The pit courtyard or sunken courtyard (地坑院dikengyuan), traditional Chinese courtyard on the Loess Plateau.
Cnetizen showing the interior of a dikengyuan—renovated for nowadays living (cr住在森林深处的小精灵)

oozey mess
KIROKAZE
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

Kiana Khansmith

tannertan36
todays bird

Love Begins
tumblr dot com
Cosmic Funnies
taylor price
noise dept.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
NASA
trying on a metaphor

if i look back, i am lost
Not today Justin
No title available
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Show & Tell
Misplaced Lens Cap

seen from Brazil

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@aceofthegreenajah
The pit courtyard or sunken courtyard (地坑院dikengyuan), traditional Chinese courtyard on the Loess Plateau.
Cnetizen showing the interior of a dikengyuan—renovated for nowadays living (cr住在森林深处的小精灵)
no animal was harmed during the making of this video. not one. for the few minutes that we were shooting film, the guns of each hunter fell silent. the industrial bolt throwers observed a moment's peace and the jaws of every predator hung softly open. no fish bit any hook and the bait worms held off on drowning only until the cameras stopped. the tails of ruminants ceased to flick just as their attendant flies, in unison, landed on their flanks to catch their tiny breaths. a spider instantly stopped winding silk around a wasp, patiently waiting for the caesura to end. a young veterinarian paused with the syringe in their hand. somewhere, a colicky baby stopped biting its mother's nipple and nursed happily for the very first time. we're sorry. we're sorry it couldn't have been longer. we didn't know this would happen.
i think after 35k notes of people tagging welcome to night vale, which i'm certain is good but which i've never listened to more than maybe 3 minutes of, i can say now that this was not written with a soothing radio voice in mind. the voice here, in my imagining, is grief-stricken, on the verge of tears.
if you're interested to know what this post IS biting, if it is not biting WTNV, it's basically just a conflation of the key descriptive passage in Jorge Luis Borges' short story El Aleph with my favorite passage from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V (the war movie that plays in reverse), plus a little piece of imagery borrowed from the staggeringly brilliant and tragically underappreciated poet Cornelius Eady, specifically the bit about the flies, which is lifted in part from my favorite image in his poem "Victims of the Latest Dance Craze." if you aren't familiar with any one of these, please consider this my recommendation of all three.
Works Cited:
"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny—Philemon Holland’s—and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon—the unimaginable universe.
I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity."
— excerpt from El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges, transl. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni in collaboration with the author
-------------------------------------------------------
"It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again."
— excerpt from Slaughterhouse V by Kurt Vonnegut
-------------------------------------------------------
"From the air,
Insects drawn by the sweat
Alight, when possible,
On the blur
Of torsos.
It is the ride
Of their tiny lives.
The wind that burns their wings,
The heaving, oblivious flesh,
Mountains stuffed with panic,
An ocean
That can’t make up its mind.
They drop away
With the scorched taste
Of vertigo."
— excerpt from "Victims of the Latest Dance Craze" by Cornelius Eady
-------------------------------------------------------
"Lazarus, listen, we have things to tell you.
We killed the sheep you meant to take to market.
We couldn't keep the old dog either.
He minded you; the rest of us he barked at.
Rebecca, who cried two days, has given her hand to the sandalmaker's son.
Please understand – we didn't know that Jesus could do this.
We're glad you're back. But give us time to think.
Imagine our surprise to have you—not well, but weller.
I'm sorry but you do stink. Everyone please give us some air.
We want to say we're sorry for all of that.
And one thing more. We threw away the lyre.
But listen, we'll pay whatever the sheep was worth.
The dog, too. And put your room the way it was before."
— "Adjusting to the Light" by Miller Williams
holy fucken shit
OOC: y’all. If you are stateside, please go watch this. I saw it on Broadway and sobbed through approx. 75% of it.
Recorded from Broadway, this musical tells the story of the American suffragist movement.
Available until July 31! It's also on YouTube until then.
Apparently today is Loving Day, named after Richard and Milford Loving, the interracial couple whose lawsuit against the state of Virginia resulted in interracial marriage becoming legal in the United States. And so this day was made as a holiday for interracial relationships. I think that's very cool and deserves a tumblr post. Happy Loving Day to everyone in interracial relationships!
