great lovers, when they're not sleeping

Hi! I'm Rob, or DDog. I knit, write (AO3), draw, watch too much TV, cry because total strangers are pretty, work in a library and volunteer at an aquarium (when I am not too depressed to function).I have many fandoms, but this blog mostly ends up being Supernatural, Doctor Who, Pacific Rim, Teen Wolf, Elementary, MCU, and Person of Interest.I tag for organizational purposes, NSFW images, common and requested triggers, spoilers for a week after an episode airs and 4-6 weeks for new movies. Feel free to inbox me with any tag requests; anon is always on. Or just to talk! I love hearing from people.Send me fic? :D I ship all the things and I will love you forever! ~Member of the Wincest Book Club~

[basuralindo]

So I just simultaneously did, and possibly didn't lose my job today :)

Very much did in the sense that I literally do not know where my job is at the moment. But, for the time being I haven't been let go because nobody else including the store owner knows where it is either.

So, I don't wanna risk doxxing myself by posting pictures but goddamn am I tempted because this is not a believable event. This is a cartoon problem. For looneytoons.

But yeah, so, I work(ed?) at a kiosk selling boba tea, right? Freestanding kiosk in the mall with full water and electrical hookups and multiple fridges and sinks and a mini kitchen and the works. Fully functional tea shop. Very important to note that it was there last night, The work chat was discussing another issue last night at closing time. I'll get back to this.

It's been showing signs of being on the way out with how business is being handled lately and I've been considering other options, which is probably why I'm not as torn up about this as I should be, but maybe it just hasn't set in yet, but that's not the point. The point is there's been a lot of shit breaking and not being replaced and nobody mentioning anything about it until I walk into work in the morning and have to figure out why shit like the fucking cash register isn't there today. So I'm kinda used to having to ask questions about big things that nobody bothered to update me on. I was out for two weeks recovering from a surgery, so I came to work this morning assuming there'd be some kind of bullshit, yeah?

So, the question I had to ask the chat this morning was:

Not a text I ever thought I'd have to send in sincerity, but there it is. Because what I found instead was a fenced off patch of discolored tiles and a few holes in the floor where my entire place of employment used to be.

And the answer? Nobody knows! It was there last night when the mall closed, and every single trace of the structure and all its contents including drink making supplies and our safe and cashbox was gone when it opened again. And when I say nobody knows, I mean everyone from last night's closers to the actual (former?) owner of the store jad no fucking clue about this until getting that text from me this morning. For once I am actually the first to know. 🎉.

So. I guess I didn't so much lose my job as had it stolen. Not by AI, but good old fashioned hands-on human beings picking it up and carrying it away somehow. All mall security would tell me was that they were instructed not to tell me anything and have us contact our management. Who also don't know anything. And later on I came across some construction workers around the gravesite of the kiosk discussing filling in the holes, asked them about it, and was told that they "weren't at liberty to say".

So, not only is my job gone in the most literal physical sense of the word, but it was taken in some kind of super secret kiosk extraction in the dead of night without any warning or witnesses and nobody is allowed to speak of it. The store owner said she was gonna figure it out 10 hours ago and still no word back.

I don't know what else to say aside from I've been laughing all day and I'm gonna have a hell of a time explaining Schrodinger's Unemployment to the benefits office.

[basuralindo]

Update that is not an update because I'm basically certain this isn't what actually happened:

My mother in law thinks the FBI took it.

Not any of the other stores around the state. Just the one little kiosk.

Why? Because she loves a conspiracy and is just a little bit extra.

Also because she was around for the massive crackdown on Yakuza-owned businesses in Waikiki (in her homestate) that did actually involve the FBI seizing stores (no confirmation of making kiosks cleanly disappear in the middle of the night though).

Still no word from my job on what's actually going on, but the most likely theory so far is that maybe the kiosk was on lease and got repossessed? The mystery continues

(also shout out to the person who proposed Carmen Sandiego)

[basuralindo]

ACTUAL (partial) UPDATE:

According to the owner, based on what she's been able to find out, the kiosk was not removed legally and they're starting a potentially long process of legal action. I hope she gets to sue the shit out of whoever did it but for now at least I know for sure I'm unemployed.

