weh

Sky, she/it. 30something. Communist, artist, and organic synthetic chemist. Art: skydarcyedwards.com skydarcyedwards.tumblr.com instagram.com/skydarcyedwards facebook.com/skydarcyedwardsart/ Previous art blog: c6h14nightmares.tumblr.com

[hexane-nightmares]

she/her

photography and other art: @skydarcyedwards

communist/socialist

living near Derbarl Yerrigan - always was, always will be Aboriginal land

free Palestine

[eisenkrahe]

Last year JK Rowling personally funded a group called Sex Matters to amend UK law so that trans women *overnight* went from legally women to legally men. This has resulted in mass exclusion of the trans community from numerous organizations, along with ongoing violent assaults on both trans and cis women alike.

With the new Harry Potter series she will be making a reported $20 million per-season renewal + other performance dependent royalties. She has been open across multiple interviews regarding her intentions to use said funds to push forth even more trans targeted legislation in the years to come.

This isn’t a “she gets paid no matter what” situation. The more eyeballs on this show the more money she has to actively harm vulnerable communities. By engaging with it you are directly supporting this and otherwise making a conscious choice to consume HP over doing the literal very least possible to not destroy the lives of trans people across the world.

If my stating the objective facts above upsets you then feel free to unfriend and move along. Your nostalgia-goggles feelings for a tired, problematic franchise mean nothing to me compared to the welfare of my trans friends and loved ones."

If you care more about badly written children's books and imaginary wizards more than you do about real people in the real world do it far the fuck away from me.

Don't try to be in my life.

In fact, you are cordially invited to eat shit and die.

[maidthings]

if trans women are only welcomed to sports on the condition of mediocrity then we arent welcome to sports

[maidthings]

at some point people lost the plot and went from "trans women have no unfair biological advantage in sports, and attempts to paint the situation otherwise are clearly a fig leaf for transmisogynistic discrimination" to "trans women actually never win at sports they're weak and unthreatening and won't take away medals from AFAB athletes"

[maidthings]

There's a common pattern to any transmisogynistic harassment of athletes, where people well say "Oh they only performed middlingly. why are people so upset" which not only implies that this harassment would be justified if she had won, but also misunderstands the reason the harassment happens in the first place: that a trans woman was placed higher than any cis woman in any context at all

[breadandm]

somebody posted this Calvin and Hobbes strip and i cannot overstate just how topical this fuckin thing is

[maidenofmadness]

Y'all ever feel like you need to cry but you're too tired so you just lay in one spot for hours?

[stellanix]

people often ask what tangible benefit space exploration has for life on earth, and while there are many potential answers to that question, i kinda disagree with its premise entirely. i imagine it's asked because, out of context, space missions seem very expensive, but nasa's budget is ~0.3% of the federal budget. not even a whole third of a penny per tax dollar. about ~40-50 dollars for the average taxpayer each year

and personally? i'm totally fine paying that amount of money just for the missions themselves. space missions won't solve all of our problems on earth, but they taught us what the hidden face of the moon is like, that pluto has a heart, that there are methane seas on a moon of saturn, how our sun and our planet came to be, what earth looks like from the edge of the solar system, that we are not the center of the universe, that we are one tiny part of an immense universe with countless stars, galaxies, and worlds

that's the benefit. it's a collective investment in our connection to the wider universe, and i just think that's worth it for it's own sake. especially compared to the far bigger sums of money governments and corporations regularly spend on far worse things. on a societal level, space exploration is miraculously cheap for what it does. there's no reason we can't afford to both solve the world's problems, and to spare a little on side to remember that there's a universe beyond them

[corvid-language-library]

The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be done with it and the sooner you can stop thinking about it. Go on, up you get, it won't be as bad as you think.

[corvid-language-library]

You won't want to do it later either. You might as well just do it now. Even if you don't finish it all, anything you manage to get done now is something you don't have to do later (when you still won't want to do it)

[sherlock-is-ace]

Where's that picture of the trans guy touching another trans guy's top surgery scars like Thomas touching Jesus' wound?!

I need it!! Today's both Easter and trans day of visibility!! That picture has never been more relevant!!!

[sherlock-is-ace]

Ok nvm I found it!!!!

And also found out Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin has a series of incredible queer religious photographs that are all amazing and I'm in love with all of them!

But this is the relevant one :')

[curation-nightmares]

Ecce Homo

Elisabeth Ohlson

[lakevida]

i always convince myself i dont sound that weird and then i go out in the world and get involved in anything longer than transactional small talk and its like ohhh thats right ive only been hanging out with gay people who speak in riddles

[adharathestara]

nazis made it illegal for Jewish people to drive before they began sending them to concentration camps. and let me remind you, people in the US are already being sent to worryingly concentration camp-esque places. the holocaust didn't just happen like that. Jewish people didn't dissappear overnight. fascism takes over slowly, and takes more and more rights from more and more people as it progresses.

and they do not, and will not, stop.

