?

That is NOT my middle name.

From now on, every time someone calls gay marriage or gays in the military an "assimilationist" thing or an "assimilationist victory," they owe me $5. If they're under 35, they owe me $10.

Come here. Sit down, @thegreenbisamurai, and shut the fuck up for 5 fucking minutes so maybe you can pull your head out of your ass.

It's not about wanting to join the military, it's about having the right to join the military without having to hide who we are.

It's about having the right to participate in every part of public life, even the ones that suck.

Got it?

Sometimes, I forget that some of you are young enough to not understand what it was like 25+ years ago, and that you really can't fucking comprehend what it was like to live in even the greatest bastions of liberalism back then, but you really fucking can't, can you?

And some of you are just so fucking happy to throw poor and red-area queers under the bus because our lived reality is just not radical enough for you, and that's so fucking obvious.

The only way for my grandfather to not go back into the coal mines as a young man was to join the Navy. There was functionally zero other economic opportunity for him. This is still the reality for a lot of people, including a lot of queer people, because, wait for it:

The Department of Defense is the largest employer in the United States. In many places, it is functionally the only major employer.

There are approximately 2.1 million active servicemembers. Counting civilian employees, the DoD employs approximately 3.2 million people. For comparison, the largest private employer in the US is Wal-Mart, which employs ~2.3 million people.

Do you think that it might matter to our overall civil rights to have the largest employer in the country (and one of the largest employers in the world) change its position on whether us dirty fags can have jobs there? Do you think that it might make a difference in whether we can work in other, better jobs to have an employer have to make a decision on whether they're going to fire ✨️a veteran✨️ for being queer?

I do not actually think it's fucking great to join the armed forces. I am not fooled by the flag-waving bullshit that I was raised with, and in fucking fact, I have an extremely low amount of tolerance for worshiping the military and the country and all the OORAH fuckshit precisely because I was raised by a father who worshipped his Greatest Generation father. Okay? Mistake this for some idolization of the military or some wilful ignorance of how shitty it is you should not.

What you should do is understand that for a lot of people, joining the military is a ticket to eating. Joining the military means being able to get health care and a roof over your head. That is done on purpose because the military fucking preys on poor kids, and that fucking sucks, but it's still reality right now. Shutting queer kids out of that means shutting them out of the ability to get out of where they are economically. And, again, more than that, it means shutting them out of the public commons. It means that when gays gained the right to serve openly, the biggest employer in the US said "FAGS CAN WORK HERE AND YOU CAN'T FIRE THEM FOR FAGGOTRY, ACTUALLY."

And that changes things in other places much the same way that Medicaid changing a policy almost invariably causes insurance companies to follow suit.

This is why you will often see, when you look at timetables for employment rights, that people gain the right to be out at work and have employment protections first in state & local employment and then those protections are extended to private employers. This is because - as I've said before - it is easier to accomplish getting state employers not to discriminate first. It's easier to make the argument that the state shouldn't discriminate rather than that the state should enforce non-discrimination on private employers, so you make that argument first, and then you continue on to the private employers. It isn't an end point. It isn't the final answer to the problem. It's a strategic step along the way that immediately improves life for queer people and creates precedent for further improvement.

This is also why when people try to take rights away from queer people - like with bathroom bills - they often start by trying to remove those rights in state-owned locations. This creates precedent.

So, like, unless you're going to show up with jobs falling out of your pockets and a strategic way to accomplish the same fucking thing while still leaving in place the precedent of the largest employer in the US thinking it's A-OK to fire fags, dykes and trannies, kindly shut the fuck up, because your words are more than pointless.

I know that's not as like, cool, hip, and groovy to think "hey, this is a load-bearing pillar of society, maybe we shouldn't be shut out of it," and it doesn't make you feel like you've got the Purest Of Leftist Ideology as saying ASSIMILATIONIST seems to for you, but it does have the upside of actually doing something that measurably improves the lives of queer people and sets a precedent for future improvement rather than being pointless [wanking gesture] posturing for leftist clout.

That will be $10. :)

Nah, man, I just have no patience for people squirting juice out their assholes and pretending they're performing a symphony.

