I Only Post On My Sideblog

This is my main, but I mainly post on @livingunderaclassicrock

[genderkoolaid]

hey boy don't kill yourself. green's dictionary of slang is available online and allows you to explore 500 years of english vulgarity. you can search by part of speech, source, time period, etymology, and usage. there's a whole category for gay slang. they even have specific citations listed so you can see the exact context for yourself. boy did you know that in 1927 "to kneel at the altar" was slang for "to sodomize"

[genderkoolaid]

some other hits:

Princess: an effeminate and relatively youthful male homosexual or lesbian (1931-4)

Daffodil: effeminate young man (1925)

To throw a fuck into: to have sex with (1919)

Top sergeant: a masculine lesbian (1939) [‘she takes command of the girls’ privates’]

Lily: penis (1919)

Wolf: sexually aggressive man (1847); a homosexual top (1918)

Soul kiss: a deep kiss, involving putting one’s tongue into one’s partner’s mouth (1907)

Tom: a lesbian (1909); [in 'old tom'] prostitute catering to lesbians (1966)

Church mouse: a male homosexual who frequents crowded churches in order to fondle any potential sex partners. (1941)

Discover one's gender: to accept or acknowledge one’s homosexuality (1941) / Lose one's gender: To return to living as a heterosexual

Minty: a masculine lesbian (1941)

Also a lot of early 20th century vulgarity is recorded in Letter from My Father, which is a collection of letters published by a man who's dad was, in short, a major slut and human disaster who wrote about his sex life for his son. It's insane. You can find copies of it online & it's a wild fucking read (literally!) and I think a really interesting look at the life of a person who goes against our stereotypes of what people in the past were "supposed" to be like.

Anyways feel free to add y'all's favs to this post. & if you use this for gay historical fanfic please share with the class

[genderkoolaid]

#OH THIS IS EXTREMELY EXTREMELY HELPFUL#writing#resources#saving for later#maybe i should move my 1920s story from '25 to '27 because..... bro..........

note for writers: these are dated to the first time they were recorded, not necessarily to their first use. I imagine for many of these, they came about naturally through spoken language before they were written down anywhere. This is especially true of more underground slang because it's probably being recorded (in ways we still have) the least. So if you wanna use a term but it's a little off date-wise, give yourself some wiggle room.

also gonna take this moment to highlight two more i found recently:

Best boy: a sweetheart, a boyfriend, a husband. (1893) [w the obvious equivalent term 'best girl']

Honeydripper or honeydrips: a sexual partner (1917)

Like. Honeydripper?????? That's so horny I can't stop thinking about it. We need to bring THAT back

[caesarsaladinn]

I missed most of the Iraq war due to being a baby, but every time I read about it I start wondering why we aren’t all talking about it all of the time

[caesarsaladinn]

it feels like the sort of unforced error that should be obsessively postmortemed for the next fifty years, a catastrophe that should utterly delegitimize the society that made it happen, but instead everybody’s like “oh yeah, that. lmao, that was crazy”

[septembriseur-deactivated202502]

I have to add to this because I was teaching a text about this topic to a bunch of post-2003 undergraduates recently and each time I do so I experience the same sense of disorientation.

This is a war about which the accepted, mainstream consensus is that no one is able to explain the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. The people involved in that decision are unable, in retrospect, to explain or justify it. In almost every postmortem of this decision, you will find some reference to the fact that Richard Haass, who advised Colin Powell at the State Department in 2001-3, has said that he “will go to [his] grave not knowing” why the U.S. invaded Iraq. George Packer, in The Assassins’ Gate, describes the invasion as “something that some people wanted to do.”

This is a war that destroyed a country. It created ISIS. It destabilized the Middle East. It killed a minimum of c. 200,000 people. It displaced millions more. It resulted in devastating losses to the cultural heritage of Iraq. And twenty years on, no one is able to explain why it happened.

It seems to me that there are several important lessons here.

[argumate]

hmm plenty of people can explain why it happened, because they described their rationale for it back in the '90s, when the first Iraq War was called before without deposing Saddam Hussein and [ushering in a new wave of democracy across the Middle East somehow].

like the reasons were dumb and stupid and obviously flawed but they were based on the idea that war was 1) winnable and 2) worth it.

[jadeharleyinc]

i will always take the opportunity to mention this:

beyond any economic, cultural and oil-related motivations, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq was literally motivated by religious apocalypse prophecy reasons.

like he was deep into this shit. in a meeting with Jacques Chirac, the French president at the time, he casually went "we're fighting Gog and Magog in the Middle East, the Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. as a fellow Christian you're going to help us invade Iraq and trigger the Rapture, right?". understandably, Chirac had to call an Old Testament expert theologian to understand what the absolute fuck Bush was talking about.

of course, none of this sprang fully formed from the ether. Reagan had already invoked the same prophecies against foul, "communistic and atheistic" Russia, and was convinced that America had to be ready to fight in Armageddon. the general trend of comparing the USA's enemies to the prophesied armies attacking Israel during Armageddon is over a century old at this point, and follows a similar sentiment long held in the British Empire (first it was the Goths, then the Ottoman Turks, then Napoleon, then the Russian Empire...)

and of course, none of this disappeared into the ether after Iraq, either. all this stuff naturally ties into the USA's support for Israel. for these apocalypse prophecies to happen and Christ to return, Israel must fall, which means it must exist. hence the significant fundamentalist evangelical American Christian support for Israel.

that's right: in a farcical mirror of QAnon theories about Deep State satanic cults, there is an actual literal apocalypse cult in America whose influence once reached all the way to the actual literal president, at least twice, and which continues to this day.

so whenever you're asking "why the fuck is the USA trying to destabilize the Middle East again??" the answer almost always includes, in no small part, "also they want to any% speedrun the end of the world in a way that forces the Eternal Kingdom of the Christian God to spawn".

(sources/further reading: 1, 2, 3)

[bootdork]

I wish it was easier to talk about mobile phone addiction without sounding like a boomer

[bootdork]

Phone addiction (specifically social media addiction) is real and it's not a joke and it is everywhere. Phone addiction literally reduces the grey matter of your brain. It's no secret young adults are more anxious and depressed than ever; more lonely than ever; more aimless than ever. Do you remember being a hugely creative kid, and feel like that spark is gone now? Can't sleep at night? Yeah, your GABA receptors are probably fucked from getting hits every 60 seconds from checking your phone. What's your daily screen time like? 6 hours? 12? These are common numbers. It's insane! It's insane and it's deliberate. Companies make more money from you when you're brain is fried from scrolling 10 hours a day through meaningless content.

But it can be reversed. Start small. If you hit this post then take 5 minutes to put your phone down in another room and do something. Do a crossword. Go for a walk. Be present! CBT is a hugely successful therapy for phone addiction and can even reverse the damage done to your brain.

I get it. I have dozens of beloved friends online, and I'm more informed now than I would ever have been without access to the Internet, but wouldn't it be nice to wonder sometimes? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to go outside and not itch for your phone screen? To have that creativity and confidence back? Start small. Start now.

[marshemillow]

Sometimes I read posts like this and wonder if I'm actually living in a different dimension than the rest of the people in the world.

Who are these people who feel the need to have their phones with them 24/7? Who are these people who feel the need to check their phone and social media all the time? Who are these people who can't go outside and feel the sun on their face and who are getting worse anxiety from screen time? My screen time comes entirely from writing fic on my phone because I find sitting up at my computer too long painful. If my screen time is 12 hours but I spend 11 of those hours making art, is it still rotting my brain, or is socializing the big problem?

These are not rehtorical, these are genuine questions. Are there actually people who are like this who don't have a preexisting problem? Yeah, I used to read a book a day when I was in middle school and now I can't pay attention to a book for more than a few minutes. That's because I have ADHD and I have adult responsibilities and worries now I didn't have when I was a kid. I had a cellphone in middle school. I had access to social media back when I could read a book a day. It obviously wasn't my phone that caused the problem.

