#A room for everyone in the system

[elexuscal]

so. June. Pride Month.

listen, i love pride month. obviously. but partly as a consequence of being Terminally Online, partly because my country's pride month is in July which means all the actual in-person events don't start for another 30 days, often my first association with it is All The Discourse Posts

which means every year i have to physically restrain myself from making in-universe Pride discourse for different fictional universes

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

someone has never lived with a coke addict. lmao

no but for real i see these posts a lot and while the basic idea is 100 % correct (drug addiction and homelessness are not personal or moral failures and people affected deserve respect and dignity), they usually take a direction or have implications i dont agree with.

first off, drug addiction is not a class issue. people of all backgrounds are drug addicts. ceos too. so i dont know what this has to do with leftism? as someone who struggles with substance abuse and for that reason has lived with and been around addicts, there are good reasons for people to be biased against them. in active addiction, many people are erratic, unpredictable, and egoistic. being wary of active addicts is self-preservation, not „bourgeois“ or whatever the reference to leftism is supposed to imply. this is also partly a gendered issue because men tend to exhibit addiction, egoism, and aggression at higher rates than women.

secondly, especially at the intersection of homelessness and drug addiction - i see a lot of these posts taking the direction of „mind your business if a homeless man is next to you mumbling to himself“ etc - it seems these people also romanticise what drug addiction with nothing to lose can do to a person. a friend of mine was hit in the face by a homeless man walking by, someone else i know was stabbed by a homeless man after they took him in. just because someone is underprivileged you dont have to stop listening to your insticts and keeping your distance to erratic and intoxicated men who seem like they might do something unpredictable. this doesnt just mean homeless men by the way, i dont trust any men exhibiting this behavior, and yeah would possibly call the cops if someone like that hung around my home or work (never have though).

on the other hand, when a homeless woman was hanging out in the hallway i let her be. my neighbor wanted to call the cops but i told her not to. personally i dont even care if she shoots up there, but if i had kids i might not want her around either.

are homeless drug addicts vulnerable and more likely to be harmed than harm someone else? yeah. do cops and doctors treat homeless people like shit? yeah. these are important conversations to have, but i wish they would happen without romantisation.

talk to any woman who has worked with homeless men, myself included - marginalisation is not virtue. many still harrass and even assault women. and these posts never take a gendered perspective: how most homeless and drug addicted women land in prostitution, how they are not safe in homeless shelters because of the men, etc.

im not saying op here said all of this but from the tone (and the tags and reblogs) it struck me as one of those posts that shames people for being alert around drug addicts and alcoholics when there is ample reason to, especially if youre a woman and theyre a man. and they never take a gendered perspective which is really important in this context, as it usually is.

[findafight]

Currently consumed by the thought of a stobin Hollywood studio era lavender marriage au. They elope from Hawkins and Steve takes Robin's last name (a scandal when the paps find out!) And work shit jobs until they hit it big. (Robin is a trailblazer director who verbally eviscerates people who abused their actresses to get a ""more authentic performance"". Steve is a leading man who shifts into Dad Roles in his fifties. They adopt a gaggle of children so his career isn't as full as Rob's and he is so happy about it.)

They are a power couple for over half a century and eventually come out (Robin as a lesbian who's had a partner since the fifties and Steve as 'just very queer. I didn't have the words back then and now I don't feel like labeling it' and their marriage as one filled with love and respect and caring without romance or sex. Calling it "every bit as real as any other marriage, except we never had the complications of fucking. We loved together and fought together and cried together and lived together. The only thing more important to us than each other are our children and grandchildren, and isn't that what every other marriage is?") to the confusion of nearly everyone because they clearly adore each other and constantly hold hands or sit on laps and call each other soulmates and gaze adoringly across rooms and once said about meeting that they knew, after that first month of teasing and jeering and growing pains, that they'd found the person they were meant to be with. That they'd be together for as long as they were given because to know someone so thoroughly that they know you better than yourself and you know them the same that you barely need to speak but you do for the joy of the other's company is a rare gift to be given, especially so young.

Because they never lied! It's just, people assume romantic intent or attraction when Robin and Steve don't! They're the loves of each other's lives but they are not romantically in love and that's hard for people to understand. Especially a high profile couple who was the Romantic Ideal for three generations. And so when they say they were never involved like that, it's hard for some to believe because those two love each other so openly and intensely and for that love to be something other than romantic doesn't compute.

But on the other hand, they had already been queer icons. Steve 100% played in a heavily queercoded war film in the fifties and Robin had a Way of shooting women and they'd been vocal "allies" since the sixties. They'd nearly come out in the eighties but by then it wasn't just a decision they could make. It involved their partners and their children and grandchildren, so they waited to do so. But they were activists early for queer folk and did their best to fight the good fight (and also 1000% cussed Regan out. As he so deserved)

Idk I've rewritten this post like five times as I was helping my brother move and I'm just. Very emotional thinking of a grand, seven decade spanning, queerplatonic love story in the studio era of Hollywood.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[zenithofstories]

I love Decked Out for so many reasons; the build itself is beautiful, the gameplay is fun and engaging, Tango deserves it, the competition is thrilling and the deck-building strategy is intriguing. But by far my favourite aspect of the game is how it has brought the Hermits together.

