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screen printing stencil i'm working on. i guess i will never stop thinking about soviet space dogs

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Girls only want one thing and it’s to flip a series of overhead switches and to punch a few glowing buttons to start up the spaceship

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Warning: I DO use dude, man, bruh, and bro as completely gender neutral terms, HOWEVER if I call you one of the above and it bothers you, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me.

This has been a PSA 

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HEEELPPP a six year old just came into the nature center and she had SO many questions. it's pouring rain and nobody else is here but her family so non-stop for an hour she had my full attention. by the end of it i had half my field guides open to various insects and mammals and birds and she just kept going.

she became extremely fixated on bigfoot and asked about the ways people try to prove its existence until I was explaining DNA to her, and she asked such thoughtful questions! she said, "what if someone found a skull they thought might be bigfoot, and there was hair left over. could we use DNA from hair to prove it's bigfoot?" but before i could answer, she said, "but if you don't have a living bigfoot that you KNOW is bigfoot, to take hair from, how could you know this hair from this dead bigfoot is really bigfoot hair?" !!!! what an awesome question!!

so this 6 year old and i started discussing control groups in scientific studies and she was so engaged!!

then the bigfoot talk led to discussions of extinction which led to dinosaurs, and she said, "what I don't understand is why people say dinosaurs are extinct, but they also say that dinosaurs became birds. how could they all be extinct if they became something else?"

she asked questions that really challenged me in that figuring out how to answer them on the fly in a way that's digestible wasn't totally straightforward.

a few minutes ago, the adult with her said it was time to go and get ice cream and she said, "can't you see I have 1,000 more questions to ask? i have to just bloooowwww them all out now so you don't have to answer them later."

I saw my younger self in her so much LOL. They said they're coming back tomorrow and I said, "I won't be here, but my colleague knows even more than I do!" And she said, "Well, I hope so. He's gonna need to."

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not to sound like a weak, morally impure centrist over here, but i think online leftist communities need to be a little more accepting of the concept that most people are just. not that well informed. we live in a society that provides access to an overwhelming amount of information and yet which discourages actually diving into much beyond the surface level. Most of the people you meet out in the world are just not gonna know much about a lot of what you care about, but that's not the same as being against those things, or being unwilling to learn, or being unnamenable to those ideas. Our modern society is an unending cascade of information and misinformation and disinformation and filtering through that shit enough to actually have a solid grasp of a subject, let alone a nuanced antiestablishment political take, is a skill that takes time and effort to develop, time and effort that is in very short supply. It really bothers me when I see leftists talk about how capitalism keeps us down by taking up all our time and energy and making recovery, both physical and emotional, cost what little we can afford, and then turn around and get upset that people are politically uninformed. On some level, you gotta meet some people where they are, and have a little faith in them to be open to new ideas and information. Ignorance is not inherently intentional, and it's not the same as antipathy.

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time to rant about jean moreau cause he’s my favorite aftg character :)

it makes me so unbelievably sad to think about how he never got to be a child and live his life for himself. because before the Nest, he was Elodie’s only protector. a child protecting a child. and then—against his will—he was ripped away from her, left feeling like he failed her, even though he had no choice. he was thrown into a place where he barely knew the language and punished for it. punished for something he couldn’t control.

and then again—for being bi? punished.

for neil not staying? punished.

for not wanting to live? punished.

he was constantly being taught that no matter what he does or doesn’t do—even if it’s completely out of his control—he will be punished. even being taken from the Nest, while it was the best thing that could’ve happened for him (even though he didn’t want it), he was still punished.

for trying to heal.

finally, with the Trojans, he starts to feel safe. he’s healing. he’s trying. but the Ravens and the press come for him again. he gets punished again. and so do the people around him—Cat, Laila, Jeremy—for things the Ravens do. they got disqualified (the ravens), and so Jean,cat, laila, and jermey loose the only place that felt like home to them. and Jean genuinely thought he was going to lose the people he cared about too. because of course he thought they’d blame him. everyone always has.

and that’s why i think he and jeremy work so well together. because jeremy is so similar, even though he hides it better.

He’s punished by his own family just for being who he is. instead of helping him with his drug problem—they ignored it. Instead of listening to him beg them to help his brother—they ignored that too. And he was punished for it. they took exy away from him. they forced him into law school. they punished him for being gay by calling him slurs and literally convincing his boyfriend to leave him.

they’re both such severely hurt characters. and their healing looks so different.

jean is slowly, carefully starting to heal.

jeremy is still trapped.

and idk. that’s just why i love the new trilogy so much. It gives these characters so much depth and complexity—it lets them exist with all their pain and softness and fear.

and i just find jean especially so tragic, because he wants to heal. but he’s scared. so instead, he pushes everything down and endures it, because if it all crumbles again, at least he’ll be ready. at least it won’t catch him off guard.

and god, that just hurts so bad.

