#anti tracking

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

Stay safe yall

[thecoldcoffeecup]

tale as old as time🥂

[the-badger-mole]

So due to friends who ship it, I often end up in KA spaces more than I would like. But I recently was told something I think you especially would find funny/ridiculous. Apparently Bryke has continued the revisionism of their show due to criticism. First it was the comics and Aang asking Katara if he can kiss her. Then it’s the freaking cookbook that tells us Aang cooks all the time for his friends and knows lots of air nomad vegetarian recipes. Now according to my KA shipping friends, Avatar Legends has talked about how Kya and Bumi were included and received a full air nomad cultural education just like Tenzin did. That Kya uses her father’s lessons on “philosophy, meditation, and balance” in her own life and teaches classes to the new air nomads. So now KA shippers are trying to claim that this shows that Aang was a good dad and did treat them fairly and wasn’t neglectful. I can only imagine what Bryke will come up with next for their new movie!

Fortunately thanks to you I have a solid argument for my friends whenever this kind of thing crops up, “If Bryke thought it was important they would have showed it on screen in the show.” So thank you!

I'm happy to help! I would add that them making these adjustments to Aang after everyone complained about them is too little too late. Especially since most of these have come well after LoK wrapped. Who are they even doing it for? Aang's stans are going to stan no matter what awful things he does. Those of us who don't like Aang aren't going to be fooled by such an embarrassingly transparent attempt. And unless they're going to George Lucas LoK and rewrite whole episodes and plot points, their original ideas still stand. All they're doing is proving the Zutara/anti Aang fans right. Aang was a terrible father/husband/friend, and now they're trying to retcon their boy. I don't follow the comics and other properties, but what I've heard about it all makes me feel vindicated. I can't wait until they reveal that Katara had a bigger statue than Aang in another part of Republic City the whole time, and the only reason she wasn't at Yakone's bloodbending trial is because she was singlehandedly delivering an entire maternity ward's worth of babies. In the middle of a blizzard. With her teeth. And the reason she's the only one who can stop Aang's Avatar Super Tantrums is because every Avatar has some sort of mystical counterpoint that's born to babysit their rage outs.

Bryke's writing is a joke.

[catofoldstones]

Sansa Stark whenever the psycho bitch who killed her father or the next top contenders for Westeros’ most traumatised unaware pedophiles try to info dump & project their secrets/plans/opinions on her

[narryamor]

“You kiss me in a way that's gonna screw me up forever.” “Cause you kiss me and it stops time.”

[finemealprompt]

DP x DC Prompt #91

Jason has been told time and time again by so many that he’s tainted. He’s no longer a hero. He’ll never be a hero again. He’s accepted it. But how is he supposed to turn down a clearly terrified teen who has traveled across the country, stating Jason is the only one who can help his friend.

[dire-roach39]

okay I don't really know how to frame this. but like. funniest way to confirm Dean is Ben's dad is

20 year-old Ben takes a genetics test for fun or whatever, and the results he gets back are just batshit insane. it's like. oh hey. my biological father is a known serial killer who's still on the FBI's most wanted list and has been found or thought dead multiple times. and my uncle. and my grandfather. and my grandmother. and my--

[bluebobatea]

if sasuke was the main character then he probably would've been a LOT more sympathised with than he is now (which is to say rarely). like the narrative wouldn't even need to change to show his pains or 'his side of the story', bc it does that plenty. it's just that he is not the main character. and idk what it is about our human minds but we tend to sympathise with main characters automatically (unless ofc you go off the rockers insane and do something like obliterate almost everyone from the planet *cough* eren yeager *cough*)

an instance that comes to my mind where this does happen is with lelouch from code geass. while i don't agree with his character motivations, people generally do sympathise with him as he is the mc and as viewers we know he isn't inherently evil. sasuke's goal towards the end is slightly similar but ofc people love to hate him so they don't even try to understand where he is coming from.

my point is, most people while engaging with the naruto story don't read between the lines and so don't see how traumatised and in pain sasuke is and hence don't understand his character motivations. heck, they don't understand a single bit about him and so they automatically hate him, as he is supposedly going against the main character's goals.

which is really sad given all that he has been through.