Photographs of the Lovings by Villet Grey
Apologies to those who are waiting for the finished piece from this post. I had to put it aside for a moment to focus on creating gifts for my loved ones' birthdays that are coming up. So instead of the end result of the previous project, here is another work in progress - it's going to be a space-themed wall hanging! My boyfriend's workspace and taste are very celestial, and we both love stargazing and moon worship. I will publish the finished version as well once it's displayed ✨🌙
Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something. What are we holding on to, Sam? There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
LOTR Week - Day 2 (23rd Sep): people
Sweden ????
So Sweden used to give random citizens control over the official @Sweden Twitter account for like a day/week/month or whatever. As you can see why, it didn’t last long
what do you mean it didn't last long they did this for like seven years between 2011 and 2018 they didn't stop doing it because someone tweeted about cock sdfgsdfgsdfgsdf they kept doing it for four more years after this
Milloin alkaa "illalla"?
Heti keskipäivästä eteenpäin, 12:01
klo 14-15 eteenpäin
klo 15-16 eteenpäin
viiden jälkeen
seitsemän jälkeen
yhdeksän jälkeen
riippuu vuodenajasta, esim. pimeän laskeutumisen mukaan
En ota kantaa
on the alberta oil sands
If you want to understand the Alberta oil sands — and everyone should, at least a little, because they are among the strangest industrial artifacts in the Western hemisphere and the standard coverage of them is almost uniformly wrong — you have to start with the fact that what's in the ground is not oil. Oil, proper oil, the stuff Saudi Arabia and Texas and the North Sea have been pumping for a century and a quarter, comes out of the ground as a liquid. You drill a hole, pressure differentials do most of the work, and what comes up is roughly pourable. This is not what's in northeastern Alberta. What's in northeastern Alberta is bitumen, which is oil that has been sitting around for a hundred million years getting its light ends biodegraded out of it by bacteria, and what's left is a substance with the consistency, at room temperature, of cold molasses or peanut butter. You cannot pump it. You cannot drill it. If you cut a chunk of oil-sand out of the formation and put it on your desk it will sit there, looking like a dark sticky brick, being the least ambitious hydrocarbon in the history of hydrocarbons.
So the entire industry is, at a physical level, a workaround for the fact that the thing they're extracting is an embarrassment to the concept of petroleum.
There are two workarounds and they both cost a lot of energy. If the deposit is close to the surface — and only about a fifth of the reserves are — you can dig it. This means you strip off the boreal forest and the peat underneath it (the "overburden," in the terminology, which is one of those words like "collateral damage" or "surplus population" that you can tell was invented to not describe something) and you run the biggest trucks and shovels in the world, actually the biggest, 400-ton dump trucks that cost five million dollars each and tires that cost the price of a house, and you mine it like coal. The oil-sand goes into crushers and then into giant hot-water tumblers that separate the bitumen from the sand the way you'd separate wet paint from gravel, with a lot of help from caustic soda and even more help from steam. The water goes into tailings ponds, which are not ponds, they are lakes, they are visible from low earth orbit, and they are full of a mixture of fine clays and residual bitumen and a lot of other chemistry that is at best dubious and at worst a slow-motion environmental catastrophe nobody in Alberta can figure out how to clean up and which, by provincial law, the operators are supposed to eventually reclaim — a promise whose timeline keeps sliding to the right and whose financial reserves, if you actually cost them out, would bankrupt most of the companies that made them. That's the mining side.
The other eighty percent of the reserves are too deep to mine. For those you use SAGD, steam-assisted gravity drainage, which works like this: you drill two horizontal wells, one stacked a few meters above the other, you blast the upper one full of high-pressure steam until the bitumen down there gets hot enough to actually flow, and then you collect the flowable bitumen out of the lower well. You are, essentially, cooking the ground. To do this you need ungodly amounts of natural gas, because steam doesn't make itself, and the natural gas is piped in from elsewhere in the province, which is why the oil sands are sometimes described (accurately) as a process for converting natural gas, which is a reasonably clean fuel, into synthetic crude, which is not, at a thermodynamic efficiency that would make a nineteenth-century millwright wince.
