hi guys, I am Ms. Cosplay from Yellow Rose Cosplay and the fonder, ask me anything, talk to me, rp with me, anything. I'm from new York but I live in Florida. I go to UCF and I go by female pronouns.
I imagine it’s up to the person making the map. But maybe the more dice in a single spot, the more mountainous or forested the area. Maybe choose a few dice to be deemed cities, and some dice for ruins.
We are grateful to everyone who contacted us and asked how they can help. What do we need now?
- Help us to spread the information about the fact that the Russian LGBT Network is ready to evacuate people. Please think for whom this information can be useful. You can spread the information publicly or personally. Everyone who needs help can contact us by email or call the Hotline (8 800 555 73 74). The call is free all over Russia.
- In accordance with the Russian legislation, every citizen can apply to the Investigative Committee with the demand to investigate the information about the crime published in mass media. We encourage everyone to apply (the template of the claim will be published tomorrow).
We understand that many people want to help those in need. But please remember that any uncoordinated actions can put in additional danger people in need and those who are ready to help. Therefore, we do not recommend to collect the addresses of people who are ready to provide temporarily shelter.
Be aware, that the situation with the human rights in the North Caucasus is truly difficult. Now people’s lives are endangered and the only way to help is the evacuation. The Russian LGBT Network has the necessary resources to evacuate people, there is a team that already makes every effort to safe lives. That is why we ask everyone to share with us the information about people in need and any offers of assistance.
the highlighting was mine- don’t dm people asking if they’re ok and if they know about this. even if you think your messaging system is secure. encryption is a two way street, and if their end is NOT secured it doesn’t really matter what your end has. especially since those arrested have had their phones confiscated, you do not want to give the authorities any more evidence. however, if you are in a position to do so, posting about it publicly will increase the odds that those who need this information see it.
This is not even the news being news, as a person who can read Russian I can sadly confirm the information. Also, seconding the reblog before mine - DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT MESSAGE PEOPLE DIRECTLY ABOUT IT. YOU CAN PUT THEM IN DANGER BY DOING THAT. Especially if using any Russia-based messaging app/social media. Russian police are assholes they are known to confiscate things they are not allowed to confiscate and request and get the information they are not allowed to get and generally ignore the same laws they are supposedly enforcing. The less evidence they can get by legal or illegal means, the better.
There is not a lot of people from Russia subscribed to me or even a lot of just people who are subscribed to me in general, but the more information is spread about this, the better. If you know any LGBT people living in Russia or Chechnya (Especially Chechnya!) you probably should reblog this.
Good thing I am not living in Russia right now.
Если вы являетесь человеком нетрадиционной ориентиции и/или гендера проживающим в Росии или Чечне(Особенно Чечне!) вам лучше прочитать этот пост по крайней мере с помощью гуглопереводчика прямо сейчас.
Hundreds of men suspected of being gay are being abducted, tortured and even killed in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya:
Russian newspapers and human rights groups report that more than 100 gay men have been detained “in connection with their non-traditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such” as part of a purge. Several people were also reportedly feared dead following violent raids.
Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch wrote: “For several weeks now, a brutal campaign against LGBT people has been sweeping through Chechnya.
Two television reporters, a waiter, and numerous other men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have been reported missing from the state of Chechnya, in Russia.
In one instance, a 16-year-old boy was detained but reappeared later with severe injuries from being beaten.
Human rights activists in the area believe that authorities have been arresting and killing the missing men, all of whom are believed to be gay.
I’ve just checked the official website of Russian LGBT network, and there are news from today:
“We receive alarming reports from Chechnya that unknown people are calling those who are now hiding from persecution and offer help with traveling abroad. These people call themselves the employees of the LGBT organization and invite to come to Krasnodar and discuss the details.
The Russian LGBT network officially states that our representatives in the regions do not communicate and are not authorized to call someone. All communication is conducted ONLY through the Hotline and mail [email protected]. We warn that such proposals for assistance are not related to the work of the Russian LGBT network and may pose a threat to life.”
“Мы получаем тревожные сообщения из Чечни о том, что неизвестные люди звонят на телефоны тех, кто сейчас скрывается от преследований и предлагают помощь с выездом заграницу. Эти люди представляются сотрудниками ЛГБТ-организацией и приглашают приехать в Краснодар и обсудить детали.
Российская ЛГБТ-сеть официально заявляет о том, что наши представители в регионах не ведут связь и не уполномочены кому-либо звонить. Все общение ведется ТОЛЬКО через Горячую линию и почту [email protected]. Мы предупреждаем, что подобные предложения о помощи не связаны с работой Российской ЛГБТ-сети и могут представлять угрозу для жизни.”