I sometimes feel compelled to check my phone when I'm bored, but that's because all my friends live far away and that's the only way I can talk to them. I've had depression as long as I can remember, and when I'm too depressed to do anything, the phone is an easy escape. That doesn't mean my phone caused the depression.

Yes phone use is linked to anxiety, but that's because you can access the news on your phone. It makes it easy to doomscroll. You're telling me people who read newspapers every day didn't have anxiety in the 1940s during world war 2? What about the amount of harassment that's normalized on the internet compared to other places? That's not caused by the phone, that's caused by bullies who can safely hide behind a screen to ruin your life instead of to your face like in ye olden days.

This isn't to say that this "stimulation" crisis is all fake, I'm well aware that I am not the main character of the universe, rather I worry this scaremongering about "phone addiction" comes from the same bullshit purity spirals of any other kind that stigmatizes people with ADHD and makes parents feel the need to more heavily restrict their child's access to resources that can help them on top of all the other reasons why "porn addiction" or "gaming addiction" are usually total bullshit and only exist to make you feel bad for doing something you enjoy. They are tools invented by christofascist cult leaders to control you. As a smart man once said, "They sell you the disease and the cure."

My hot take on this is that if someone is ACTUALLY spending an unhealthy amount of time on their phone doing things that make their brain stagnate, just telling them "put the phone down and go outside" is not going to do anything. It doesn't fix the underlying cause of their problems that they feel the need to use their phone to distract themselves from in an effort to not feel that pain. In my experience, a lot of people who rely heavily on their phones are abuse survivors or cult survivors or people struggling with an already existing mental illness. Making them present might just make them feel more traumatized if no other solution is given.

All phones do is bring to light problems that already exist. It makes it easy to impulsively procrastinate. It makes it easy to not think too deeply or question your assumptions. It gives you an easy out for bordom that may be actual physical pain if you have unmedicated ADHD. All of these have solutions that don't target phones at all.

In short; Maybe you can't talk about "phone addiction" without sounding like a boomer because the concept of "phone addiction" in and of itself is a boomer idea. Maybe the concept of pathologizing coping mechanisms is just a boomer thing.

Someone please tell me if I'm missing something, because I'm seriously just lost. I hear shit like this everywhere, even in my own family, and they're always just kinda like "source: trust me bro" and then use purity culture jargon to justify their belief that phones are harmful. While continuing to use their phones just as much as they always have.

[shinjiro-aragaki99]

For disabled people, often social media is the only contact they get with other human beings. I'm thankful for all of my internet friends because they help me feel less alone since most people I know in real life couldn't care less about me.

My phone and a game on it (Peridot) is what gets me to leave the house sometimes and walk around outside since it's a location-based game by Niantic. If I was just to walk around my neighborhood without the game, my mind would be consumed with negative thoughts without something to focus on besides walking.

[c-h-stevens]

The reason why everybody's going on about smartphones messing up with your brain is this guy called Johann Hari. On 2022, he published this book called Stolen Focus that makes pretty much the same claims as OP. (I can't remember if he actually claimed phones shrink your brain though.) He wasn't the one who came up with the whole thing, but he seems to have popularized quite a bit.

This is a problem because Hari's book isn't very credible. But that's nothing new from him, as he's been accused of plagiarism, sockpuppeting, tampering with Wikipedia, and generally just making shit up. (Wiki article, but it's well sourced.) He seems to be your typical yellow journalist who manufactures controversy to sell. You could say he's trying to steal your attention 😜

I always find these arguments funny because many people in my family have been unable to fall asleep without listening to the radio since--well, pretty much since small affordable radios broadcasting 24/7 became a thing. Now I fall asleep listening to Spotify playlists and my phone eventually goes to sleep as well, instead of continuing to blare music into the night. Progress! Seriously though, ADHD runs in my family. It's just that nobody was diagnosing it in the 1940s, so they managed it the best they could.

[c-h-stevens]

As usual, I remembered something after posting.

There's this other guy called Jonathan Haidt (similar names, so you can't really blame me for getting confused!) who also got into the racket. Specifically, the "smartphones are rewiring children's brains!" racket. Here's an interview where he expounds upon his thoughts, such as how there's no bias against women and POC in academics and they should stop being mean to Republicans. So yeah.

On one hand, he is an actual psychologist. On the other hand, this seems to be another situation where someone sells books by exaggerating the actual scientific findings because scary claims do better numbers than neutral assessments of facts. (Which is ironically the same issue social media has.) Here's a more neutral assessment of the facts. And another one.

TBH the real problem with giving kids unrestricted access to social media is that they can end up being radicalized into Nazis before you notice. Also a problem, though a smaller one, is how you're an adult hanging out in your own space and children will barge right into it despite your warnings to stay out, because their parents used social media as a nanny and now they think all spaces should be made adequate for them. But this is a completely different issue from the original one.

[prismatic-bell]

You know, something else occurs to me that may make it look more dire than it is:

In 1995, my mom paid bills, made phone calls, played video games, listened to music, wrote letters, watched movies, paid for stuff, and read books all on different devices. Some of those things didn't even have a device. Bills had to be paid by putting paper checks in a paper envelope and sending it off somewhere. Books were either paper or audio, which came on cassettes or CDs. Games like Monopoly and Scrabble could only be played on boards. Letters were paper and had to be typed or handwritten. Same with homework. If you wanted to write fanfiction or books or magazine subscriptions, same deal--you were writing by hand or on a typewriter. You might spring for a word processor, but they tended to be expensive and had only a single function.

....and now I do all that by phone. My utilities all have apps. I do have computer games and old-school video games, but I also play stuff on my phone, including a Scrabble clone and solitaire. My music is through Spotify (although I want to start going back to physical media). I like getting physical books from the library, but I'll use Libby if it's easier. My phone is even my alarm clock.

Is it addiction, or consolidation?

[kalessinsdaughter]

I'm generation X, and do you know how we distracted ourselves from thoughts we couldn't cope with, before smartphones?

Watching trash TV, just, anything that was on, flipping between channels mindlessly to find something that could distract. And by god, was that sneered on and pathologised back in the days.

MTV was even worse. The short duration of each video would fragment our poor little brains and ruin our capacity to follow longer narratives and maintain focus longer than a goldfish could. Also, the degenerate content!

Reading pulp fiction or trashy romance novels was another trusty escape. And by god, was that sneered on as well.

Or, worse, we escaped into comic books. Don't even get me started on how that was pathologised, and would supposedly rot our brains, disrupt our language development, and ruin our ability to ever read or write properly.

What we didn't do (or, probably, did to an even lower extent than people today) was get professional help with mental health issues that made us overindulge in escape as a coping mechanism.

Like someone said further up the thread: people will balance their activities to fit their needs, with what they have available. So, give people easy access to alternatives, instead of telling them to not use the only tools they have available.

And older generations have always vilified the escape mechanisms of younger generations, even when they're just the same ones they themselves used, only in a different format.

[elfwreck]

There are problems with "kids these days spend too much time on their phones."

The solution is not "take away their phones." It's "GIVE THEM SOMETHING ELSE TO DO."

My teen friends spent time in video arcades. My kids didn't, because there are no arcades today. I went to crafts fairs hosted by the library, with booths and stands where I could look and buy things. My kids didn't, because I'm in a big city now and the library does not have a lawn or any space at all outside. I hung out at the mall with friends. (Or just by myself, window-shopping and riding the escalators up and down, because I didn't have a lot of friends but I was happy to just walk around and enjoy the sights.) My kids didn't - the malls don't allow unescorted minors anymore. I played D&D in the library at school, both at lunch and after school. My kids' junior high and high schools had no libraries.

