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They're waiting for Tangle to get back from the Mickey D's run.

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A bit more pixel art practice before bed. This time the deer that massive damaged my psyche

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@fumblebaum is absolutely cooked for the Halloween party this year. At least until @acesentialsketches gets a bit TOO into character.

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Just a silly doodle of @acesentialsketches and I's OCs for the Slightly Damned webcomic by Chu. Cipher really hasn't adjusted to the Medius time cycle. He'll get it... eventually.

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Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

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I am a long-time fan of you and I know you care a lot about social issues. When I saw your analysis on the HH designs, I feel you missed two major aspects of Alastor's design that are suspect. One, the 'deer' aspect of Alastor is a reference to a Native American Cannibal spirit which name is taboo and so I won't type it here. Though the creature itself isn't associated with deer, the common depiction of them is a cannibalistic deer-monster. Second, the 'magic symbols' Alastor uses are straight up Voodoo/Vodoun symbols. Not used in the right context or with an actual voudoun priest/priestess serving as a sensitivity reader. I bring these up, because I feel your analysis lacked a lot of context. If you answer this, thank you in advance.

Ah, you might be able to help me on this, I've heard before that the creature in question is taboo to mention or depict, but I've looked around multiple times for a source on the taboo. Which indigenous cultures is it that have the taboo on the creature? It's part of multiple nations' folklore, do they all collectively have the same taboo on the creature, or do they have differing stances on it?

I have seen this claim of taboo repeated across the internet, it's on various poorly-sourced mythology blogs and it gets repeated by TikTokers and in social media discussions, but I haven't been able to find any official sources from Algonquian-speaking indigenous nations, whose cultures originate the stories, asking that outsiders not discuss or represent the creature.

I've been able to find anecdotes shared by people that their elders have told them not to say the creature's name at certain times or in certain circumstances, because it supposedly draws the creature (or the evil it represents) closer, but I've not been able to find any strong indications that that taboo extends to non-members of the culture, or people speaking outside of the nation's lands, or on the Internet.

I saw a few people who identified as Ojibwe make fun of the idea that the word needs to be censored in text especially, with one of them calling it "colonizer nonsense." According to them, the rule they grew up with is not to speak the creature's name out loud in certain circumstances, and they claimed that it was considered significantly more taboo (at least in their communities) to whistle at night, since that would call the creature. Again, this is all anecdotal, but better sources seem scarce on the ground.

Do you have a link or a source, or some knowledge of which nations or organizations are calling for the taboo to be respected by non-indigenous people? The main reason I did not bring up this subject is because I simply cannot find any good sources on which to base a criticism. I don't want to spread the idea that First Nations people are calling for a taboo on depictions or mentions of a creature from their culture unless I can positively confirm that they are actually doing that.

Similarly, if you have a solid source from an authoritative Vodoun practitioner criticizing Alastor's design, I'd love to read it, it might come in handy someday. Not asking you to do my research for me, obviously, just that if you have one to hand or off the top of your head, you'd be doing me a favor.

As I say in the video itself, it was meant to be a fairly short project, and I did not have a lot of research time available. If I'm going to broach a critique on Alastor's design as it relates to Vodoun practises and culture, I need to study some primary sources from those cultures outlining what they consider to be best practises and faux-pas when it comes to depiction and use in pop culture. It's maybe a subject for a future video some day, but not until I've done the reading, and I would probably make it a much broader discussion than just Alastor and Hazbin Hotel.

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Some of you are going to have to realize really fast that posting on social media about your acts of resistance, or the acts of resistance of your workplace/student group, or things you're planning, or even about charitable actions like volunteering, is a stupid idea in the kind of climate where such acts are increasingly incredibly necessary. And that therefore you cannot and should not assume that someone is apathetic or not doing anything important based on their social media activity. And that some acts require secrecy to be effective and people might only be able to safely talk about them years later, if ever.

And then get off your high fucking horse about how people aren't doing anything, how no one is currently firebombing a Walmart, how "white women who say things like 'joy is an act of resistance' take no other acts of resistance" etc. I promise that right now many ordinary people you will never know about are taking actions that seem small on their own but will lessen harm in significant and tangible ways, and that those people are doing more good than anyone whose main revolutionary actions are snarkily complaining online. This is not the time to be tallying social media points and using them to judge each other.

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I drew Saint in some dresses as practice last month and I forgot about it but I really like that right one

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my name's cougar but my friends call me mountain lion and my mama calls me puma and today's my first day at big cat high. i'm so nervous i hope they don't realize i'm not panthera >ܫ<

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"It doesn't help your credibility to exaggerate, most employers wouldn't literally work you to death" like, I used to work in distribution. If booking a truck driver for back to back shifts until they fall asleep at the wheel, crash, and die counts as being worked to death, I have personally met employers who've worked employees to death and gotten away with a slap on the wrist. It may not be universal, but it's a hell of a lot more common than a lot of us would prefer to think.

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Birthday gift art for @e-glyde of her and those funny ghost and goo characters

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Some Magma doodles

(The text in the first drawing says noga talgidaniga otda sayong ma? "Have you ever slept?", in the last one it says kobba sa! "It's bad!")

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I miss when I would get Tumblr asks that actually said things and weren't just digital panhandling scams.

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Elephants melt my heart every time I see them, I swear