untitled

This is the interior of a modern Kyrgyz yurt. Btw. Those tapestries on the walls and ceiling are usually made of felted wool and are for insulation (traditionally they were also for weather-proofing, but now that's usually done with plastic sheeting). The ribbing is traditionally bright red and the rugs and tapestries are also usually brightly colored. Many people involved in animal husbandry still live in these for part of the year, and some year-round.

Dust Dancing on a Sunbeam

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

*checks wiki*

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

when considering the sexual violence against trans women, it's important to remember that "people only view us sexually" does not mean the same thing as "people only find us attractive". it means "people can only conceptualize of our existence within a sexual light" because that's how the majority of our coverage in media has been tinged in the past century. as a result of the chaste and patriarchal nature of modern capitalism, gender and sexuality are inseparable in much public discourse by virtue of propaganda, and as a result, a trans woman is seen as sexual because efforts towards projecting specifically femininity is only categorized as sexual. and when paired with the uncharitable perception of "man", that propaganda can often evolve how people view us directly into "sexual threat" anywhere, for any reason. i could be in the freezer aisle of costco looking down at the ground while i push my cart and i'd still get dirty looks for wearing a dress (this has happened).

when i say "they're either jerking off or sharpening a knife", i mean we're either viewed sexually, or as sexually threatening, in almost all scenarios.