The net energy math on this is — fine. It works. You put one unit of energy in, you get three or four out, that's the rough ratio, less than conventional oil's old ten-to-one but more than enough to make money at any oil price north of roughly fifty dollars a barrel, which the global oil price has been north of most of the time since about 2004. So it gets done. And once you've gotten the bitumen out of the ground — whether by digging or by cooking — you still can't ship it, because at pipeline temperature it's still too thick to flow, so you cut it with condensate (a light hydrocarbon imported specifically for this purpose, sometimes from the US Gulf, shipped north, used as a thinner) until it's a mix called dilbit, diluted bitumen, which is what actually goes down the pipe. About a third of every barrel of dilbit leaving Alberta is diluent. You are paying to ship the thinner.
This is, I want to stress, the normal operation of the industry. None of this is scandal. This is the regular Tuesday.
The scale of it is the part people don't absorb, because the numbers are all in units nobody has intuitions for. Canadian oil sands production is running around 3.5 million barrels a day as of 2025, which is more than every OPEC producer except Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which is almost half of all oil produced in Canada, which accounts for most of the difference between Canada being an oil-exporting country and Canada being a quiet resource backwater with a per-capita income that looks more like Ireland's. The industry is about thirty percent of Alberta's GDP. It is the entire reason Alberta's per-capita GDP is what it is. Until the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion came online in May 2024 — after twelve years of construction, at a cost of 34 billion Canadian dollars, after the federal government had to buy the project from Kinder Morgan because no private company could eat the political risk — basically all of it went to the United States, which meant Canadian producers had exactly one customer and priced accordingly, at whatever discount to WTI the American refiners felt like imposing. This was annoying to Canada in the way that having a single customer is always annoying to a supplier, and it's the thing the pipeline was supposed to fix, and fixing it is already looking like it wasn't as much of a fix as promised because production keeps growing faster than egress capacity can keep up.
Okay. That's the industrial situation. Here's the part that actually matters.
Fort McMurray is not a city in any sense that the word normally carries. It is a town of maybe 75,000 permanent residents, up near the 57th parallel, surrounded by boreal forest and muskeg, to which is attached — and the word "attached" is wrong, the word needs to be something more like "grafted" or "hosting" — a second population of roughly 35,000 workers who live in what are called camps. The camps are the actual operational engine of the industry. A camp is a cluster of prefab dormitory buildings attached to a cafeteria and a gym and maybe a movie room, plopped down in the bush near a mine or a SAGD plant, with capacity for anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand workers. Workers fly in from everywhere in Canada — Newfoundland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, whatever backwater the post-industrial labor market has stranded them in — on two-week-on two-week-off rotations, work twelve-hour shifts, live in a room the size of a cell, and fly home to spend two weeks with their families before coming back. The term of art is "shadow population." The official census counts them separately.
And this arrangement is not incidental to how the industry works. It is the industry. You cannot run a facility the size of Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine with a labor force of people who live in the nearest city and commute to work. There is no nearest city. The nearest city is eight hundred kilometers away. You have to import the workforce, and because you have to import the workforce, you have to house them, and because you have to house them cheaply, you put them in camps, and because the camps are miserable, you pay the workers a lot of money, and because you pay the workers a lot of money, they put up with the camps, and the whole system is stable as long as the oil price is high enough to subsidize the discomfort premium. It is an entire industrial operation structured around the fact that nobody would voluntarily live where the bitumen is, and so the industry has to buy the labor's tolerance of not-living-there, over and over, shift after shift, for however many decades the deposit lasts.
Which brings me to Kate Beaton.
Beaton is from Mabou, Cape Breton, which is one of those Canadian places that the twentieth century was mostly unkind to. Cape Breton had coal, and Cape Breton had steel, and Cape Breton had fishing, and Cape Breton lost all three of these industries in the space of about forty years, and what it has now is diminished. The island's culture, which is Gaelic-inflected and absurdly musical and which has produced a shocking amount of art per capita, has as one of its load-bearing assumptions the idea that you will probably have to leave to make a living, and that this leaving will be sad but necessary, and that everyone you know will do it too, and that it's been going on since the Highland Clearances, and will go on after you. This is the Cape Breton structure of feeling. It predates the oil sands by about two hundred years. The oil sands are just the current destination.