My grandfathers served in WWII. All three of 'em, because my grandmother remarried after my granddaddy died. I have plenty of complicated feelings about all of it, but fuck you if you think I'm talking about it with you, buddy.

You got me! You're in the right! It sure doesn't matter whether the biggest employer in the country thinks fags are dirty or not. We can't try to dismantle the military industrial complex and set meaningful legal precedent at the same time! We are just silly people who can only hold the most pure thought in our heads at any given time.

Your praxis sucks and I'm not wasting any more time on you.

You still owe me $10.

I got up and switched the laundry and I'm still like

Do... do people like this think the military stops existing if queer people aren't in it? What... what is the point of that point?

it occurs to me that to people like this, "queer people collectively refuse to enlist" and "queer people are banned from enlisting" probably sound synonymous

Yes, it probably does.

I have to admit that i think it's really funny that this person thinks they triggered some "innert" [sic] trauma in me bc I wrote a lot of vehement words. Like, I guess you're new here.

I love how this person's attempt at a rebuttal didn't actually address any of your main points. Like my bro I think I figured out why your opinion is so shitty, sorry about your reading comprehension.

I think there's something broken in some people's brains in that they claim to have totally dismantled the idea that the US is inherently superior in their own minds but they will speak in such a way that makes it clear that they don't think that anyone in the US starves to death or dies from exposure or dies because their perfectly treatable medical condition... wasn't.

Like, if the argument is that it's only death that matters, like, people do actually die from poverty, y'all. And like, having the right to do something doesn't mean you have to go and do it. I have the right to do a lot of fucking things that I don't do.

Funny that, innit?

va worker here: yeah the military sucks. know what else sucks? almost losing your job and your livelihood while an administration thinks about forcing you back into the closet you left. the trump admin floated a lot of anti-trans military policies, up to and including kicking out out trans people (who were supposed to be safe being out because that's how it works right now). the "compromise" position was reinstating dadt (don't ask don't tell) for trans people. like, do i even have to draw the line between that and where we are right now?

wanna know what else sucks? people killing themselves or losing their workers' benefits because someone found out they were queer. which, yes, happened (and still does but to a much lesser extent). most people in the us military right now never see combat. those that do? it can fuck them up. seriously fuck them up. wanna guess what happens when they don't have access to teams of doctors who know this shit inside and out? go ahead, fucking guess. or read a newspaper, there are plenty of stories out there about what happens when vets can't access the vha. when they're not allowed to? yeah.

know what else sucks? having a uterus and being unable to get an abortion because of the state you live in. the military, right the fuck now, is offering to pay the travel expenses for their members who need an abortion, queers included. my local vha hospital is also getting the discharged folks abortions or performing them. but, and this is crucial, this only applies to people who were honorably discharged. aka their fucking benefits weren't yanked because of xyz.

yeah, the military sucks and has a billion and one problems right now. know what problem it doesn't have? queers losing the benefits they earned and signed a contract to get. the military and vha are now upholding their end of the contract instead of exploiting queer workers and tossing them out when the bill comes due. and that's fucking important.

I'm forever stuck on being grateful of the fact they can't hatecrime queers in the military and get away with it as easily anymore.

do people like this forget/not know military queers were endangered by their own squads?

Also, and this is a comparatively minor point compared to the rest, but do these people not realize that non-combat military roles exist??? Please explain to me how a trans lawyer who wants to join the JAG Corps because they want to make a difference in the treatment of rape survivors in the service is "exterminating brown people". Explain to me how a poor person who pays for medical school by working for the Medical Corps instead of doing a residency is "stealing native land" or committing murder. Fucking explain to me the problem with a queer person joining the Merchant Marine or the Coast Guard.

The answer there is that by being part of it at all, you're complicit. Remember that this mindset hounded a trans man who handles software license renewals for a defense contractor off of Twitter entirely bc he's "complicit in war crimes."

That any American is that level of complicit does not seem to occur to them.

I disagree, that any American is that level of complicit is actually an important part of that mindset.

In the same way that TERFs believe that every man is a threat and must constantly check himself to make sure he isn't accidentally indulging his nature as an aggressive abuser, but also can never escape the fact that he has male privilege, every American is guilty of being American.

