So, I'm trans. And several years ago, I was at my great grandfather's funeral. 17, newly on T, barely out to anyone other than my close friends and family. And I'm standing there at the refreshment's table, surrounded by strangers and members of my family's church, when George walks up to me.

This man is ancient, bent like a finger and frail. Tufts of white hair surround his wrinkled face. Like always, he's wearing thick glasses, massive hearing aids, and his veteran's hat. George was my first introduction to the concept of war, when he told me as a child why he was missing two fingers on his hand. He's been a fixture at church since I can remember. I've only ever seen him at there or in uniform at parades, the rest of his time spent in a nursing home somewhere. He picks up a deviled egg and says, in his quiet voice,

"You know, before your grandfather died, he told me that now he had 3 grandsons."

I'm frozen in place. I don't know what to say to that, if I should say anything at all. This is not a conversation I expected to have, especially not with this man. But he continues.

"I didn't know what he meant! So he explained it to me."

And I can imagine it. My great grandfather, uninformed and opinionated but supportive, explaining to his friend the news he barely understood himself over after-service coffee and cookies. His eldest grandchild was now a boy.

"And, you know, I didn't know what to think."

Here, George looks me up and down. This 90-something year old war veteran, who knew me mostly as the little girl playing in the church kitchen with his wife, processing what my great grandfather had really meant. It feels like a long pause, even thought it probably passed in a second.

"But you look good. So, eh!"

And then he smiled, shrugged, and walked away without another word. If I was fine, if I was happier, then that's all that mattered.

George passed away this week, at the age of 99. This memory has been bouncing around in my head for a while, but I wasn't sure if or how I should share it. It was a conversation that meant very little, but also meant the world. It was scary, and funny, and the moment when I realized that sometimes the people you least expect will accept you. Sometimes, even if they don't fully understand, even if they barely know you, someone will choose to support you. And that will always matter.

my chemical romance is the funniest and weirdest band ever. They’re all fucking losers who would genuinely rather play dnd than hook up with groupies. The singer used to work at Cartoon Network. The bassist is on the fbi watchlist for crimes against disney. One guitarist is a guitar god but he also used to keep a little action figure of spiderman in his pocket all the time, the other is like a little lap dog of a man, but he’s also on the fbi watchlist for death threats against a us president. They refused to be on the twilight soundtrack, one of the most popular franchises at the time but then they preformed on yo gabba gabba and re-recorded one of their songs in simlish.

Oh I didn’t forget. Make no mistake I did not forget the fact that Stephanie Meyer, nyt’s bestselling author of thee Twilight series who, upon looking at the weirdest greasiest human alive said oh my god I need to make this man* a creepy ass abusive predator. And I did not forget Gerard was so offended and upset that they wrote a whole ass diss track about it and went on a rant on Twitter that ended with them talking about getting that philharmonic cheddar. I can never forget.

The philharmonic cheddar. For proof and prosperity!

To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.

Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:

Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.

Who can outdo Wife Guy Tolkien? Dude was writing elaborate AUs where his wife is an impossibly beautiful magic-wielding immortal elf princess who fights Satan and wins to rescue her human boyfriend from Satan’s doom fortress. Flawless.

@vancekilo how does it feel being the most correct person to ever comment on a post

*scritch scritch scritch scritch*

The thing is, until you get past the mindset of "justice=punishment" you will never be able to create lasting change. We have actual proof that punitive justice creates more crime and makes criminals more violent. We have actual proof that rehabilitation reduces crime and recidivism. But some of y'all are so stuck on this idea that the wrongdoer must be punished for justice to be done that you will choose sating your need for revenge over actually moving toward a better world every time. And that's sad!

Everyone in the notes saying punishment doesn't undo the bad thing: exactly! Punishment does not create or preserve healing, prevention, protection, fairness, or goodness. The only thing punishment does is satisfy a sadistic public desire for revenge and give us the illusion of control.

advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

You get bigger so you can store even MORE love and appreciation for the world inside of you

because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

I fell down these stairs just looking at this picture

Cursed artifact: Stairs of Discontinuity.

Exposure has a 90% chance of causing a concussion, but a 10% chance of spontaneously increasing your parkour skill

Yes! New installment of Stairs that Want You Dead!

This is dazzle camouflage, they've literally dazzled these stairs (the point of which was to make it hard to tell things like how far away a boat is, which maybe is not a good trait for stairs)

side note but apparently dazzle camouflage is as old as world war 1, and theres a painting of a ship with dazzle camo from fucking 1915

this feels like some sort of ai generated goof but no this is real

@capn-twitchery

@entities-of-posts

The Spiral

literally my favorite type of tweet

oh my god i have some of these saved 1 sec

Man: What’s a matter girl, you had a little bit too much corn?

