queer stuff and kittens

until today.

mum’s painting the kitchen, so she had to take everything off the top of the cupboard. and uh…you know how battery powered things…start dying? they……slowly run out of juice? she asked me to check inside one of the jars. the pig, to be exact. and…the pig was the terrified scream. i unsuspectingly opened the jar and as the lid came off the jar, i remembered what i did. but i didn’t remember in time, because in that next second, a fucking demon cry sounded from this Almost Dead Battery Powered Pig Cookie Jar. it was a sound i never want to hear again. everyone ran into the kitchen to see what that god awful sound was and i just stood there, holding this satanic wailing pig. i shut my eyes, and waited the full 15 seconds, until it was silent, before turning to my mum and handed her the pig, and then leaving the kitchen.

borzoi: somehow manages to bark backwards/in reverse

Shalom Blac out in public without her wig on for the first time in 13 years at the Streamy Awards 😍😍✨

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

and the moth was with god