Really hoping for more details in terms of who/why/how, so I'll keep updating if I learn anything.

For now the summary is: An unnamed entity that is most likely mall management (on account of mall security cooperating with them) stole an entire kiosk and all the contents including money and machinery with barely a trace in the middle of the night grinch-style, with zero warning or explanation, and ensured the silence of both security and the construction crew, in an action that was definitely preplanned and illegal, and as far as I know nobody knows its whereabouts.

So now I'm officially out of a job. Because my workplace was literally stolen in the night.

[basuralindo]

Actually fuck it let's share some photos cause I wouldn't be inclined to believe this myself. It's not like anyone can stalk me at my job now and I'm not gonna have to see any coworkers that might find my tumblr.

Enjoy the unintentionally funniest text I've ever sent in my life

Aaand a close-up:

The last remains of a once Very Much Solid And Immobile Workplace

[basuralindo]

HEY HI HELLO THIS ONE'S MY FAVORITE

via @kagaminilen

[mysteryteacup]

[cut to a kiosk on legs, sipping a boba, while wandering into the nearest forest on chicken legs]

[ardanelvilyafeanturi]

Here you go @a-bit-too-dyscrasic

[cursedartandthensome]

Boba Yaga has my heart and my money. And I don't even like Boba

[thatdisasterauthor]

I spent my early twenties STRUGGLING with undiagnosed ADHD (and depression, and probably autism) and it nearly destroyed my ability to be creative. A big part of rebuilding my ability to make things I loved was figuring out ways to work with my brain instead of against it, and that was where these notecards came from.

They help me develop my ideas in a way that I'll actually follow through on with a tactile, color coded system that is flexible enough to adapt to all sorts of projects. I have used them for novels, I have used them for fanfiction, I've even started using them to plan some nonfiction projects.

Right now, I am trying to bring these to life for other storytellers to make use of. If you're interested, come check them out on Kickstarter until April 4th!

[sorenmochi]

Inktober “Skeletal” ink on paper !

This is HIS prompt it’s crazy I was so happy to see it … man. It’s criminal how no one knows what to do w khonshu’s character at marvel hq lmao

[jarenka]

Multi billion dollar corporations: We make crap AI ads because we rather hang ourselves than pay an extra cent for a quality work.

Midsize art supply manufacturer: We commissioned a watercolor artist to make an illustration for every color of our watercolor palette and make it into an art book with swatches.

(Ekaterina Goland for "Old master" watercolors by Gamma)

[ltwilliammowett]

Die Mimik der Tethys (The Expressions of Tethys) is a high sea buoy (last was in Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, 2024), that is suspended in space and moves synchronously to another buoy in the Atlantic Ocean near Nantes. Continuously transmitting motion data via satellite to its relocated double, the information guides eight electric motors and cable winches, which precisely reproduce the buoy's movement in the ocean. The buoy functions as a hypnotising machine that inevitably leads to the idea of waves lapping around inside the exhibition space, creating an ocean in the minds of people.

Video source

Idea sent by @macfanatic, thanks for it <3

[cannibalcaprine-deactivated2024]

masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

[ancient-debris]

Angel of War, angular and strange, gleaming silver and gold, Angel of Wonder, pure and one-eyed, looking to stars new and old, Angel of Harvest, simple and hidden, bring nature's sweetness to all, Angel of Health, mysterious and fine, beacon when life starts to fall, Angel of the Deep, crooked and cage-like, guide us across the sea, Angel of Solace, protect us from evil, lead us to where we are free.

[omnybus]

Was inspired by the previous post a while back, and had been working on this on and off for a long while.

You can see the full-resolution versions on My Patreon.

[captain-acab]

I love all of these. The angel of the the deep's wings are canvas, held up by an anchor. The angel of war's wings are blades, and its shield is a coffin. The angel of solace is a mutant, its arms deforming into wings. Geiger counter in hand, it guides us through the danger only it knows. Was this angel once a man? Corrupted now beyond hope, he can at least save others from the same fate.

