I always knew I loved reading 9,000 versions of the same fic trope over and over and over because it fed something in my soul. Like, please, please do write your take on this! I promise I'll eat it up with a spoon. Until this week I didn't know I could have the same experience with hot takes, but here we are. I have been surviving off reading all y'alls horrified "here's what was wrong with GO3" posts non stop and it's not the hating I'm vibing on. It's the feeling seen and understood by each and every one of you out there also grieving and posting about it. So keep em coming. Love to everyone. Stay safe.
it's not the hating I'm vibing on. It's the feeling seen and understood by each and every one of you out there also grieving and posting about it.
This. It's not the hate that feeds me, it's the sense of community around a shared sentiment, that we're not alone or stupid or media illiterate, like other people said.
does anybody remember the s1 exchange between aziraphale and crowley where crowley was like what do you mean god is going to drown everyone even kids you can’t kill kids and then aziraphale was like it’s ok god is going to create a rainbow at the end :))))) and then the gomens finale is like god kills everyone but it’s ok bc there’s 1 gay couple at the end :)))))) anyway,
Transphobia is about to be signed into law in the UK. We can fight this.
I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.
Last year we broke the record for an LGBT+ mass lobby of Parliament. Will you help us break it again? Join us on 25th June 2026 to demand be
The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.
Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.
A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:
Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.
Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.
Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns
Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.
I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.
It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:
Worried about what to say?
Bring your personal worries about transphobia being signed into law, and trans friends being excluded from public spaces. You are a living person who deserves dignity. Remind your MP of that. You will also get guidance and brochures from Trans Solidarity Alliance that outlines our demands. This is mine from last year.
Money issues?
Trans Solidarity Alliance provides a travel bursary that you can sign up for via the link.
Got a refusal or no response from your MP?
Come anyway! You can request a same-day appointment with your MP through a process called greencarding. They will come and see you if they’re already in Parliament. Even if they don’t, they’re made acutely aware of your cause because you showed up in person. This is my greencard from last year.
Here is the EHRC Code of Practice in full. It's a tough read, but some highlights are:
Organisations can’t provide trans-inclusive, single-sex services, or they risk being sued for discrimination.
e.g. domestic violence support for women including trans women, men’s rugby group including trans men (12.68).
Trans people will have nowhere safe to pee.
If you’re a trans man, businesses can't allow you to pee in the men's, and you can also be ejected from women’s bathrooms if you’re perceived as a man. Vice versa for trans women. EHRC suggests a ‘third space’ bathroom, which is discriminatory and unworkable for most businesses. (13.130-133)
Sports organisations must exclude trans people from single-sex competitions (13.73).
A women’s only sports competition must exclude trans women because of their biological advantage or face potential lawsuits (13.74), but a trans man who has undergone testosterone treatment can also be excluded based on fairness rules (13.81).
Trans women are stripped of the legal definition of ‘lesbian’, and therefore no longer have legal protections if they’re discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation. (2.50, 2.92).
Here is the Good Law Project's better explanation of the EHRC Code.
I have also made a PDF printout of QR codes for the government petition, email your MP tool, and mass lobby link to pass around your communities. DM me and I'll send it to you.
incidentally, the notion of an ageless immortal being committing to something like New Year's resolutions so perfectly encapsulates what Good Omens is all about. what could be flimsier, more subjective, more human than accounting for who you are now--and who you might become in one trip-round-the-sun?
Good Omens is about the ephemera of being human: lignin-infested shelves and James Bond memorabilia, filigreed snuffboxes alongside stickers and potting soil and whatever pomade the barber recommended last Tuesday. it's a story that understands that all life happens in the incidentals; that stuff becomes something more for being cherished.
Crowley and Aziraphale are doggedly, determinedly materialistic. that's not a bad thing! and it's not just a part they're playing, like Gabriel in his off-the-rack suits. they're able to understand each other--to love each other--because they love the world: selfishly, joyously, materially.
glory, victory, all that jazz? they're abstracts. but love is a thing made of atoms.
this is something the S3 writers, headed by that evil man, don't acknowledge: love doesn't cave in the universe. it stores up every trifle, because those vacant wine glasses (still streaky with a long-legged red) and half-emptied teacups (tannins softened into something algal)--they're the things we share to build a life, a world, an us.
the idea of an ageless immortal being devising little nitpicky changes for himself!!! the ritual of marking time by choosing what you'll do with it!!! (and failing! and trying again! and forgetting about it all entirely until next year, when you try again!!!)