Even if they want to do better, every American is complicit in and responsible for the violent actions of their government, and every American should be held accountable for their personal decisions because they all have the privilege of making choices that affect the actions of their government. So if you're an American and choose to join the military, you must want all of the terrible things that the military does because you had the privilege (because you're American) to do anything else you desired. But you chose the military, of course, because that's just how Americans are, and trying to argue nuance is just trying to escape accountability for being American.

Just look at that popular post that was circulating about how the OP was going to "hold every American accountable if Trump gets elected again, because collective responsibility and all that" as if every American has a voice in that. We ARE all complicit to them. I think some of them just haven't realized they believe that, yet.

I ... don't think so. The people making this argument, like thegreenbisamurai, are Americans who truly believe that they are not complicit because they have managed to divorce themselves from what they feel is visible complicity. I'm genuinely not talking about international perception of Americans but of internal perception of one another.

These are the people who -- again -- hounded a trans man off of Twitter because he renews software licenses for Lockheed Martin or whatever, but don't comprehend that -- for example -- banking with pretty much any major bank makes you complicit, because I guarantee you that any major bank not only has significant investments in the War Machine, but they have an entire team of people whose whole job it is to specifically make investments in the War Machine, and those investments are not a small part of that bank's investment profile. Not at all.

This is sort of a 'no ethical consumption under capitalism' thing, honestly, and I don't think that a lot of Americans are truly honest with themselves about exactly how intertwined with their daily lives the US Military actually is, and how absolutely impossible it would be to live a life which is not complicit in varying degrees.

Does this mean 'throw your hands up and give up, because we can't not be complicit'? Does this mean 'people actually doing war crimes with their own hands are as complicit as someone who enlists as a medic or does firejumping to avoid going to Vietnam?' No. It means being honest with yourself about what's going on. It means thinking about what you say when you say things like calling the places the military is sent to a 'godforsaken corner of the earth' or drawing a bright line between 'brown people' and 'queer people in the US.' (Boy, that was telling.) It means being honest with yourself about the fact that when you put things that way, you're saying that it's okay for brown people in the US to die from malnutrition or unaddressed medical needs, as long as they die in an ideologically pure way.

People will do a lot to avoid starving. A hungry man knows no G-d but bread. So the answer is not to judge people for survival-based complicity in a system that is designed to keep them hungry and subservient, but recognize that yes, the system is designed that way, accept where reality is right now, not judge people for the things they do to stay alive, and continually work on harm reduction. This is, in essence, a trolley problem, and the only real solution to a trolley problem is to build a third track.

Bringing this one back for Reasons.

Also, a TON of DoD positions aren't even military. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians (many vets, many not) who make sure people get paid and get fed and get medical care and have their insurance forms correct and take photos and do all kinds of other things that aren't "killing brown people." A *lot* of us are queer/trans/whatever. There are at least FIVE queer peeps just in my office of ~25, military and civilian. It's a secure job - barring a second Trump admin - it's supportive, and plenty of us are disabled vets.

I was on active duty when DADT was repealed, and while there were folks that everyone knew were queer, the relief was *palpable* that it was now safe.

Having a job you're good at is hugely important for stability and enjoyment of life.

I have a friend who is an archaeologist and employed by the DoD, who is part of an entire arm of the DoD entirely dedicated to archaeology and heritage management. She knows other DoD employees who work on conservation.

In her previous DoD job she was sent to Vietnam to run excavations finding missing servicemen to send their remains home to their families (something that Vietnam has been working with the US on since 1985).

She has health issues that she can afford to deal with because a DoD job comes with federal employee benefits. There are many, many people employed by the DoD who do things that have absolutely nothing to do with actual military service and who rely on those jobs and the associated benefits and the benefits are another thing that goes away if you can be kicked out for being queer.

something i have always found really weird is when english texts italicize words from other languages.

i remember reading a book as a kid and the author continually italicizing the word tamales

Either Ben Simmons or the designer actually read "The Garden of Time" and I'm impressed

The TL;DR version is the Count has to pluck 'time flower' to turn back time and prevent an angry mob from arriving

“Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let’s talk about this”—a scrape of stone on stone—“being three thousand and some years older than this.” A heavy clunk.