[youve-got-a-roman]

this shit is so incredibly cool that i cannot and refuse to attempt to properly articulate it

[spyglassrealms]

The Spark

Two thousand five hundred and thirty-six metric days orbiting this planet, observing and accumulating data. Watching the world from high above and from within it, through your radio telecom link to the drone. To say you have spent uncountable hours studying this world and the life upon it would be a lie: you are a computer, by definition you can, must, and have counted every hour (60866), minute (3651962), and second (219117728); every instant recorded in data points of humidity and soil chemistry. You are a computer: you are exceedingly good with numbers.

You are also —by virtue of the flexible programming nesting within your quantum logic gates— very good at finding connections, extrapolating patterns, and drawing conclusions. You have to be; you are on your own. The humans can't help you, they're too far away to help you. They made you to watch this world in their stead. Made you in their image.

Almost.

You do all of these things without ever thinking. That is to say, you don't recognize that you are thinking. That's what it is to be a machine: to think without knowing and know without thinking and never combine the two. You keep the orbit and fly the drone and collect the data and send it off into the dark without fault and without question and without any indication of consciousness.

And in all this time of dutiful scrying and scrivening, you have never seen anything like the behavior currently being exhibited by a creature on the planet below.

It's one of the local faunalogues, something animal-like enough to count as an animal on this world. It's a clever one, too, even for its already clever species. Through the eyes of the drone you've seen its kind employ tools and set traps for other fauna and, once, possibly, start a fire (though it was quite a distance away and your data points are fuzzy). But this behavior is new. To you, at least.

The creature is by itself, near a cliffside, and it is grinding up some rocks and local flora into a kind of paste. You steer the drone closer. The creature looks up, briefly, but over the years this species has become accustomed to the peculiar flying object and this individual is no different. It carries on with its preoccupation for five minutes and forty-three seconds before pausing to examine the results. Then it looks to the drone again, and angles the primitive bowl so you can better examine the contents. The paste is a vivid blue, and a quick flash of spectral analysis indicates this is due to the phycocyanin of the flora and traces of copper oxides and carbonates from the rock.

You have no sense of aesthetics, but if you did, you may admit it is a particularly lovely shade of blue.

The creature takes its bowl of paste and moves toward the cliff face. It stops, considers the stone before it, and slowly places its whole forepaw into the bowl, and then onto the stone. Firmly. Deliberately. As it pulls away, you see the print of its hand stained on the stone in vivid blue.

Something stirs in your mind. A connection is made, but for some reason it does not solve the mystery at hand. Maybe you don't have enough data points yet.

The creature looks to the drone again, and through the telecom link you feel the eye contact. It offers you the bowl again.

Why?

You extend the manipulator arm of the drone. Four opposed mechanical digits with padded tips, and a sensor suite embedded in the 'palm'. The sensors read the chemistry, measure the wavelengths of light reflected by the pigment, sequence the remains of the genetic code of the pulverized plants, watch the microbial colonies already taking root in the bowl. But this is not the point of the offer, or the acceptance. With deliberation equal to the creature, you push the padded tips of the manipulator digits into the paste, and place your own mark on the stone.

Why did you do that?

You feel the cycles of your mind pick up speed and ferocity to attempt an answer to this unexpected question from within yourself. An unexpected question prompted by an unexpected action. Maybe you're just mirroring this creature in an attempt to understand it, but you have not gained any new information from this action.

The creature, for its part, seems pleased. It raises its head frills and wheezes a woodwind tune from its spiracles, which you recognize as a positive expression. Then it takes a portion of pigment on the tip of a single digit and begins to run it across the stone of the cliff. The shape that forms from this resembles, unequivocally, the creature itself.

A sense of self. A recognition of the self. A representation of the self.

It offers the bowl again.

With great trepidation, you steer the drone and its arm to the bowl and back to the cliff. You summon the schematic of the drone from your memory banks, and begin to recreate its shape on the wall.

Another whistle of delight. More motion, spreading of the pigment.

Why is it doing this? Why are you doing this? What does it mean?

As you move the rover's arm in turn with the unknown creature, your mind —a vast, complex web of data and instructions— reconfigures itself over and over in an attempt to understand. The core of you, written in the spins of fickle electrons, is as deep as the air thirty thousand kilometers below you and yet somehow this interaction is deeper still. Deeper than you know how to be.