I grew up in the suburbs and could walk to parks. As a small child, I played on the slide and merry-go-round; as a teen, I played frisbee with friends or just walked around and talked about our D&D game. My kids grew up in an industrial slum zone in a large city and there are no parks they can safely walk to, and the ones that do exist are poorly maintained and also they have no lawn, just a tiny lot with a handful of swings and slides. Some of the swings are broken.

And if I let them go on their own, I'd get yelled at for being irresponsible. Possibly arrested - some parents have been charged with crimes for letting their kids play alone in a park for an hour or two. (Some parents have been arrested for letting kids play alone in their own backyard.) There's an increasing assumption that anyone under the age of 18 needs literal constant supervision.

We have removed all the third spaces so OF COURSE kids are doing all their socializing online. There's nothing else available.

[damienhaaas]

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[science-junkie]

… and here is a gift for all of us.

[goddess47]

So I can find this again! Great list!

[clairificusrex]

Don’t lose this post

[piratewithvigor]

My first thought in regard to every band that gets played on my radio station

ACDC: Every dad’s favourite band

Adams, Bryan: Every mom’s favourite singer until Michael Buble came along

Aerosmith: haha they thought Vince Neil was a lady

Alice Cooper: he’s a Game Of Thrones fanboy and I have proof

Alice In Chains: my sister doesn’t like them because she decided AC were Alice Cooper’s initials ONLY

Allman Brothers Band: good music for dropping acid to

Allman, Gregg: That’s too many Gs for one name

Animals: House Of The Rising Sun, or who even cares

Argent: Sometimes Hold Your Head Up is really catchy

Asia: Tuesdays

Autograph: one of the members went on to be a pharmacist

Bachman-Turner Overdrive: There are just so many pop culture jokes about Taking Care Of Business that whatever I say won’t be as funny

Bad Company: with their song; Bad Company, off their album; Bad Company

Benatar, Pat: Always getting her confused with Patti Smith

Black Crowes: I like them for Lickin, but it doesn’t seem to exist outside of one shoddy video on youtube and my old CD

Blackfoot: this band name feels kind of racy

Black Sabbath: Dio was not better or worse than Ozzy; just different

Blondie: I like Call Me, but Blondie confuses me stylistically

Blue Oyster Cult: MORE COWBELL

Bon Jovi: Hello, childhood trauma, I missed you

Boston: ONE GUY. ONE GUY DID IT ALL AND NO ONE KNOWS

Bowie, David: Don’t let your children watch The Man Who Fell To Earth, or David Bowie’s will end up being the third penis they see in life

Browne, Jackson: Another musician ruined by Supernatural

Buffalo Springfield: Jack Nicholson was at the riot they sing about

Burdon, Eric: no ideas, brain empty

Bush: ditto

Candlebox: ditto once more. Who are these people?

Cars: This band feels so gay and so straight at the same time, I can only assume they’re the poster children of bisexual panic

Cheap Trick: I played Dream Police on Guitar Hero so fucking much because it was the only song anyone who played with me could keep up with

Chicago: Chicago 30 exists, but they do not have 30 albums. Fucking riddle me that

Clapton, Eric: 6 discs in one Greatest Hits is too many. That’s called “re releasing your discography”

Cochrane, Tom: For some reason, everyone thinks Rascal Flats did it better

Cocker, Joe: Belushi did it right

Collective Soul: who?

Collins, Phil: If his biggest hits were done by MCR, they would be emo anthems, but because he’s 5′6″ and from the 80s, they’re not

Cream: *Vietnam flashbacks on the hippie side*

CCR: *Vietnam flashbacks on the war side*

CSNY: David Crosby; meh

Deep Purple: THEY’RE SO MUCH MORE THAN SMOKE ON THE WATER

Def Leppard: the only music for when you’re a heartbroken bitch but also a sexy one

Derek And The Dominos: Clapton and ‘Layla’ broke up

Derringer, Rick: Tom Petty if he was from the midwest

Dio: You thought it was an anime reference, but it was me, Dio

Dire Straits: You can tell how bigoted a radio station is based on how much of Money For Nothing they censor

Doobie Brothers: I have yet to smoke weed, but I listen to the Doobies, and I think that’s pretty close

Dylan, Bob: I take back everything I said about him in my youth

Eagles: Hotel California isn’t their best song, but the memes that come from it are second to none

Edgar Winter Group: @the–blackdahlia

Electric Light Orchestra: Actually an orchestra and sound a fuckton like George Harrison

ELO: I really hesitate to ask what happens with the 7 virgins and a mule

Essex, David: no prominent memories of him

Fabulous Thunderbirds: cannot spell

Faces: Who on earth thought that was a good album name?

Faith No More: I got nothing

Fixx: One Thing Leads To Another is a damn bop

Fleetwood Mac: I ain’t straight, but I’m simply not enough of a witch to enjoy them to full potential

Fogerty, John: He got sued cause he sounded like himself

Foghat: Slow Ride slowly becoming less coherent feels like a drug trip

Foo Fighters: He was just excited to buy a grill

Ford, Lita: deserved better

Foreigner: dramatically overplayed

Frampton, Peter: a masterful user of the talk box

Free: dramatically underplayed

Gabriel, Peter: leaving Genesis changed him a lot

Genesis: if someone likes Genesis, clarify the era, because yes, it does matter

Georgia Satellites: sing like you have a cactus in your ass

Golden Earring: Twilight Zone slaps, but it doesn’t slap as hard as this station thinks it does

Grand Funk Railroad: Funk

Grateful Dead: I like their aesthetic more than their music

Great White: there are so many fucking shark jokes

Greenbaum, Norman: makes me think of Subway for some reason

Green Day: the first of the emo revolution

Greg Kihn Band: RocKihnRoll is literally the most clever album name I’ve ever seen

Guns N Roses: They have more than three good songs, but radio stations never recognize that

Hagar, Sammy: I’m still trying to figure out where he lived to take 16 hours to get to LA driving 55 and how fucking fast was he driving beforehand?

Harrison, George: He went from religious to rock, and if he had continued rocking, he would have gotten too cool 

Head East: I respect people who use breakfast foods as album names

Heart: Magic Man and Barracuda are played at least once every goddamn day. They’re not even the best songs!

Hendrix, Jimi: I have both a cousin and a sibling named after Hendrix references

Henley, Don: Dirty Laundry gives me too much inspiration

Hollies: Somehow sound like they’re both from the 60s and the 80s at the same time

Idol, Billy: he’s doing well for himself

INXS: Terminator vibes

Iris, Donnie: knockoff Roy Orbison

James Gang: too many funks

Jane’s Addiction: if TMNT had a grunge band representative

Jefferson Airplane: *assorted cheers*

Jefferson Starship: *assorted boos*

Jethro Tull: The only band to make you feel not cool enough to play the flute

Jett, Joan: icon

J. Geils Band: I requested them on the radio once and it got played

Joel, Billy: he really did just air everybody’s business like that

John Cafferty And The Beaver Brown Band: literally wtf is that name

John, Elton: yarn Elton sits in my basement, unstaring. Please someone take him from me

Joplin, Janis: Queen

Journey: Stop overplaying Don’t Stop Believing. It takes away from the rest of the repetoire

Judas Priest: literally started the gay leather aesthetic

Kansas: another fucking band Supernatural stole

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: the man confuses me to the point where he isn’t in the right place alphabetically

Kiss: Mick Mars and I will simply have to disagree on the subject

Kravitz, Lenny: runaway vibes

Led Zeppelin: Fucking fight me if you don’t think they’re the most talented band (maybe not the most talented individually, but collectively, no one comes close)

Lennon, John: My least favourite Beatle for reasons

Live: I got nothin

Living Colour: slap a decent amount

Loverboy: do you not get TURNT the fuck up to the big Loverboy hits? Who hurt you??

