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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
izzy's playlists!
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Cosmic Funnies
trying on a metaphor
ellievsbear
will byers stan first human second
i don't do bad sauce passes
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
#extradirty
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d e v o n
sheepfilms
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Game of Thrones Daily
NASA
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@almostshouting
it’s likely I recently followed you on my nsft/18+ only blog which is darlingsapphicgirl so yeah this isn’t the blog I followed you from but it’s my default one and idk how to change that but if you’re here for chaos head over to @sameoldshit it’s where I’m feral
Minors do not interact with that blog
dan and phil reveal the truth (but like actually this time)
How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.
TW: rape, sexual assault, child abuse
Archived version here, in case you hit the pay wall:
https://archive.is/HJtxW
I have been doodling a lot on my iPad mini these days, after a couple of years of just not feelin’ anything artwise. But I have shamefully neglected to post them to Tumblr! So have an art dump!
It started with a sheep. I was messing around with new watercolor tools and crosshatching tools, thought “that looks kinda like a sheep” and then took out the bits that didn’t look like a sheep.
The noble Aukhound, originally bred to herd migratory seabirds. These majestic, slightly damp creatures are now used extensively in ecological restoration work.
I do this whenever I see a frog.
Then I was just in the mood for weird shadowy cloaked figures.
You know that’s a clove cigarette.
Portrait Of A Creature With A Chicken On Its Head
Just two weird little creatures having tea together.
as much as I hate to admit it, but I think I’m falling for a man who’ll never feel the same way about me. He is so close to perfect, so close to everything that I’ve ever wanted in a relationship, but I know that he doesn’t want anything like I do. He doesn’t want the affection that I want, the emotional connection, the intimacy that isn’t just fleeting but is lasting.
ahahahahahaha turns out he’s a complete arsehole why did I ever think he was perfect ffs you dumb bitch
TWILIGHT (2008), dir. Catherine Hardwicke
“They can’t even afford soup” proceeds to wastes soup like they could have donated that and fed a hungry family but middle class eco activists just do this for attention
Jesus Christ
Van Gogh couldn't afford soup either
the painting is behind glass, so there’s only slight damage to the frame and whatever clean up will be needed to the gallery, but it’s still going to waste several hours of a conservationists time. like, what are we doing here? what was accomplished besides annoying the fuck out of some museum workers and wasting 2 tins of perfectly good soup?
the way these are obvious plants, literally just exactly what oil execs think "activist" looks like
Fun fact: Just Stop Oil is funded by the Climate Emergency Fund, which is funded itself by oil heiress Aileen Getty of Getty Oil, which was responsible for a 30 million gallon oil spill in NY.
This was a psyop.
AHHHHHHHHH SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP NOT EVRRYTHING IS A FUCKING CONSPIRACY DO AN OUNCE OF RESEARCH
He didn’t make her feel special, he didn’t make her feel like she mattered. It wasn’t like before, when they’d put her on a pedestal, but he treated her like a person who was capable of making mistakes. There was something about him that caught her off guard, he was unexpected and surprising but he also met her energy, her intensity and her passion. She always thought she’d be the extrovert in a relationship, in a friendship, but he somehow met her energy, even when it was at its lowest. He was far from perfect, she knew that, he was far from everything she wanted. Realistically, they wouldn’t have worked as a couple, they were too similar and yet too different in all the wrong ways. They’d work as friends, because they wouldn’t put up with each other’s bullshit. They work as lovers because the spark they needed was there but it certainly wasn’t love. But they wouldn’t work as a couple because the entire relationship would be arguments and sex and bitching and lord knows that isn’t healthy. But maybe it would be, maybe they both need someone to cut through all the bullshit and to call them out on their shitty behaviour.
Right now, though, she didn’t know how she felt about him. She liked him, she knew that, but the question of how much was the important thing. It wasn’t love, not yet, and it was definitely lust, for now. She realised that her feelings for him were fickle, that they were weak and merely a facade. The speed which she fell out of love with him was insane, how quickly she realised that maybe she’s be better off without him seemed to be a sign that everything they had was a lie. She knew she’d miss him if they split and departed but sooner or later she’d get over it. What she would miss she could easily find else, she already had the friendship part but she was struggling to find the sex. For now at least though. Maybe it would be easier once all this work was done, maybe it’d be easier once he’d gone.