There are almost always Hermits hanging out in the Citadel, and they gather in numbers for the phase rankings reveal and shard distribution. Tango watches as many runs as he can. It is ridiculous fun to see them all interacting and talking and laughing together.

[ocpdzim]

what you’ve got to understand about working conditions in education (and also other care-oriented careers) is that if they’re shit, two things are true at once:

that does not ever excuse being cruel to a kid, no matter what

until those conditions are fixed, education will continue to suck absolute shit

this is because when working conditions for teachers are really bad, many of the good teachers who recognize when they are reaching a point where they can no longer be the sort of teacher the kids deserve due to burnout WILL quit. they will do the responsible thing and go away for their own sake and the sake of the kids. and you end up stuck w a combination of new teachers who are trying their best but won’t last long, burnt out teachers who are trying their best but have nothing left to give and therefore aren’t very effective at actually teaching, and cockroach shitheads who take out their misery on the kids.

we have all had terrible experiences with bad teachers, many of them flat out traumatic, but for fuck’s sake please try to look at the systemic underpinnings of the problem for one minute. spitefully declaring that teachers don’t deserve good working conditions or even the right to complain about bad working conditions because ms. whoever in 5th grade was a bitch is only going to create more of her. if you want good teachers then we need an education system they can survive in

[smittyreads]

Narrowed it down to my top 7 reads out of 64 from 2023 📚🎉

[badolmen]

I think one of the hardest things for privileged leftists have to learn is that they can’t just automatically agree with the majority. They can’t just automatically agree with the opinion of the POC, the queer, the Jewish person they’re interacting with in the moment because ‘they’re the experts in their own life.’ Which is true! But there is no monolith. POC and queers and religious minorities are not some mystical pure hivemind that always agree on everything and have correct opinions all the time. People are people. What one person finds offensive another might not care about.

I feel like it’s very evident these days where you have some people of a minority saying x is bad and some people saying x is good. Which is correct? Well, you have to educate yourself and make a critical assessment of the arguments before coming to your own conclusion. But now you have leftists who are desperate to be the most agreeable person in the room with the ‘right’ opinions who waffle and fail to organize in any meaningful way because they refuse to let the subject at hand have meaning for them, personally. They’re so busy ‘listening’ to minorities they’re not actually thinking about what they’re hearing, they’re not processing the biases underprivileged people can still carry, they’re not critical of reactionary politics or propaganda so long as it’s what the people immediately around them agree on.

Grow a spine, pick a side, and actually have a framework for your political and social involvement other than ‘let’s be real niceys with everyone :)’

[goblin-hart]

I keep finding myself in these conversations recently:

someone in power provides a resource to help people and makes it available to everyone (cause duh).

And someone goes: but what if people take advantage of it?

...you mean...if someone uses a resource which is available?

But what if they don't need it!

Then it won't help them?? Even if they use it?

*foaming at the mouth* But they shouldn't get apple if not starving!

If there are enough apple...why shouldn't everyone have access to apple?

[merlinssaggyyfronts]

on todays episode of ‘wow, merlin is literally this song’. yk what is horrifically merlin coded? waiting room by phoebe bridgars. “if you were a waiting room, i’d never see the doctor. i would sit with my first aid kit and bleed.” arthur is his waiting room. and merlin WAITS THERE. never free, always scared and in hiding, always lying, he never fulfills his destiny- he STAYS with arthur, in their little waiting room til its forcibly taken from him.

also the “know its for the better” over and over and OVER AGAIN, all of merlins sacrifices being for the better of destiny and all of albion. him keeping quiet about his magic, about all the things hes done (nearly letting mordred die, nimuehs death, poisoning morgana) because its for the better. because it was for destiny.

and all the people hes lost (will saying hes a sorcerer in his place before dying himself, freyas death, balinors death, lancelots sacrifice in his place) was all for the better. freya had to die to become the lady of the lake (and like what i think with wills death, so he wouldnt have anyone distracting him away from his destiny with arthur), balinor had to die so merlin would inherit his dragonlord abilities, lancelot had to die in merlins place so he could stay at arthurs side. merlin losing everyone was for the better. and personally i am not okay with that

[daddymikeyway]

2001

[lost-in-the-planetarium]

system things is telling my headmates i will DO THE THING later if they don't do anything silly that will upset us

just to immediately be stopping someone from doing just that

[aromanticasterisms]

so no furina story quest 2 :((

[icewindandboringhorror]

oughhhhhhhhhhhh........ 89 F days in early May..........

[vaguely-concerned]

sometimes I think about the fact that synox is the only person who calls blue by his given name and have unnameable emotions about it. big 'the only people who call me that are synox and my mother' vibes for me personally tbh

[crematedpast]

Concerning in-system relationships.

Made with two headmates in mind. The relationships between headmates are complex and even difficult at times but can be sweet if given the chance.