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama is a Neil Young diss track

Marshall Tucker Band: no opinion

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: VERY STRONG OPINIONS THAT THEY AREN’T GOOD

McCartney, Paul/Wings: Power couple

Meatloaf: I have nothing but respect for a man who willingly named himself Meatloaf

Mellencamp, John: voted cutest lesbian of 1987

Metallica: I liked their appearance on Jimmy Fallon

Midnight Oil: I get them confused for Talking Heads a lot

Modern English: who?

Molly Hatchet: Hollies vibes, but also Georgia Satellites vibes

Money, Eddie: DAN AVIDAN, IF YOU SEE THIS, COVER TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT

Motley Crue: Stan Mick Mars and John Corabi. They’re the only ones who deserve it

Mott The Hoople: no one loves them except for David Bowie

Mountain: props for naming an album ‘Climbing’

Nazareth: I want to make a John Mulaney joke here, but I can never come up with one

Nicks, Stevie: witch queen

Night Ranger: I get them confused with Urge Overkill

Nirvana: Kurt Cobain was the ally grunge needed

Nova, Aldo: he’s Canadian, at least

Nugent, Ted: *serves a ghost as jerky*

Offspring: nothing here

Osbourne, Ozzy: this bitch crazy

Outfield: Your Love is kind of a sketchy song, but it slaps hard

Palmer, Robert: low quality Eddie Money

Pearl Jam: *grunts in Eddie Vedder*

Petty, Tom: I have so many feelings about Tom Petty and they are all good

Pink Floyd: which one is Pink?

Plant, Robert: solo career is a crapshoot, but his voice is unparalleled

Poison: I want them to write a song called ‘Alice Cooper’

Pretenders: I want to say good things, but I have nothing to say

Queen: A doctor of astrophysics, a screaming girl, a disco queen and a diva walk into a bar. It’s Queen; they’re there to play a gig

Queensryche: neutral opinion

Quiet Riot: they got big because of a song they hated. I love that

Rafferty, Gerry: the second-sexiest sax opening in all of music

Rainbow: Ritchie Blackmore created something very magnificent

Ram Jam: one good song and they didn’t even write it

Ratt: I’m sure they have more than Round And Round, but I don’t know it

RHCP: funky, but if you have paid money to hear them, you’re going to The Bad Place (I don’t make the rules)

Red Rider: basically Golden Earring

Reed, Lou: Walk On The Wild Side would be such a cool song if it wasn’t so dull

REM: American Tragically Hip

REO Speedwagon: Props for having a dad joke as an album title

Rolling Stones: Never in my life could I imagine the drummer being named anything but Charlie

Rush: How to make being uncool the coolest fucking shit

Santana: The world needs more Santana

Scandal: There’s something really funny about The Warrior being my brother’s “song” with his girlfriend

Scorpions: Was Wind Of Change written by the CIA? Only the spotify podcast I got an ad for once could say

Seger, Bob: A different variety of Eric Clapton (frankly a better variety, but that’s just me)

Simple Minds: we ALL forgot about you

Skid Row: Sebastian Bach is prettier than all of us

Soundgarden: music that makes you feel like you dunked your head underwater

Springsteen, Bruce: my arch-nemesis. Maybe someday, he’ll find out about it

Squeeze: according to my friends, the stupidest band name ever, but they’re theatre kids, so you know

Squier, Billy: If he can make it through 1984 alive, you can make it through whatever bad day you’re having

Stealers Wheel: Yet another band who I always mistake for George Harrison

Steely Dan: my house’s nickname for the Robber in Settlers Of Catan

Steppenwolf: Either makes me think of Jay & Silent Bob, Jack Nicholson, or that time I had to cut 6lbs of onions

Steve Miller Band: when you’re in the right mood, they slap hard

Stewart, Rod: my soundtrack to summer 2015

Stills, Stephen: Love The One You’re With Is Catchy, but the lyrics are questionable

Stone Temple Pilots: the only band to write a song about goo you smear on yourself

Stray Cats: an obscene amount of merch is available for them

Styx: Supernatural would have ruined them for me too if I hadn’t been into them previously. 

Supertramp: I hunted for Breakfast In America for two years and it was worth every hunt

Sweet: I will never understand my two-month obsession with Ballroom Blitz when I was 15, but it was legit all I listened to

Talking Heads: you may find yourself in a pizza hut. And you may find yourself in a taco bell. And you may find yourself at the combination pizza hut and taco bell. And you may ask yourself; ‘how did I get here?’

Temple Of The Dog: I keep confusing them for Nazareth

Ten Years After: somehow still relevant

Tesla: not the car or the dude

The Beatles: Evokes a lot of opinions from people. Mine is that I love them

The Clash: I showed my sister the ‘Lock The Taskbar’ vine ONCE and it still kills her

The Doors: evokes teenage terror from deep within my soul

The Guess Who: Canada’s answer to confusing question-themed band names

The Kinks: kinky

The Police: wrote the theme of 2020 and everyone somehow forgot it was about a teacher resisting becoming a pedophile

The Ramones: playing all of their songs in a row wouldn’t take more than 2 hours

The Romantics: you don’t think you know them, but if you’ve seen Shrek 2, you have

The Who: If someone can explain Tommy to me, I’d be glad to hear it

The Zombies: I think they happened because of the 60s

Thin Lizzy: Could the boys maybe leave town?

Thorogood, George: blues, but make it modern

Toto: the most memed song behind All Star

Townshend, Pete: just makes me think of the end of Mr. Deeds

T-Rex: Mark Bolan is an icon

Triumph: The no-name brand of Rush

Tubes: like the yogurt

Twisted Sister: they did a christmas album and my mom does NOT hate it

U2: U2 Movers; we move in mysterious ways

Van Halen: RIP Eddie

Van Morrison: honestly, who’s named Van?

Vaughn, Stevie Ray: Steamy Ray Vaughn

Walsh, Joe: The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get

War: Foghat, but even groovier

Whitesnake: the most successful band to be named after a penis

Wright, Gary: the 90s thanks him for writing the song every movie used for the “guy sees cute girl and it’s love at first sight” scene

Yes: To Be Continued

Young, Neil: The best part of CSNY

Zevon, Warren: the album cover of Excitable Boy makes me deeply uncomfortable for reasons I don’t understand

ZZ Top: has been the same three guys since 1969. Lineup unchanged. 

3 Doors Down: They feel a little modern to be on a classic rock station, but whatever

38 Special: Why 38?

[bootleg-nessie]

Rating band names based on their accuracy:

(I keep updating this list so check back later)

The Beatles: 0/10. None of these people are beetles, they’re just a bunch of fruity guys from Liverpool with matching haircuts

Pink Floyd: 4/10. There is not a single person named Floyd in the band, but some of the members do arguably look kinda pink

Nirvana: 10/10. Getting high and listening to Nirvana is roughly what I imagine actual nirvana to be like

Foo Fighters: either 0/10 or 10/10. I have never seen foo in real life so either they’re pretending to fight a problem that doesn’t exist or they’re doing an absolutely fantastic job of fighting it

The Eagles: 0/10. Same as the Beatles, there is not a single eagle in this band. The name is misleading and we have all been lied to

Queen: 6/10. Partial points for Freddie Mercury

Led Zeppelin: 0/10. I don’t think any of these guys have ever even seen a zeppelin, let alone one made of lead. A lead balloon would crash faster than my hopes and dreams

The Rolling Stones: 3/10. There is not a single stone in this band. Some points added because I’m pretty sure they rolled quite a few

U2: 0/10. Despite what the name says, I am not a member of this band

Metallica: 9/10. Naming a metal band “Metallica” is like naming your dog “doggy”

Red Hot Chili Peppers: 2/10. These guys are not chili peppers. They’re not even that hot, let alone red hot

Guns N’ Roses: 0/10. How the fuck could a gun or a flower play music

Backstreet Boys: ?/10. Depends entirely on their current given location

Simon and Garfunkel: 10/10. No notes

The Doors: 1/10. Jim Morrison is kinda shaped like a door tho

Chicago: 4/10. The number of people in this band does not come even remotely close to the population of Chicago. Points added because it originated in Chicago

Earth, wind, and fire: 2/10. This is even more innacurate than Chicago. Points added because wind instruments were often used

Def Leppard: 3/10. There is not a single leopard in this band. Some of the members are probably kinda deaf by now tho

The Beach Boys: ?/10. Accuracy depends entirely on location

The Black Eyed Peas: 6/10. Not sure what the hell an ‘eyed pea’ is but the black part is pretty accurate

Imagine Dragons: ?/10. Depends entirely on whether or not they’re thinking about dragons.

