dreamed I was having a very serious discussion with my friend about a union organising issue and in trying to append a hopeful supportive emoji I accidentally sent the entire group chat a unicode orchiectomy emoji

Discoholic 🪩

oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
🪼
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

shark vs the universe
RMH
d e v o n

@theartofmadeline

Andulka

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
taylor price
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Origami Around
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occasionally subtle

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Monterey Bay Aquarium
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
seen from United States
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@mercuryhat
dreamed I was having a very serious discussion with my friend about a union organising issue and in trying to append a hopeful supportive emoji I accidentally sent the entire group chat a unicode orchiectomy emoji
Hello bisexual community
Begin killing
ancient roman women whose husband keeps looking at the neighbour's boy quintus and he never looks at her that way and she can't even chainsmoke in the kitchen because they don't have marlboro blues in ancient times. and she can't even go to the club because they haven't discovered drum and bass music yet. her friend clodia's having visions of a woman named doechii but neither of them knows what that means
so I spent a lot of last year working with / around this local activist group mostly made up of your typical ambiently queer, ambiently leftist college students. like every loose affinity group it struggled with the sort of unpredictable fluctuating capacity problem of most participants being tied to day jobs or college term times, variously disabled, turning up when they could make it and then vanishing for months at a time. it's to be expected with that kind of organising but it does also make for kind of a pain in the neck.
anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.
about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.
now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.
this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.
in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.
so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.
you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,
or the MLM MLM LLM MLM if you're nasty.
Here's a legal PSA:
If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...
YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.
Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.
If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".
Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.
YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.
Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.
Know your rights. Don't let eccentric detectives put you away.
important addendum: confessing in this manner can make you much sexier, with a sultry tone of voice, a heaving bosom, a devil-may-care sneer on your cruel lips and in some cases the ability to sing narrative verse; it is worth considering whether these advantages are worth the cost of any potential criminal sentence
genuinely so frustrating when youtubers swear or say something like "kill" or "suicide" out loud uncensored, but the subtitles censor it. like why the fuck, if YouTube is gonna get your ass for writing "kill myself", literally who wouldn't it get you for Saying It??? all it does is make me feel babied as someone who has sensory processing issues, and I can't imagine how much worse I would feel if I was completely deaf. why do hearing people get the uncensored version but we get the toddlerified end??? how is that fair?
marge was born to hag she literally should be at the club with her group of gay guys she should be on poppers tipping the dolls. homer took everything away from her he makes me sick
“bits to use in everyday conversations”
In Heaven, We Will Be Together
fruit fly needlefelt sculpture made for a professor, nickel for scale
It has a pipecleaner skeleton, allowing it to stand on its own and have a mild degree of posability
The wings were very challenging, as I wanted them to look transparent but couldn’t achieve that look with roving. At the very least it looks like a fly, I suppose…
Cicada Killer with Cicada
Etsy
hedwig & campy
not pictured: flora having a near-death experience
accidentally tabbed into the explore page and the first thing trending on tumblr is good omens... kind of blows my mind how a man being a violent rapist who pretty explicitly used the social capital he gained by being a famous author to abuse women is not enough to turn you off of doing Fandom Stuff with their work. but fictional men being more real to the average tumblr user than real women is not surprising so I guess I don't have any right to act scandalized. it's just depressing man
like there's a conversation to be had for sure about what the appropriate ways are to engage with the work of a still-living creative who has been proven to use the goodwill their fame has bought them to get away with abusing people. because I don't think asking for gaiman or anyone else's entire body of work to be completely removed from any kind of public discussion is reasonable or practical. but I don't know man I am just personally of the belief that Fandomposting identically to the type of fandomposting you were doing before these facts came to light is really not it no matter how much you might talk about hating him in between those fandomposts.
you are too old to be misunderstanding what "death of the author" means this badly. it's not very complicated at all. it refers to the audiences interpretation of a text superseding authorial intent, and has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you excuse platforming someone who uses that platform to commit abuse. and to defend the "meaning and joy" people get out of publicly celebrating and legitimizing the work of a man who is currently still alive and whose numerous victims are still in a protracted legal battle to receive some semblance of justice for the hideous abuse they were subjected to is vile.
every time the general public is given the chance to stand by abuse victims they prioritize their own personal comfort and desire for entertainment, and there's nothing I can do to stop that but what I can do is tell them all they should be ashamed of themselves. because they should be and I have no qualms saying it no matter how "meaningful" gaimans work has been to them
apparently, chinese goths have figured out how to do qing era costuming. jiangshi time.
@post-brahminism check it
when brandon sanderson talks about villains in his famous free youtube writing class video lectures he'll say 'what's the difference between gollum and sauron' and of course he means the villain that's present in the narrative and characterized in a way the audience can potentially relate to or sympathize with vs. the looming threatening anonymous far-off force (among other things). but every time he asks that i think 'well one of those guys tracked down frodo and got his ring back'
Brandon Sanderson: What's the difference between Gollum and Sauron?
OP: Skill issue.
Brandon Sanderson:
What’s the difference between
Gollum and Sauron?
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.