Icarus' Stuff

He/they 32 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 ADHD chaos!! Currently posting D&D characters, OCs, and self-educational art and reading material. May also find angry trans noises...

[kira-7]

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

If you want to spread it elsewhere, here's the official link

[arctic-hands]

[Video Description: An ad with piano music over it all, showing an elderly woman in her home, knitting, when two younger men walk by her window, which catches her attention. She stares out her window at them as they kiss each other while walking, the old lady staring in disbelief. Cut to the old woman approaching a residence with a broom in hand, staring up at the second floor window where a small rainbow Pride flag is hanging. The old woman stares up at it and mutters "Ridiculo", before getting up on a ladder with her broom to remove the flag. Focus on the flag fluttering to the ground as church bells chime. The scene then cuts to the couple from before, approaching their home with grocery bags in hand before one stops and stares at the second floor, stopping his partner who then drops the groceries as he too stares up. It's then revealed that the small pride flag had been replaced with a gigantic, hand-knit pride flag. It then cuts back to the old woman's home, where a tin of rainbow-colored yarn sits on her table. The hands of the old woman are holding and fondly touching an old black and white photo of two young smiling women, leaning against each other. Cut to the old woman's face as she stares out with a look of happy pride on her face. At the end of the video, the name "Idealista" appears on screen, followed by "buon pride" along with a rainbow. End VD.]

[spaceofentropy]

One correction:

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

In this case, thankfully, the Strong Opinion™️ is that those two men are ridiculous with their teeny tiny flag for ants.

[w0nderland42]

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

[icarus-in-the-sheets]

Happy Pride Month, Aotearoa!

[buttpoems]

[papercranesandpride]

I remember years ago, long enough ago that I was still using either Tiktok or Instagram regularly, because that's where I saw this, long enough ago that unfortunately I do not remember the username, I saw an older trans woman responding to a comment asking "how come we see trans women from your generation, but never trans men?" And her response was simple. "Unfortunately, it's because most of them are dead." Between lack of safe and legal abortions (which, hey, look what's an issue again), the HIV/AIDs crisis (which still is lacking in approved treatments for trans men, and they're still likely to be denied PrEP/PEP even when they should be eligible as sexually active queer men), and how many of them chose to take their own lives after being forced into marriages and other women's roles, a lot of the trans men that should be elderly right now did not make it.

And now, when I find myself making the mistake of going on Instagram, I get to see trans men themselves talking about how historically, trans men didn't do anything for the community, and so we need to step up now. Which, first of all, that isn't true, but second of all, if trans men's contributions are lesser, that makes a lot of sense if we listen to that trans woman talking about the trans men she was in community with back in the day. It's very hard to advance the trans cause if you're not alive.

Anyway. It's a really chilling answer. "Where are all the elderly trans men?" "They're dead." And I just wish more people saw that tiktok and listened to it and really took it to heart, now that we're in the age of "well obviously trans men have it so much easier."

[what-even-is-thiss]

I often forget that people outside of my little corner of the internet don’t see problems related to reproductive organs as gender neutral and making jokes about my very manly uterus won’t go over well with the normies

[buffalo-tracks]

Internet archive links to books I've started to recommend if you care about indigenous people and anti-colonialism.

The Wretched of the Earth

Discourse On Colonialism

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism

Settlers: The Mythology Of The White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

Borderlands/La Frontera

As We Have Always Done

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Books I couldn't find on the archive but still recommend you purchase or check out at the library:

[animentality]

[icarus-in-the-sheets]

My spouse proposed to me in a taco bell with a "marry me" sauce packet in front of my mother on a whim. We had been talking about getting married bc my insurance was bad, which I believed to be mostly a joke, or at least a dire backup plan. So obviously the sauce packet was a joke.

A year or so later, I have realized I actually wanna spend my life with this goober, so I anxiously wake him up at 6am, and am like, "so about that joke at taco bell... can that be legit?" and they say, "no I was serious, I thought we were already engaged, I was just waiting for the insurance to be a better deal before planning a wedding"

[gaudebo]

a therapist i hate is back from maternity leave and it’s ruining my LIFEEEE stop asking me for things I Dont Like Youuuu

[icarus-in-the-sheets]

that sucks, I'm sorry you're dealing with that

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[creatingblackcharacters]

And what is it we just talked about in book club?? THIS.

