[mismedleym]

animated version of moon eyes for her one year anniversary

[birdfriend-theband]

“The songs of Goodbye, Babylon take place on the dim periphery of Boston, in a twilight New England of crumbling millyards and foggy coastal marshes; in the incandescent, rain-soaked streets of faded towns; on blustery beaches in autumn, in the cathedral forests of summer, in the raw and haunted spring; in the falling dark of winter and the midnight hush of hometown dive bars.

This is a New England of myth, where the cycle of rain and the ancient flow of water erode everything, making even the most recent history feel primeval. It’s a New England of memory, where ancient roots grow through city sidewalks, ghosts gather in the architecture and the farmers’ fields grow gravestones.

But it’s a real place, too; our home - where we live, work and sing our songs.

There’s not much of a musical tradition out here anymore. Finding ourselves at the end of an era of history, standing on the threshold of an unfamiliar new world, we’ve picked up whatever scraps of song we can find. On Goodbye, Babylon, we’ve gathered echoes of folk songs, barroom waltzes, psychedelic dirges, church singing and the the ramshackle fanfares of high school marching bands. We’ve gathered stories of our lives, our love, our fears and forebodings at the end of the days of grace.”

[hobohobgoblim]

[blessedscavengers]

happy butch appreciation day to all my fellow butches!

when I was teaching an art class I had one of the kids I was teaching come up to me and ask if I was an adult tomboy and then proceeded to tell me about her friend who is also a tomboy and I thought that was quite possible the cutest thing a kid ever said to me and also describes my gender pretty well since kids don’t tend to know about butch as an identity

terfs fuck off

made in 2023

[datdeinonychus]

"Call that girl a radish

'cause she's a dyke-on."

"A daikon?"

"A dyke icon!"

[datdeinonychus]

One reason it's called a cock cage and not a dick cage is because the latter would inevitably prompt many people to think of Nick Cage during horny times, and that doesn't do it for me personally (though i completely understand the man's allure). The only bonus for me would be to refer to it as my "Dickolas Cage"

[datdeinonychus]

Of course another reason is because of the handy alliteration, in which case, we could also propose

"anaconda armor"

"cyclops cell"

"dick detention"

"joystick jail"

"penis penitentiary"

[datdeinonychus]

One reason it's called a cock cage and not a dick cage is because the latter would inevitably prompt many people to think of Nick Cage during horny times, and that doesn't do it for me personally (though i completely understand the man's allure). The only bonus for me would be to refer to it as my "Dickolas Cage"

[inkskinned]

at the end of the day it’s not that you hate your job - actually, you like working, you like routine, you like feeling like an adult - it’s that any time you fuck anything up, you feel like you’re fucking dying.

because you could be actually fucking dying. because if one day you wake up and you misunderstood something - you could lose your job, and nobody is hiring, and nobody is paying, and nobody takes people like you, and that job you want hasn’t gotten back to you. and what exactly are you going to do without insurance? good luck with those meds. you should have thought of that before being a person.

so it’s not just that you forgot to CC someone on an email, it’s that if you don’t have this job, you can’t afford rent. it’s not that you misread a comment, it’s that if you get fired, you will be in massive amounts of unpayable debt. it’s not that you are bad at your job, but here are the stakes as they have been decided for you: be perfect or fucking die. like, literally, die. that is how much safety net you have: none.

it’s not burnout, technically. but you literally just had two typos in your work, and you’re already picturing the ending. you want to throw up & curl up & make it all go away. it is two typos. if he decides he is mad at you, you lose literally everything.

your mom says that you seem stressed. the thing is that you have never known a job that isn’t stressful. welcome to capitalism. there is no other road, only this one. what the fuck is a career. you come here, and we hold your life against the barrel of a gun, and somewhere someone is spinning the chamber and pulling. eventually the bullet will come.

you live in a mugging. your boss owns three cars and has four kids. you worry about having enough to feed your dog. good luck. beg for forgiveness. CC the right people next time and be grateful, kid. somebody has it worse than you. someone, probably, has it worse than you. so what if you can’t sleep or eat or focus. your work chat sound literally makes you panic. you had to change the sounds of computer notifications so you’d stop having such an upset stomach.

welcome to the real world! the rat race! the dog eat dog circus!

your doctor studies the results and frowns at you. “it’s bad for your heart,” she says. “try to reduce your levels of stress.”