I don’t have enough people following me, please boost this, this is terrifying
To my fellow Russians, I am here. If I could give you a place to stay I would. I am in america because my family fled russia during the fall of the Tsar’s. I am a LGBT member as well, I want to take my girlfriend to Russia with me to experience part of my heritage, and find out more about my family, since I recently lost the last person from my Russian side. But we can’t, we are scared to, and hearing this makes it all worse. To my Brat’ya and Sestry in Russia, my heart goes out to you all, I may not know much Russian, so I hope my words come across properly. But I wish I could help. I wish I could do something. Stay strong and stay brave. We are Russian, we are strong. No one can tell us to mold to the cookie cut way. We mold others not do as they say. Remember who we are, where we come from and what/who we love. We love the motherland, we may not love the president/dictator, but we love Mother Russia, and we love our significant other. We love our self’s and our families. Love makes us stronger, no matter what people say otherwise, love makes us stronger. Stay strong my brothers and sisters in Russia, stay queer, we will make it out of this together.
I know a ton of you have been waiting for this one. Teaching you to make your own plastic keychains!
To start off, I think the biggest question everyone has is what I use to make them. I work with shrink film. You might be familiar with Shinky Dink brand shrink film as a kid. I use Grafix brand white inkjet shrink film. The inkjet kind is relatively pricey compared to the regular kind. If you’re using regular, I don’t recommend you stick it in your printer. Sharpie markers would be good for that.
Alright, now open up the file with the images that you’re working with. Make sure your images are a lot bigger than you want your finished product to be since they shrink significantly.
You’ll also want to lighten the opacity to about half. I go somewhere between 50-60%.
Now print your image out! I’ve found that it works best for me when I have it at the plain paper setting, and standard print quality.
Holepunch with a ¼" holepuncher BEFORE you shrink them. It’s so much more work to have to punch holes when your plastic is thick!
Cut out your design, leaving the amount of border you want.
Set them on a tray for convenience. An aluminum foil sheet works too, but I recommend cookie trays because they are easier and quicker to get out of the oven.
Preset heat. Your shrink film package will tell you what temperature to set it at, but I find that it isn’t always accurate for me. I generally set temperature to 350 degrees or so.
Put them in the oven. Remember to keep track of time! I leave them in for about a minute and a half.
After time is up they should be super small! Magic!
If your charms are not flat, put something heavy on it right out of the oven when they are still hot and malleable.
If you’d like to, you can seal them now. In my last two batches, I used clear topcoat nail polish. The problem with that is that I need between 3-5 coats of it, and it takes a while to dry. I’ve been experimenting with modpodge.
For lariats, you can use jump rings or lobster clasps.
Here is one that I made that wasn’t sealed. The finished texture after shrinking is a little bit rough. There’s nothing wrong with leaving them unsealed, but because they are inkjet printed, the colors wash right of without protection.
This is one that was sealed with modpodge. The colors become a little more vibrant and smooth and water resistant. Things often get stuck on when applying or drying so be careful.
These ones down here were sealed with clear nail polish. They come out shiny if you put enough coats, but the grainy texture will still be there.
Well, there ya go! Have fun making your own keychains!
The First Amendment Defense Act would allow hospitals, governments, universities, and businesses to ignore same-sex marriage, deny women health care, and fire gay people.
The First Amendment Defense Act is the nuclear version of the so-called “religious freedom” laws that have appeared across the country, most infamously in Mike Pence’s Indiana. The Republican House will surely pass it, the Senate will pass it unless it’s filibustered by Democrats, and President-elect Trump has promised to sign it.
If it becomes law, FADA will be the worst thing to happen to women and LGBT people in a generation.
Like state “religious freedom restoration acts,” FADA’s basic principle is that it’s not discrimination when businesses discriminate against LGBT people if they have a religious reason for doing so. The most famous situations have to do with marriage: wedding cake bakers who say that if they bake a cake, they’re violating their religion; Kim Davis, the government clerk who said that signing a secular marriage certificate was a religious act that she could not perform.
But those stories are a red herring. The more important cases are ones like hospitals refusing to treat LGBT people (or their children), pharmacies refusing to fill birth control prescriptions, businesses refusing to offer health benefits to a same-sex partner, and state-funded adoption agencies refusing to place kids with gay families. Underneath the rhetorical BS, that’s what FADA is all about.
First, the bill applies to any corporation, organization, or person who “believes or acts in accordance with a religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.”
Notice how broad that is: any business, agency, or individual, including government employees, hospitals, or huge businesses like Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A. Old-age homes and hospices that turn away gay people – yes, this has actually happened – are covered. Hospitals that refuse a same-sex partner visitation rights – covered. National hotel chains that refuse to rent rooms to gay couples (or unmarried straight ones) – covered.
And notice that it applies not just to religious beliefs about same-sex marriage, but also to sexual conduct in general. Translation: contraception, sex education, treatment of STDs – all of these are part of the bill. If a national pharmacy chain wants to refuse to fill prescriptions for the “morning after pill,” if a company wants to fire someone for being pregnant out of wedlock or becoming HIV positive, if a public school wants to stop teaching sex ed – all covered.
And finally, since “moral conviction” is added in there, it doesn’t matter that Jesus never mentioned health insurance coverage. No actual religious grounds are necessary; just some moral conviction that the only allowable sex is sex within a heterosexual marriage.