[decadentqueentidalwave]

So Kansas made trans people’s ID cards invalid, which means they can’t drive or really participate in society…

[sweetly-dazed]

It means trans people in kanas can't do the following:

Vote

Recieve medical care from outpatient

Drive

Travel domestically or internationally with that driver's license

Go out to bars or clubs

Go to out of state dispensaries if someone needs medical cannabis

Validate their medications at pharmacies which can be life saving (Trans people can also be on insulin and other very necessary medications besides the hormones for gender affriming care! A high percentage of trans folx are disabled or chronically ill)

Most importantly, none of them are able to stay stealth in the state of kanas which means they are more subjected to hate crimes and unjustified police violence.

Its not just a blatant attack on our trans people here its an active act of genocide that's cannot be done with any means of justification besides bigotry reasons.

[annabelle--cane]

I know what people are getting at when they say not to do this but I do actually appreciate knowing if someone's mental illness is at work when they give me an apology? like I don't think it's wrong to say "sorry for ghosting you, I had a paranoid episode and could barely look at my phone for two months" or "sorry for missing this event, I was really depressed and couldn't get out of bed" or "sorry I acted really weird and left quickly the other day, something triggered me and I couldn't figure out how to cool down until I was alone" because those are full and complete answers that would be less accurate if the symptom were edited out. I know what those things mean and I would actually prefer to know if my friend messed something up for reasons not entirely within their control rather than have them attempt to take responsibility for things they already actively try to avoid doing.

[syzygy-yzygy]

Girl are you the Hays Code the way you consider media irredeemable if it depicts anything that strays away from the norm you're comfortable with or depicts anything morally questionable without definitively condemning it and anyone associated with it, therefore creating worse stories and content and making it difficult for people to engage with complicated issues from a nuanced and controlled perspective?

[skydarcyedwards]

I'm at the scale model airport photographing the tiny planes.

[jingerpi]

imagine you're a child, you learn your queer and your parents are extremely bigoted. you have some friends on Roblox who are very kind, they're in their early 20s and they sympathize as they went through the same things as a kid. they offer to use your correct name and pronouns, maybe some even offer to buy you a binder or help you find hrt or support groups local to you

roblox rolls out their age group system, and you can no longer talk to any adults on the platform. you can only talk to people in person, i.e. your parents, who are horrid. now you're back at square one, being helplessly abused. to make it worse, you're homeschooled, as I was. you can't reach out to anyone at school for support either.

or maybe you're not homeschooled, and you ask your pronouns to be used at school. it goes well for a while, and you feel some relief.

then your state passes a bill that requires forced outing. your teachers report to your parents that you've been trying out a different name and pronouns.

they pull you from school, send you to boarding school or conversion therapy, and force you to attend private schools in the future that match their values.

you are entirely under their control. you could've made connections with other adults, ones willing to help you out. to treat you like a human, give you access to life saving care. and it's stripped away, you're alone, and everything feels hopeless.

this is the reality for many children. this is almost exactly what I went through as a child. it is not a mere hypothetical, it happens regularly. please stop falling for this moral grandstanding, it's about control- it's always been about control.

[suggestionsofkindness]

I’m taking your hand very gently when I say this, especially cause I struggle with it too:

It is more important that you are in the pictures than how you look in them. Having pictures of something joyful and being in them helps you remember good times years ahead. The more time passes, the more nostalgic it gets, and the more you might regret not being in the pictures or having them. At some point, you will hopefully also look at yourself with kinder eyes, and notice the joy in the pictures themself and the joy the memories bring.

Your presence matters far more than your looks ever will. 🌸

[intactics-deactivated20211231]

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for”. We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

[dataandphilosophy]

“For example, if you’re trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didn’t see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldn’t make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT — even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to “this is important, so do WHATEVER I SAY”; they want to be convinced that what you’re proposing will work.”

Source.

[demonprincex]

some people’s politics have no conceptual interest in accumulating power outside of their own social ingroup. they want to be right, but not to win, because being morally righteous does win the day within the tight social circles in which they operate, and it gives them status and a sense of control within their insular setting. in fact, focusing on the moral righteousness of every action helps keep their activist communities so small and insular (and therefore easier for them to control). to try and actually win on a larger scale would be to open themselves up to scrutiny, and a diversity of experiences and cultures, and lots and lots of people with very practical concerns who would not fall for their manipulations.

a lot of the very beloved powerful people within activist spaces work like this, and do not realize that they do. but as social beings we are strongly motivated by status and attention, and we tend to do what will help us hold onto those things if we have got em. these are the same dynamics that sometimes develop into out-and-out cults, but more often than not, they just lead to a shitty internal culture, lots of burnout and turnover and bad vibes.