[xabura]

Kataang shippers getting mad that Zutara shippers wish their ship was canon as if they don't always brag about how Kataang is canon and have been harassing the NATLA writers because they think they won't make Kataang canon.

[britney-rosberg06]

me everytime carlos opens his mouth

[laurellynnleake]

🚨 June 6th 2024: USA COVID Alert 🚨

SARS-CoV-2 rates are rising across the USA, especially in the West - mask up to protect yourself and your loved ones.

Remember, the US government is now actively hiding COVID data across Turtle Island, hospitals are rarely testing or masking, and death certificates do NOT list COVID-related complications like heart attacks and strokes. That means we have to rely on public wastewater data (measuring viruses in sewer water), and even that's being suppressed, and everything's on a 2 week delay. So when the numbers we CAN see go up (like the current official 430,000 infections per day), that's just the tip of the iceberg...Right now wastewater numbers are about TWICE AS HIGH AS THEY WERE LAST JUNE, before the US declared the pandemic over.

These graphs are from wastewaterscan.org and Iowacovid19tracker.org. They collect a lot of local and national data too - look up your own area!

SARS-COV-2 aerosols hang in the air like smoke, and can infect you hours after the contagious person's gone. Keep yourself safe by wearing a well-fitting respirator mask (like N95s or KN95s) whenever you're in CROWDED and COVERED areas, and when CLOSE to people (that includes outside pride events, protest rallies, backyard cookouts, etc). Whenever possible, keep indoors air moving by opening windows, and improve air quality with HEPA air filters (ex. DIY Corsi-Rosenthal box fans).

If you're sick: https://tinyurl.com/currentlysick

Mask database: https://tinyurl.com/maskdb

Air filtration resources: https://cleanaircrew.org/

How To Talk To Your Loved Ones About COVID: COVID.tips

You do NOT want to get COVID-19 if you can avoid it - the initial infection can be nasty, and the long-term effects brutally disabling. Wearing a mask is the quickest and easiest way to break the chain of transmission, and to stand in solidarity with marginalized people fighting to survive across the globe.

Spread the word and take care of each other out there!

[ID 1: Screenshot of IowaCovid19Tracker on June 7th, showing a map of SARS-CoV-2 viral activity in the USA for the last week of May 2024. Hawai'i is blue with the highest "Excessive cases", followed by Wyoming and Utah (red, "Substantial"). New Mexico, Nevada, Florida, Arkansas, Montana, Missouri, Maryland, California, Washington, and Texas are all orange, meaning "Moderate" cases. Most of the Northeast and Alaska are yellow, or "Low", with the remaining states green, or "Minimal." ID 2: Screenshot of WasteWaterScan.org tracker showing data for all sites averaged together as a single line graph. The line starts at late March 2024 to early June, at around 275 parts per million (SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids found in wastewater samples). It slowly decreases to about 125 per mill by April 21st, then slopes upward jaggedly until it spikes to around 375 at the end of May. ID 3: A screenshot of the WasteWaterScan.org tracker showing data for all sites stacked on top of each other in a line graph, with the lower end of the spectrum having so many blue lines so as to appear almost as a solid color. The graph shows late April to early June, and has the most lines around 200 parts per million, but a good handful of lines extend up to 2400 parts per million. Below the line chart, a historical chart shows a longer view, with peaks in the winter of 2023 and 2024. Looking at the last month or two on that scale, there appears to be an uptick starting in mid May that is about twice as high as the same time in 2023.

[snoftshell-snurtle]

[image description: 1987 donatello, five years old, wearing water wings and a dubious expression. helpful arrows indicate "aquatic reptile!", "genius", "not a baby", and "does not need water wings, irma"]

[coochiequeens]

A woman wanted to have a relationship with the child she gave birth to. And the men's response "was to insist that their son had no mother — only a surrogate — and that the child’s identity was as part of a motherless family." But the kid was created from her egg. She is the kids biological mother.