So when Beaton graduated from Mount Allison in 2005 with an arts degree and a pile of student loans, she did what her cousins and the boys from her high school had already been doing for a decade, which was get on a plane to Alberta. She went to the camps. She worked tool cribs, she worked supply offices, she worked at Syncrude's Long Lake and at Shell's Albian Sands and at a couple of the smaller operators whose names I can't remember off the top of my head, and she kept a notebook, and eventually — many years later, after she'd become internet-famous for Hark! A Vagrant, which is a different story — she turned the notebook into a graphic memoir called Ducks, published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly, which won pretty much every prize available to graphic novels and landed on Obama's list that year, and which is, I think, the single best book anyone has written about what the oil sands actually are, which is a very specific kind of social machine.
The book is called Ducks because in 2008, while Beaton was there, 1,600 migratory ducks landed on a Syncrude tailings pond and died in it, which became briefly a global news story and got Syncrude fined three million dollars, which is roughly the kind of money Syncrude made every forty-five minutes that year. The ducks were the visible atrocity. The book is about the invisible one.
The invisible one is that the ratio of men to women in the camps was, depending on which camp and which shift, somewhere between 30-to-1 and 50-to-1. Beaton spent two years as one of the maybe two or three women at any given installation surrounded by several hundred men who were working twelve-hour shifts, living in single-occupancy dorms a hundred meters from hers, drinking heavily when off-shift because there was nothing else to do, doing cocaine at a rate that surprised even her, isolated from their wives and girlfriends and mothers and daughters, and — this is the part the book builds very patiently and very devastatingly — slowly losing the ability to behave like the people they used to be when they were still at home. The book is not a condemnation of the men. It is explicitly not that. The book's most painful move is that it keeps humanizing them, keeps showing how they're also trapped, also miserable, also being used up by the same machine, even as they do the things they do to her. Which, without getting into the specifics — read the book — include the full range of what several hundred isolated men will do to two women when the HR function is a phone number in Calgary that nobody is going to call.
And the thing Beaton sees, the thing she sets up with complete economy and then lets the rest of the book bear out, is that the machine is designed to produce exactly this. It's not a bug. The camp structure produces isolated men away from their social networks in exchange for money. Isolated men away from their social networks, given enough money and enough boredom, will do predictable things, and those predictable things are accepted by the operators as part of the cost of doing business, the way a mine accepts that a certain number of miners will get silicosis. It's a function of the design. Nobody up the chain at Suncor or Syncrude or Shell wants the women in the camps to be harassed. It's just that preventing the harassment would require reorganizing the entire labor-rotation structure of the industry, which would raise the cost per barrel, which would make the operation uncompetitive, and so the harassment is priced in as an externality. The women are told they have a bad attitude. The men are told to knock it off. The rotation continues. The oil flows.
What makes Ducks extraordinary, and what makes it a book about the oil sands rather than a book about harassment — though it is also that — is that Beaton also sees the men. She sees the welders from Cape Breton she grew up around, except here they're trapped in a way she recognizes because she's trapped in the same way, a way her dad would recognize from his own generation going to Boston or Toronto, a way her grandfather would recognize from the mines. The Maritime out-migration has been happening long enough that it has a folk repertoire, a whole tradition of songs about leaving, and the men in the camps are inside that tradition whether they know it or not. Some of them are actively dying inside it — there's a running count in the book, not emphasized, just there in the margin, of young men who die on the highway between Fort McMurray and Edmonton, or who kill themselves in their dorms, or who disappear. The mortality of the rotation is ambient. It's baked in. Nobody makes a particular fuss because making a particular fuss isn't what anyone there has the cultural equipment to do.
And the thing I keep coming back to, reading that book, is how precisely it maps onto earlier Canadian industrial extractions. Cape Breton exported its own men to its own mines in the 1890s and they died of black lung. Newfoundland exported its men to the Banks and they died drowning. The cod collapsed in 1992 and those men went to Fort Mac. There is a temporal rhyme here that Beaton doesn't belabor but that sits underneath the whole book: this is what Canadian industrial history is, a series of extractive operations that consume the bodies and social networks of men from places the previous extractive operation already hollowed out. The oil sands are just the current iteration. When the oil sands go — and they will go, either because the world stops buying the product or because the bitumen that's economically recoverable runs out or because a carbon regime finally prices the externalities — whatever comes next will be staffed by the grandsons of the men who died at Fort McKay, who were themselves the grandsons of the men who died at Glace Bay. Same as it ever was.
