A Whole Bunch of Queer Nonsense

Leave him alone, he's enjoying his meal. Too cute!

nightmare surveillance shit aside, this is so fucking funny

Wally Dion, Green Star Quilt, 2019 circuit boards, brass wire, copper tube

it shimmers like no gemstones i've ever seen: green as malachite and emerald but shot through with opal, gold, copper. photographs can't do it justice because of how it shines, as well as the way the actual material elements have their own dimensions. you can lean in and study all the fine lines of the circuits or step back and admire how the rearranged whole forms new patterns. it's one of the most beautiful creations i've ever seen.

He can’t be stopped

I sure would be in trouble if I posted that! It's a good thing I didn't post it!

I can remember about half of them. My earliest memory was probably 1995 and they go from there.

they get to feel a little swaggy out there 💖

especially given that, again, these are queer young people, who a.) have a lot of reasons to despair right now and b.) have a lot of awful online spaces they could be spending time in instead of touching grass, it's a fucking bummer to see them so wary of hanging out in physical space with real people.

Esp in a surveillance state where there's anxieties about meeting new people in case they're bad or incompatible with your beliefs, sometimes people only want to connect with new people when they can scope them out on socials first, and that only adds to this anxiety of meeting people as a social skill!

all of this follows from the basic fact that our society is structured to reward pushiness and arrogance, and expects people to "assert themselves" and "put themselves out there" and look after their own interests. that's what we admire and that's what we expect, and even OP, firmly goodhearted and wanting to help these people, is seeing it as a failure on their parts that they're not pushy and rude enough to make friends. that's just a bad way to structure a society! the work of fixing loneliness should be done by people who aren't lonely; they're the ones with the power to do so.

Framing this in terms of whose job it is to talk first entirely misses the point of socializing for fun, which is that none of you have to do anything. If you show up to an open event that's expressly intended to bring strangers together, then politely approaching people isn't being "intrusive and rude" - it's participating. Similarly, if you show up to your regular social event and only talk to your existing friends, that's also participating! You're not obliged to talk to strangers, just as strangers aren't obliged to talk to you. Friendship requires both parties to make an effort, and if you decline to make any beyond simply being a body in a room, then while it might hurt your feelings to be excluded, you cannot rightly get mad at strangers for failing to take the extra step you refused to take yourself. Which doesn't mean we have no communal responsibility to one other. Ideally, we should always strive to be welcoming! But community, by definition, goes both ways, and if you're thinking foremost about what you need or want from strangers, and not what they might need or want from you, then you likely won't get very far. all of this follows from the basic fact that our society is structured to reward pushiness and arrogance, and expects people to "assert themselves" and "put themselves out there" and look after their own interests. that's what we admire and that's what we expect, and even OP, firmly goodhearted and wanting to help these people, is seeing it as a failure on their parts that they're not pushy and rude enough to make friends. Here's the thing: if it's fundamentally pushy/arrogant/rude to approach a stranger for potential friendship purposes, then that holds true regardless of whether they're part of a group or standing by themselves. Right? You're framing this as though there's some profound difference between you, a solo person, daring to talk to a group of strangers, and a group of strangers daring to talk to you, a solo person, but there's not. Regardless of who initiates things, in order for a conversation to take place, someone has to take that first step! Someone has to submit themselves to the mortifying ordeal! You're assigning a negative moral value to the act of talking to strangers to explain why you shouldn't have to do it, but your strategy ultimately depends on strangers talking to you. You've attempted to justify this contradiction by saying "well, those Cool Kids have social capital and I don't," but this literally just something you've made up in your head, not because social capital doesn't exist, but because you're assigning it equally to these hypothetical strangers based purely on the fact that they're already talking to each other, and not because you've got any actual insight into the social dynamics at play. For all you know, these people just met and are equally new to the space you're in; alternatively, they might be its founders, possessed of complex, deeply internecine relationships that it'd take three hours, a box of wine and a string board to unpack - but just by looking, at the moment you first walk in, you don't know which is which. the work of fixing loneliness should be done by people who aren't lonely; they're the ones with the power to do so. Wrong: you also have this power! You're an autonomous human being! I'm not saying it's never difficult or scary or that nobody can ever face specific challenges that make socialization harder for them than others, but to insist as a general point that lonely people don't or shouldn't bear the lion's share of responsibility for making themselves un-lonely is the voice of learned helplessness talking. You can be made a friend by someone proactive, but you can also make friends, too. There's no shame in preferring the former, but there's no moral dimension to the preference, and it's not the same as being incapable of the latter. And at a certain point, if just waiting for someone to notice you isn't working and you're unhappy with the outcome, then the onus is indeed on you to make a change - because it's your life.

His painty foot prints 😭 his hands covered in paint 😭 little man this cannot be good for you need to change your life style or you might pass away