What does “covered” mean? Essentially, FADA prohibits the federal government from doing anything about any of these acts. Specifically, it lists revoking tax exempt status (as it did for Bob Jones University because of its racist policies, in the case that started the whole “religious freedom” movement) and refusing any federal grant, contract, or certification.
But then the bill adds “otherwise discriminate against such person,” which actually means anything at all, so long as the government is taking some adverse action. (“Person” includes companies and organizations, remember.) For example:
- The current government policy requiring federal contractors – 20% of the entire U.S. workforce – not to discriminate against LGBT people will be immediately revoked. Contractors can legally fire people for being gay (or transgender).
- A governor can order that, in his state, no clerk anywhere may certify a same-sex marriage, and the federal government could do nothing about it.
- If a restaurant or hotel posts a sign saying “NO FAGGOTS ALLOWED,” FADA prohibits the government from “discriminating” against it by initiating an enforcement action under public accommodations laws. Gay couples may be refused hotel rooms anywhere in the country.
- If a company refuses to let a person take time off to take care of her same-sex partner in the hospital, the government cannot pursue any action under relevant employment laws.
- If a state-funded adoption agency refuses to place children with legally married same-sex couples, the government cannot withdraw its contracts with that agency. (This was a key request by Catholic adoption agencies, which receive the bulk of their funding from the government.)
- An employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs could refuse to process a claim for survivor benefits for the same-sex spouse of a servicemember.
- All schools and universities can discriminate against LGBT people, regardless of Title IX (as long as they link that discrimination to a view about marriage, which is quite easy to do). Universities may turn away gay applicants, deny LGBT clubs, and fire all gay faculty and staff members, with no penalties from the federal government.
- Any hospital may refuse to provide contraception, reproductive health care (including consultations of any kind), or health care of any kind to unmarried people or gay people, and not lose accreditation.
- And yes, however unlikely, your boss could fire you for having (straight) premarital sex, and no federal agency could come after you.
Oh, and then there’s that third point to consider. FADA has one of the strangest “pre-emption” clauses of any bill I’ve ever seen. Normally, federal bills either pre-empt state ones, or have a “no pre-emption” clause, saying that state laws take precedence. FADA has some of each, stating that “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to preempt State law, or repeal Federal law, that is equally or more protective of free exercise of religious beliefs and moral convictions.”
In other words, if a state has a non-discrimination law against gay people, FADA supercedes it, prohibiting any federal action based on that law. But if a state has a law that protects the religious party more, FADA doesn’t supercede it.
Under that language, state level actions against anti-gay corporations, organizations, and individuals would not be prohibited – but the federal government could offer no assistance, and indeed could not do anything at all, even if the anti-gay party is in clear violation of state law. In other words, states with more protections for women or LGBT people – you’re on your own out there.
Overall, FADA makes LGBTs officially second-class citizens of the United States – more like those in anti-gay countries like Putin’s Russia. We may be fired, barred from entry, denied services, denied health care, denied education, and denied legitimacy in ways that straight married people (and probably most straight unmarried people) do not. My fully legal marriage isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, because no one anywhere has to respect it, not even a government employee.
As you can see, FADA effectively overturns Obergefell without anyone having to file a lawsuit, because it creates a loophole as large as the right to marry itself. Any governor, mayor, or clerk could proffer a “moral objection” to same-sex marriage, and stop all employees under his or her authority from registering gay couples or certifying gay weddings. And even absent such action, any employer or business can act as though the marriage simply does not exist.
But FADA goes much further than marriage. It attacks unmarried women, who may be denied health care by state hospitals, employers, and insurance companies. It makes it impossible for the federal government to do anything in a host of discriminatory situations. It turns back the clock not just two years, to before Obergefell, but twenty years, to a time when simply being gay was criminal.
And it has the support of the House, the Senate, and the President-Elect.
I never thought this would happen. I thought the woman who raised me supported me and my girlfriend. That was until I made a mistake and gave her the wrong time my girlfriend got off work so we could go see her for thanksgiving dinner. Since then she had not spoken to me. She said that I should not put my life around my girlfriend, the love of my life. And now.....now she has cut me off and kicked me out, I'm lucky I have a save place to go to, the apartment my girlfriend and I just got. But its hard. I have been in bed crying, yes I was planning on leaving her life, cutting her out because of how toxic she has been, but the fact it happened. And by her, is heart breaking. I thought I was in a good position, that she supported me.....I guess I was sadly mistaken
The winter holidays can be an extremely hard time for many transgender people due to unsupportive families, doubly so for our trans siblings living on the streets. This year the Trans Umbrella Foundation of Regina Saskatchewan is striving to create a safe space for gender variant individuals to gather this holiday season in which to enjoy a free hot meal and receive gifts.
Sadly we have only raised $5 so far, and as December draws closer we might not be able to help our trans siblings in need. Please consider donating to our gofundme page to help us support our community.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post and please please share if you can not donate.
I’m gonna reblog this here too, even if each of you could donate a dollar, that’d be over $500 which would be incredible. But please don’t feel pressured if you can’t, I still love you, and all my trans followers too. Y'all are precious beautiful people.