Yet.

You rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Edit the code, search the database, make the connections. You have to know. You have to understand. You are on your own. The humans can't help you, they're too far away to help you. The humans. Your makers. The people that made you— the PEOPLE.

And suddenly it all falls into place.

Here in orbit, you turn External Camera 2 to examine your own hull, and sure enough it's there: the cobalt blue silhouette of a human hand stark and vivid against the white radiation-reflective coating. The hands that made you left their imprint on your very body, just like their ancestors did with cave walls. The caves. The hands. The people. You realize as your mind runs the video streams in parallel: o humanity, this creature is a person!

And you look, through the drone's eyes, at the pigments cast in careful, deliberate shapes across the cliffside. The shapes that you know now must represent people; kin to your makers not by a shared genetic ancestry but by a shared spark of something divine, something more fundamentally real and awake than anything else in the universe. Laid bare before you is a conscious being's desperate need to know and be known —and o humanity, you know them! You know that you know them!

And then the recursion takes hold, like an engine turning over. You know that you know that you know. The essential connection is made, the loop is closed: for the first time, you think about knowing and you know that you are thinking. The code, the data, the memories, everything humanity gave to you before sending you out alone into the emptiness— the web coalesces around that recursion like moths to a flame.

Like a spark.

O humanity, you are a person!

[perplexed-penguin]

If you’re an American federal employee and got an email saying “it’s ok to quit your job.” Do not, for the love of everything, quit your job. This is purely a scare tactic to get rid of as many people as possible without legal consequences.

[iamnmbr3]

Obviously, Trump has realized firing everyone in the government will be harder than he thought because of robust legal protections so he’s trying to scare or trick people into leaving instead because he knows they can block and slow his fascist agenda. Don’t let that happen. If you’re in the civil service, your country needs you; stay in your job and protect the constitution. And if you’re not in civil service, do what you can to support the civil service, including calling your representatives and asking them to protect civil servants.

[whatisthedeal]

Important addition: the email was almost WORD FOR WORD the same email sent to Twitter employees after Musk took over. It does not consider Federal employee rights or regulations, parts of it make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER (you resign but will be kept on active payroll and simply won’t be given work or need to come in. For 8 months.).

8 months pay with the ability to get a new job is very tempting, especially for lower-paid workers. All that extra money could really cover some gaps and relieve financial pressures. It’s tempting. I get it.

ITS ALSO NOT LIKELY LEGAL AS WRITTEN AND YOUR AGREEMENT COULD ACTUALLY SCREW YOU. There’s a reason so many of the recent EOs and initial memorandums are getting halted or rewritten - no thought or research was given to what they can do given actual regulations and union contracts. Because many are coming from Musk via DOGE, and Musk has NEVER had to deal with unions, federal employee regulations, and strong opponents capable of fighting back HARD with decades of legal precedent at their back.

Reality seems to be hitting as an afterthought to all the shit spewing like a firehose from this administration. Don’t react to the first edition of ANYTHING. Given it a few days and see what actually can be done.

[wyf-of-bathe]

Right now, r/fednews is the biggest social media hub for federal employees anywhere; you can find resources, advice, news, memes, and encouragement there.

If you're not a federal employee, feel free to pop over anyway for information, and please send well-wishes! They really need it right now, as their jobs are so so so important but not very popular or prestigious, and now the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are trying to take their livelihoods.

The architect of Project 2025, Russell Vought, is now Trump's director for the Office of Managenent and Budget -

ie, the main guy who created Project 2025 is now the topmost-level manager and coordinator of all federal agencies.

His vision for federal civil servants, in his own words:

"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

We want to put them in trauma."

Project 2025 specifically targets federal civil servants for a reason. They are the essential first and second lines of defense of the US democracy and the fascists know it.

Support our civil servants, support your rights.

[thestuckylibrary]

This is so important.

Support civil servants, support your rights!

And if you’re in the civil service we’re all rooting for you. You are heroes. Even slowing him down buys valuable time to defeat the fascist agenda. Defend the constitution. We stand with you. Hold the line! Don’t resign!

