finding out how your body works is cool but if someone says four infections across 20+ years is a sign of a medical condition I would consider pushing them into a creek without checking if their phone is waterproof

kipperlilly: having a tragic family backstory is an unfair advantage against people with regular parents!

*cut to The Seven who all have the normalest parents and family ever and yet they all still became a prominent and popular and successful adventuring party*

there's a massive cadre of people on here who can best be described by the phrase "be gay do war crimes"

#it's me#I'm that person

this is not intended to be a funny quirky joke meme phrase it's a description of american or otherwise western gays with deeply imperialist and racist tendencies, you do not want to say you're this person

Genuinely can you shut the fuck up. do you hear yourself rn

@clarissa39 are you sure you kicked the racism and imperialism? Cause it sure doesn't fucking seem like it

Yeah you're right, it's an ongoing process to correct my attitudes and it's going to take a lot of time and effort but is very much the right thing to do. What I mean here is what I have done and been complicit in in the past doesn't go away because I'm getting better and trying to correct my past errors.

Also because I was involved in the YPG in Syria as an irregular, so an illegal combatant...you know, a war criminal

Like very literally this is why I joke about it.

you could've led with that last part and saved everyone a lot of trouble but it is admittedly very funny that you didn't

I’ll never forget the time I was sitting with this guy, nice kid, didn’t know him well, I think we must have had a bottle of wine or some questionable hashish or something, and in response to an awkward silence I just started talking and ended up going on a long meandering rant about how ugly American robins are. I’m talking a full monologue. I had an intro and conclusion. It was pointlessly vehement. I have never been so mean or loquacious about anything in my life.

Consider my horror when this perfectly nice guy wordlessly lifted his shirt to reveal a full-torso prismacolor tattoo of his spiritual soul animal, the American robin.

Their scientific name sounds like "Migrating Turd" but otherwise I find them charming if fairly derpy and mundane. I don't know if I'd get a tattoo of one though. They're like the potato of American birds.

I have no actual animosity towards them. They’re fine. I like them. They remind me if my college roommate and beloved friend. I don’t know why I said any of that—I was grasping at straws for something kind of provocative to say and failed so catastrophically that I was catapulted into a Seinfeld skit.

eerily similar to the time in college someone tried to make conversation by making fun of a silly book a former high school teacher of theirs had written only for me to just pull out a physical copy of the exact book because i’d realized he was talking about my dad

the foot seeks the mouth like leaves seek the sun

yesterday was the ten year anniversary of my insensitive American Robin comment and my tattooed friend messaged me to celebrate the “funniest thing that had ever happened to him” so sometimes critically failing a charisma check leads to a whole decade of joy for someone else

So, there's a lot of USians around who are very clearly fucking fed up with their political choices this election cycle, and planning to sit it out.

And I get it! What's the point of voting if there's no one to vote for?

The thing is, I'm Australian. In Australia, voting is compulsory. We don't get to sit out our elections, and I'll be real honest with you - we don't exactly get better choices than you lot. So how do you vote if there's no one to vote for? You find someone to vote against. And there's always someone to vote against.

Now, we have the pleasure of preferential voting in Australia - We get to rank every candidate from 1 to X, and I'll tell you, there's something so cathartic about putting the biggest bastard of the lot at the very bottom of your preferences. I understand that USians don't get that option - you get to mark one person, and that's it.

That means that you get one shot, so aim it at the biggest bastard of the lot. The candidate you most utterly detest. Put your vote in the worst possible place for them. Don't even think about who that vote's going towards, that's not the point. Remember, every vote is a vote against someone. Make sure you fuck up that someone's election day!

Why not mention the artist's name though? Art doesn't belong in Florida man posts. This is Berndnaut Smilde.

*opens the oven after preheating to 400*

This is Margaret when she opens that email

I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

@kisstheashes

Oh don't worry, I didn't make it out of Evangelical Purity Culture thinking that girls had it peachy or anything. Our experiences are different, but both bad.