“Inexplicable, Warden.”

“Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.”

“Indubitable, Warden.”

“Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.”

“Maybe the building’s shy.”

“That is just tough shit for the building.”

ice cold take but if you have to pay for accessibility features it is not in fact accessible

If you need to jump through one billion flaming hoops for accessibility accommodations they are not in fact accessible.

imagine accusing the us military of being too woke

As protests start ramping up and violence escalates please remember:

DO NOT PUT MILK IN YOUR EYES FOR PEPPER SPRAY OR TEAR GAS.

It can and will cause infection due to bacteria. Flush with water, distilled if possible, and never EVER wear contact lenses to protests where there may be police retaliation.

Please reblog. It may save someone's sight.

I'm going to either find or make my own post about this but I'm a street medic, I was trained by the Black Rose organization medical branch during Occupy and have since done my own research with papers written for and by the cops and military about treating chemical agent exposure. this is correct, please do not use milk. I'm not sure about distilled water because I haven't seen it used in any papers or ok the ground, but my suspicion is that while it is probably not harmful, the osmotic qualities of distilled water may hurt or cause contact damage to the mucus membranes of the eyes. in addition, riot control chemicals are mostly designed to be water-activated and plain water will make the exposure sites hurt worse with minimal benefit besides flushing out any particles that aren't glued on with the oil medium they use for these agents.

in at least one study, the research on tear gas and pepper spray exposure showed that plain water was so painful that most cops who volunteered to be test subjects for treatment trials refused to use it, opting instead to just wait until they could shower or for the chemicals to degrade on their own. this is a pretty important indicator of both cops being mega pussies, and that plain water isn't very effective at treating riot control chemical injuries.

the substance that tested best in multiple trials was sterile buffered saline solution. in other words, the same stuff that comes in the squirt bottles for cleaning your contact lenses. this is a useful tool to carry into a protest because the squirt bottle makes it easy to direct the flow of water over the surface of the eyeball. trials also showed that putting this solution into your eyes prior to exposure cut down on discomfort quite a bit. in practice, this looks like putting in some clean eye drops from the drug store before you are exposed to riot weapons.

remember, if you are injured in a protest, call "medic!" out loud and street medics will find you. this has been standard protest practice for decades.

onions and milk and vinegar should not go in your eyes. I've seen all three recommended for tear gas treatment and I do not think they are a good idea or that they will work. stick to sterile saline or LAW (liquid antacid + water).

consider carrying an osha-approved eyewash bottle for easier application

also, please wear a helmet and buy a gas mask

forgot about this. absolutely nuts ass landslide result for you cannot kill me in a way that matters 🫡

Richey Edwards by Valerie Phillips

My friend explained the spoon theory to our DM and he was like “ohhh so it’s like when you’re out of spell slots and you need to take a long rest to regain them all” and now I keep thinking of myself as being out of spell slots instead of out of spoons

It’s perfect actually because taking a shower is like a 2nd level task, whereas making an important phone call is a 5th. If you’re out of 5th level task slots, you can’t do that phone call. However you can expend higher level slots to take that shower if you’ve spent your lower task slots on dishes, eating, and getting dressed.

Browsing social media is a cantrip

I actually say this all the time!

Also if you don’t finish a long rest (ie sleep well, taking your meds as directed etc) you do not regain spell slots and the next day you’re working with what you had left over from yesterday

there are also ritual spells ! where if you’re allowed enough time and a comfortable, quiet environment you might be able to accomplish something without loosing a spell slot ! 😌

I love the additions here

And there are some spells you’re never going to be able to cast, because your class doesn’t allow for it. Sure, you can maybe level up to the point where you can take a feat and learn one or two of spells - if you’re in a campaign that allows feats - but for the most part, if it’s not on your list, it’s not on your list, and that’s all there is to it. No matter how simple it seems to someone else, or how useful it would be to you.

YES THIS. Also of note: if you have executive dysfunction as part of your various symptoms, you also have to use an action to STOP doing something. Like — even if you have enough slots, you can’t just cast another spell. Pfft.