The industry knows all this, by the way. None of it is secret. The oil companies have sociologists on retainer. The turnover statistics are studied. The mental health crisis in the camps is a line item, it has a budget, there are contractors whose entire business is running crisis-response services for a workforce they know is coming apart. The 2016 wildfire — which evacuated 88,000 people from Fort McMurray in the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history, which burned down 2,400 homes, which briefly shut down most of the industry — revealed in passing that the regional municipality's shadow population was around 40,000 people at that moment, people who lived here but didn't live here, who were uncounted in most of the news coverage because they weren't from there, they were from somewhere else, and they all went back to their somewhere elses during the evacuation and some of them simply never came back. The 2018 post-fire census found the shadow population down fifteen percent. The oil didn't care. The oil kept flowing. The rotations restarted.
And the Indigenous piece, which I've been circling without saying directly, is that all of this is happening on land that belongs, by every reasonable reading of treaty and prior occupation, to the Athabasca Chipewyan and the Mikisew Cree and the Fort McKay First Nation and the Métis communities of the region, who have been variously co-opted, partnered-with, sued-into-submission, paid-off, or simply bulldozed over, depending on the decade and the specific negotiation. Some of the bands have significant ownership stakes in the operations now, which is a development the 1970s activist version of this story did not predict. Some are still in active litigation over water quality and cancer clusters downstream on the Athabasca River. Both things are true. The oil sands produce billionaires and elders dying of bile duct cancer and they produce them in the same watershed and if you want a tidy story about which is the real one you'll have to write it yourself because the ground doesn't offer one.
Beaton's book ends, more or less, with her going home to Cape Breton, having paid off her loans. She is permanently changed. She does not know if she is changed in a way she can live with. The book came out fourteen years after she left the camps and you can feel in it the time it took her to process what she'd seen, which tracks — it takes that long, usually, to figure out what a thing was, and sometimes you never figure it out, you just get old enough to stop being wrecked by it. She is one of the very few people who went through those camps and came out with the specific combination of linguistic ability and patience and moral seriousness to write about them. The others — the welders and the mechanics and the engineers and the heavy-equipment operators — mostly did not. They went home. They drank. They worked the next rotation. They raised kids who, statistically, also went to Alberta, because the Maritime economy did not improve. The book is as much about them as it is about her, and the fact that their version of the book doesn't exist, and won't, is part of what the book is finally about.
There is a thing you learn if you read enough industrial history, which is that the machine doesn't need you to understand it in order to keep running. Understanding the oil sands does not stop them. Beaton writing Ducks did not stop them. The 1,600 ducks in the tailings pond did not stop them. The 88,000-person wildfire evacuation did not stop them. The carbon math does not stop them. The Chipewyan cancer clusters have not stopped them. The only thing that will eventually stop them is the price, and the price is set in a market that does not weight any of the inputs I have just listed, and so the bitumen will keep coming out of the ground until it doesn't, and the men will keep flying in, and the women who work among them will keep being what they have to be to survive the rotation, and somewhere a Cape Breton teenager is right now considering her options and thinking about student loans.
Same as it ever was.
some of you are painfully unaware that part of the whole reason many kinksters are like "what happens in my or someone else's bedroom is no one else's business"
is because people have been arrested and put in fucking PRISON just for having gay sex in the privacy of their own homes. in the United States. this millennia.
if you think i'm joking, look up Lawrence v. Texas (2003). 14 out of the 50 US States STILL had laws on the books criminalizing sodomy--and yes, you could be imprisoned for multiple years and sometimes even life for repeat offenses.
in the years directly leading up to the landmark case, enforcement even in those 14 states varied, but it was absolutely weaponized against queer people, especially when stacked on top of other offenses to make up a longer sentence.
um so anyway, what happens between two or more consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes is none of my OR YOUR business, and i'm not fucking kidding!
Important additional context:
"Sodomy" does not, in a legal context, mean "anal sex."
It means "any sexual act the court has decided is deviant."
BDSM? Sodomy.
Crossdressing for sexual pleasure? Sodomy.
Jacking off to nude photos or video your consenting adult lover sent you of themselves? Sodomy.
Het oral sex? SODOMY!!!
