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pick your fighter

the ‘$1000 to go to Hawaii’ bride, the ‘I bought a $99 polygraph on amazon’ lady, or the ‘why was $200 so huge’ birthday girl

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Interspecies lesbianism

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Heres the thing you gotta understand about statistics. 

“Increases your chances by 80%” does not mean “there is now an 80% chance”. 

If your chances were previously 10%, your chances are now 18%, not 90%. 

if your chances were roughly 1%, they’re now just slightly less than 2%. 

thats how that works. 

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A few things I notice:  - in his first tweet, it did matter to him quite a lot to believe the characters were NOT gay (”they’re not”).  - in his last tweet, he says that they would not be authentically written, as the authors are straight. I don’t believe that, especially as in this case they are puppets in a children’s show. They do not need to be a nuanced representation of the gay experience. All they’d need is exist as gay characters / in a mlm relationship, and that’d be enough. (I also believe that, even if it’s better to let minorities tell their own stories, members of the minority definitely should educate themselves enough in order to write about people other than them in a respectful way, and that wouldn’t be inauthentic if done well)

straight people shut up challenge

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I liked this story but wasn’t necessarily going to reblog, until that last line 

what if humans are space hobbits

i dearly love the ‘humans are space orcs’ trope, but here’s a different take: what if humans, among all the spacefaring races, have looked at the grim and gritty side of interplanetary colonization and said politely, “no thank you. we prefer to be civilized about this.”

imagine, if you will, Proud Warrior Races galore, each one more scarred and eyepatched and bristling with weaponry than the last, being baffled and insulted that the emissary the humans sent is this soft, clean, fluffy person with carefully done nail enamel and maybe a fancy hairdo or a curly waxed mustache or something.

the human has no scars and smells faintly of flowers. the human is wearing perfectly tailored soft clothes and no armor whatsoever. the human is completely unarmed! not even a knife! the human is wearing shiny jewelry and carrying a delicate little shiny all-purpose device, and what’s to stop a warrior from just taking everything from them? the human smiles and offers the most polite greeting their translator could dig up. it’s like the humans WANT to be destroyed.

the Proud Warrior Race leader strides forward decisively, intending to tear the human’s soft little head off and prove who is going to be the conquerer and who is going to be the conquered in this particular first contact.

what the leader assumed to be jewelry suddenly bursts off the human’s body into a cloud of bead-sized autonomous drones and delivers a numbing shock to every joint in the warrior’s body. the leader sits down hard, twitching. the human is still smiling politely.

one of the leader’s lieutenants snarls, “if you were a being of honor, you’d do your own fighting instead of having machines –” but breaks off at a gesture from the leader.

“those beads,” the still-shaky leader says, “are not the largest automatic weapons you have. are they.”

“oh, goodness, no,” the human smiles. “not the smallest either, not by several orders of magnitude. you’ve been breathing the smallest ones for twenty minutes. now, shall we have a civilized meeting, gentlefolk?”

they have a civilized meeting.

there are cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

later, the Proud Warrior Race leaders will not divulge exactly why they agreed to a binding treaty never to make war on humans or their allies for the rest of time. but whenever someone starts making noise about breaking the treaty, because what the hell, they’re just soft humans, the leaders get a haunted look. “imagine how strong you’d have to be,” they say, “before you could afford to be that soft.”

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the CW hasn’t earned the right to use Batman characters: a comparative essay ft. Titans, a show that has.

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Children’s art in media: fully-colored, stylized but recognizabke figures with backgrounds and aesthetically textured and messy crayon coloring that

Children’s art in real life: an anguished disembodied head floating on one side, a massive sea of amorphous red scribbles taking up half the paper, ‘SAM’ written in enormous shaky letters overlapping everything, partial figure of a dinosaur abandoned before drawing the legs

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Found the Duluth Trading Post catalogue. @foleypdx and @bossbeth You might need to see it for… reasons…

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Christianity and conservatism are not compatible ideologies. Conservatives, socially, are against refugees, against equality, and fiscally are against social programs and financial aid to those in need.

Jesus demanded they help refugees, demanded equality, and demanded aid to the poor.

