masonhawthorne

[masonhawthorne]

OP: My dad insisted on betting me 20 yuan he could do a handstand... with both hands.

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Travel to Melbourne: booked

Accomodation: booked

Holiday anticipation: building

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wait until the end

(video by saraaaandipity on IG)

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My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

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The Starter Family, by Sage Tyrtle

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Using the bathroom in general is a human right and should be enshrined as such and I'm not joking. Too many groups of people are denied bathroom breaks or the use of bathrooms entirely--disabled people, blue-collar workers, children, homeless people, prisoners, students, the elderly. I'm surely missing other groups. Not using the bathroom when needed can cause serious, long-term damage, not to mention death. Free, clean, accessible bathrooms should be available everywhere. It's fucking cruel to deny someone the use of the bathroom, regardless of the reasoning. I'd rather every student in the world goof off and every homeless person make a mess and every worker "steal company time" than let one person suffer because they're denied the right to fucking pee in peace.

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those flat escalator moving walkway things they have in airports effectively kill you and make a clone on the other side like the teleporter but in a gradual ship of theseus kind of way

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Show Me the Monet #13 - David Palmer

American , b. 1953 -

Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 in.

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Orange Water - Bernadett Timko , 2024 .

Hungarian , b. 1992 -

Oil on paper , 23 x 31 in.

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I was thinking about how I have grown to value mandatory voting over a system that allows allegedly more freedom. Because in country, mandatory voting means I just have to send in a ballot. It can be empty or filled with the write in ballot "pickle farts" if I want.

If I go to the voting station all I have to do is get my name checked off. I don't have to vote if I don't want to.

But it means it is much more difficult for the government to try and suppress voters. Because voters have a legal obligation to go to the polls, so you can't restrict them or try tactics to dissuade them.

Voting polls are open long hours with access to food and water being a fairly standard staple. You don't need any form of ID, you have to be given time to go vote in work hours without penalty if you cannot do it after work hours.

Every now and then a politician tries some small way of voter suppression but it isn't as easy. And so I have learned to appreciate it.

But when I googled, out of curiosity, if the USA had ever had anything like that I was met with a barrage of websites talking about freedom and justice and the absolute liberty of Americans. I thought an eagle was going to bust out of the screen.

Going through some of these I noticed they were think tanks connected to billionaires, one of them was funded and created by the Koch brothers.

Gotta love how often the American "freedom" is actually used as a way to further deny actual freedoms, both linguistically and politically.

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“The Slur Song” by @bigfoots-biggest-fan as performed by Cisero @ The Prohibition Cabaret

I fucking love this song so much and as soon as my friend played it for me for the first time, I knew I had to perform this. This is just such a banger song to perform at any drag show bc I am given plenty of people to point to. Not to mention that I had my family front row for this one.

The coat for this look took 40 hours to bedazzle alone (and gave me a serious case of solvent poisoning-) and the paper pad took me about 4 hours to complete in total. I’m glad I managed to get these pictures from @/solcm15 on insta so I at least have some good pictures of this beast. Needless to say, I’ve changed how I bedazzle from now on.

Just look at this hot bitch… Everyone gets to have a meeting with the Drag HR Manager and I hope to perform this number so many more times ❤️

[masonhawthorne]

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FEED HER

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A beaver dam in British Columbia showing its ability to hold back sediment pollution during heavy rainfall.

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I can’t decide what’s funnier, the dog, or the guy that’s dying of laughter in the background

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lookit this ant nest! that’s a lotta larvae, huh

…oh wait

that ain’t children, that’s livestock.

The relationship between ants and aphids or other sap- feeding insects is pretty widely known, but these ants (probably Lasius claviger) rear their root aphids inside their nest, farming them for both honeydew and meat. The ants are pale yellow because they almost never go aboveground, and considering that they’ve been known to eat the “excess” nymphs of their massive aphid herds, they probably don’t have much reason to leave their nest at all.

Root aphids like these aren’t normally found outside Lasius nests, and unlike freeliving aphids they have a special organ for holding honeydew until it’s ready to be milked by an ant.

I found this scene under a sheet of scrap metal, with the aphids left in loose piles with few or no roots available to drink sap from. I’m guessing that the ants moved them under the sun- warmed metal to heat them up and speed their growth and digestion between meals, a trick many ants practice on their larvae.

[masonhawthorne]

Here have a vine compilation that I made and enjoy I’m not late to the party or anything (update for part two)