I have seen a lot of content about E.P.C. that very firmly centers the ways that purity culture dovetails with rape culture, the ways that women and women's bodies were held responsible for the actions of men, and the ways that their own sexuality was erased under the burden of being cast as the pure, moral, oppositional force to the depredations of male sexuality. This is in no way meant to diminish that.

It is meant to focus on a part of this dynamic I don't see commented on nearly as much though. In purity culture, men are perpetrators. A good man doesn't radiate goodness, it's more that he's managed to contain the inherently evil toxicity that is his sexuality and hasn't let it harm everyone around him as it naturally will if unchecked. When I look for other stories like mine, I already see stories by and for women, and a lot of them... haven't really challenged those core assumptions about men. Which means that I can't really find comfort and solidarity there.

The narrative I've run into a fair bit is "I was taught women were responsible for managing men's horrible, evil sexuality, but I've learned that we're not. Men are responsible for managing their own horrible, evil sexuality." I very rarely run into specific positivity for masculine sexuality when I'm in circles discussing purity culture, because frankly, there are plenty of people who feel that masculine sexuality isn't stigmatized enough.

So yeah. I was specific about gender for a reason. Not because I don't understand other people's positions, but because while I do, I don't see so much stuff addressing my specific situation. So I figured I'd make some of the positivity I myself need.

In short: Not dismissing the harm done to women by Evangelical Purity Culture, this one was just more about my experience as a dude.

That's because this is Silmarillion

EASY, NO-KNEAD BRIOCHE ROLLS, (OVERNIGHT AND REFRIGERATED OR NOT)

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

being aware of the impact of things we can often not think about (like straws) is important if we’re to make strides on environmental preservation 

that does not eclipse the importance of being aware of how it impacts disabled people. they’re both conversations we need to have

Being aware of unintended impacts is important, but let’s also be aware that plastic straws aren’t even one of the points of impact that actually matter. Yeah, make them opt-in (have people ask for a straw and be given one, rather than just be given one by default), but the kinds of things that actually need bans are fishing nets made of plastic filament, microplastics (tiny chips of plastic a millimeter or less in size put in cleaning and hygiene products to make them scrub better), disposable plastic bags such as the ones used as US grocery stores, and other corporate scale plastic waste.

Being aware of unintended sources of pollution is great, but straws aren’t actually one of those sources.

The entire plastic straw ban craze is based on a statistic that was literally a 9 year old child’s best guess based on advertising data handed out by straw manufacturers. And I don’t mean that as a way to disparage children in science, but actual data not intended to ~*~show strong sales to stock holders~*~ paints a very different picture, and even the worst case scenario presented by the inflated half-a-billion-a-day stat doesn’t actually lead to the insane environmental risks that plastic bags, microplastics, fishing nets, and corporate waste do.

But banning straws lets people feel self-righteous, so that they don’t have to put in the effort of dealing with other, more severe problems.

And the only cost is that disabled people have to suffer (or, hey, depending on the allergy or infection risks involved, die).

What’s a spot of ableism in exchange for getting to feel good about making no actual positive impact?

there are some internet friends where eventually you start calling them by their real name and then there’s times where its like nah son your name is crispy forever

Being a young adult is so strange. You enter a coffee shop. The 20 year old girl waiting behind you cried all night because she just came to a new city for university and she feels so alone. That 27 year old guy over there works a job he is overqualified for, he lives with his parents and wants to move out but doesn't know what to do about it. That one 24 year old dude already has a car, a house, and a job waiting for him once he graduates thanks to his dad's connections. The 26 year old barista couldn't complete his higher education because he has to work and take care of his family. The 28 year old girl sitting next to you has no friends to go out with so she is texting her mother. That couple (both 25 years old) are married and the girl is pregnant. The 29 year old writing something on her laptop has realized that she chose the wrong major so she is trying to start all over. We are not alone in this, but we are actually so alone. Do you feel me

0 cis women have been harmed by gender neutral language around pregnancy

These tags have passed peer review.

youre telling me a ham fisted this metaphor??