Clever Title

One day, something in space is going to look at humans the same way. You go to a new galaxy and there's freaking humans in there, like they just spontaneously manifest on random planets that have the ability to sustain them. All you need is an atmosphere with enough oxygen, some form of water, and that's pretty much all you need before they seem to just pop out of the ground and start terraforming it.

The mystery of the lake fish has been solved, by the way. It's waterfowl. Much like the birds that eat seeds and spread them around, waterfowl consume roe from the water, and while the number of fertilised fish eggs that pass through the digestive system of a duck or wild goose alive and unharmed may be small, it's not zero. A goose will shit in the lake water, and through comes the roe. It happens just often enough that lakes and ponds become - and remain - populated with fish.

Humans don't pop up on unknown planets and and unreachable galaxies on purpose. They couldn't get in there any more than they could get out of there, they have no choice but to claim the most viable-looking planet they can reach and start terraforming it. But how did they even get there?

Cosmic disasters stranding human travelers on planets in ways they can't then escape the planet after isn't out of the question.

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;

A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;

Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman. 

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses. 

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings. 

like, we can all agree that the sentence for drug possession, drunk driving, trespassing, etc. is not execution, and even if it was, that’s after they’ve been arrested and convicted. cops are not judges, so it’s not their call to decide if someone is guilty or to punish them for it. so why does it matter if someone is “a known criminal,” or if they have drugs in their system, or if they have a gun on their person?

“well, obviously it’s to bias the public against the person who was killed,” you might say. okay, but why is that?

it’s because they know that we think of guilty people as less than human, and innocent people as blameless. therefore the murdered person deserved to die (because guilty people deserve what they get), and the cop is innocent (he was just trying to protect people!). if it didn’t work as a tactic, then they wouldn’t do it!

Pecha Pika! 🩷⚡️

Redrawing cards to help me through art block :’)

i feel so seen!!

I'm asexual. I figured that out not long after I first came across the term in high school. But figuring out my gender took a lot longer. I didn't really think about my gender identity for years, it wasn't until I was in college that I started trying to figure out what my gender was. That process took years.

I didn't really feel attached to my assigned gender, but I also didn't feel the gender dysphoria that trans people described. I didn't particularly feel like I was neither of those either. For a long time, I honestly didn't feel like any of the gender descriptions and identities I was coming across really fit. I just didn't care that much about what my actual gender was. Eventually I decided upon the agender label as that seemed the most apt. As the paper says, it's really hard to be truly without gender in this highly gendered world. Agender is a way of defining myself in a way that people who experience gender might be able to understand when "I'm just me." isn't really an acceptable answer to the "what's your gender?" question.

I don't mind being perceived as a gender, none of them are offensive to me. While I do like when I am perceived as male or at least not female, I think that more has to do with growing up female and not wanting to be pushed into traditional female roles and values than a connection or repulsion to any gender. I'm impossible to misgender because I frankly don't care.

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with my gender, is trying to define it to people. There's been a large push in recent years for asking people for their pronouns, or including pronouns in things like email signatures and surveys. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is a bad thing! This is very affirming for a lot of people. But it feels like I need to pick something that doesn't quite fit. At pride, for instance, there's always pronoun buttons. But they're all she/her, he/him, they/them, she/they, he/they, it/it, xe/xir, etc etc. And that's great. I'm always glad that there are a lot of options for people. But there's never any pins for any/all pronouns. I've never picked up a free pronoun pin at pride, despite always looking, because they all feel like picking what pronouns I don't want poeple to use and the answer is that I don't care. I fround an any/all pronoun pin once at a queer museum and I cried.

Once I had someone do the whole "that seems so hard, you must be so patient" standard routine. I ask her, "why's that?" You know, why do I need to be some kind of virtuous martyr to watch 90s cartoons with other disabled people for $30 an hour?

And she says to me, with full seriousness and a look of utter dread on her face,

"All the biting."

OK mate. What do you mean. What biting. What are you on about.

"The biting," she repeats, as if it's obvious and I ought to intuitively know what she means. Then she kind of snaps her teeth to demonstrate. "You know?"

No I don't know. What do you mean biting.

"They bite," she says. Eyes wide, dead serious. "The, um, the Slow People. They bite."