Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?

Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.

All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)

But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.

But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.

I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?

It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.

Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.

Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, my Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)

you are not you when you're hungry..

There's a WALL of them

4.01 | 4.05

I WASN'T READYYY!!!

Suspenders, cane, monocle, top hat, fancy! - Drunk Uncle (catching up on last week’s snl)

Nothing I’ve read has changed me more than “you do people a favor by accepting their help” like I repeat this constantly to so many people because it’s true!!! People like to feel useful, they like to feel kind, they like to feel like they have an ability to impact people’s lives so just let them!! Not everything is a thing to be owed back — accept people’s kindness without making a competition out of it

the myth of persephone is about the trauma of the separation of mothers and daughters by marriage and this is the hill i will die on

To be clear I’m not against retellings that reinterpret the relationship between Hades and Persephone and present it as consensual and healthy– I do think there’s something incredibly powerful about looking at a story that’s been passed down to us through millennia about a girl being kidnapped and raped and saying “no. No, that’s not the kind of story I want to hear, that’s not the kind of story I want to tell, and that’s certainly not the kind of story I want my daughters to grow up on.” (Although I think it’s disappointing that these are now the only sorts of Persephone retellings we get, and at this point it’s really not a particularly revolutionary take, given how often it’s been done.)

But I also think we do a great disservice to the women of the ancient world by not remembering how this story, in that form, mirrored their very real pain. I’ve been thinking recently about how we can tell that women participated in the formation of their culture’s folklore because women’s trauma is embedded in it. (In Greek terms, the stories of Leto and Alcmene very clearly come out of women’s traumatic experiences with childbirth, and there are elements of women’s traumatic experiences of sexual assault embedded in, for example, the stories of Daphne or Callisto or Artemis and Actaeon) And the story of Persephone comes out of women’s experiences of being permanently separated from their mothers and daughters at marriage. (See also this post from @gardenvarietycrime.​)

For an ancient woman sending her daughter off to be married, knowing that she will see her only rarely and that the odds of death in childbirth were high, Persephone meant something. For an ancient girl leaving her mother and her entire world for a man she may never have met knowing the same, Persephone meant something. I do think a lot of the conflation of death and marriage in the ancient world comes out of this: that a girl is dead to her mother and her family whether she leaves them to go to a husband’s house or the house of Hades. Maybe it’s a consolation to know that someone else has done this before you, to know that a goddess once lost her daughter and a goddess once lost her mother the same way you are losing yours. And that they survived it.

Essentially I think we need to remember that this myth (like all myths and all folklore) is not necessarily entirely the product of men, that women’s voices and women’s trauma remain embedded in it despite all of our written sources being men’s tellings of the story. And when we retell it we risk losing those voices if we are not careful and if we dismiss the myth as it survives today as solely men’s version of the story.

it just wouldn’t be Christmas without Mom’s homemade Juggaloaf.

i thought this was a gif from the next orphan black episode but apparently its from a movie and NOT in fact helena climbing into a dumpster

If you say “I’m not voting ❤️” your excuse better be not living in America, under 18 or you legally cannot vote for whatever reason. Now is not a time to be apolitical.

NPR just ran a story about how undecided voters are less than 1% of the voting population so the current tactic is to disenfranchise voters into not voting. They're flooding social media with trolls and bots talking about how they're not voting because their preferred candidate didn't win the primaries, about how nothings going to change and there's no point in voting. And the thing is, we know how social media works. People get stuck in these echo chambers and have those ideas reinforced over and over again by hundreds of different (fake) voices. It's not directly voter suppression, but it smells very heavily of it.

So like. Don't fall into their lies. Vote like our lives depend on it, because they do.

ATTENTION PEOPLE WHO OWN ANY PHYSICAL COPIES OF ANY RECENT VIDEO GAMES

Ever look at the cover art of your case and think “wow this looks super generic and uninspired”?

I’ll use Doom as an examlpe:

FANTASTIC game. SHITTY cover art. Looks like a cod clone.

A lot of games suffer from this,

HOWEVER

recently I’ve noticed that many games have a little secret inside the box…

You see, on the inside, when you open the case, some of these titles will have an alternate box art!

Simply open the case, *carefully* pull out the paper…

And on the other side…

:O

Now doesn’t that look like a much better representation of what playing DOOM is like!?!? The best part is theres no mountain of text on the back, the art just keeps going!

Best DOOM cover ever.

Other examples include Final Fantasy XV, The Last of Us, The Evil Within, Fallout 4, etc.

Not all of my games had this, but the ones that did had such cool art. I love the lack of “advertising text” on the back. Some of the alternate box art just paints a scene from the game so well you dont even need the title to know what it is.

Reblog to save a life! You might have some badass alternate box art in your games and you just never knew it :D

I totally forgot to post these here…! :0 I love them all ;_; Patreon - Twitter - Instagram - Artstation