Pig: *very long disgruntled groan which rises in pitch*

Man: Is that a yeah?

Pig: *shorter groan*

Man: Okay.  Here I come, I gotta get the intoxicated pig… Look at this pig…

Pig: *quiet snort*

Man: Hey!

Pig: *snort*

Man: Are you messed up, girl?  

Pig: *short snort*

Man: Never seen a damn pig… Look at that, that one here’s fine, that one there is fine, this one here is turned belly up 

Pig: *snort snort snort snort*

Man: Hey you

Pig: *snort*

Man: Whoa!  Whoa!  Shit!  [Unintelligible] HOWH!  Come here girl! 

Pig: *grunt grunt grunt*

Man: Holy hell, fuck…I didn’t mean to do that

“Whoa! Woah! Shit The Bed Almighty!” Is my new favorite expletive

and if anyone’s wondering, the man (from Cecilia, Kentucky, USA) had emptied a broken deer feeder full of accidentally fermented corn into a field where no animals were supposed to be. the pigs broke out of their pen, got into the corn, and the one you see here seriously overindulged

they observed her overnight and got Animal Control to do a check-up on her. she’s fine

so yes, you you can enjoy the video without worrying about Drunk Pig

source

So glad to hear she’s just drunk off her… whatever you call a pig ass. Haunches?

A lot of sentiments I see online about "just standing up for yourself" fall apart when considering that a common consequence of "standing up for yourself" is losing a key part of your current support network. It's hard to tell someone to stop being transphobic to you when you carpool with them to work, and it'll get a lot more expensive without them. Can your budget tolerate that cost, or is it the expense that stretches you too far? It's hard to tell someone that they need to be more polite to you when they're the one who helps walk you through legalese. Can you find someone else to do it for you, or are you left floundering? It's hard to tell someone to stop being sexist to you when they're the one writing your reference letter. Do you have someone else who can be your reference, or are they the only one whose letter would be accepted?

In order to be able to stand up for yourself, you need to be able to bear the potential consequence of that person leaving. You need to either have redundancy in your network, or be able to pay for what they did for you. Safety is about more than if someone will hit you.

There is some pretty shocking footage out there of the Baltimore bridge collapse early this morning. I've already seen some incredibly wrong, incredibly insensitive Hot Takes about how shitty the bridge was to have fallen after being bonked by a boat, etc

Please don't be that person.

The facts will come out. Speculation is silly. In addition to loss of life, the Francis Scott Key bridge was a major arterial in that region's highway system. Its loss will be felt for years, and not just to daily commuters.

Baltimore harbor is closed. No shipping at all. This will impact supply chains in ways we cannot even assess yet.

It's pretty fucked up.

Hey y'all, Baltimorian here.

A strange alien doctor stands near the unconscious body of Padme Amidala. “It appears she has lost the will to live.” A older man with a limp hobbles closer with the aid of a cane. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” says Dr. Gregory House.

-Keeps Padme on life support despite DNR, somehow this ends in him getting punched by Obi-Wan

-Immediately starts putting her on every treatment known to man

-Walks over to Wilson’s office, which is the only part of the entire ship that just looks the same as it does in the show

-Homoerotically complains about how stupid Jedi are, then makes a bet with Wilson on whether Obi Wan is gay or the father of Padme’s twins (Wilson wants House to believe people can be faithful)

-Padme almost dies again. Turns out the treatment’s not working

-“if the dark side nearly killed her, maybe it can save her”

-House uses force lightning to restart Padme’s heart

-Gets brought into Cuddy’s office and told off for using an experimental treatment, and the power of the dark side, in her hospital

-House is taken off the case and foreman is put in charge of the case

-Padme is unexpectedly doing better, but Cuddy refuses to tell House or else he’ll be using the dark side to save all his patients

-House watches on as Wilson tries seducing a relieved Obi Wan while he paces in the lobby. Doesn’t seem to work

-House interrogates Obi Wan about his relationship with Padme, insinuates it’s Obi Wans Fault. Gets in a struggle and once theyre seperated it’s revealed he ripped out some beard hair

-Padme is getting released from the hospital but crashes again with obvious signs of infection. Everyone blames the dark side of the force

-is put in intensive care again, everyone thinks she’s going to die, House is brooding.

-House meets Bail Organa and talks to him, Bail mentions how he was so worried about her the last time she was in a hospital, and this seems much more hopeless

-“what time she was in the hospital?”

-House marches in as they’re about to pull the plug, rolling Padme’s unconcious body over to point at dark spot on the back of her neck

-Foreman looks disapointed, “it’s a bruise house, her husband nearly snapped her neck.”

-“Our princess’ boyfriend here failed to mentioned she was scratched by a Nexu on Genosis years ago. Nexu claws are known as a vicious poison.”