I guess what I'm trying to say is, remembering how Terry saw these characters--how he set them loose in the world--makes me so happy. it reminds me that part of why I love Good Omens is that it makes me want to be a better person--a hopeful person.
this blue marble is the best of all possible worlds for being ours. there's so much I want to do; not all of it will come to pass, and not all of it should. but isn't it wonderful, getting to try?
That's because he didn't write, nor intend to write, a horrible terrible disturbed woman beyond redemption. The genesis of Carrie (told in its entirety in the 1999 edition's introduction that you can read here, and in King's memoir On Writing), was this: sometime in high school, King read an article in Life magazine about supposed poltergeist activity in a home, which seemed to be associated with the teenage girl who lived there. The article included the hypothesis that poltergeist activity is, in some way, tapped into or manifested by girls at that critical and tumultuous age.
And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.
Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.
Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It's about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It's about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.
"Sometimes—quite often, in fact—I wish that Tina and Sandy were alive to read it," King says in the 1999 introduction to Carrie. "Or their daughters."
Wow wtf HIV/AIDS was discovered by Flossie Wong-Staal, an Chinese-American woman, and she’s the reason the HIV test even exists. AND THEN she invented the molecular knife that lead to treatments for HIV/AIDS. And she’s STILL ALIVE. We don’t hear about the contributions of Women of Color enough, my word. Madness.
you can always tell a major breakthrough is made by a woman, a woc or any poc because it’s either completely ignored or never credited like it just happened by itself
men who try to shame women for liking calming games like animal crossing or minecraft or whatever are so pitiful. like maybe if u planted some virtual flowers to some calming music for a few hours u wouldnt be such a lil bitch
Friends, in case some of you, like me, are published authors or illustrators or creators of any kind, and you are still using any Google service (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Classroom), please consider deleting all your material from Drive and moving it to external harddisks or something similar before it turns into a catastrophic problem like mangaka Masahiro Itosugi just experienced:
Japanese adult manga creator Masahiro Itosugi had his Google account permanently banned when he uploaded old manuscripts to Drive, reignitin
I really hope this comes as no surprise to all of you and you were already taking precautions about it, but I know for a fact that 100% of my colleagues in the academic field back their papers and their books up on Drive, and that most of our institutional email addresses and some essential tools (for example Gmeet, that we are required to use for remote teaching or to record conferences) are based on Google Workspace (including crucial stuff like uni department documents, scientific journal archives, publicly funded projects contracts and so on).
Now they could be flagged for copyright infringment and lose access to their entire accounts for uploading back up copies of THEIR OWN work on Drive, because AI systems are apparently unable to recognise the legitimate owner of copyrighted material (or they have been intentionally set up to not recognise it so that tech corps can steal people's work).
The complete automation of the scraping-scanning-banning process, that Google has now delegated entirely to unchecked AI, with no human review, is coming for us quicker than I thought, and while there may be some things that I fear we can't disentangle from this mess anymore (I'm thinking of Gmail specifically), we can still pull our work from Drive before it's too late.
I'm not sure how to properly tag this, but if you know people who may need this warning, please help them understand how serious things are becoming.
So we're all gonna let the new Harry Potter show die on the vine, right? No hatewatching. No thinkpieces. No videos about how bad it is. Deprive it of oxygen and let it wither away unremarked-upon and unprofitable; make HBO lose their entire investment and prove to the corporate entertainment sphere that the entire IP is poison. And spend that time doing something that brings you joy instead.
im being so serious when i say this but we need to bring back the "my genitals are none of your business" "if gender is whats in my pants then my gender is some loose change" mentality from the late 2010's because too many people on here are openly flirting with exclusionary people who spout enbyphobic rhetoric. stop caring about what people's agabs are you assholes. they literally mean nothing. they're not a zodiac sign or indicative of people's character. you are not wholly pure or wholly evil because of your assigned sex. you're just a person.
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 1989. 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.
Read this post yesterday and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since. I am on a whole different continent than the op and it is still the same here. We are taught american queer history in school and none of our own. US queer liberation is seen as universal, even on the other side of the globe. I don't think the americans angry about this post realise that their history has culturally replaced ours and that even when doing research in our own languages we have to sift through article after article about the united states, and when finding something about our own countries it tends to just be a timeline of when things were decriminalised/legalised with little footnotes about who signed the act. Even in queer spaces the people that should be our icons are still unheard of, the people who gave us our rights are rarely written about and even when they are those texts don't reach the larger queer communities. We all need to take steps to decenter the US in our lives
IneffabLeigh's Art 'n Drabbles @ineffableigh - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