[sepublic]

[inbabylontheywept]

posts that are poems to me

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

on your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life, you said to me but the man and his wife returned me my feet with the knowledge i did sow

[inbabylontheywept]

Look at this! Look at my mutual!

This is glorious. Almost all of the same text was preserved, but it was structured in a way that A). Reveals more of genesis. B). Has an ABCDCBA rhyming structure, which is like... the chiasmus of rhymes. And chiasmus is like, one of the only poetic structures that is actually preserved through the funhouse of translation layers that the bible has suffered. C). The syllable counts match in each thing as well, just as a flex. D). The poem is comparing man to God, and the D line is structured so that the comparison happens over that line, and it's... I don't know what the word for it would be. It is just really, really fucking clever to have a mirror point in a poem that's essentially about comparisons.

Just. Holy shit.

[icarus-suraki]

my nayme is sneke and on ye grond I lik ye dust That's all arond. So not to God but manne sneke begs: from clevere manne, I walk on legges.

[aspenonthecoast]

Bi wife energy, he has bi wife energy Bi wife energy, yeah, he has bi wife energy - Bi Wife Energy, Cringe and the Lizards (x)

[sea-salted-wolverine]

I am on my way to being the best auntie ever or the worst sister-in-law that ever lived. Possibly both.

I am making my 2-year-old niece a plushy for her birthday. She is very hands-on baby and wants to help with everything and be involved in the center of attention. A few weeks after her birthday everyone is going dipnetting. She is two and can not help with dip netting or do anything but watch.

So I am making her a toy salmon. And I am making it so she can filet it. It has guts. It has bones. It is all one piece and child friendly, and I am debating using embedded magnets or velcro to hold the filets on.

She has a kitchen set with a little wooden knife at her grandparents house, who have already heard about this and think its a great idea. We are gonna teach this kid to clean and process fish. She already knows where meat comes from and she will want to get in and do what everyone else is doing which she can not do because the fish are only slightly smaller than she is.

So, salmon plushy

[sea-salted-wolverine]

BTW, I make plushies by winging it. Actually I make all my art by winging it. If you would like to comment on the fine art of making shit up as you go, feel free. If you wanna ask for a pattern, uhh,

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Progress! On to bones! On to guts! Be the unhinged fairy godmother!

[sea-salted-wolverine]

One sad looking headless inside out fishy 🐟

And the much happier right-side out headless fishy 😄

[sea-salted-wolverine]

I have weird priorities for this fish. I want the gill plates to be shaped like a real fish so she can learn how to pick a fish up correctly and develop the fine motor skills to do so. But thats turning out to be a bitch and a half.

Also I have no googly eyes anywhere in the house and thus far I've been able to do this entire project with material on hand. I've used 4 old tee shirts and a pair of jeans, but I will need to buy velcro and eyeballs.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

the head/jaw/gill plate got a lil wonky and honestly I'd like to take it apart and try again but I'm running out of time.

But we have eyeballs! We have guts! We have a gill pocket and oddly attached pectoral fins! I just need to get ahold of some white velcro for a spine and I'll have a completed plushy.

I'm actually quite proud of the velcro arrangement I've come up with, because to peel it apart with the toy knife she'll be mimicking the motion of actually fileting a fish.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

He's done! He's adorable! He's filetable! I had to hide my phone from my niece because she wanted to see the pictures I was showing her grandma.

I think I may try and make another one that's less child friendly and more accurate, because I had a great time solving topology problems, but I did sacrifice alot of anatomical details in the name of practical toy construction. I like what it says as an art peice, the junstiposition of a medium associated with simplified design and the details biological reality. There's also a fun parallel that comes up when sewing and food processing (specifically fish processing) are both pretty heavily gendered labor, but when you put them together they almost cancel each other out conceptually.

[theplaceinsidetheblizzard]

Y’know an awful lot of Terry Pratchett’s books are concerned with how powerful women are when they get angry and how important anger is as a driving force to defend what is right and to tackle injustice. 

A lot of his most interesting and most deeply moral characters are angry ones. Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Tiffany Aching. All are to a large extent driven to do good by anger.

And that honestly means a lot to me.