If you're starting to think "but how could anyone prove that happened without breaking down the door?"
Ha. Haha. Ahaha.
First, I'll give you one guess how they did prove it.
Two, these were often scapegoat charges--basically they couldn't actually nail you on anything because you hadn't done anything actually illegal, only things they didn't like, and they relied on public disgust against your "degenerate character" (yeah there's a very big reason we keep saying not to use that word and it's not to be killjoys) to make sure you knew your place.
Which means that in practice:
Went to a socialist meeting? Sodomy.
Male kindergarten teacher? Sodomy.
Mixing races? Sodomy.
Not Christian (or the right kind of Christian)? Sodomy.
Kink is only the beginning. They'll come after the kinksters because they're low-hanging fruit, and you'll gleefully help them dig a hole, laughing all the way and never consider that it's way too big for the number of bodies you need to bury.
I see someone in the tags saying "except pedophiles, they don't count, hang them."
YES THEY FUCKING DO COUNT.
Wanna know why?
Take a look at how many politicians have labeled trans people and their allies as pedophiles.
Take a look at how many politicians used to label gay people as pedophiles.
Take a look at how much suspicion falls on innocent men who just think working with kids is fun and want the chance to help, grow, nurture, and teach.
Take a look at yourself.
What about you could someone twist into "that person is a pedophile" if they wanted rid of you?
I can tell you exactly how they'd do it with me. I'm queer. I have a niece who came out as lesbian in her teens. I supported her.
Clearly I groomed her into that lifestyle, right?
Child sex abusers should be proven in a court of law to be guilty, and penalized to the fullest extent of the law. Pedophiles who have not abused children and seek to avoid doing so should not be hanged for something going wild in their brains.
Yes! That's super uncomfortable to say! I'm a CSA survivor! It's awkward and it means I have to defend people I really wish were not the way they are!
But the rope you use to lynch another will yank you into the tree to die.
No sodomy laws. None.
TW for talk on CSA and child marriage, this topic tends to get me fired up
Its also a fucking useless example for sodomy law especially because of how wildly age of consent can vary even in the united states. Which I hate that people get so weird about when you try to discuss it. No, knowing this stuff isnt a "red flag" you have to know something before you can speak on it or try and change it!
Child marriage is legal in 34 states with 4 of them technically not even having an age minimum outside of common law that could theoretically set it at 12. If we go back a few years the state of it would be even MORE dire as many of these laws putting age minimums only were put into place in the past eight years! So if one defines sodomy as "any sexual act done premarital that isnt missionary" then these wouldn't be covered.
Sodomy laws are USELESS for protecting children, because laws about CSA are better off being their OWN thing with strictly defined terms. Sodomy is so nebulous and hand wavy it does nothing but punish people who have done nothing wrong, strict terms with clear meanings is what creates protections. "You can't just make "if we think its gross" the law and expect that to actually work on deterring people who are doing the actual crimes. Which are ALREADY illegal.
Plus this isn't even getting into the psychology part of it that most people who commit CSA aren't even attracted to minors, they just like power over their victims and its easy to hold power over a child. its about control. Not 100% of the time, but very very often its about dominance rather then attraction. Plus there's the fact of sexual intrusive thoughts being a common form of OCD that causes a lot of distress in those that have those thoughts. This is a whole rabbit hole but just... You dont need to be attracted to a victims to traffic them, you might just want control, or authority, or just money!
I think it is really, really worth focusing on that “already illegal” part, because this is the foot in the door for a million and a half fascist proposed laws, not just sodomy.
“We need a law that makes it illegal to go into a bathroom that doesn’t align with your birth sex! Otherwise, people might go into the wrong bathroom to sexually assault someone!” Huh, interesting, but isn’t it already illegal to sexually assault someone, including in a bathroom??? Because if so, then you can just completely discard that explanation for the entire law. It is already illegal to go into the wrong bathroom and sexually assault a person; ergo, the law is not about sexual assault at all, it’s just about bathrooms.
“We need to arrest undocumented immigrants in order to crack down on gang activity!” Huh, interesting, but isn’t that gang activity already illegal??? So, if you wanted to crack down on gang activity, you could simply arrest people who are associated with gangs, and in fact, we do already do that. Ergo, this rhetoric isn’t actually about gang activity at all; it’s just about undocumented immigrants.
