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Queer is the label we used when we weren’t sure. Queer is the label we used when we were sure no other label would do. Queer is a gender that is my own and only my own. Queer is a sexuality that defies definition. 

Queer is the label which became genderqueer, and from which non-binary and genderfluid sprung. Queer is the label which is the un-box, in which everyone who is not cishet (including ace people!!) fits. Queer is community.

Queer is activist. Queer is in the streets screaming ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’ Queer is not ashamed.

Queer was ours from the beginning. Queer was ours a century ago. Queer was used against us, and we said ‘fuck you,’ and we took it BACK. Queer is butches and bears with bats, protecting our community.

Queer is blue-collar. Queer is working-class. Queer is poor. Queer is people who can’t afford to sit out Stonewall quietly and then go fight for marriage equality when the tax bills come due. Queer is a distinct identity, and queer is the un-box.

Queer makes TERFs and exclusionists angry, because it doesn’t let them define people by gold stars and terms like ‘SGA’ that come from conversion therapy. Queer doesn’t give a shit about historical revision to exclude members of the community who have always been here, because queer has always been here and always will be.

Queer is the life raft onto which we climb. Queer is community. Queer is important, and people will have to pry it from my cold dead hands. I’ve been queer for thirty years. My community is queer, and it is opt-in.

If you tag my fucking posts ‘q slur’ or any variant thereof I will immediately fucking block you. Don’t fucking do it. If you feel obligated to tag my posts ‘q slur,’ don’t interact with them. My identity is not a bad word and does not require censoring.

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Emoji spell for extreme good luck for the next two months

🍀🌰🌒🌓🌔🌕🌠⭐⚡☀⚡⭐🌠🌕🌔🌓🌒🌰⭐🌱🌿🍀🎆🌋🎇🌠🔮🔔💰💰💰💰💸💸💸💸💳💳💳💳💸💸💸💸💸💸💸💸💰💰💰🍀🌿🍀🌿🍀🌿🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀🌋🌊🌈🎆🎇🎉🎊🔓🔆🔓💰💸💳🔅📈🏁🍚⬆⬇↕🔄✳✴🌊🌈🌒🌓🌔🌕🌠⭐⚡🌋🎆🎇🎆🎉🎊🎍💸💸💸✴✳✳✳✳↕↕↕↕🎆🎇🌋✴✳🐇🐸🍀🌰🌱🌼🍀🍀🍀🌻🌺🍀🍀🌿🍀🌰🌱🌿🍀

Likes charge. Reblogs CAST

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my absolute favourite poem

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Life is a Disco Ball!

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Yall think the gods take classics classes for fun

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Wait, people are mad that it's blurry? Isn't that black hole in another galaxy????

It’s literally like 55 million light years away

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Diferentes razas de perro en versión guerrera, por Nikita Orlov.

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reminder to:

straighten your back

go pee goddAMN IT STOP HOLDING IT

go take your meds if you need to

drink some water

go get a snack if you havent eaten in a while

maybe wander around the house/stretch a little if you’ve been sat at the computer a while (artists especially: sTRETCH THOSE WRISTS)

reply to that text/message from earlier you’d forgotten about

maybe send a nice lil message to someone having a bad day?

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this is not what i intended to draw tonight and yet

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😂😂😂

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me looking at the black hole photo: wow that is so incredible and historic holy shit!

Also me thinking about black holes and space for even one minute:

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We’ve been talking a bit about disaster preparedness and end-of-the-world fantasies, so here’s something I never really see discussed:

How would a significant interruption in access to modern pharmaceuticals effect medical transition?

The only thing I can think of is I find a veterinarian (because every zombie survival team needs a veterinarian) to cut my balls off and then I start drinking pregnant horse peepee, as our foremothers once did upon the steppes of Scythia.

And I really don’t think I can find words to adequately describe how badly I want that to Not Happen.

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is it possible that plants have consciousness?

this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014. 

the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):

this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up. 

but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop. 

they remembered that no harm was coming from this action and decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop. 

she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.

they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered. 

it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after 28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!

how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this??? 

well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen. 

so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????

plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???) 

national geographic wrote an awesome article visualizing the experiment here if you want to read more!