[perfectlyripeclementine]

calling my lover "mine" but not in the way that my toothbrush or notebook are mine, mine in the way my neighborhood is mine, and also everybody else's, "mine" like mine to tend to, mine to care for, mine to love. "mine" not like possession but devotion.

[purlturtle]

Not "belongs to me"; "belongs with me."

[unchartedthelostlegacy]

i love graffiti. "comics and jazz are the only american art forms" you forgot graffiti. did you remember graffiti? That art form birthed in Philly and NYC in the early 70s by poor Black kids. that art form that spread all over the world and influenced so many. that's used without irony in commercials when they're trying to appeal to a "young urban" customer.

did you forget graffiti? that racism broken windows theory victim? that reach the establishment takes claiming that it's exclusively violent gang members throwing up those full-color pieces and wildstyle tags in the middle of the night outsmarting fifty security cameras because the billboard was ugly anyway. as if, even if it was, it wouldn't be impressive as all hell. risking brutality and fall damage so your art can occupy the space a gentrified condo named something like "Coluumna" took away from you. proving that despite only assholes affording to live here anymore there's still a soul beneath it. an animal with dripping stripes and teeth that go clack-clack tsssss

[cannabiscomrade]

Bathroom accessibility is not limited to mobility aids.

Bathroom accessibility is also having hooks to hang medical equipment.

I went to Walmart today and none of the bathroom stalls had hooks for my feeding tube backpack. Not even the disabled stall. They were intentionally removed by the store.

These hooks are important because we shouldn’t have to put our equipment on the floor and risk god knows what by contaminating our backpacks in the public bathroom.

Bathroom accessibility is having a fully equipped disabled stall or single use bathroom, hooks for medical equipment/bags, infant/child AND adult changing tables, sharps containers, free pads/tampons, and having a free to access, fully functioning and clean bathroom at all times.

[cannabiscomrade]

Image description: Tags from @evil-queens-rule reading:

#also stop turning off the outlets in the bathrooms!! #sometimes I need a place to plug in my nebulizer machine and the bathroom is like the most private place to do it #but if all the outlets are turned off fuck u /end image description

No this is so true!! I can never find a place to plug in my nebulizer. I don’t need it all the time but when I do I’m pretty much homebound due to the inaccessibility of outlets in a lot of public spaces.

[apatheistlesbian]

"Accessible" restrooms are also not actually accessible if the doors to the room are heavy and do not have a way to be automatically opened. How am I supposed to wheel myself into the restroom if my hands are busy trying to push and hold the door open? (This applies to restrooms with multiple stalls AND single use restrooms!)

[bequeerdodopemonkshit]

"Just because you lost me as a friend, doesn't mean you gained me as an enemy. I'm bigger than that, I still wanna see you eat, just not at my table." -- Tupac Shakur

[gospocki]

!!

[shrinkrants]

I’m so uninterested in narratives. That word that gets used often. Narrative-building. People that want to be all about narrative-shifting, narrative-building. I believe that when we are in relationship with each other, we influence each other. What matters to me, as the unit of interest, is relationships. The second thing that matters to me as a unit of impact is harm. I want to figure out how to transform harm in every possible context because I have been harmed, and I have harmed other people. My political commitments are to developing stronger relationships with people, and to transforming harm. All those other things that you mentioned, the ideas only matter to me to the extent that they impact both those [commitments]. It is deeply offensive and hurtful to me that we have prisons because they break relationships and people. That’s how I feel about prisons—they are inherently made for isolation. When they talk about repair and restorative justice, it’s all about relationships, and relationships in the context of harm. So, when people talk about these things as though they are just abstract ideas, or things that are just theory-building without connection to actual people’s lives, I can’t recognize it.

Mariame Kaba, Everything Worth Doing is Done with Other People

[reblogging this ‘cause it can’t be said too often]

(via shrinkrants)

[timemachineyeah]

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad. 