“We need to diminish free speech and freedom of movement rights for suspected terrorists, because otherwise they could commit mass murder!” Well, interestingly, mass murder is already illegal, and if you have probable cause that indicates that someone is planning to commit mass murder, you can simply arrest them for that. Since the law is already fully equipped to go after people who are genuinely suspected of gearing up to commit a violent terroristic act, this clearly isn’t really about terrorism at all; it’s just about diminishing free speech and freedom of movement rights.
“We need tort reform that caps the monetary damages that large corporations can be forced to pay, in order to keep people from bringing frivolous and fraudulent lawsuits!” Hmm, but see the thing with that is fraud is already a crime, and frivolous lawsuits can already be thrown out. If a law caps the amount of damages corporations need to pay in lawsuits which were not found to be frivolous or fraudulent, then almost by definition, it has nothing to do with frivolous lawsuits or fraud – it’s just about limiting corporate liability.
I could go on.
Always ask yourself what the actual function of a proposed law is – not just the stated goal, but what it actually does that is not already covered by an equally restrictive law.
And remember, a good general rule is:
If something is already illegal, then the people who are trying to pass a new law to ban it are probably trying to ban something else.
Chloe Atkins’ portraits of lesbians at San Francisco’s Club Q featured in her published collection Girls Night Out (1998)
Queer joy detected!
So. Tyr, my dog, is a Great Pyraneese. This is important because this breed is known to be smart. Not in the way a German Shepherd or border Collie is smart, and wanting to please a human; Great Pyrs are independent minded and bred to Be Management of herds when a human might not be around.
Anyway.
It has been very pleasant out. We had the windows cracked and left them cracked when we went to work. This has never been an issue before.
My darling spouse was working on a job in a small town about a mile from our place. He was getting some stuff from the work van when he sees a large white dog prancing along.
"Huh." He thinks. "That looks an awful lot like.....TYR WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE."
Tyr, delighted that she has Found Father, bounds up happily and gets in the work van to give face kisses.
"GIRL NO WHAT." Kev says, scrambling to go let the client know that he has to take the fucking criminal back home real quick.
Turns out she discovered that a window can be shoved open with a determined snoot, and a window screen is not as strong as 80 pounds of muscular dog. And went for an adventure.
I got a call at this point while I was doing payroll.
"BABE WE NEED TO BABY GATE ALL THE FUCKING WINDOWS." My spouse says.
"....okay??" I say, and then get the story. I swore a bunch.
Anyway my dog is a criminal escape artist and we have to baby proof the fucking windows now
My mom thinks this is the funniest thing ever because I, Age 11, discovered I could remove window screens to climb out my window and climb the house roof to stargaze, which nearly gave her a heart attack when she looked out a window when hearing a noise and saw her fucking child squirreling around on the roof.
"Like mother like daughter" she texted me and then about 20 laughing emojis in a row
really love keeping up with my mutuals through their little tags and vent posts. getting updates on how they’re doing is something like: glad to know your job at the library is going well. i’m sorry you haven’t gotten that raise. glad your finals went well. i’m sorry your teacher is so unhelpful. glad your tv show got renewed. i’m sorry they killed your favorite character. glad that you scored tickets to see your favorite artist. i’m sorry they aren’t touring near you at all. glad your cat is doing well. i’m sorry your mom is sick again. glad you’re feeling better now that it’s your favorite season. i’m sorry your meds aren’t working. glad you’re married now. i’m sorry you have to step back for your mental health. glad you’re still here. i’m sorry life is so hard. glad you’re alive, i hope things get easier for you soon
Bear games and daydreaming ...
Photograph at Martinselkonen Wilds Centre in Finland.
📸 by @valtterimulkahainen
Just spent 45 minutes researching what a specific street in a city smells like in october so i could write the word "damp." the word is in the final draft. it is doing its job. it cost me 45 minutes and a mild obsession with historical weather records. worth it. the word is perfect. you would not believe how hard i worked on that word.
Long familiarity with A Civil Campaign, in which Miles Vorkosigan invites a few friends round to meet his gardener, really inoculated me against the dinners in Harrow the Ninth. Six-armed skeleton clawing its way out of a dude's chest? God and his necrosaints getting biblical on the dining table? Ianthe is there? Ech, I've seen worse.