Loving Vincent (2017) dir. Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman
“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly’.”
Fucking badass. May they Rest in Peace.
so i'm seeing this post go around quite a bit uncritically with links to straight up donate to ukrainian neo-nazi groups so i'll break it down, here's the post you'll probably see:
here's the contents of one link, calling themselves "freikorps" and using what looks to be an azov battalion insignia as an avatar:
and here's what the azov battalion is if you don't know:
now here's another link this time with with a pic of ppl flying a right sector flag:
if you dont know what right sector is:
so please don't donate to this shit, the situation isn't just some simple little good guy vs big bad guy thing, if you see someone sharing that post, try sharing this with them bcus they probably don't know
Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.
PRINCESS MONONOKE もののけ姫 1997, dir. Hayao Miyazaki
Life always took a turn for the unspectacular when she was with him, it stopped being exciting and started being normal. Things changed as they should and her life continued on like normal. There were no stops, no heartaches, no pauses in time that stopped her heart but instead it was like it always had been. It was a life that she saw as being a moderate perfection. Though she dreamed of bigger, more intense things, when he was around it was like they’d reached the epilogue and the world had slowed again. They were the “ten years later”, the “what happened after”, the world beyond “I’ll see you soon.” Although she longed for exciting, she longed for the thrill of adventure, when she was with him it was like she’d done all that, and it was the calm after the storm. Her heart longed for what could have been but now she had him and he wasn’t a could, a should, or a would but he was there and he made her feel safe. Despite the outside world being chaotic and loud, with him she felt like she knew what she wanted, what she needed even.
There was an indifference to him that no one else saw, she thought, a subtlety that was lake on others but she knew him too well to see any different. It was there in the glimpses he gave her, in the twang of the guitar string as he played, in the briefest of hand touches, but she saw it in him. He seemingly didn’t care about the rest of the world, but she knew how deeply he felt everything around him, how much the sun touched his skin, how the cold chilled him to his bones, how the heat of the fire warmed his body, and how every word he heard was absorbed into his soul. Good and bad, he felt it and she could see it on his face, in the time she’d known him she’d seen it change. Once a carefree boy who floated on sunlight and ran through the rain, now a man he pushed his way through the heat of summer and sliced through the winds of winter. She’d known him for too long perhaps, maybe this had been enough and she’d seen him fall and collapse too many times but she wasn’t in love with him. Her heart didn’t skip a beat to be around him, instead it was a comfort to be with him, like a sibling, a family member who you trust beyond words. He was like a blanket to her when she needed but it wasn’t love, it was the softness of convenience, the comfort of habituality, the joy of the ease that he gave her.
She knew she wasn’t in love with him, despite what her friends said and, by god did they like to talk, but she knew that it wasn’t love. It was far from that because she’d felt that before and this wasn’t it. And it wasn’t like she was telling herself it wasn’t, she wasn’t in denial about him, because she been in love before and she’d been in love with him. There was a time when his voice made her heart skip a beat, when the touch of his skin against hers was a remarkable, electric occasion but now it was less and more than that all together. His voice was like background noise now, and she didn’t find herself listening to it in the silences but instead used it to fuel her energy and to give her the support she needed throughout the day. His touch meant nothing except the feeling of home, like somewhere she was meant to be.
She wasn’t in love with him. She wasn’t. Unless she was.
STUDIO GHIBLI + LANDSCAPES
Tales from Earthsea (2006) Spirited Away (2001) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) Porco Rosso (1992) Castle in the Sky (1986) The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)
part 1 | part 2
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden
The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.
The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience
The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project
Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub
Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette
Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Some documentaries:
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]
How to Survive a Plague (2012)
We Were Here (2011)
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y'all. Please, take care of one another.
http://www.aidsquilt.org/view-the-quilt/search-the-quilt
Updated link to the quilt
this is so hard to read or even think about but… it’s so important. it’s so important to understand just the …overwhelming SCALE of this. how many people died while the government did NOTHING.
i’m gonna fucking faint
12.7.21
maneskinofficial I wanna touch your body so f*cking electric ⚡️
VENT’ANNI