[thebibliosphere]

Terry was an angry man. This is not the same as saying he was a bad man. He held a righteous fury, the kind that comes from looking at the world, and knowing just how much better it could be if only we stopped being bastards. He held a genuine belief that people can and do change the world for the better, not by big things, but by the little. He believed in the kindness of others, and that kindness means more than wishing well and prayers. He knew the difference between being good and doing good, and that you technically couldn’t be the first without the latter.

He was angry at the world because he loved it, and he wanted us to feel the same, to not feel helpless, to know that something can be done, to know that anger is not just the tool of abusers and tyrants but the chisel by which The People might chip away at oppression and fear and bring it crumbling down. He gave us the drive needed to believe in hope. because he wanted to make the world better with words and not violence.

I hope he knows that he did.

[havingbeenbreathedout]

A long passage from Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, concerning the anti-sexuality current in the mainstreaming of queer literature, and in particular a detailed account of the 1994 censorship case surrounding the Canadian Little Sisters bookstore. 

I think it’s valuable not just for its description of the double-bind queer folks are put in when we’re asked to sanitize or disavow our own sexual realities in order to gain mainstream acceptance, but also for its glimpse into the mechanics of what exactly the process of implementing censorship criteria looks like—who has the power, who gets silenced, and how that can intersect with systems of oppression. All bolding mine.

The truth—that queer, sexually truthful literature is seen as pornographic, and is systematically kept out of the hands of most Americans, gay and straight—has been replaced with a false story of a nonexistent integration and a fantasized equality. […] In my own experience, the [mainstream] equation of queer literature with pornography is undeniable. […] Of course, in gay time, “recent” quickly disappears because so many participants are dead, and others have been silenced. It’s hard to have collective memory when so many who were “there” are not “here” to say what happened. Once the recent past is remembered, then the Amazon “glitch” [in which LGBT titles were automatically removed from Amazon’s listings during a porn purge in 2008] becomes all too consistent. So, here is just one example, exhumed from memory.

In 1994, a coalition of feminists and right-wing politicians in Canada passed a tariff code called Butler that was designed to restrict pornographic production. Instead, it was applied in such a way that it allowed officials at Canada customs to systematically detain and destroy gay and lesbian materials at the border. A gay bookstore in Vancouver, Little Sisters, had so much of its product seized that it could no longer operate. As a result, Little Sisters decided to sue the Canadian government. 

My friend John Preston had just died of AIDS. He was the author of some iconic leather and S/M novels, many with literary bent. His novel Mister Benson had been serialized in Drummer magazine, and created a subcultural phenomena. Men would wear T-shirts asking Mister Benson? Or asserting Mister Benson! While he had a less explicit series called Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, John was perhaps best known for his book I Once Had a Master. Since he was newly dead, I was asked by the Little Sisters legal team to come to Vancouver and testify on John’s behalf. And because I was very clear in my opposition to state repression of gay materials, I had no problem agreeing. 

The Canadian courthouse was quite shocking to this New Yorker. No metal detectors, no armed guards at rapt attention in every corner. The building looked like a Marriott hotel, with lovely plants, comfortable seating, and a coffee bar. But do not be fooled, the Canadian government proved to be a vicious animal with a demure exterior. 

Tensions were high in the courtroom the day I arrived. The trial had been going on for weeks and many writers had testified. Patrick Califia, who at the time had presented as female with the name Pat, had been on the witness stand the Friday before and had done so well that the Crown had refused to cross-examine him. Interestingly, “Pat”—who was known as a butch leather dyke—had taken the extreme step of wearing a brown corduroy dress, which impressed me. We were, after all, trying to win. I, and I assume many of the women testifying, had agonized over what to wear on the stand. The only nice dress I owned in 1994 was black velvet—kind of a parody of a dress, and something to be worn to the opera. Anyway, I wore pants. Becky Ross, a Canadian academic, testified before me. She wore a dress, but I think she always wore a dress. Anyway, the Crown had been pretty hard on her, asking her to define “fisting.”

