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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Not today Justin
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@celestialcontrail
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
There is a very specific kind of sadness in realizing your parents loved you, and still did not always know how to meet your emotional needs.
Because it is confusing. It would almost feel easier if there was no love there at all. But sometimes there was love. In the way they tried to protect you. In the sacrifices they made. In the ways they worried about you, cared for you, wanted a good life for you.
And at the same time, there were still things missing.
Maybe comfort did not come in the way you needed it to. Maybe your feelings were not always understood, or noticed, or handled gently. Maybe you learned to keep certain parts of yourself quiet because it felt easier than trying to explain them.
That kind of hurt is difficult because it does not always come from cruelty. Sometimes it comes from people who loved you deeply, but did not know how to emotionally connect in the ways you needed. People carrying their own wounds, limitations, fears, or ways of surviving.
And you are allowed to acknowledge both truths at once.
You are allowed to recognize their love and still grieve what you needed but did not receive. Those things do not cancel each other out.
Forgiveness, for a lot of people, is not pretending nothing hurt you. It is slowly accepting that someone can love you and still fall short of understanding you completely.
That does not make your pain dramatic. It does not make them monsters either. Sometimes it just means everyone was trying with the emotional tools they had, and some of those tools were not enough.
And I think many people quietly carry guilt for still feeling hurt by parents they know tried their best. But being loved imperfectly can still leave wounds. It makes sense that it affected you.
At the same time, you do not have to stay trapped only in anger forever either. Sometimes healing looks like understanding that your parents were human before they were parents. People shaped by their own experiences, their own upbringing, their own emotional gaps.
That understanding does not erase your feelings. It just softens the sharp edges around them a little.
You deserved emotional safety. You deserved gentleness. You deserved to feel understood, comforted, and emotionally close to the people raising you.
And if they could not fully give that to you, it is okay to mourn it.
But I hope you also know this: the love you needed is still something you can experience in your life. Through other people. Through chosen family. Through the way you learn to treat yourself now.
The story does not end at what you did or did not receive growing up.
You are still allowed softness after all of it 🤍
ALL. OF. THIS.
Incredibly violent take of mine but I actually don’t think you need to relate to a story in any way to enjoy it. You can enjoy a story even if you can’t point at a character and insert some aspect of your personality or identity into them. In fact I would argue the need for a character like that to be present in every single story you experience is a sign of stunted growth.
It is a peaceful and serene take, actually.
Emergency help for a cat
She's not my cat, she belongs to the girlfriend of a friend of mine, but she lived in my house for a while and she's a really sweet kitty. She even knows how to use a toilet.
Our normally bouncy cat Bella didn’t greet us at the door, and I knew something was wron… Seth Keitz needs your support for Help Save Bella:
My friend Seth (whose girlfriend is the cat's owner) helped me get the fundraiser for my daughter's cat out, so I owe him one.
Help a pair of trans people save their sweet little cat, if you can.
Analyzing over 3800 emails and texts involving the academic, MintPress News has uncovered a deep, years-long friendship between leftist inte
6 KEY FINDINGS OF THIS INVESTIGATION:
Right up until his arrest for child sex trafficking, Chomsky was advising Epstein on crisis management, sympathizing with the “horrible way you are being treated in the press and public.”
On multiple occasions, Chomsky expressed his desire to visit Little St. James Island, site of Epstein’s infamous sex crimes.
Chomsky flew on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” jet, stayed at his mansions in Manhattan and Paris, and regularly met him for dinner and other social occasions.
Chomsky quietly met with a host of other highly questionable characters, including Steve Bannon, Woody Allen, and Ehud Barak.
Chomsky considered Epstein his “best friend,” and his closest advisor, and regularly exchanged gifts with the disgraced pedophile.
Chomsky’s relationship with his children broke apart, due in part to their protests over his attempts to name Epstein’s accountant and right-hand man to the board of the family’s trust fund.
2026 - 2025 - 2024 - 2023
in spite of it all, happy 2026 pride.
you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads
you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride
these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.
final thought - breaking the pride tradition and more than likely won't make a new piece. the top one from TDOV is all i'm making this year. i have my focus on other projects currently and i don't want to force a poster design. these came from a specific head space and my current head space is Very Tired lmao so i wanna work on other things. 👍
do not forget the patron saint of these weeks that we celebrate ourselves proudly and openly in the streets
her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.
remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.
thank you, Marsha. we remember you.
As we barrel into another Pride Month, we will inevitably all see the stupidest, coldest, most reductive, exclusionary, assimilationist nonsense discourse simmer to the surface of social media again like scum foaming up on a long simmering soup.
And when that happens, whether it's garbage takes about trans people, or ace people, or nonbinary people, or neopronouns, or he/him lesbians, or bi women with boyfriends, or furries, or *what the fuck ever*- remember-
You do not need to quibble over the details. You do not need verbally spar on every hill that dipshits want to die on.
