there's no need to call me "sir", professor

a mary oliver quote that peeled me like a fruit

**TW for butchphobic rhetoric mention**

I am writing an article for a queer forum in India about butchphobia, particularly among Gen Z heavy online spaces. As my own experiences are limited to my own city and closed circles (trust me, Kolkata isn't a good or safe place for butches and gnc folk), I would like some more voices to chime in. If you identify as butch, stud, masc or gnc, what do you feel about the common and pervasive microaggressions among exclusionary lgbtq spaces that

Please rb this with your thoughts in the tags or comments if you feel safe, otherwise, I'm opening my asks (they will not be published publicly), and you are free to dm me if you don't wish to send an ask. Also do let me know if you wish to be credited for your thoughts, or would like to remain anonymous.

Note: Only people identifying as butch/stud/ masc or gnc interact please. Desis are particularly encouraged, but people from all countries and ethnicities are welcome.

post-post clarity when you're looking at your post on the dash like who gives a fuck. delete

From Birmingham Mutual Aid on instagram

You can find the mentioned resources post here

💕​🏴​💕​🏴​💕​🏴​💕​​🏴​💕​

hitting reblog, head in hands, the sigh heard round the world

shhh anyways bad days are also part of a very good and sexy life

When I'm liking your vent post just know that I'm kneeling with my sword to offer you support.

You’re just not ready. At no point in this video when he says the next thing are you ready.

"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

stop holding ya pee for so damn long

Are you psychic?

no, i just know somebody following me is putting that shit off when it’s vital

No but really always reblog for a follower in need.

the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you

After I complained on here about my difficulty in getting ADHD meds, a friend referred me to her psychiatrist and other friends helped me actually get an appointment set up and I went to it and I got prescribed ADHD meds. A couple different kinds, so I can document how they affect me and figure out with the psychiatrist which ones work best.

I took them for the first time last Thursday. They’re supposed to last a fairly short time, four to six hours; I took one before I went to work and had a fine day at work, productive but not outrageously so, nothing to particularly write home about, and I had mostly forgotten that I was on ADHD meds by the time I got home.

There was a choir staging rehearsal, so I was watching the baby for the evening, and the dishwasher was broken so there was like a week of dishes in the sink, and I really wanted pasta with homemade tomato sauce so I started that on the stove and put the baby in his high chair with a spatula to chew on and sang him songs while I washed the dishes -

- and about halfway through this I realized that all of this was so profoundly out of character that my roommates, if they’d been home, might have suspected bodysnatching aliens.

I am too tired when I get home from work to cook dinner. Sometimes someone else cooks a thing I can eat, and sometimes I just drink an Ensure and go to bed. I hate doing dishes when the sink is full; I kind of hate doing dishes even when the sink is not full, and I’d done the dishes exactly once in the previous six months. I am not usually too tired to play with the baby, but only if he wants to come headbutt my pillows while I lie in bed.

Well, I thought, I guess ADHD meds actually do something! And I finished the dishes and finished the dinner and fed us both and did my laundry and cleaned my room and started putting the baby’s books on the bookshelves, which he objected to (he firmly believes that his books should be evenly dispersed through the house, so if he wants one it is always nearby), so I gave up and worked on a writing project I’m in the middle of.

If you knew two people, one of whom came home from work and cooked and cleaned and did childcare and then wrote fiction, and the other one who came home from work and crawled into bed and browsed Tumblr all evening, you would probably attribute other, underlying differences to them. The first one is motivated and driven; the second one is immature and not used to having to keep her own space clean and do her own chores. The first one is trustworthy and conscientious and gets things done; the second one, maybe not. The first one has more willpower; the first one works harder. 

It’s none of that. It’s brain chemistry.

I’m not saying that you can never accomplish anything through concerted effort - obviously you can, and effort matters a lot. I’m not saying that there’s no point in trying to expand the number of things you can do without changing your underlying brain chemistry; there is, and I do a lot of that, and it often works really well.

But I am saying that we attribute far, far too much of peoples’ behavior to virtue, to hardworkingness, to willpower, to passion, to values, when the actual underlying thing is none of those. And because of that, people hate themselves for being lazy, for being slow, for not trying hard enough. I wasn’t trying harder on drugs. I wasn’t trying at all. Cooking dinner on a normal night really is about willpower and effort and careful planning around my limitations and advance strategic decision making and triage. Cooking dinner on stimulants is just - the thing that happens when I walk into the kitchen and want to eat something. 

