Entrez sans frapper

i actually do believe that many men are lonely in a gendered way. i think they have accurately identified an issue. socially approved male behavior kind of requires men to be shitty friends

they have no use for women they don't want to fuck, and female "friends" they can't fuck get dropped pretty fast. so about 50% of the population is written off by default

and then they can't be too emotional or too intimate with their male friends, lest they be perceived as feminine or gay by male peers. so the friendships they do allow themselves to have are rather shallow

it's just that this is a self-inflicted problem. and moreover, it's a problem rooted in the idea that it's better for men to suffer in this way than to be perceived/treated as a woman or a gay man (i.e. inferiors)

the way to end the male loneliness crisis would be for men to choose to be good friends to the people around them. and if they don't want to do that, well.

this is not to say that women and other non-men don't suffer from loneliness – there are broader social factors driving loneliness in general – but i do actually think men are correct when they say that their gender plays a role in their loneliness

Sure, the Northern Tribe might have benders, but they have such a different culture/identity around bending compared to the South. We see in Hama's flashbacks that the Southern Tribe had male and female benders at the helm, fighting equally, learning the same things, sharing the same tactics. They weren't left behind as strictly healers or defenseless women given a man's gift, they were strong.

And the thing that separates Katara and Aang's stories being the last benders of their nations is that Aang remembers what it means to be an Air Nomad. There are obviously blind spots because of how young he was, but Aang knows the customs and the culture and spiritual practices. He was able to pass those down to Tenzin and his grandchildren, he was able to start the process of rebuilding what was lost.

But Katara? She was even younger than Aang was when the Southern waterbenders were eradicated. There are Southern practices that are most definetly just... a fractured part of history because she never got to experience them. There are ways of hunting, of building, of navigating the waters, ways of healing, probably even spiritbending, that are simply lost to time.

And maybe her grandmother can clue her into it, memories from a nonbender living aside benders, but it's not the same. She didn't get to hear it from the waterbenders, she didn't get to learn from a Southern waterbender, she doesn't even know what to rebuild because it was never something she was versed in.

That's why The Puppet Master is such a heartbreaking episode. Because Hama could have been the Southern teacher Katara clearly wanted, she could have shown her more, but ended up passing on her legacy of Bloodbending. And on the inverse, I can't even fully call Hama a villain for wanting Katara to know how to bloodbend, because the ache of thinking you were the only one left for so long, the rage against a Nation known for destroying nations, would've driven anyone insane.

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.

A lot of the responses from (mostly white, cis) other people were something along the lines of "Yeah, freedom is dead in this country. This is not freedom."

But that's just been the lived reality of Black people in the United States this entire time

And a lot of Indigenous people, and undocumented people, and the list unfortunately could and does go on

Those friends were right, by the way - this isn't freedom

From their description:

"We enable Black travelers to plan trips with confidence and less anxiety by providing user-generated travel insights from the Black perspective across 9 dimensions for cities all around the world."

Yeah.

And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that's a lot of red.

And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don't know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it's normal there?

But nope, that's not the case:

Some selections from the article:

"The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

If you want to police the bathrooms then... how? You really gonna pull open every Tom, Dick, and Harry's pants to check if they do in fact, have a dong?

Like... make them tell you, in writing, that they want you to check for penis or pussy and if you're to do that to underage people as well.

If they say "dont check the minors" you get...

Cherry on the cake time! How do you know if someone's a minor? YOU DONT! So now you have to ask for ID to know if they're an adult. If they cant prove they're an adult then you don't have to check their pants!

here's a little animatic I call "rockstar Pearl". We never see Garnet give Pearl some decent advice about Rose so I wanted to do something along those lines! I feel like even if she couldn't fully understand all their history she'd try to get them to talk to one another.

Lita Lacson, contemporary Filipina artist.

"Tomorrow in Yellow."