Just stop and ask- hey, does this fucking matter?
Does it matter if some queer people do _____? Does it cause any actual, measurable, material harm? Is this *actually* a problem? Be specific. Beyond just 'it makes me uncomfortable' and 'but that doesn't make sense' - does it actually *matter*?
Because if the answer is no, then who the fuck cares?
I don't care if something is confusing, or illogical, or weird, or makes you uncomfortable. Does it actually harm anyone? No? Then mind your fucking business.
Its not your responsibility to Lincoln-Douglass debate every overzealous puritan and under-informed tween on the complex nuance and inherent political context of the queer experience. Focus on what matters . Ask them what, if any, harm does ____ actually do, and THAT is all you need to address. (Oh you wanna defend ___ spaces? Which spaces specifically? What are you worried about happening? Oh is ____ normalizing ____? Does it? Does that...matter?)
Because even if other people dont like it, Queer People will continue to be weird, messy, confusing, contradictory, illogical, and strange as we all do our fucking best to be ourselves as best we can be. The way we survive and grow and thrive is by giving each other the grace and space to do so, whether or not we deeply, logically resonate with whatever others have going on.
And we don't talk shit about each other. We don't take pot shots at the queers who are queerer than we are. Throwing other queer people under the bus has never made things better.
So. Circle the wagons, close the ranks, and get comfortable rubbing elbows with people who are, you know, freaks and weirdos.
Happy Pride.
i think a lot of people internalized the misogynistic idea that “men are rational and women are emotional” and just went “that’s true… but it’s a good thing!” instead of saying “that’s obviously bullshit and we shouldn’t perpetuate this belief in any form”
Some of the most emotionally unregulated people in my life have been men. Being an irrational jackass has no gender.
And the most annoying thing to deal with is someone acting from a place of pure emotion who's completely convinced they're the "rational" one.
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
And the world didn’t know her name.
This entirely AI-generated sob story is very poignant but not great history. "Carol Kaye was a brilliant session player, contributing to many hits across an exceptionally long and successful career" is 18 words and I think substantially more accurate.
This review of a documentary about her and the other prolific session players of the 60s music scene gets the distortions across quite well - lots of session players, industry standard practices leaving them all off the record labels, mom in classic clothes or not. The stuff about no one knowing she worked on these hits runs into the fact that she wrote about it herself. The music historians digging out contract numbers did happen - because there was an extensive and very public controversy between Kaye and fans of a different session player, the late James Jamerson, over who had contributed to which records.
The "$55 per session for ten thousand sessions" thing is the most obviously false bit of the post - you think her fee stayed the same between 1957 and 1973? I think it's probably taken from a standard AFM union rate for Motown sessions at some point in the period. But I'll note as a baseline that $55 a session for ten thousand sessions is $550,000. In early 1960s money that's roughly six million dollars today. Not huge bucks for a long career, but it roughly lines up with her saying in the documentary that at her peak she was earning more than the president.
And "starting to be recognised" is a bit much - she turned down induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year and was ranked as the 5th greatest bassist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2020. Which you can find in the fairly extensive Legacy section of her Wikipedia page.
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
And the world didn’t know her name.
She was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 but refused, fuck yeah, Carol. Her official website is incredible.
@demilypyro
I don’t think we ought to normalize or justify bullying as a means to keep people from being annoying — a sentiment that in and of itself could make for a whole article’s worth of conversation — but I do think we should make a habit of politely but directly telling people “hey I didn’t like that”, “that wasn’t funny”, “you are mistaken”, and the like if it’s called for, and more importantly, you should be able to take a “that wasn’t funny” for instance without taking it personally, because protecting a polite harmony where no one can criticize each other, not even politely, is also really, really bad.
Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain of five years of escalating anti-LGBTQ censorship.
if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:
When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story of two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.
This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.
and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.
voter suppression against black people is reaching Jim Crow era levels in the US so please get registered to vote now, learn who's going to be on your ballot in advance, try to talk some sense into your conservative relatives or coworkers (diplomatically), and, when November rolls around, vote to make Republicans lose as many seats as possible. there are many other things to do, of course, but the midterms will have a massive impact on the future of civil rights.
The next three elections are incredibly critical to turning back the fascist wave.
2026 - Make the Republicans hurt for all the ways they're trying to strip people of their votes and put a check on Trump. We can flip the House and maybe even the Senate and actually put some of the checks the Constitution intended back in place. SCOTUS is still fucked and not a lot will get passed over Trump's veto, but we can stop the bleeding.
2028 - Get Trump, Vance, and all the fascists out of the Executive Branch. It's also the only way to start on SCOTUS reform and getting back on the right track. This is also the president who will be overseeing the next census that controls which states get how many Congresspeople.
2030 - State legislatures will be the absolute MOST important races this cycle. These legislators are the ones who will be drawing the maps for the next 10 years of elections. Republicans used 2010 to completely rewrite maps across the country; Democrats need to do it in 2030.