[imjunebitch]

u gotta get less misanthropic I'm not kidding

[imjunebitch]

especially now with all the bullshit going on in Kansas, in Texas, in Iran, with Israel and Palestine, this ICE shit, this Epstein shit, it is essential to remember that evil and violence is not the natural state of humanity. this is not what humanity is like. if it was, there would be no reason to be disgusted or fight against it. most people are good and decent, and are victims of this, and by reducing it to a "carte blanche humanity is fucked anyway" you are casting aside the good, decent, loving people with rich inner lives who these cowardly fucks think are disposable

[demigirl-in-christ]

being real for a second, i struggle with this so much. with everything going on it's hard not to think humanity is just evil by default, or at the very least apathetic to evil. it feels like nobody cares.

[isuggestlandback]

The world is really really REALLY fucked up right now.

It's so fair that you feel like no one cares, we live under media conglomerates that preach anger and fear non stop.

I promise you there are people out there working as hard as they can to change things, and to help each other, and even though they don't get the attention that the evil and the hatred gets they are real and they are out there!

Refusing to stop caring is an act of rebellion. I'm sorry the world is so fucked. Things are awful and I'm scared too, but I absolutely refuse to let them convince me that there's no hope.

I promise there's a better world out there! I see you and I wish you an easier world ♡

[guerrillatech]

[politicalhobbyist]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

idk if I've told this story on here before but one time I was sitting at my desk at work and a random dog I'd never seen before strolled into my office and curled up at my feet. and I was like oh you are adorable but what the fuck?

then a woman knocked on the door and said "oh I'm so sorry he's a therapy dog he's trained to seek out people in severe distress"

and I was like right okay, just getting my whole life drive-by roasted by a dog then

[i-was-today-years-old-when]

TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)

[ancestralia]

In 1997 Amelia’s daughter, Mary Moran, and other members of the Moran family were invited to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where they were welcomed in Freetown by Sierra Leone’s President and then flown by helicopter to the country’s interior.  There, in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Mary and Bendu Jabati met and sang this song together for the first time.  Years earlier, Bendu’s grandmother had told her that this song, which had been passed down in her village from mother to daughter for centuries, would one day reunite her to long-lost relatives.

In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song: a processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.

(The OP's link leads to a site with a recording of the song sung by both Mary Moran and her mother, Amelia)

[bathater]

For anyone looking: original link is broken, but fortunately the site is still up just migrated here. Also shared on the site are this clip of a news report regarding the story of Amelia and her descendants and a video of Mary and Wilson Moran's own reflections on their family history.

The full story of search connecting Amelia's Song to the Mende is told in the documentary The Language You Cry In. The distributor's site is here if a public library near you doesn't have it available already.

The story of Harris Neck, GA and the seizure of land by the U.S. War Department removing 75 African American families from their homes is also part of the Moran family's story and part of the ongoing injustice faced by Black communities in the U.S. South. You can find out more about the fight to reclaim Harris Neck in the short documentary film Descended: The Fight for Harris Neck, which is currently fully available on YouTube.

The Harris Neck Land Trust has more information on all of the above on their website, where they can also be contacted, and accept donations to help support them in their legal battle to reclaim the land for the families it was stolen from.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m not gonna platform this idiot but I saw somebody reblog a post from a radfem I think by accident. But the post claimed that men who hire prostitutes are “rapists who buy their victims silence”

I don’t think I need to explain to y’all why this is wrong but in case I do, buying a service from someone and following their rules as a client is not a breech of consent.

A lot of the danger that comes from being a prostitute has to do with its illegality. If a client breaks the rules and the service provider can’t file a complaint without risking imprisonment of themselves and/or their client, that’s not a safe work environment.

The idea that nobody would willingly sell sexual services unless they’re desperate is just false. There’s also a lot of other jobs people do when they’re desperate and they don’t like doing. For me it was working retail.

The difference between me pretending to be happy for clientele while working retail and someone pretending to be happy while selling sexual services to clients is that while I was working retail I at least theoretically had sick leave, health insurance, and a way to file a complaint if a customer assaulted me.

Sex work isn’t inherently any more degrading or miserable than any other kind of work. The issue is the lack of protection and workers rights.

[icarus-in-the-sheets]

-----------⛦˙☠︎︎⋆Fear (he/him)⋆☠︎︎˙⛧-------------

aka Ekilar Diocles, Guardian of the Rhean Rescue.

Created for a diplomatic mission that needed another background character who was a martial fighter, but who has become a vital and staple member of the focal location of my D&D world-build.

Fear is coming in as both our Gay Pride character and as I had originally intended before it was suddenly June, an exercise in my studies of CBC's Lesson 1.5: Hair for Thought. Find character building processes, original sketch, and backstory below the cut!

