Hold me closer

I say this with so, so much care: Real queer shit written by real queers can and will sometimes make you uncomfortable. That's one of the defining features of weird, independent queer media. And weird independent media more broadly. Art that comes from true individual passion and authenticity has edges and bite to it that mass market corporate products intentionally do not. Has a rawness that can offend.

But given that it’s a pain to seek out each one one by one, I’ve got a list of links in order a smidge further down! Please try to support Dark Horse Comics if you can, but if you’re broke like me and still want to read, the Internet is a beautiful place. According to the wiki page, there are at least two more installments to come, scheduled for May 1st and June 5th, but there’s no real update schedule for the series as a whole.

Do note: they are graphic, gory, and sad, with a lot of body horror. But they’re really fantastic.

Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites contains: 1. Stray 2. The Unfamiliar 3. Let Sleeping Dogs Lie 4. A Dog and His Boy 5. The Gathering Storm 6. Lost 7. Something Whiskered This Way Comes 8. Grave Happenings

9. Sacrifice (Hellboy Crossover)

Beasts of Burden: Neighborhood Watch contains: 10. Food Run 11. Story Time 12. The View From The Hill (the one in this post!)

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

Adding @fatfemmefreaquency tags because they are really important. Romance is talked down because it's mainly women and queer people writing and reading it, but it's still the most sold genre out there, this is known.

I do agree with everything said here, but I have a bit more to add to "self-censorship". It mainly comes down to social media (which we all know). Because, using myself as an example, I can't fully promote what I write in pretty much any social media without getting it flagged. You can't use many, many words in many, many social media platforms. Patreon allows smut but then sometimes it gets hidden because some random criteria never fully explained. Insta and TikTok are basically hell for anything remotely sex-related. Tumblr is on thin fucking ice because I have to hide most of my stories with the "explicit sexual content" tag which removes it from a lot of people's dashboards and search. Because it's starting to influence the way we talk out of social media, which is what really concerns me. We do not need to "sanitize" sexuality, we need to talk about it more freely before they cut any more rights. Like what do you mean you use "unalive" in a fucking book? THEY KILLED THEM! Use real words, don't infantilize and puritanize the world just because of a few people might get uncomfy or angry. Might be a pet peeve of mine, too 😂

It's a whole campaing against sexuality, and as someone with a fucking PhD on History of sexuality, THIS IS FUCKING BAD!!! We need to fight against this. Sexuality might seem like something silly to many people, but it's one of the first things they try to control. It's been like that for centuries. Please, don't let the bad guys win this one. Because remember something which is fucking important when talking about media in any form: women and queer people are the ones mantaining culture. Stop selling everything to the capitalistic and patriarchal freaks to get validation.

One of the central conceits of Western culture is that allowing oneself to feel any kind of pleasure at all is somehow inherently damaging and harmful. This is an idea we need to work to uproot from our minds.

"Re"-domestication of cheetahs?

With reference to This Post In ancient Egypt, Cheetahs were sometimes used as hunting animals like greyhounds, and kept as housepets by the royal family and later, many wealthy households.

Now, there's an argument about how "domesticated" these cheetahs were- the majority of them were captured from the wild as adults and tamed/trained to tolerate humans and obey hunting commands, mostly because back then and still today, cheetahs are extremely hard to breed in captivity. Some were bred and raised from cubs, and there was not a shortage of cheetahs living in and around human habitation for them to replace stock with.

Even today, cheetahs are... weirdly comfortable around humans, if those humans know how to mind their manners. Game wardens in Kruger National Park sometimes sleep next to young cheetahs they are re-introducing into the wild, or have had female cheetahs who are familiar with them drop their cubs off on their feet to 'babysit' while she goes hunting.

Here's a pair of San hunters from the Naankuse Wildlife Reserve in Namibia bow-hunting while a wild local male cheetah hangs out with them (the angle makes him look much bigger and closer to the men than he is, but he's still VERY close). The male's name is Aiko, and is well-known to these men- they're not worried about his presence because they know how to respect his space and he knows not to go after game they've downed. Game they miss is free for him to run down, and game he flushes from the bushes are much easier to shoot- a mutually beneficial partnership. It's extremely similar to how the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea hunt with their dogs, some of the most recently domesticated and most similar to ancient 'proto-dogs' alive today.

So, cheetahs aren't domesticated the way dogs and housecats are- they haven't been selectively bred for generations, they're not dependent on humans, and they can and will attack people that bother them.

But like Coyotes, the remaining cheetahs we have are VERY habituated to humans, arguably even moreso than coyotes are, and we've made a lot of progress in getting them to breed in captivity- Ironically by pairing them up with highly domesticated dogs, who teach them domesticated animal behaviors like "not worrying about everything".

With Coyotes, the obstacle to domestication are mostly practical matters like "getting a coyote farm funded, zoned, built and insured.", whereas with cheetahs the problem is "there are almost no cheetahs left to practice domestication on and the ones we do have are already inbred". There IS a lot of commercial interest in domesticated cheetahs, so I think a good way to get the funding for species conservation and genetic re-diversification of cheetahs would be to frame it as a prerequisite to "Re-Domestication" and pet cheetahs.