5 June, 2024 By Julie Bindel

This article is taken from the June 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

There is a contradiction at the heart of the international surrogacy industry. Its participants pretend that surrogates’ feelings for the children in their wombs do not exist, whilst simultaneously trying to prevent them acting on those feelings. Many commissioning parents broker the babies in jurisdictions that allow restrictions on surrogates’ rights.

In the UK, this contradiction was recently laid bare in a Family Court case (citation number: [2024] EWFC 20). A gay male couple were engaged in a long-running legal battle with their son’s surrogate. Rather than vanish after handing over the child, she wanted a role in the boy’s life. The men’s response was to insist that their son had no mother — only a surrogate — and that the child’s identity was as part of a motherless family. There was “no vacancy” for her to occupy in his life, they claimed, and it was prejudicial to gay families to suggest otherwise.

At the start of this story, G, the surrogate in question, was a 36-year-old single mother of a teenager and naive about what surrogacy entailed. The commissioning parents were friends of her sister but not people she knew. Aged 43 and 36 and married, they were members of an agency, Surrogacy UK, and very familiar with its protocols — which included a “getting to know you” period — and support. However rather than go through the agency, the men chose to fast-track the process with an independent arrangement with G.

Following a failed transfer of a donor egg, the trio decided to use G’s own egg. The men agreed that G would have contact with the child, but none of the parties properly considered the implications. The relationship between the three deteriorated during G’s pregnancy. G gave birth to a boy in September 2020.

After the birth, G would not initially consent to the parental order, under which she would lose parental responsibility as she feared being cut out of the child’s life. But during a lengthy online hearing in which she was alone and unrepresented — unlike the men — G was pressured by the judge to agree to the parental order along with a contact agreement called a child arrangements order.

After obtaining parental responsibility, the men quickly reneged on the agreement. When G turned up at their house for a pre-arranged visit they threatened to call the police. She recorded the meeting. The Family Court judge later declared of the recording “what was said has rightly been described as ‘horrendous’”. The men told G she was “harbouring a desire to have an inappropriate relationship” by wanting the boy to recognise her as his mother and accused her of having “rejected the role of surrogate”.

In January 2022, the men refused to allow G to visit her son and applied for the contact agreement to be changed. G then made her own application for the parental order to be overturned. She won her case in November the same year. This restored her parental responsibility for the child and removed it from the man who was not the child’s biological father.

The men redoubled their efforts to remove G as a parent, this time applying for an adoption order. During court proceedings, they claimed their son’s identity was that of a child of same-sex parents being raised within the LGBT community and that he belonged to a “motherless family”.

As a lesbian who came out in the 1970s, I’m only too aware of the history of demonisation of lesbian and gay couples. Parents who conceived children in heterosexual relationships were often denied custody and contact if they came out as gay after separation. Foster and adoption agencies were openly prejudiced. But times have changed, and same-sex parents are now a common sight at the school gates in some parts of the UK.

Claims that the children of same-sex parents are disadvantaged in some way have largely been defeated with an expanding body of evidence (e.g. Zhang Y, Huang H, Wang M, et al., BMJ Global Health, 2023) showing their outcomes are similar to those of heterosexual families. Gay rights are robustly supported in most public institutions and private organisations. For a gay couple to call on historic prejudice to justify excluding a mother from a child’s life is unforgivable.

In any case, the men’s argument was fatally — and obviously — undermined by its own logic. If the boy did not have a mother, there would be no need for the court case.

As the jointly-instructed clinical psychologist in the case recognised, the driver of the men’s case was the “elephant in the room” — G’s existence as the child’s legal and biological mother — and the men’s fear of her maternal bond with her son. The men had difficulties “accepting the reality” of the child’s conception, the psychologist found, and considering what sense the boy might make of the situation as he grew up.

“They have strongly held to the surrogacy agreement and the narrative of [G] being a ‘surrogate’ because in that narrative there are no, or hardly any feelings from the surrogate for the baby,” the psychologist wrote. He described the men as attempting an “erasure of the mother”, which he said was not in the child’s best interest as it did not reflect reality.

