coasterchild

[coasterchild]

[coasterchild]

[coasterchild]

A boy can dream, can't he?

[coasterchild]

watched this for the first time when i was 14 i think? it saved me

[coasterchild]

“He’s so fine, he can’t be beat!” Harvey Guillén serving disco sweetness. Photos by Fausto J B.

[coasterchild]

HUSTLERS (2019)

[coasterchild]

Blacksmith, 2020 - by Maciek Przeklasa (1984), Polish

[coasterchild]

this might be controversial but i also dont really mind. people need spaces that are not the internet where they can be mean and have bad opinions about things because they can change. but capturing a permanent snapshot of a person and then judging them for that for the rest of their life is, actually, really fucking bad for someone's development as a human being

[coasterchild]

“body horror” not to me. Not if it’s you

[coasterchild]

rosecutclothing • Café Brauer Floral Suit for shanemadej and saraerubin's wedding 🌼 They came to me with the idea of incorporating stars, rain and the state flowers of where they were from and met, so we have the California poppy, Connecticut mountain-laurel and Illinois violet. Thanks SO much for trusting me to make this, it was an absolute honor ! All chainstitch embroidery on deep blue wool. Wedding photos by erinhoytphotography 🌼 #rosecutclothing #chainstitchemboridery #californiapoppy #altwedding

source: [rosecutclothing] posted Nov 30, 2023

[coasterchild]

Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect of the Sixth House 📘💀🗡

(psst, the timelapse of this can be see on my patreon!)

[coasterchild]

I honestly think that the lack of non-sexual nudity in public spaces has done horrific damage to American society.

We deeply struggle to understand the natural diversity of bodies because we only see naked bodies in a sexual context. We are taught that seeing nudity is somehow inherently harmful, especially to children. We struggle to differentiate between sexually suggestive and sexually explicit material.

It fucks up the way people think about and talk about sex ed. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about breast feeding. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about queer folks. It feeds into fatphobia and ableism and is all rooted in this deeply harmful puritanism.

Like, I need people to understand that seeing a bare titty in public is not going to hurt a child. Seeing a man in a banana hammock isn’t inherently traumatizing. I would argue, in fact, that adults treating those things as dangerous and gross and scary is going to do way more damage to a kid’s psychology than seeing the nudity in the first place.

[coasterchild]

Tryst: No, hold on. KAT, play the theme song.

KAT: Playing: Bacta Basics’ theme song.

Bacta: I am NOT going to explain this!

[coasterchild]

Medieval salt glazed pottery with Godzilla motifs

[coasterchild]

These are so fun to make

[coasterchild]

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

[coasterchild]

Tbh i think kids should be fucked up by media sometimes. I think that being uncomfortable or scared or having a general "what the fuck..." reaction is a good thing for them in the long run. I think kids should read books that will give them deep seated discomfort and they should sit with that feeling. If you refuse to expose them to anything that isnt sunshine and rainbows and perfectly tied up happy endings in the name of "not traumatizing them" then youre really no better than the parents screaming "think of the children!!" about books with gay people in school libraries, just with different topics. Life isnt all sunshine and rainbows and perfectly tied up happy endings and if kids dont learn that while theyre still in an environment safe enough to sit with and work through that feeling at their own pace the first time they feel it, you are creating a generation of porcelain doll adults who think that anything mildly uncomfortable or challenging to their worldview will shatter them like glass.

And no, it is not "trauma" to feel bad about something. Thats part of life that you have GOT to learn to work through and cope with. Not everything that feels bad or fucks you up a bit is trauma just because you think about it sometimes and go "well that was fucked up." If its not actively impeding your functioning, its not trauma.