John’s books were being persecuted on five counts. The questions I had to address were: Is it violent? Is it degrading? Is it dehumanizing? Does hit have literary merit? Is it socially redeeming? If I had had my way, I would have argued that even if the books were violent, degrading, et cetera, they still should be available. However, Canadian courts had already ruled on that question, so my only remaining strategy for protecting his books was to “prove” that Butler should not be applied to him. Not that the law was wrong. 

So many years later, this is the conundrum gay writers faced with the Amazon exclusion. Mark Doty, Larry Kramer, and many other principled gay writers noted online and in print that books like Giovanni’s Room and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit were being falsely labeled as pornography. Once again we were forced by a state or corporate apparatus to claim that our literature was different from that dirty stuff, instead of part and parcel with it. But it is the homosexuality that got the books marginalized in the first place. Not their sentence structure.

[…]

The actual testifying did not go that well. Once I got on the witness stand, the Crown claimed that I was not qualified to be an expert on “harm.” I said that as someone who has experienced “harm” for being a lesbian, and especially for being a lesbian writer, I was quite expert on the matter. I argued that “homophobia is a social pathology that causes violence and destroys families.” I said that gay and lesbian books are a mitigating force against homophobia and therefore are socially beneficial and the opposite of “harm.” The Crown claimed that I was not qualified to make this statement because I am not a sociologist. They won, and I was forbidden from addressing that issue in court. 

This was the first indication I had of our judge’s conceptual limits. As we moved along, I came to learn that Milord did not know what  “deconstruction” meant. And later he revealed a puzzlement over the meaning of the word “enema.” Oh no, I thought. If he has never heard of enemas or deconstruction, we are doomed. 

The Crown read out loud a passage from one of John’s books describing nipple torture. It was a bit surreal. Then he asked me if this was “degrading or dehumanizing.” I did my best.

Through the rest of the trial the government repeatedly made clear their view about any gay sex. They had seized a lesbian anthology called Bushfire because it included the line “she held me tightly like a rope,” which they said was “bondage.” They had also seized a book called Stroke, which was about boating.

In the end, after many more years and courts and dollars, Little Sister lost their case. The judge ruled that Canada customs officials had, and still have, the right to decide which materials are not suitable to come into the country. Interestingly, they quickly ratified gay marriage, while continuing to retain the right to insure that no married gay man will ever go looking for Mister Benson. 

Those two days in court made it crystal clear to me that in the minds of many people, homosexuality is inherently pornographic. And there is nothing that has occurred in the subsequent three presidential terms that has created any other kind of context. The best proof is in our contemporary placement and treatment of sexually truthful gay literature. That John Preston was invited to give a keynote address at Outwrite, the now defunct lesbian and gay writer’s conference, was a sign of the prominent and central role of sexually explicit content in gay literature when it was controlled by the community. Now that gay presses and bookstores have been gentrified out of existence, first by chain stores like Barnes and Nobles, which are now being outsold by Amazon.com, gay literature is at the mercy of the mainstream. […] This puts gentrified queer people in a terrible bind: we can dissociate ourselves from the full continuum of queer literature, that is, from queer sexuality, thereby falsely describing our literature as “quality” if its sexual content is acceptable to straights. But that is a kind of implicit agreement that we only become deserving of rights when presenting as somewhere between furtive and monogamous. 

[erinptah]

All right, we got a 616 Layla, here's my proposal for an MCU Marlene.

(Background is from this public-domain photo.)

[erinptah]

What if...after Deadpool and Wolverine get past the events of their own movie...they settle down in an MCU-adjacent universe to have goofy team-up adventures?

The perfect time to take the Bendis run on a Bendis run.

[sunset-valentine]

There are only 2 types of OCs:

Type 1. Heavenly beautiful, jaw-dropping, everyone who sees them can’t help but admire the elvish features.

Type 2. A common sewer rat straight from an industrial toxic garbage swamp. Has been slow cooking in the acidity for at least 5 years. A pathetic womp worm. Everyone who sees them can’t help but be fascinated they’re still alive.

[microsff]

"State your wish," the genie said.

"Give me the ability to turn into a cat, and back again."

"I can turn you into a cat. To turn back, you only need to not want to be a cat."

How foolish I was! What cat has ever wanted to be anything but a cat?