Cage the Elephant: 1/10. Why would you do that. Let the elephant go

Green Day: 0/10. They’re not even green

The Police: 0/10. There is not a single cop in this band

KISS: 5/10. I’m sure they probably kissed sometimes

The Monkees: 0/10. Are you fucking kidding me

We Butter the Bread with Butter: 8/10. I can’t verify this but I have no reason to suspect that they’d lie. Butter seems like the most logical thing to butter bread with

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: 0/10. I got really excited about the concept of a lizard wizard only to be let down. My disappointment is immeasurable

They Might Be Giants: 5/10. I googled everyone in this band’s height, the tallest guy’s only 6’1 so I wouldn’t exactly consider him a giant. Then again, I can’t really argue because the claim was only that they MIGHT be giants

The Presidents of the United States of America: 2/10. None of these people are Joe Biden nor are any of them former presidents. This is incredibly misleading. I’m pretty sure “Lump” was written about my first girlfriend tho so I’ll give them a point or two

Gorillaz: 2/10 Not quite but we’re kinda close genetically so I’ll give them partial credit

The Killers: ?/10. I have no way of verifying if they’ve actually killed before but the fact that they’re not in prison tells me probably not

The Offspring: 10/10. These guys are definitely somebody’s offspring

Arctic Monkeys: 1/10. They are neither monkeys nor are they from the arctic

Thirty Seconds to Mars: 1/10. It takes WAY longer to get to mars than that

Beastie Boys: 8/10. They’re pretty beast on the guitar

Jimmy Eat World: 1/10. Slow the fuck down Jimmy, you’re biting off way more than you can chew

Hole: 9/10. One point deducted because I’m pretty sure they had more than one hole

Rage Against the Machine: 10/10. They did exactly that

Alice In Chains: 0/10. This is illegal. Let Alice go

The Band: 10/10. This could not possibly be more accurate

Nine Inch Nails: 1/10. I can’t find any good pictures of their feet but from what I can tell their fingernails definitely aren’t nine inches long

Bush: ?/10. Not quite sure about this one, felt uncomfortable asking

The Who: 2/10. I’m not dealing with this “Who’s On First” bullshit

Radiohead: 0/10. Not a single person in this band has a radio for a head

Queens of the Stone Age: 0/10. This band should be called “five random dudes from the modern era” but FRDFTMA is a bit of a mouthful

Soundgarden: 2/10. Sound does not grow in the garden

Sonic Youth: 5/10. They’re not exactly youth anymore but the sonic part checks out

Talking heads: 8/10. There’s more to the band than just a bunch of disembodied heads but the heads do tend to talk

The Cranberries: 0/10. Decent music but I only added them so that the Beatles and Freddie Mercury weren’t the only fruits on this list

The Wiggles: 8/10. They do tend to wiggle a lot

[pricklepines]

iñaki luffy you are so loved forever

edit:

[youngalientype]

People will literally see a sage green building and be like "what if it was white" 🙄

[youngalientype]

People will literally see a unique little house and be like "what if it had beige vinyl siding" 🤢

[youngalientype]

People will literally see a gorgeous Victorian painted lady house and be like "what if we knock it down and make it a carwash" 🤮

[youngalientype]

People will literally decide to build a community center for their town and then be like "what if it looked like a prison" 👹

[youngalientype]

People will literally see a mom and pop store going out of business and be like "what if we had a 3rd Dunkin Donuts there" 💀

[youngalientype]

People will literally see a vacant lot and be like "what if we had 6th dollar store there" 🤑

[youngalientype]

People will literally see a 40 year old bowling alley and be like "what if it was storage units" 😵‍💫

[youngalientype]

[headspace-hotel]

the whole "how to fix the USAmerican food system" thing has become a major interest of mine, and much of why I find this topic engaging is that no one seems to discuss or propose any solutions that are very good

[headspace-hotel]

Articles about the food system's contribution to climate change: Americans are affluent and want to eat too much meat, but we can fix it by switching to a plant based diet.

Articles about poverty in America: A troubling percentage of Americans are food insecure and have no access to a grocery store or farmer's market near home.

Articles about public health in America: Since America is such a wealthy country, Americans eat too much food and are obese.

WHICH IS IT.

But seriously, we will never fix the problems with our food system until we kill diet culture.

Food that tastes good and satisfies hunger is a fundamental human need.

Does this statement seem radical, foolish, or even infuriating to you? Many people believe everyone should have enough food to survive, but few openly argue that it is important to enjoy eating or to not be hungry. In fact, many public policy-makers and even researches argue that people eating food that tastes good, and eating to the point where they are not hungry anymore, is a problem and the cause of obesity. I have read many a scientific paper arguing that heavily processed foods are "hyperpalatable" which causes people to eat too much.

The three schools of thought I listed at the top do not seem to talk to each other. Specifically, the first and the third ("plant based" and "america is wealthy so we're fat") emphasize making better choices, while the second provides overwhelming, disturbing evidence that this is cruel and impossible for many, many people, necessitating much more systemic change.

The proposals to fix our problems seem to flagrantly deny basic foundational facts ABOUT the problems.

Being fat in America is strongly linked to being poor. Poor people are way more likely to be fat; we KNOW this.

We also know that the areas where the most poor people live are the most likely to be "food deserts:" places where the people can't easily reach a grocery store where there's fresh vegetables and fruits and the like.

Many poor Americans primarily shop for food at small convenience stores like Dollar General, or even gas stations. These places often do not sell fresh fruits and vegetables, and their selections of whole food ingredients are minimal. In many areas, a store that actually sells produce is over an hour's drive away. Even in areas with grocery stores, the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables is often horrible.

To consistently eat fresh fruits and vegetables, you have to be willing to eat them underripe, overripe, on the verge of spoiling, watery, and sour, because that's what produce from Walmart is generally like. It seems more common to me to eat canned vegetables (but this unfortunately makes most vegetables sort of repulsive).

I could go on forever about the ins and outs of how the food system is fucked up, but basically food production and distribution is centralized under huge companies that control everything, which means a long time and distance passes between production of the food and the food being eaten. This is a pretty strong selective force against fresh fruits and vegetables, making them inaccessible to multitudes of smaller locations, and also making them disgusting when they do reach the consumer.

Even if they weren't disgusting, fresh produce is high risk (spoils quickly) for low reward (low density of calories for the price)

Now, things made from fruits and vegetables that are processed into a shelf-stable form DO exist, but they are RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE. Especially relative to the amount of calories they provide, a measurement I wish was used more often. In college, when I was forever trying in vain to feed myself, the "healthy" options for food were often twice as expensive as Pop Tarts or chips and literally half the amount of calories. Even worse, the lack of nutrition in these "healthy" options was advertised as a positive!

