Celine

WHEEL OF TIME 1.06 || The Flame of Tar Valon

Evelyne Brochu has a special message for Clone Club 💞 from inside the Orphan Black: The Next Chapter Season 2 recording booth

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I grew up on a farm two miles outside a town with less than 200 people. For a short while, there was a queer-owned coffee shop/art gallery on the main highway. It's where I spent the better part of an entire summer, just hanging out with my laptop. The owner would start experimenting with new drink ideas on slow days, and give me free ones in exchange for feedback.

"And he didn't get run out of town?!" Nah, because his mom owned a hair salon and did the hair of all the old ladies in town, and if they were jerks to her son, she would have stopped doing up their hair and they'd have had to drive half an hour into the city to find a new hairdresser.

My hometown isn't some bastion of progressive politics or anything, but like...it's not a two-dimensional caricature, either. I still live in the area. There are queer people. There are a lot of people of color, especially Black elders and Latinx immigrants. There are disabled folks. There's an entire group of found-family queer leftists who bought a farm together. I know of at least two pagan families, and multiple Jewish folks.

If you read "town of 200 people" and immediately assumed that all of them are white, Christian, cis, straight, able-bodied, republican landowners? You're extremely mistaken.

It's NOT a politically progressive town. It's got MASSIVE issues with poverty and inequality and bigotry and gerrymandering just like everywhere else in this godforsaken country. Rich white people control the city government. It's not an amazing bastion of progressive politics, which is VERBATIM what I said in the OP, y'all.

Listen to me.

You do not want this future to happen to you I promise you. Because the minute you enter into a subscription existence you allow for a possibility of losing everything. Why?

Well, because when you stop paying then you stop having.

I buy my cars outright for this reason.

I have not thrown away my DVD collection for this reason.

I still have my old-school ipod for this reason.

I buy songs I really like direct from the artist on top of my subscription for this reason.

I back shit up on to my external hard drives rather than depending on a cloud only for this reason (which reminds me that I need to do taht this weekend).

If someone ELSE is holding the physical source of what you're paying for? YOU DON'T OWN IT. You're just giving someone your energy and time for permission to access it.

You're leasing your existence.

Don't fucking fall for it, do you hear me?

It's bad enough we have to lease our water, our heat, our internet and our entertainment.

Buy what you want outright WHENEVER YOU CAN. Then do anything you can to maintain it in the face of planned obsolescence. I promise you, there will be a moment when you will be glad you did

The rich want what little everyone else has left. ALL the land. ALL the real estate. Everything of any physical value. In exchange for leasing you a house you cannot personalize, that you can be evicted from, at any time, for someone who’ll pay more. For a car you lease for three years, that’s designed to start breaking down in two. For furniture you’ll be financially penalized for ruining, if your cat scratches it or you spill a drink. You won’t be allowed to repair any of these things, to avoid penalty fees, because you don’t own them.

Phones are already becoming abandonware, five years or fewer from being made, because selling you a new one every year makes more money than just updating the OS to include functioning on older models.

You need to own something. You can’t get a loan without collateral, unless you’re a multi-millionaire. An owned car is collateral. A house. Stocks and market investments. $50,000 cash in your bank account is not enough to borrow $1M for a house in soaring housing markets. And who among us has $50K sitting untouched in a bank, to begin with?

The “owning nothing” future is a scam, to not only take what wealth the common person has left to pass on to their families, but to control the lives of you and your descendants, through money. If you want a home at all, they’ll tell you where you’re going to work. If you want food this month, you’d better show up, without fail. You won’t ever see the money for it. They’ll just change a number that doesn’t really exist, in a computer, and extend your subscriptions for you. Getting fired will literally mean losing everything you have, instantly.

It’s the return a nobility class that owns everything, and the serfs living in poverty, given a pittance of food and shelter to tending the nobility’s cash generators. There is no way out of this serfdom; you’re either born into a rich family, or you live and die in poverty.

Or... we the 99% band together and fucking fight back against the 1% making life so miserable. It’s obscene that so few can can exploit so many.

Start by saying no to buying anything with a subscription that would fuck with your daily life, if that subscription were to run out. Including fucking Nest and Ring devices that the Texas state government has been accessing remotely to turn off citizens’ air conditioning, in 100F+ heat, so rich people, hotels, & retail don’t have to experience any “interruption of service” since the electricity draw is too much for Texas’ shitty power grid.

I am perfectly happy working 8 hrs a day because I don’t have to:

grow my own food

find my own clean water

heat my house

Lesbian Pulp Novels with Happy Endings, Part One

Pulp novels were a lifeline for many gay and bisexual women in the 50s and 60s, a place to see themselves reflected and know they weren’t alone. Although tragic endings were a genre staple, it’s a myth that all lesbian pulp novels ended unhappily. Happy endings were rare, but even at the beginning of the pulp era, books were published where two women were together and happy at the end.

Here are eight from the first two decades of the pulp period. Free links to the texts provided where available.

1. The Strange Path (Torchlight to Valhalla) by Gale Wilhelm, 1938.

“Morgen Teutenberg is an introverted 21-year-old woman nursing her dying father Fritz. She meets a handsome young man who is smitten with her despite her lack of enthusiasm. Then a childhood friend moves back into the street and new feelings are awakened.” [link] 2. Diana, The Story of a Strange Love (Diana, a Strange Autobiography) by Diana Fredericks, 1939.

A thinly veiled autobiography, Diana is the story of a woman coming to terms with her lesbianism through a series of failed and eventually successful relationships. Julie Abraham, in an introduction to a 1995 reprinting says, “It offers a defense of lesbian relationships that was unprecedented in 1939 and radical for decades afterwards.” 3. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith writing as Claire Morgan, 1952. “A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic.” [link] 4. Odd Girl [Originally titled Anne Loves Beth] by Artemis Smith, 1959. A love triangle and a mistaken marriage leads a woman to discover her true desires. [link] 5. Another Kind of Love by Paula Christian, 1959. Laura Garraway, after being spurned by her Hollywood lover, flees to New York City where she finally finds a place where she belongs. [link] 6. The Girls in 3-B by Valerie Taylor, 1959. “Three young women move to Chicago and room together; each wants to emancipate herself from smalltown mores. Valerie Taylor skillfully paints a sociological portrait of the emotional and economic pitfalls of heterosexuality in 1950s America—and then offers a defiantly subversive alternative.” [link] 7. Edge of Twilight by Paula Christian, 1959. Stewardess Val Macgregor lives a wild life, until she meets Toni, the new stewardess, and must come to terms with new feelings. 8. The Dark Side of Venus by Shirley Verel, 1960. “A story of two women who defied the conventions of society for the only kind of love that could fulfill them.” (Please note: These books were written at a time when lesbian relationships were taboo in the United States and may reflect prejudices of the era. They may also contain confronting themes like violence against women).

 And you visit them every once in a while like “hello, I’ve paid for your rent and your tools, have you worked on that commission giant oil painting of me getting sucked off by my political opponent, who is unfortunately still the mayor of this town, like I requested?”

 And your favourite feral art person looks up - mouth full of gravel and completely surrounded by art-related trash like “no, but I designed a helicopter.”