He is Gay Romantic and Demisexual. He is slow to love, loyal and steadfast in his love, and lets heartbreak linger a little too long. My default for characters is bisexual and polyamorous until proven otherwise unless I have a specific plan for them. I did not have a specific plan for Fear's sexuality and let him guide me. He guided me to one of @ceruleanties' characters named Hank, a dilf of a graviturgy wizard with a kind heart and smile. I related personally to the stubbornness and aversion to change that Fear was developing as a character, and re-imagined it alongside a Demi identity as well [I do not identify as demi myself but my allo identity is in question often enough in my head that demi is relatable to me plentifully].

Fear's physical design went through some iterations before becoming what it is here. His first design was rather generic, as I was just wanting to draw a randomized character design. I used a tail and horn art reference chart from DeviantArt to design him, and I notated that he had dark blue skin and cyan accents and drew him in a generic leather outfit that was notated as being white with simple straps/belts.

When I started looking for characters in need of overhaul for CBC's course I was looking primarily at dark brown characters like Finley who were designed with a human or human approximate skin tone, but without a racial intention. However, I noticed that as a dark-skinned man, he also may have needed attention, despite not having a human skin tone. Other things about the importance of his faith and the community he adopts and protects also reminded me of positive tropes associated with strong Black characters, and I felt the change would honor that.

In regards to Lesson 1.5 and his hair specifically, I have pictured above two styles - sponge twists and long locs in a bun. I came up with these two very different styles in response to two very different times in his life.

For his younger years living in the cold depths of Hell, when keeping up appearances and masking his identity in a false persona of violence and anger, he took time to style and color his natural cyan-white hair into a black-tipped sponge twist and kept it short for the mercenary-style work that he did so that it would stay out of his way. The style was about appearances - something he could put effort into controlling while the untrained eye would see it as effortless.

After he dropped the toxic masking of his youth, Fear moved out of Hell and adopted a community, giving him time to heal and grow -spiritually and mentally. His protected locs represent the growth and healing he found in that recovery. They are something he nurtures, showing that he isn't just a warrior and protector of his community, but also learning to protect himself.

I have *a lot* more to say about Fear. As well as a lot more research to do on his characterization and probably on his design. For example, I discovered while writing this that I have research to do on the specific fashion choices I've made for him and the ramifications that have for him as a Gay Black character. He means so much to me and his story is near and dear to my heart. I love him so much and he keeps coloring outside the lines and throwing me new surprises.

[icarus-in-the-sheets]

Fun fact: this man is also autistic, blink and you'll miss it in the original write up but I didn't use the term "masking" lightly.

Swords and knives, and hand-to-hand combat and fitness are his most prominent special interests. He doesn't feel right if he doesn't start his day with a run and he uses the maintenance of his weaponry as a centering stim.

[ultraviolet-techno-ecology]

Embossed braille should be standard on computer keyboards. 

It would raise braille literacy more than anything else I could imagine - among both the blind and the sighted. Currently braille is actually vanishing due to an increasing reliance on audiobooks and screen readers. 

I think that braille has a lot of potential use among non-blind groups. As an alternative to traditional writing for dyslexics. As a way to help photosensitive people type with their eyes closed. Or simply as a means to help sighted people find things without needing the lights on all the time!

[acutelyhomosexual]

Accessibility note: It’s important that braille doesn’t vanish because it’s one of the only written language that works for blind and sight-impaired people. It is necessary for them to interact with the real world where screen readers and audio devices are not available to them, such as elevators, most major metro systems, stairwells, doorways, the bumps in the sidewalk at corners are actually developed in conjunction with audio signals so blind people don’t step off the curb into traffic before the correct time. 

Digital technology has made accessibility so much easier for all of us disabled people, but we still *need* the real-world accommodations that we fought and died for

[icarus-in-the-sheets]

I'm reblogging this again bc as someone with (1) a little photosensitivity; and (2) who's laptop keyboard is literally the worst color for seeing what the printed letters say; and (3) also some issues with body awareness at times which makes the whole "just muscle memory where the keys are" thing that is supposed to help one type without peeking not always work; and (4) is a total linguistics nerd, especially for alphabets

I would learn braille if it was just right there, and it would probably improve my quality of life.

[creatingblackcharacters]

King of Drag s1e2 Perka $exxx as Steve Urkel/Sonic the Hedgehog

"do you want to talk about your autism?" would you like to yank the rest of my edges off while you're at it 😭 I'm actually gagged with personal affront right now 😭