And okay, I have to get into the folly of capitalism here a little bit—as far as marketing is concerned, there are unhealthy foods that nourish you and healthy foods that don't, so if you wish to avoid straight chugging high fructose corn syrup and palm oil, your shelf stable options are populated by many "fat free" "sugar free" faerie foods that exchange nutritive substances for flavorings that don't actually nourish you. My school's on campus mini-store sold a whole shelf's worth of beverages that were pointless to buy because they contained less than 20 calories. If you don't have grocery store access or the ability to cook much, you're either eating ramen and microwave macaroni and cheese, or you're eating some kind of 3 dollar granola bar that won't even give you enough energy to get through the morning

On top of it, food ingredients that are good candidates to be part of a healthy diet tend to be marketed as faddish "specialty" or "health" foods, pricing poorer people out of them.

All this to say, there are super obvious systemic reasons why Americans eat the way that they do, and everyone seems allergic to admitting that.

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

How to Talk About Abortion

Republicans are losing on abortion. They’re losing elections, from the midterms to red state ballot measures. They’re losing public opinion: 78% of Americans believe abortion should be a decision left to a woman and her doctor, with support for reproductive rights the highest it’s ever been. 

Given all this losing, how is it possible that the GOP is still framing the debate on abortion? It’s absurd that the national conversation has become a question of when it’s fair to legislate someone’s body. With voters more furious and pro-choice than ever, the most effective message is also the only appropriate answer: never.

Yet while Republicans frame their bans as reasonable compromises, pro-choice politicians have been inexplicably taking the bait. Democrats continue to cater to an imaginary middle out of fear that they’ll be labeled extremists, even though conservatives will attach the label to them regardless. And to prove the horror of abortion bans, they’re focusing almost exclusively on the extreme stories they believe will be most sympathetic—sexual violence victims, for example, and women with wanted pregnancies denied abortions despite the risk to their lives. 

It’s vital to highlight all of the harm caused by bans, and stories like these undoubtedly demonstrate the horror of these laws. But concentrating on the few experiences that Democrats believe are most palatable at the expense of the majority of cases is a grave moral and strategic error.

Every abortion denied is a tragedy. You don’t have to go into sepsis to be forever harmed by an abortion ban. You don’t need to be raped to have control of your body stolen from you. 

And while the most extreme consequences of abortion bans do happen with shocking regularity, they are still outliers: Most people seek out abortions because they don’t want to be pregnant. And that’s okay—in fact, it’s critical. 

Reproductive rights and justice isn’t about who ‘deserves’ care, or who has endured enough suffering to have earned an abortion. Forcing anyone to be pregnant against their will, for any reason, is immoral and cruel. Yet somehow in the hubbub of polls and bills, talking points and politics, the power of this fundamental truth has been pushed aside. 

That’s why Republicans need the public debate on abortion to be distracted with fights over 12 weeks versus 15 weeks, or what medical conditions should be listed in so-called exceptions. They want Americans to forget the central compelling reality of what these bans really do: legally require pregnancy. They take away a person’s ability to control their own body and life. It is a profound existential harm.

The national conversation on abortion may be neglecting that fact, but Republicans haven’t forgotten. They know exactly what’s at stake and have planned for the suffering their laws will cause—suffering they know won’t just impact those forced to carry doomed pregnancies or victimized children, but all women and girls.  

Tucked away in most abortion bans is language on medical exceptions that anticipates precisely what happens when you force people to be pregnant against their wills:   

“[N]o condition shall be deemed a medical emergency if based on a claim or diagnosis that the woman will engage in conduct which would result in her death or in substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” (Senate Bill 20, North Carolina)

The wording shifts slightly from state to state, but the mandate is the same: pregnant people will be made to stay that way, even if a doctor believes they will kill themselves. 

What better proof is there that conservative lawmakers know how vital it is to one’s humanity to have control over your own body? How ‘reasonable’ and ‘commonsense’ can a law be that predicts women becoming suicidal as a result? 

That’s why it’s so important that Democrats focus on more than just certain tragic stories when talking about abortion. Every case is an extreme case, because every woman’s life and free will is important. 

Besides, by paying disproportionate attention to the experiences that strategists believe are the most sympathetic, Democrats are giving the GOP a critical political opportunity: the ability to avow that they’ll tweak abortion bans to account for those particular cases. In fact, Republicans have already started doing this—using exceptions and amendments to claim they’re making their laws more lenient. 

The truth, of course, is that these are changes in name only. When Idaho Republicans added language to their abortion ban to “clarify” allowances for medically-emergent abortions, for example, doctors in the state were furious over the farce. Boise-based maternal fetal medicine specialist Dr. Lauren Miller said that politicians were “trying to make it look like something happened, when in fact, this makes no meaningful change.”

But even if Republican exceptions were genuine, and allowed for abortions in certain cases—what about everyone else?

Before Roe was overturned, one in four American women would have an abortion in their lifetime. That’s a huge portion of the population now without care. To abandon them, even in our talking points, is unthinkable. 

It also doesn’t make any political sense. Support for abortion rights is the highest it’s ever been—why would Democrats cede anything at all? 

We know why Republicans are framing state bans as sensible middle-grounds, despite all evidence to the contrary. They desperately need voters to believe that they’re not extremists. (A tall order when the nation’s leading anti-abortion groups want to make birth control illegal.) And in a moment when Americans are really unhappy with abortion bans, the hope is that painting 12- and 15-week restrictions as a concession will make voters feel as if Republicans have compromised or lost something. 

But the strategy isn’t working. A recent poll from NARAL Pro-Choice America showed 70% of respondents don’t buy the idea that a 15-week ban is a “reasonable compromise.” And an ABC/Washington Post poll reports that only 18% of Americans believe abortion should be regulated by law at all. 

And so remaining on the defensive—whether it’s allowing conservatives to define what a ‘middle ground’ is, or fighting solely to restore Roe and nothing more—only gives credence to one of the biggest abortion lies of all: the notion that Americans are split on the issue.

In a moment when Republicans across multiple states are working to stop citizens’ right to vote directly on abortion, there is perhaps no myth more important to debunk. Because if Americans believe that the country is evenly divided on abortion, they’re much less likely to ask questions when restrictions are passed against voters’ wishes. 

That’s the same reason conservatives are pushing for a national abortion ban by calling it a ‘national standard’ or ‘national consensus’. Anti-abortion activists won’t use the word ‘ban’ because they need federal abortion legislation to sound like something everyone agrees on. Otherwise, voters might be reminded that a small group of extremist legislators are enacting bans that Americans decidedly don’t want.

For years, the conventional wisdom was that conservatives won the messaging war on abortion. Whether it was true or not then, it’s certainly not the case now. That’s why there’s no reason for pro-choice politicians or mainstream activists to mince words or tiptoe: If the GOP isn’t winning the debate, why in the world would we let them frame it?

Anytime an anti-abortion activist or lawmaker starts to talk about their ‘reasonable’ abortion bans, they need to be asked why a so-called moderate bill needs to anticipate women becoming suicidal. If they talk about ‘exceptions’, demand that they produce a single person who was able to obtain an abortion using one. And when Republicans argue that Americans want a ‘compromise’ on abortion, ask why, then, they’re so afraid of letting voters have a say. 

Let them attack us, let them spin and lie. Because it’s not “extreme” to believe no one should be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will. It’s not “radical” to point out that pregnancy is too complicated to legislate. How do we know? To start, because these beliefs are the norm.

And that’s what Democrats need to be reminding the public of every day. These are bans being passed against our wills, laws that are hurting people every single day. Not just those with tragic stories—but anyone with the ability to get pregnant. It has never been more important to lead with the truth instead of responding to their lies. 

Abortion rights has historic support, it’s time we all talk like it.

