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in 2004 george w bush won the presidential election and promised in his acceptance speech to codify a federal ban on gay marriage. 30 states passed bans on gay marriage in the wake of his re-election. and then they fell. one by one by one. it has to get worse before it gets better.

queers. trans people especially. our attitude for the next decade has to be “we’re not fucking scared of you”. do you understand? this has always been at the core of who we are and what we do. we fucking move. we take up space or carve out our own with our bare hands. we take care of us.

do you know the other queers in your neighborhood? do you know who you can call at a bad time? do you know whose house you can crash at? do you know where you can go for a free meal? do you know where you can bring meals to the hungry? do you know the LGBT resources available in your area? do you know the informed consent clinics in your area?

do you know how DIY HRT works? do you know and have friends who don’t? do you know our history? have you read the works of james baldwin and leslie feinberg? are you equipped with knowledge about the forces that work against us? do you understand dialectical materialism? do you know what to say if stopped by the police? do you know what good opsec is? are your legal documents in order? do you know how to get them in order?

scream, cry, rot in your bed, do whatever you need to do to process this, then find something to do. do not fall into despair. in the face of extermination say “fuck you.”

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jokes to make after failure that aren’t self-deprecating:

I’m the best to ever do it

Nobody saw that (best if said loudly)

No one’s ever done it like me

I could be President/they should make me President

Behold, a mere fraction of my power!

The public wants to be me soooooo bad

I’m an expert in (thing you just failed at)

How could this have happened to god’s favorite princess?

Nothing ibuprofen and a glass of water cant fix

I’m being sabotaged

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huh !

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being touch-starved or lonely makes me feel like a house cat discovering no one’s home. I’m rubbing my face along the bed sheets, following the sun’s slow crawl through the windows, curling up by the wall in time for the heater to kick on; keeping an ear out for the front door.

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world loading error: please wait.

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Shout out to that guy from Florida talking to my coworker about wanting to take his sail boat through Lake Superior in November. He was planning on a little trip and my coworker was like hey man I don't know how to tell you this but you will Actually Die

*Lake Superior, in the far distance*: yes yes yes yes yes do it yes yes

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imo a discord server should be like a breakout room for fandom. like the place to run your wips by your besties or discuss your otp in more detail with a few people who were insane about it on your post or organise events with a handful of trusted mutuals etc etc. if it’s where ALL the fandom activity is going to happen it will inevitably foster a cliquey environment where the fandom is divided into “those in the server” and “those who aren’t”, lurking is disincentivised if not made outright impossible, people who feel uncomfortable joining in conversations and would rather interact with fandom through reblogging etc are largely excluded because there’s no repost mechanism, and the fandom itself becomes an enclosed space so new fans are limited in how much content and meta they can access without having to make the plunge into Joining The In Group, there’s limited scope for interaction between different communities within the same fandom, god it’s just an altogether dogshit stupid idea. what if we moved all fandom activity to really massive private groupchats. STUPID

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Please do not let debt collectors play in your face.

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i suspect that a huge factor in the defense of students using gen ai (and academic dishonesty in general tbh) comes from the fundamental misunderstanding of how school works.

to simplify thousands of educator's theories into the simplest terms, there are two types of stuff you're learning in school: content and skills. content is what we often think of as the material in school- spelling, times tables, names, dates, facts, etc.- whereas skills are usually more subtle. think phonics, mental math, reading comprehension, comparing and contrasting; though students do those things often, the how usually isn't deemed as important as the what.

this leads to a disconnect that's most obvious when students ask the infamous "when will we use this in the real world?" they have- often correctly- identified content that the content is niche, outdated, or not optimized but haven't considered the skills that this class/lesson/assignment will teach.

i can think of two shining examples from when i was a kid. one was in middle school when they announced that we were now gonna be studying latin, and we all wondered why on earth they would choose latin as our foreign language. every adult promised us it'd be helpful if we went into medicine, law, or religion (ignoring that most of us didn't want to go into medicine, law, or religion), but we didn't buy that and never took it seriously. the truth was that our new principal knew that learning languages gets harder as you get older, and so building the skills of learning a language while it was easy for us was more important than which language we learned, and that's an answer twelve year old me would've actually respected.

similarly, my geometry class all hated proofs. we couldn't think of a single situation where you'd have to convince someone a triangle was a triangle and "look at it, of course it's a triangle" wouldn't be an acceptable answer. it was actually the band director who pointed out that it wasn't literally about triangles; it was about being able to prove or disprove something, anything using facts.

and so, so, so many assignments that are annoying as hell in school make more sense when you think about the skills as well as the content. "why do i have to present information about something the teacher obviously already knows about?" because research, verifying sources, summarizing, and public speaking are all really important skills. "why does this have to be a group project?" because you will have to work with other people in your life, and learning how to be a team player (and deal with people who aren't) is an essential skill. "why do we have to read these scientific articles and learn about graphs?" because if you can understand them, people can't lie to you about them.

now, of course, there's a lot we could do better- especially we as in the american school system. the reason i have an education minor but am not teaching is because of those issues. there are plenty of assignments that are busywork and teachers that are assholes and ways that the system is failing us.

but that doesn't mean you should cut off your nose to spite your face!

the ability to learn and grow and think critically is one of our most powerful tools as people. our brains are capable of incredible things! however, the same way you can't lift a car unless you consistently lift and build up to that, your brain needs to train in order to do its best.

so yeah, maybe chatgpt can write a five paragraph essay for you on the differences between thomas jefferson and alexander hamilton's governing philosophies. and maybe it won't even fuck it up! congratulations, you got away with it. but by outright refusing to use your brain and practice these skills, who have you helped? you haven't learned anything. worse, you haven't even learned how to learn.

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happy make a shit comic day guys

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Companions combat animation by Jessica Simard, DA:tV gameplay animator, currently senior animator at Larian Studios.

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i love ricky. i love smeemo. i love mr j. i love kofu. i love pangur. i love grim. i love belphegor.