To be conservative means to not be Christian, and to claim you are both is to be a hypocrite.

Something Jesus also condemned.

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Way too many parents need to learn the difference between “a child being disrespectful” and “a human person expressing an opinion that differs from theirs”

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This is how the golden age of piracy ended.

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Rewrite a classic fairy tale by telling it backwards. The end is now the beginning.

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I was invited by a boy in my class to visit him at home to play when we were both 8. We had a pleasant afternoon, nothing out of the ordinary. I was completely oblivious to the fact that he had a crush on me, and apparently other boys were teasing him for it, and for not having made me his girlfriend or something.  So he came to see me at recess and said “well, I have no idea why I liked you, you have a great body but your face is ugly”. And it stuck, and soon all the other kids were calling me ugly too. And I know that he was probably saying this because his feelings was hurt, but it stayed with me over the years, and I still don’t think I have a pretty face, even though I’m reasonably happy with my body.

#GrowingUpUgly When guys in middle school would get dared by their friends to ask you out and see if you say yes as a joke

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Polyamory as ‘women’s liberation’ bullshit

(Reposting a reply as a seperate post because the OP I was replying to turned out to be terfy and that kind of people have no place on my blog. Also a lot here are not my own ideas but based on some conversations I had today, but hey, every idea ever is based on input of others, right?):

Quite often polyamorous men who date women will claim that ‘polyamory is liberating for women’ but when it comes down to it they’ve replaced ‘only I can fuck this woman’ with ‘everyone can fuck this woman but none of us actually have a responsibility to treat her any better than we did before, because she now has the liberty to chose multiple partners to fulfill all her needs so I’m off the hook and can continue to be a disappointing misogynist’, which like.. isn’t liberating at all?

Fuck that shit.

It’s just like how anarchist liberation isn’t the absence of all rules but the power to make rules together by agreeing what works best for your community so everyone’s needs are met. (Shit like ‘we all do the dishes’ and ‘we avoid this particular triggering topic in this space’, etc.) In the same way, relationships with less rules aren’t more liberating, addressing power inequalities and striving towards mutual control over the rules of a relationship so they actually fulfill our needs is liberating. Which can mean ‘monogamy isn’t our thing’ and ‘some of our needs are fulfilled by someone outside this relationship’, but it can also mean ‘we’re gonna both put effort on fulfilling each others needs instead of having yet another relationship where a woman does all the work’.

Which is also true when a couple isn’t composed of a man and a woman. There are also plenty of queer people out there who use ‘one person doesn’t need to fulfill all needs because we’re poly’ as an excuse to be shitty unsupportive partners. But it is even more common when a man is dating a woman because that kinda behavior is pre-programmed by sexism.

So, yeah, polyamory is not inherently more liberating. Men who date women and claim that polyamory ‘liberates women’ are pretty much certainly somewhat invested in getting laid more while needing to put less effort into fulfilling the needs of women (and this is extra true for trans women, whose needs always come last and who are treated as doubly disposable).

And telling women that they’re oppressing themselves when they don’t go along with that fantasy is pretty gross.

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Gustave Courbet, Le Sommeil,1866.

Le Sommeil [The Sleepers], which depicts two women entwined in a post-coital embrace, caused a stir when it was first shown in the 1870s. The police were called in, and the painting was not shown again until the 1980s. But its brief showing had an influence on a number of contemporary artists, and helped challenge the taboos associated with lesbian relationships. For modern audiences it’s a good reminder that people in the 19th century were not ignorant of lesbian relationships, as we tend to believe. And it’s pretty damn sexy, don’t you think?

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Reblogging for @embyrr922 ‘s addition.  Thin-slicing is not “weirdly accurate”: this is confirmation bias at play.  Top-down cognition (what underlies thin-slicing) is quick-and-dirty, so not that reliable. It is also based on patterns, which is an issue in our era of mass media and the overabundance of information and images. Our brains have access to unprecedented amounts of data of all sorts, and creates recognition patterns out of all of this. 

Intuition is real. Vibes are real. Energy doesn’t lie. Tune in.