[anistarrose]

the uncommon allergy haver to anticapitalist pipeline

[anistarrose]

in January 2023, companies became required to label sesame on all products it was present in, and undergo rigorous cleaning procedures to prevent sesame contamination, after it was declared the 9th "major" food allergen in the United States.

so, instead of considering this a mandate to give a single shit about people with sesame allergies, almost all American companies decided to just add sesame flour to all their relevant products. because apparently that was cheaper.

it's almost impossible for me to find hot dog and hamburger buns without sesame now. and I am one of the lucky ones. I'm someone who just so happened to notice the label updates, not get caught unawares and have a severe allergic reaction. I'm someone lucky enough to be surrounded by multiple choices of supermarkets, and someone with the incredible privilege to have parents who'll help me search the shelves, and cover those costs that my allergies rack up. not everyone with allergies/other intolerances has all or any of those privileges to begin with.

most food allergies will never be prevalent enough that under capitalism, it will be profitable to give them the level of accommodation that they deserve. I speak from experience with a wide portfolio of hypersensitivity quirks when I say that the rarer the food allergy, the worse it gets.

and here's the thing: I can live without hamburger buns, with only superficial decreases in my quality of life. but sesame isn't my only rare allergy, and ever since this legislation hit, I've been lying awake at night, afraid of what I might lose access to next.

I've been lying awake at night wondering what I'll have to do to live, to obtain enough safe food to survive, if any of my other allergies get this same treatment. and I reiterate. I am one of the privlidged ones.

what these companies have done is completely legal. what these companies did has also cut off up to over a million people from what were previously safe, affordable staples of their diets. a system that has any incentive not to accommodate the dietary needs of any population is not a system that can be allowed to exist. this is the uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anticapitalist pipeline.

[anistarrose]

[Image description: two screenshots of tumblr tags, reading:

"also pea protein. mcdicks just added pea protein without any proper warning so if you got a legume allergy, don't eat their buns."

"did you know pea protein and pea flour is a thing. i didn't. but i sure found out quick after i ate frozen nuggets and when i got gravy from a restaurant. now i have to check fucking everything because i've also found pea protein in ice cream of all things." End description.]

thank you @butchwelddone and @insidejupiter respectively for these psas. signal boosting here for all my fellow legume-allergic folks, stay safe (and stay away from McDonalds buns)

[tamlins-stories-and-poems]

My dad has a cow milk allergy, my sibling has a coconut allergy, one of our close friends is allergic to most spices, wheat, and soy. If we’re lucky, we can find a product that any two of them can eat. Almost anything that calls itself “allergy free” is loaded with coconut.

Also! Fifteen years or so ago, all the whipped toppings went from being dairy free to advertising how they were “made with real cream!” Not to mention various other foods that followed the trend, and really screwed everyone over for having cow’s milk and whatever original milk alternative they used to cut costs both in everything.

So, yeah. For-profit food my belothed.

[ms-demeanor]

USAmerican corn-allergy-haver here l love you all and I think we should burn it all down.

[ms-demeanor]

By the way the practical [miserable] advice is to cook most things from scratch for yourself and to eat out rarely and only at restaurants you've completely vetted.

The advice that fucking nobody ever tells you about and that is why I literally went back to school to get a degree in nutrition is

If you suffer from a food allergy that cuts you off from bread and cereal products in the US you probably need to supplement your diet with vitamins because the primary source of folate in the American diet is fortified cereals and a severe folate deficiency is basically a form of anemia.

You can supplement this with vitamins but :) if you have :) grain allergies :) make sure :) that your allergens :) aren't used :) as fillers in :) the vitamins :) :) :) :)

Either you can take folate/folic acid on its own or you can take half a daily prenatal vitamin to meet the RDA for folate.

[ms-demeanor]

I have wheat, corn, and sesame allergies. I eat out about once a month and have to bring my own food to weddings, conferences, and anything else that will take me away from my own kitchen. I don't go to theme parks because there's nothing I can eat there. Backpacking and camping are difficult because pre-made camping foods contain my allergens and it's hard to carry foods that I know I can eat. If I go out to eat with friends no I don't I go out to have a cup of coffee - oh, is artificial creamer all you've got? nah it's got cornstarch in it, that's fine, I'll just drink it black that's okay oh wait all you've got is decaf that's fine I'll just have water OH you are using eco-friendly corn plastic cups well that's okay I am at least here being with people I'll eat when I get home. I am not on at least three medications my doctor recommended because corn is part of the product and I can't afford to have the meds made at a compounding pharmacy. Corn is in all of these things because it is RIDICULOUSLY cheap which is at least partially as a result of subsidies and is also at least partially as a result of the scaling economics of monocrops for agribusiness.

It is ten dollars cheaper to get 21 ounces more mac and cheese *shipped from canada* than it is to buy one of the pre-made foods that I can actually eat.

You may say "oh, well that's because that's the weenie organic brand that uses artisinal cheddar, of course it's more expensive than kraft" and I would have to say:

THE WEENIE ORGANIC BRAND ALSO DOESN'T PUT FUCKING CORN IN EVERYTHING.

Anyway. This has done extremely normal things to my ability to feed myself, maintain my health, and socialize as well as my desire to do arson.

[ohclippy]

We welcome Sun Tropics, Kettle Heroes, Finally! and Still Riding Foods to our Manufacturer Partnership!

New update just dropped [5/2023]!

[girl-debord]

So I posted these two images that I made in a post together just shy of a year ago, and the post got 10,000+ notes. Today I saw a meme with a text convo of someone sending one of them to a military recruiter (which is extremely funny) and I thought “oh I should find that post again”

but when I went to find it, it had completely vanished. not just the original post, but even reblogs of it. I couldn’t even find screenshots anyone had taken of the original post. it wasn’t brought to my attention as a reported post, tumblr never even contacted me about deleting it, it just… disappeared

really gets the noggin joggin

[teethinstagramcankissmyass]

[quincunx]

so that’s the line huh tumblr. that old post just went too far and you had to poof it.

[fanfleufleu-deactivated20221121]

Reblog to remember the post before it gets deleted again

[xiranjayzhao]

Feminists with no class consciousness are rly like "Poor Marie Antoinette she was a victim of child trafficking, sold as a 14 year old little girl to a 15 year gross old man she had never met, they didn't let her keep anything she brought from one palace while moving to another palace, she was an immigrant struggling in the highest position a woman could take in a foreign country, the rich ladies at court were so mean to her she had no choice but to LARP as a milkmaid in her special cottage in her palace to cope, she was a teenage queen for 20 years when the Revolution broke out, the mean revolutionaries accused her of SA'ing her son, ok it was one guy who I refuse to learn the name of who was immediately booed by everyone else in the court but let's blame it on the revolutionaries as a whole because they were so mean-"

[xiranjayzhao]

Louis XVI....mistress? Hated Marie???

WHAT IS GOING ON, WHERE ARE YOU GETTING YOUR HISTORY FROM 😭

He was one of the few people who DIDN'T hate her and was very influenced by her (the flight as far as Varennes wouldn't have happened if not for Marie pushing so hard for it) so actually if she were pro-Revolution it absolutely would've made a difference

[friedcupcakepirate]

There’s this idea rooted in sexism that women throughout history are blameless.

This is often to excuse them for the bad things that happened regardless of their position of power, as seen in Marie Antoinette.

It can also be seen in the US during slavery where women are often ignored when it comes to their role in slavery. With women tending to own large numbers of enslaved people, with them often being part of their dowry. But they are only portrayed as southern damsels, never fully addressing their role in perpetuating the system.

Women throughout history were rarely objects with no self possession or agency, and while their rights and freedom was much more limited than it is today in many countries, this does not excuse the wrongs they committed or stood by.

It would be like excusing Carolyn Bryant’s role in Emmett Till’s murder as she was only a young woman. Rather than acknowledging she knew what she was doing and never viewed her actions nor their results as wrong.