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WE NEED TO START TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT BIGENDERISM

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Man, we have got to stop treating art like it has an expiration date. That show stopped airing? Doesn’t mean it can’t haunt your every waking thought. Everybody’s into this album, but you don’t have the energy for new music right now? It’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready. That movie’s fifty years old and indie as shit? Incredible, you have the chance to share it with folks who might never otherwise feel that particular punch of delight. Books don’t go bad. Shows inspire fandoms decades after they’ve wrapped up. We’re still looking at cave paintings and statue work from ancient times and letting the joy of creation bring tears to our eyes. That’s the point of art. It’s as close to immortality as we ever get. Why try to give that magic a shelf life?

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Bad Omens?

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Let’s talk about Stonewall and the origin of Pride in the United States, eh?

Sodomy laws among other policies were commonplace in the US through the 1960’s. Police enforced these policies by harassing and brutalizing and criminalizing queer people, acting on behalf of the state in an ongoing attempt to eradicate queer people from society.

This was particularly a problem in NYC due to NY liquor license laws that revoked the licenses of all bars “patronized by prostitutes and homosexuals.” A few years before the Stonewall Riots, this law was amended to say that the gays can drink at bars as long as no “disorderly conduct” occurred.

What was considered disorderly conduct? Kissing, dancing, touching, acting too gay, etc. Courtesy of NYPD, gay bars were raided monthly in the late 1960’s. If cops found disorderly conduct during the raid, the bar lost their liquor license.

Stonewall Inn was notable because it was ran as a members-only “bottle club” which made them exempt from needing a liquor license. It was ran by the mafia and by all accounts it was a real dump, but it was one of the only gay bars where queer ppl were allowed to dance. They had a relatively secure entrance and protocols in place to warn patrons of police.

At 1:20 AM on June 28, 1969, NYPD raided Stonewall Inn. Four undercover cops were admitted to the establishment earlier in the evening and took inventory of illegal acts while backup waited for the signal nearby. Police barred doors and windows to keep the 200ish patrons in place while they processed arrests. People with a feminine appearance were secluded and inspected to determine whether or not they were “cross-dressing” which was illegal. These secluded people reported mass discomfort as police openly groped several lesbians while inspecting them.

Some patrons refused to cooperate with the police in one way or another, at which point NYPD decided to arrest everyone in Stonewall. They called in wagons for mass transport.

Instead of going home, the people previously released from police custody lingered outside on the street. This plus all the cop cars began pulling in a crowd of curious onlookers, the majority of whom were queer. By the time the first wagon arrived, the crowd was in the hundreds. NYPD began escorting arrestees. Tensions grew between onlookers and police, resulting in spats. People started throwing coins and bottles at police wagons when they heard reports of ongoing police brutality inside Stonewall.

Michael Fader was present and later described the crowd’s disposition:

“We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration… Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw.”

A woman being escorted to one of the wagons tried to break free and escape a few times; when she complained her handcuffs were too tight, she was hit in the head with a baton. She looked at bystanders and shouted, “Why don’t you guys do anything?”

When cops literally tossed her into a wagon, the crowd started to fight back. They threw coins and bricks at cops and tried to immobilize their vehicles. Police barricaded themselves inside Stonewall and called for backup. The crowd tried to ram down the door and break windows. Someone started a fire. You know, riot shit. Riots broke out for the next few nights. I’m glossing over a lot but I think you get the point.

In addition to radical acts of resistance through violence and destruction, queer people outside Stonewall openly defied the bigoted laws designed to eradicate them. They danced and kissed and touched and showed the fuck up in support of their community.

This is why Pride exists.

Pride is a celebration of rebellion. We show up to openly flaunt what makes us heinous in the eyes of bigots. We show up as a reminder: DO NOT FUCK WITH US.

With progress came normalization and this has made us complacent. We’ve allow cops at pride. We’ve embraced rainbow capitalism. Things are changing, though.

An outbreak of fascism across the world has powerful people once again calling for the suppression (and thus eradication) of people in our community. In particular, trans people and people of color are at risk right now and we need to fucking protect them.

Sharpen your fangs. Be vigilant. Do not trust the state to do ‘the right thing’ because to them the right thing is the law of the land, which is a shit moral compass. They’ve never given us anything we haven’t had to take by force, illegally, while facing violent action from the state.

Don’t fucking forget that.

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I learned a lot today from Obviously Queer’s video essay “FEMME: Lesbian History, Identity, Politics and Invisibility” and femmebis’ “The “Lesbian-Only Term” Myth: A Comprehensive Historical Essay on ‘Butch’ and ‘Femme’ ”.

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I love women so much

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Has anyone done these yet 😭😂

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prints are here!! yippee!!

the stickers should be in next week, but pre-orders are open for them :3