-“it would have killed her years ago”

-“unless a small chunk of claw stuck in her back, working into the muscles near the nape of her neck for years. The little prince of Darkness chokes her, pressure and muscles spasming lets it work into a blood vessel. It’s why the force lightning only was a bandaid, it vaporized what was in her bloodstream but broke up the rest of the claw and let it enter in her bloodstream. Start her on dialysis, she’ll be fine by tomorrow afternoon.”

-Next day Padme’s wheeled out of the hospital with her two children, bittersweetness. House watches from balcony before going back to his office

-Wilson enters with his shirt unbuttoned and a few bruises on his neck, declaring, “the Jedi is gay. I win.”

-House holds up a paternity test, “he’s bisexual, it’s a draw”

@exteenpopstar

#love the implication that house is force sensitive and decided to become a dark side user for medical malpractice reasons (via @gravity-loves-me)

I’m HOWLING this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read

Y'know, there's this gripe I've had for years that really frustrates me, and it has to do with Love, Simon and people joking about it and calling it too-pg and designed-for-straight-people and all the like. (A similar thing has happened to Heartstopper, but that's another conversation.)

I saw Love, Simon in theaters when it came out my senior year in high school. I saw it three times, once with my friends/parents on opening night, once with my brother over spring break, and once with my grandparents.

On opening night, the air in the room was electric. It was palpable. Half the heads in there were dyed various colors. Queer kids were holding hands. We were all crying and laughing and cheering as a group. My friends grabbed my hands at the part where Simon was outed and didn't let go until his parents were saying that they accepted him. My friend came out to me as non-binary. Another person in our group admitted that she had feelings for girls. It was incredible. I left shaking. This was the first mainstream queer romance movie that had ever been produced by one of the main five studios, and I know that sounds like another "first queer character from Disney" bit but you have to understand that even in 2018 this was groundbreaking. Getting to have a sweet queer rom-com where the main character was told that he got "to breathe now" after coming out meant so much to me and my friends.

But also, from a designed-for-straight-people POV (which, to be frank, it was written by a bisexual author and directed by a gay man, this was not designed for straight audiences), why is it a bad thing that it appealed to the widest possible audience? That it could make my parents and grandparents see things in a new light? My stepdad wasn't at all interested in rom-coms but he saw it with me because it was something I cared about and he hugged me when we came out of the theater. My very Catholic grandparents watched it with me and though my grandpa said he still didn't quite understand the whole 'gay thing,' all he wanted was for me to be happy and to have a happy ending like Simon did. My Nana actually cried when Simon came out and squeeze my hand when his mother told him he could breathe.

And when Martin blackmailed Simon, my mom, badass ally that she is, literally hissed "Dropkick him. Dropkick him in the balls" leading to multiple queer kids in the audience to laugh or smile. Having my parents there- the only parents, by the way, out of my group of queer and questioning friends- made multiple people realize that supportive adults were out there. That parents like those in Love, Simon do exist in real life.

When people complain about Heartstopper not being realistic or Love, Simon being too cutesy, I remember seeing Love, Simon on opening night. I remember my friend coming out and my stepdad hugging me and my mom defending us through this character. I remember the cheers that went through the audience when Bram and Simon kissed and the chatter in the foyer after the movie was over and the way that this movie made me understand that happy endings do exist.

Queer kids need happy endings. Straight people need entry points to becoming allies. Both of these things can come together in beautiful ways. They can find out about more queer culture later, but for now, let them have this. Let them all have a glimpse at a better, happier world. Let them have queer joy.

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”

forms of eldritch horror include but are not limited to - nobody will ever believe you, you must live alone with this knowledge - you will never feel safe again, and you realize you were never safe before - everything that was familiar is now strange and abhorrent to the point anything that now seems normal should be held in utmost suspicion - having this new knowledge has opened doors that will continually reveal new equally cursed knowledge without end - death and madness are no longer escapes

I’ve always felt that the idea of madness or sanity in an eldritch horror sense were misnomers. If anything, I feel a better term is a change of perspective. There is nothing inherent in seeing a greater being that “drives you insane”, it’s that this being doesn’t fit into your previous worldview at all and you have to wrestle that. Every character can and should react differently, changing in ways that “make sense” for them. It’s either a change in worldview or attempting to fit the greater being into your preexisting one. Both will have negative results, but will be interesting as hell to explore.

You know what? Unironically, I think this is the best comment I’ve seen on this post.

I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains.  Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does.  Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be.  Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does.  This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.

as someone who is partially a classicist, this is a better analysis of Greek mythology as a whole than 99.95% of the takes I’ve seen on here (and a substantial number of the takes I’ve seen in ~academia~)