[heavyweightheart]

This casual rant is like a primer on weight science. Amazing. I second their book recommendations, and would add to the list Body Respect by Drs Bacon & Aphramor, Body of Truth by journalist Harriet Brown, and What’s Wrong with Fat? by UCLA professor of sociology Abigail Saguy.

[mikkeneko]

man I remember that time I reblogged an anti-fatphobia post and lost a follower and  reader who took the time to come into my DMs and rant about how betrayed he felt that I, who he had trusted and respected, would dare to signal boost content that made people feel like it was okay to be fat. how dare I

anyway the weightloss industry is a scam

[happyheidi]

Art by Katherine Blower 🍂

[shrinkrants]

When I was in ninth grade, my science teacher asked the class if stones were alive. We were learning the seven criteria of life. After reviewing the list, we said that no, stones were not alive. He asked us if we were sure. We went over the criteria again and told him yes, we were sure. He said that it might be that stones did things more slowly than we could measure. Could it be that we lacked the ability to see these things in stones? Or could the criteria be wrong? Then he smiled. This possibility—of something like a stone being alive—has stayed with me. Ojibwe Anishinaabe author and academic Lawrence Gross would agree with this science teacher. In Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being, Gross writes about the Anishinaabe language being more suited for quantum physics than English because it understands the dynamic nature of creation. It is a verb-based language, meaning that it talks about what things do rather than what they are. We are not human beings; we are humans being. Anishinaabemowin, like many other languages, is concerned with the relationships between things. This is revealed by the kinds of verbs that are used to describe what is happening. In English, I would say that the man hit his dog or that rain hit the ground, using the same verb. In Anishinaabemowin, we use different verbs depending on whether the thing being hit is animate or inanimate. For the Anishinaabeg, stones may be alive. Our word for stone is asin, and it is animate.

Patty Krawec, Can These Stones Live? The Christian Century (via shrinkrants)

[eelhound]

"If human societies are not simply aggregations of isolated individuals who come together to truck and barter, how then shall we conceptualize society? It’s [...] worth questioning the very idea of the self-sovereign individual. We are not born as sovereign individual agents even though of course we have certain capacities and scope for self-determination. We are, rather, creatures whose personal development and flourishing requires that we be nested within social and intergenerational collectives. We are actually 'Nested-I’s.'

As evolutionary scientists like E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and Martin Nowak have argued, group selection is a more influential force than individual selection in evolution. Collective social structures profoundly influence and constrain our individuality. Biologically speaking, it is even a bit difficult to talk about 'individuals' as if they were separate from 'nature.' Human beings could not function without millions of bacteria living in their guts, or without being immersed within a biodiverse ecosystem of living organisms. Yet much of economics remains locked into the mindset of atomistic, acquisitiveness individuals engaged in mechanical, cause-and-effect transactions in the service of capital accumulation. There is relatively little attention to the holistic, dynamic, non-linear dimensions of living systems. The notions of human aliveness and nonmarket values are scanted.

The idea of 'rational self-interest' is now so thoroughly embedded in modern life that the ontological frame is considered self-evident. However, as economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis show in their book A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, human beings have a rich evolutionary history of developing social systems and institutions to support 'strong reciprocity' and collective interests. The significant work of the late Elinor Ostrom, too, helped demonstrate the profound importance of social collaboration as a powerful economic force. Alas, despite her receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her pioneering work, the discipline has not really embraced her perspectives more fully.

This is a shame. Ostrom’s work has been a bellwether for many social movements that reject the stunted social vision and imagination of standard economics. In my own work as a commons scholar, I have seen scores of self-organized commons function extremely well. They use peer-governance and -provisioning to give people greater control over their lives, and in more satisfying, humane ways than labor markets. One need only look to such phenomena as open-source software, cosmo-local production (globally shared design knowledge + local physical production), open-access scientific publishing, data commons, WiFi and civic infrastructures managed as commons, cooperatives, community land trusts, community-supported agriculture, agroecology, indigenous land stewardship, cohousing, participatory budgeting in government, and much else."

- David Bollier, from "My Advice to an Aspiring Economist: Don’t Be an Economist." Evonomics, 21 January 2021.