Refusing an adoption order that would likely have resulted in cutting G from her son’s life, the court ruled that G should have direct and unsupervised contact with him. The judge criticised the men for blaming G for everything that went wrong. The judgment also raised questions about how an adoption order would be explained to the boy, given it would have been made without his mother’s consent.

To some extent, history repeated itself in this case. There are multiple examples of legal battles involving lesbian couples who created a child with the help of a sperm donor who later inconveniently insisted on contact or on playing the role of father.

As the Court of Appeal ruled in one such case in 2012: “What the adults look forward to before undertaking the hazards of conception, birth and the first experience of parenting may prove to be illusion or fantasy. [The couple] may have had the desire to create a two-parent lesbian nuclear family completely intact and free from fracture resulting from contact with the third parent. But such desires may be essentially selfish and may later insufficiently weigh the welfare and developing rights of the child that they have created.”

What’s concerning in this case is the language used — the “erasure” of the mother

Contested surrogacy cases are little different from these wrangles and, indeed, from any other contact disputes. What’s concerning about G’s case, and what makes it different from the case of the lesbian parents above, is the language used. The psychologist explicitly referred to the men’s attempted “erasure” of the mother. They simply refused to acknowledge G’s existence in any of the forms in which she fulfilled a maternal capacity: legal, genetic and as the person who gave birth. They were supported in this illusion by the professionals who weighed in on their behalf.

In the space of a few years the term “motherless” has moved from an emotive description of absence to a positive identity argued for in court. This shift is entirely consistent with the narrative that surrogacy participants feed to the public.

When celebrity couples introduce their surrogate children on social media, the women who gave birth to them are rarely mentioned. The new babies are “welcomed” as if they have been sent by special delivery. That is in line with the attitude of the international surrogacy industry, which reduces the role of the birth mother to that of a “carrier” or rented womb.

For commissioning parents, it must be very easy to regard the woman who bore their child for nine months as a mere service provider, someone to be gratefully forgotten as soon as the final instalment is paid and the product handed over.

Meanwhile, parts of the NHS are determined to de-gender childbirth, routinely referring to “birthing parents” rather than mothers. As an example (there are multiple) the Royal United Hospital Bath’s “information for families” on labour induction refers to dads, but there is no mention of mothers — only birthing parents.

Feminists have long campaigned for gender-neutral language to reflect roles that are indeed, or can be, gender-neutral. But the uncoupling of sex from the necessarily female processes of pregnancy and childbirth is a step towards a dystopian future. In 2015 Victoria Smith wrote, “Gender-neutral language around reproduction creates the illusion of dismantling a hierarchy — when what you really end up doing is ignoring it.” I would go further. Gender-neutral language around reproduction — just like any language that obscures reality — reinforces and helps establish hierarchies of oppression.

To the men, G was simply a surrogate womb to a motherless child. But to G and to Z, she was his mother. As the psychologist said, “‘Motherlessness’ does not exist. The child was born from two people, biologically, and from three people, psychologically … The mother certainly played a part, biologically and psychologically, in the conception of the child.”

The case — unremarked and unnoticed by the media — will do nothing to change popular opinion of surrogacy. It is likely to encourage intending parents to explore dubious overseas jurisdictions, where surrogates have fewer rights. The surrogacy profiteers will continue to cheerlead wealthy couples in their exploitation of impoverished and naive women.

As for the word “motherless”: in time it may lose its negative connotations and become solidified as an identity. Will it become a badge that straight children can use to signal their connection to LGBTQ+ community? Or an oppression card that can be deployed by the children of wealthy men to explain bad behaviour towards women? Either way, Disney and Dickens are going to need a lot of rewriting.

[rickybaby]

Daniel participates in the end-of-season F1 testing | 28.11.2023 (Photo by Joe Portlock/Getty Images)

[thenewgirl76]

Halfa Dc hero/vigilante + one too many hits to the head via the Fenton Booo-merang = triggering of epic proportions upon the inevitable showdown with Captain Boomerang.

Ok DpxDc fans. Go crazy.

[damngoodbabysiitter]

Make me evil Then I'm an angel instead At least you'll sanctify me when I'm dead