Drugs don’t work for everybody. (Honestly, they don’t totally work for me; I don’t like taking them two days in a row, and I wouldn’t want to take them if I had to get a specific thing done instead of Doing Things in general.) I think people who have a drug sometimes work for them are really lucky, in a lot of ways, because it’s hard to really believe that it’s not your priorities or personality, it’s your executive function, until you can observe how you behave with the same priorities and the same personality and vastly boosted executive function. But I also think this is true of people who never have a drug work for them. 

People vary, a lot, and one axis along which they vary is executive function, and it’s really hard to imagine what it’s like to be someone with way more executive function or way less executive function than you. At least for me, it doesn’t feel like trying harder or caring more. It feels like not needing to.

from rayne fisher-quann’s latest substack post

my dad took me to see brokeback mountain in theaters because it was not even a little bit promoted as a queer love story, so we had no idea. he was just like "cowboy movie! yeehaw" and then my dad realized what was going on before I did, and we watched people scream and throw food and walk out throwing tantrums, and my very undiagnosed anxiety disorder skyrocketed because of the crowd reaction. my dad asked if we needed to leave, I said the crowd was stressing me out but I was liking the movie. so he said "cool. let them leave and enjoy it in peace" which is what we did, and then I kept watching and I understood™️ and my anxiety did not get better, but on the drive home the only thing dad said was "well! they told a hell of a love story" and he said the nervous dad cackle, and at 14 I didn't get him very much at all, but I think he knew years before I knew and he was trying to figure out how to tell me it was okay.

Bad Girls Club by Xin Yingzong

As someone who's spent half her life in the Gaming and Entertainment industries, let me tell you how FUCKED everything is.

For context, I'm a 34 year old trans woman who spent the last SEVENTEEN YEARS of my life in these industries. So half my life has been in this.

I'm currently 9 months out of work after being laid off from a huge well known company due to them "selling off half the company's outside studios so the core company could invest in NFTs and Blockchain."

Unemployment has fully run out for me at this point and I'm struggling.

This is not new. I'm not the only one. And what's more is that it's been happening to gaming and entertainment studios for years and it continues to get worse.

Day after day, week after week, month after month I've seen studios both big and small laying off workers and then announcing "AI! NFTS! BLOCKCHAIN!" shit constantly.

These companies have posted record profits and then have used those profits to... cut their staff and pay their execs more.

All the while they pretend to still be "FOR THE FANS" and as more of the workers unionize and try to band together shun those workers saying "HOW COULD YOU!? THE FANS WANT THEIR CONTENT!" as if the content is worth people's lives and livelihood.

The biggest thing we, as workers, are fighting for is FAIR PAY and to not have our works or voices used for AI!

And these studios keep saying NO, and then making it impossible for us to work or live.

The studio heads have purposely stonewalled talks and contact deals because they KNOW we are all underpaid and want to WAIT US OUT until we are SO POOR we HAVE to make a deal.

So if you continue to see my post (and posts from others like me) saying "Hey, I'm still out for work, if you have some spare money I'd really appreciate it" - please consider helping us out.

We want to get back to work and they won't let us without us selling away our souls.

Why don’t you want consumers to boycott, again? Kinda seems like we should.

Hi! Great question!

Here’s the answer:

Because the stuff you’re seeing release NOW? Movies, games, TV shows, etc?

Yeah, that was done by people. Real people. Who worked very hard to put that in front of you.

Boycotting, at the moment, only shows the execs that “okay, the people don’t want THIS CONTENT THAT WAS CREATED BY HUMANS! So we should double down on this AI, NFT, Blockchain shit!”

Any (major) content that is attempted to be made in full (or in major part) by AI or what have you, is far off.

As of now, the AI stuff you’ll see will mostly be used to do promotional stuff (see VO for movie trailers, which is already happening and easy for them to do).

Companies will use any excuse they can to “learn the wrong lesson” if it’ll save them money that they can immediately put into a CEO or board member’s pocket.

I understand. I really do, but knowing that these same human creators aren’t actually getting any of that money doesn’t sit well. At least, not for me.

This hurts my heart.

`

Do you think we ever did?

We never see any of that money anyway.

Do you think if a game or movie or TV show does well that we get paid more because it succeeded?

Because we never did.

If it hurts your heart to know we aren’t being treated well right now, it should hurt more to know we never get the benefits of anything we do that succeeds and only get the ramifications of if something fails.

The companies have always pocketed the profits and paid their laborers as little as possible.

So, again, if it hurts you to hear that… imagine how much it hurts US.

Which means you should listen to us when we say “This Is What You Should Do, As Fans, While We Are On Strike!”

If a time comes where we say “please boycott these projects/companies” then do so, but until then… please support our work to show that you care about what we do.

And if you see anyone, like me, asking for financial help to get us by until the strike is over? Donate what you can or share those posts asking for help.