Watch: As Blythe’s poem ends, it’s clear what we must do in the face of rape culture and “pocket feminism.”

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Watch: As Blythe’s poem ends, it’s clear what we must do in the face of rape culture and “pocket feminism.”
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW
op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
God I’m not okay about it
Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.
I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3
Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:
I mean, will you LOOK at this:
This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:
There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.
theyre saying you have to go to work again tomorrow even though you just went today
Paul of Scotland, Destiny Is In Your Hands, 2020 pencil on white paper, 11.69"x16.54"
DO NOT SCROLL AWAY. THIS IS NOT A PHOTO. THIS IS NOT OIL ON CANVAS. THIS ISN’T EVEN ACRYLIC ON CANVAS. THIS IS PENCIL ON WHITE PAPER!
PENCIL?!?
I love speed runners
to those asking: welcome to restaurant%, where you help ganondorf rebuild his life as a humble restaurant owner by building a restaurant around him as fast as possible without getting murked
I saw this video the other day! If it’s not immediately obvious, the “booth” is made out of indestructible parts, and enclosing Ganon in them breaks his AI so he no longer attacks.
This is genuinely the best speedrun challenge I've ever seen. I will think of nothing else for weeks, probably.
spock³
inspired by this new favorite picture of mine
Baba's domain 🐈 Collab with @ceeejus 🌟
Okay, hear me out.
One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.
So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.
Enter the gray economies.
Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.
Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.
Because what do these groups actually do?
They:
set norms for compensation and contracts
regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting
provide a framework for dispute resolution
establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)
That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.
Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!
The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.
That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.
Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code
Again: not altruism. Stability.
And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.
Which is very historically grounded.
On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.
Pirate codes, for example, often included:
compensation for injury
shared distribution of loot
limits on captain authority
Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).
So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:
The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.
The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.
And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.
If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.
If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.
But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?
You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.
So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.
Which is both deeply funny and a little too real.
#you're telling me han solo is a union man? (via @professorsparklepants)
Han Solo look SO MUCH like a union man.
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I really like the new official artwork for Jou's deck!
The story of Icarus always spoke to me deeply as a Black boy who grew up trying to find his wings. Mixed with the African Folklore I grew up with I found something magic. We launch on Kickstarter in just 13 Days, follow our page on Kickstarter and help us take Flight 🪽💫
A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.
looked up russians vs japanese piracy twt beef and its worse than i thought😭 it all started with japanese users being mad at discovering there's all those unofficial russian manga reading sites. russians tell them that there's not much licensed manga in russia to consume legally in the first place. japanese say its your problem, you should then go to japan and buy it legally. russians obviously go ??? it's crazy expensive to fly to japan plus we're sanctioned and often can't purchase foreign things with our money. japanese go full russophobia and say ahhh you evil aggressors deserve it for war. russians answer that even before the war this wouldn't be a solution. then brazilians join russians to fight on the side of piracy and started gotcha japanese with their war crimes and xenophobia. then other japanese users joined on the side of piracy and said anti-piracy japanese are hypocrites because its common in japan to listen to pirated western music. i guess this made japanese anti-piracy people even madder and they went all in saying crazy stuff like comparing piracy to rape. the more hilarious example was one japanese user trying to gotcha russians by threatening to pirate and read... dostoevsky🤣 sums up their level of ignorance regarding this whole topic.
gosh, isn't it interesting that this symptom is specific to men for some unknowable reason? listening and learning
why is this symptom specific to men. think
#‘I HAVE BIG FEELINGS’ is only allowed for toddlers#you are an adult. use your words. stop making excuses.#bet these men dont do that around their bosses or anywhere there could be consequences they care about either 💅
lol “have you considered your abusive boyfriend might have ADHD? Try having some empathy once in a while”. Great. Love it.
Seriously, ‘the angry man being aggressive and physically threatening is doing so to express that he is mad’. WOW ya don’t say. ‘But this common abusive behavior is different because he’s special’. Bro they all think the reason they’re abusive is special and not actually abuse or not actually about hurting you or not actually about intimidating you!
Why does he do that? - Lundy Bancroft
and out of the darkness - you you you you you
pov you just got home from work. you haven't slept well in a few days and all you want is to have a drink and relax. you walk into your home. there's one extra child there that wasn't there when you left. you ask your husband where she came from. not only has he spontaneously adopted her, she's also the main person of interest in an active federal felony investigation. when you try to suggest turning her in, your husband says he will kill himself. and there's a fucking wild ferret that definitely hasn't been vaccinated hanging out in your living room. you have no idea which one of your husband's insane daughters brought it home. you are olruggio wha, and this is a normal tuesday
I feel like when I say ‘relatable’ what I really mean is ‘resonant.’ I don’t want characters who I feel are like me, I want characters who have emotions so strong I can feel them through the page.
I think this is important because a lot of us forget the power of stories to make us feel things about characters who are not like us, who have experienced things that we never will. The purpose of listening to someone else's story should not necessarily be identification, but understanding.
Don’t invite me anywhere last minute I enjoy doing nothing so I need to know ahead of time if my plan to do nothing needs to be changed
This is legit and people don’t realize it.
“hey what are you doing?” “nothing” “oh great! so you are avaliab-” “no you don’t understand. I’m doing nothing.”
I’m doing nothing. Actively. It’s important.
This is essential nothing I’m doing.
delicious in dungeon :3c
available as a print in my new shop!