[xiranjayzhao]

You're exactly right. The woobification of Marie Antoinette is the epitome of white bourgeois feminism and that's why her stans annoy me so much. They don't realize they're parroting royalist propaganda spread after the Bourbon restoration and would rather project onto this imagined OC of a sad rich girl being tugged along by events she had no control over instead of looking into the REAL Marie, who had more agency and power than any other woman in France and chose to use it against the working class women furious at her for resisting progressive reforms.

Some have misinterpreted this post as "no one should sympathize with Marie Antoinette ever." No, I was calling out how Marie apologists garner sympathy for her at the expense of the truth. They frame facts in deceptive ways to make people think she was some kind of traumatized teenager during the Revolution, with the implication that the revolutionaries were monsters for going after her.

I know that the historical tendency to vilify women more than men creates this urge to rehabilitate women who went down with the worst reputations, but we do actually have to be considerate with our choices and be conscious of power dynamics other than gender. Marie Antoinette didn't bankrupt France, but she wasn't a blameless victim either. Olympe de Gouges had some iconic quotes but...doesn't really deserve that much glorification either when she was a Girondin supporter? Charlotte Corday had NERVE but ultimately her assassination of Marat was an extremely foolish tactical decision and accelerated the purge of the very Girondins she was trying to save.

Of this era, the women whose vilification is ACTUALLY most undeserved are the working class women themselves, like Pauline Leon, Claire Lacombe, and Simone Evrard, who were the real backbone of the Revolution but ended up being branded as mad "harpies," mindless mobs, and dismissed by even the Left intellectuals. We know very little about them as individuals because they weren't the ones who wrote or spawned essays after essays of public discourse, so unfortunately we can't make movies and TV shows about them on par with the volume that Marie Antoinette gets, but we can at least do better than whitewashing their oppressors.

(And I want to say once again that I am NOT putting more blame on Marie than Louis. There just aren't enough people ignorant enough to stan Louis XVI to annoy me into making posts like this about him.)

[vaspider]

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

[vaspider]

If you think this essay was about Pete Buttigieg and my feelings about him as a person or a politician, you have ENTIRELY MISSED the point of what I wrote.

Substitute your favorite queer in there. Doesn't matter who. Alan Cumming? Laverne Cox? Suzy Izzard? Sure.

It isn't about him. It's about them, about the cishets, and it's about us - all of us - either on the same fucking boat together or drowning alone.

I'll say it every time I get one of these point-missing replies or tag groups. The Secretary of Transportation is just an example in this essay. He is a gay man who my father would like until he found out he's a little light in the loafers. That's it.

It's not about him. Don't miss the point.

[theconcealedweapon]

[76easy8]

Why bother having tenants if I cannot make money. Get the fuck out then. I’ll just as soon tear it down and make it a parking lot then.

[theconcealedweapon]

"I bought this house that I don't need so that anyone who lives in it must generate profit for me. And if owning this house stops being profitable for me, I will destroy it."

It seems like you're literally admitting that landlords are evil.

[captain-acab]

[tami-taylors-hair]

“Mean girls all grow up to be nurses!”

“Mean girls all go into social work!”

“The mean girl to teacher pipeline!”

Y’all, these are just pink collar jobs. The reason you think there’s so many “mean girls” in these fields is because they’re all like 97% women. Of course some of them are gonna be assholes. There’s assholes everywhere.

We get it. Your job isn’t like other girls’ jobs. It’s a cool job.

[onepunchman]

it’s true that there are some incredibly cruel people in all of these professions.

it’s also true that they all suffer from chronic underpayment, overwork, lack of institutional support, and insane bureaucratic demands that would make them fail the people in their care all the time even if every single one was a saint.

[rotationalsymmetry]

That’s absolutely missing the point.

While those are all “helper” professions and they very much are pink collar (and are underpaid, that’s not an incompatible idea), they’re also ones that involve power over vulnerable people’s lives. (And I’ve only encountered it as a comparison to, say, male bullies becoming cops, it’s not like men aren’t being mentioned here.)

Secretaries/administrative assistants aren’t on that list for a reason. Flight attendants aren’t on that list. Housecleaners aren’t on that list. Receptionists. Customer service representatives. Dental hygienists. The people who style hair or do nails. That’s not a list of pink collar jobs. It’s specifically (pink collar) positions where if you want to abuse people you’re relatively likely to get away with it.

It can both be true that “nurses who care for disabled people need better pay” and “nurses who care for disabled people have a lot of opportunities to abuse their power and that’s something worth talking about.”

Women aren’t immune from treating people badly because they’re women, or because women are underpaid. They’re sure not immune from specifically seeking out jobs that will allow them to be cruel without any consequences to them, if they get personal satisfaction out of being cruel.

You are trying to shut down a conversation about abuse.

[dead-dyke]

Shitty people are attracted to positions of power. That includes working class women!

There have been a lot of studies about hazing and abuse in nursing communities and even murder!

My mother is a nurse, her co-workers sit around laughing about the people who fall out of their wheel chairs, about the nurses who do cry when someone dies, my mother has ignored patients crying out in pain in order to drink her coffee.

My mother has intentionally let elderly patients at her nursing home die. She has abused them and she has laughed about it. She has left people suffering and has caused that suffering.

Nurses are underpaid and they are disrespected as medical professionals who aren’t a doctor. That’s true and we should talk about that, but we can not ignore the fact that violent women seek out these jobs with God Complexes and the intent to do harm.

Sure, that harm might be because they are bitter, over-worked, and disrespected. None the less, it is no different than when a male doctor causes purposeful harm to his patient.

Nurses contribute to eugenics, to patient abuse, elder abuse, and yeah even child abuse (my mother was proficient in all of them!)

Here are some important articles to read:

Nurses Eat Their Young An article about hazing and bullying among nurses. The title comes from a common saying in medical circles, the first time I heard it, it was in reference to my mother’s best friend who had poured coffee over the hands of a new nurse who had reported another nurse to a superior for abusing a patient.

Bullying in Nursing – Why The Hazing is Getting Worse A brief article on forms of hazing.

Nurse hazing: a costly reality

Why do nurses abuse patients? Reflections from South African obstetric services

Patients’ lives being left at mercy of abusive nurses

Every single one of these articles, with exception of the last – which is guardian article – is a professionally published medical article.

[headspace-hotel]

And as always, my stance is going to be, “If you can’t do your job without abusing people, quit your job.”

[spacelazarwolf]

not to be a fucking boomer but holy motherfuck i’m so tired of young queers on social media having temper tantrums about flags and words and fanfiction and just shit no one gives a fuck about in real life.

here’s a list of things i’ve encountered in irl queer spaces that no one batted an eye about that i have seen nuclear level freak-outs about on tumblr:

- trans man calling himself a lesbian

- trans man calling himself a femboy

- lesbian being married to a trans man

- trans man and trans woman calmly and respectfully talking about reproductive transphobia (me and my voice teacher who i adore)

- gay men in puppy masks simply existing

- trans woman not doing voice training/feminization because she likes her voice the way it is and somehow not “tRiGgErInG” the women around her with her scary deep Male VoiceTM

- queer people saying slurs in normal speech when we talk about history or community or for self identification

- talking about how cishets are shitty to us no matter how we identify and not policing other people’s language when they talk about their personal experiences

i am far from the first person to say this but oh my god go outside. meet other queer and trans people in person at queer events. if you can’t do that, see if there are any streaming events you can attend. but just get off social media. stop thinking of the queer community as this nebulous online thing with rules and regulations created by and for white tumblr teens. it’s a real living breathing group of people that has infinitely varied experiences that a 20 yr old white tumblr user will never be able to succinctly boil down into a one liner. definitions mean nothing. stomping ur feet on tumblr bc u saw a trans man use a word u don’t like or a trans woman like a thing u think is gross and bad is stupid and u should not do it. grow up and go do something fun.