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love books. because it’s like what if something happened

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Calling all Kiwis!

If you live in Aotearoa - New Zealand and care about our biodiversity and country and don't want it sold out for short term profit, please make a submission in opposition to the Regulatory Standards Bill.

The closing date for submissions is 1.00pm, Monday, 23 June 2025

Regulatory Standards Bill will stop lawmakers considering broader public health

What's Wrong With the RSB

Regulatory Standards Bill threatens the public interest, public health and Māori rights

The ‘dangerous’ bill has been updated, but how?

The dangers in the Regulatory Standards Bill

‘Alarm bells need to ring’: Concerns over Regulatory Standards Bill

How the Regulatory Standards Bill gives companies more rights than the public

-> Submit here <-

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Kā mihi o te tau hou, ā, mānawatia a Matariki e hoa mā!!

Happy Māori new year friends!!

At least here, Matariki has risen and it’s the time of celebration for the Māori new year, and is the time for the traditional new year for many indigenous peoples across the pacific, from here in the south in Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu, to Fiji, to Hawai’i, and off the coast of Argentina!

It’s a time to set intentions for the new year and remember all those who have passed in the last year into Raroheka, guided and protected by the whetū Pōhutakawa. Times are tough as of late, but I’m hoping that everyone will pull through and share joy throughout the coming year regardless of hardship.

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On conservation and survival

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One other thing I should have added is that the narrative that queerness comes from 'somewhere else' is really popular with bigots. And it gets heaps of play in colonies where Victorian Europeans rolled up and destroyed a lot of indigenous culture and history they didn't approve of (which was most of it, as it happened). Then enforced a very conservative form of Christianity.

So, there's regressive forces on both sides of this - squeezing local queer history out.

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. martha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1989. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

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There's a comment there about how this is mostly the result of rainbow capitalism taking its cues from the US, and not being actually interested enough in queer history to be local (I'm paraphrasing) and I do just want to pull that out because Aotearoa had it's own local festivals before companies turned their attention to 'Pride'. And most of them continue.

In the 1990s (when I was in my teens-twenties) in Wellington we had Devotion. Which was a parade and then a big dance party.

If you really squint into this picture you might see a tiny speck of blue at the back that could be my blue dyed hair. (I'm kidding myself, you can't see that, but I was there too.)

And this wasn't the beginning. There's lots of good history on the Pride website

The thing about a lot of these events was that they weren't commercial, these were community events. There's no logos or police cars with rainbow wraps on them in the photos. No one is marching in uniform. Most events were held in venues owned by the council because commercial places didn't want them.

Because the US has such cultural hegemony, inspiration was drawn from things there. The Polynesian Panthers were doing something similar (that's a whole story you should absolutely look into if you haven't already).

And then the corporates discovered rainbow capitalism, and now that 'the gays' can be considered a 'market' we've got companies getting into it. They have imported a lot of their strategies from the US, because they focus more on the capitalism than the rainbow part. So they want to make June the month, and focus on US history as it comes pre-packaged to maximise sales (and it's far away so they can pretend everything is good here and always was, same as race issues).

Social media has absolutely amplified that as it is very US-centric and local stuff gets pushed out, but this is absolutely the result of the shallowness of rainbow capitalism as it tries to turn us into a market segment.

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. martha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1989. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

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the resurgence of Thin being In has made thin people so much more fucking annoying i keep seeing recipe and gardening videos or tiktoks that look good or are informative but the (very much thin!!) creators can't stop going "oh gotta get my FAT ASS to work in the garden!! 😂 making some tortillas because i'm a FAT LARD ASS, sorry for adding two tablespoons of oil to this i'm such a fucking BIG BACK FAT DIPSHIT aren't i 😂😂" are you not embarrassed

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"Director Phoebe Kemp said in a statement: “Twelfth Night already toys with gender and performance – it feels like Shakespeare wrote it for us. This reading is about joy, solidarity and showing what’s possible when trans and nonbinary artists are at the centre of the story.”"

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It's even worse.

In Aotearoa we have the 'Variable Oystercatcher - Black variant'. And the te reo name for the bird is tōrea-pango (which literally means black oyster catcher). Even when they're not black, they're still black oystercatchers.

oh come on you guys

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30+ year old women are the backbone of this website

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Very exciting things are happening at Maungatautari. There's video (and audio) of the kākāpō booming. And the North Island brown kiwi programme is going so well they are sending kiwi out to other places.

Also in Aotearoa, there's been a massive increase in the numbers of native birds and insects in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington region). This is mostly due to an increase in predator trapping by community groups.

can we get a post going of environmental/conservation progress lately (especially outside of the USA). it can feel so defeating and it’s easy to burn out when you’re surrounded by all the negatives

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better pictures of my papier mache cat i made when i was 17 (its cat-sized)

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reblog this and put in the tags which capital cities you’ve been to

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look I know it’s supposed to be a joke but that “irradiated wasteland” is the unceded homeland of the Paiute and Shoshone peoples and consists of fragile Mojave and Great Basin desert ecosystems that are actively being exploited and destroyed by mining interests who utilize the perception of desert as wasteland to justify their destruction of indigenous lands and communities. the joke's not funny. fuck off with this.