Your Friendly Local Geek

She's fat and gets the guy and no one bats an eye.

She's fat and the hottest chick in the sorority and that's normal.

She's fat and an actress and she gets good roles.

She's fat and she's funny and she has character depth and growth.

She's fat and the main character and no one mentions her weight once.

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

They only do so around people they trust.

Rauru and Sonia being all lovey-dovey and he's purring up a storm, because his wife is giving him ear scritches. (and Zelda trying her hardest not to giggle at her new parents)

Mineru wants none of that, but then Zelda shows up and they start geeking out together and Mineru catches herself purring with happiness, because now she has a little sister/niece figure she can geek out with to her heart's content.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

Everyone know the “Vetinari is a male witch”… But the last part is never taken into consideration. But really, do you really think Vetinari is the only one that fit those points?

Let me say it otherwise: We’re searching for two characters, one is young and more energetic, the other is older and a family person. Both have a sway over peoples (like being a smooth talker, or being an inspiration for many), Both are expert in their personal field, both are stealthy in their own way (Be it “look like everybody and peoples recognize them by their clothes” or “is so much part of their home city that if they stand still they become indistinguishably from the wall.”), both use their appearance or reputation to reach their goal, both use mostly mundane means but sometime verge a bit in the supernatural (like getting a goddess to help them after a con, or fusing with a dark spirit of revenge but keeping it under control), and who may or may not have a particular affinity with Ankh-Morpork.

What I’m saying is: Ankh-Morpork has a coven of male witches, made of Moist “the virgin” von lipwig, Sam “the father” Vimes, and Havelock “the other one” Vetinari. 

‘She sounds like a witch to me, whatever she thought she was. A good one, too.’

Tiffany inflated with inherited pride.‘

Did she help people?’ Miss Level added.

… ‘She made them help one another,’ she said. ‘She made them help themselves.’

In the silence that followed, Tiffany heard the birds singing by the road. You got a lot of birds here, but she missed the high scream of the buzzards.

Miss Level sighed. ‘Not many of us are that good,’ she said. ‘If I was that good, we wouldn’t be going to visit old Mr Weavall again.’

This is a conversation about Granny Aching in The Wee Free Men. She never had the label of “witch” in life, but it seems that Miss Level, who is a witch finder, believes that making people help each other and themselves is a large part of the definition of what a witch really is. And what is means to be a really good witch.

And Vimes, Lipwig and Vetinari all fit that definition.

Vimes… Well, he does it out of sheer stubbornness. He works every hour the gods give to make the city a slightly better place, to take a little more evil out of the world, to create a little bit of justice. He looks after his Watchmen, he always has their back (he’s always right behind them, even when their back is against the wall) and in turn they look out for one another. Do I even need to talk about the Guarding Dark? I think that speaks for itself.

Lipwig’s motivations for doing what he does are a little different to say the least, but you can’t argue with the end result. He has this delightfully chaotic energy that somehow means that everything all works out for the best, and the city loves him for it. They’re under a sort of spell, watching the magic show, wondering how the trick is going to be done, and they don’t realise all along that in doing so, they’re contributing to real progress in the city.

And finally, Havelock “alloys are stronger” Vetinari. Through the Guild system, he tricks some incredibly selfish, self-serving, scheming people into helping one another in a roundabout way, while they go on believing that they’re only serving their own interests. The Guilds look after the families of their members, because it’s in their best interests, so children get a much better education than ever before. People just don’t slip through the cracks. And people have opportunities to better themselves like never before.

And it’s the city where, for some reason, everybody wants to live.

Belief is a powerful force on the Disc. Wizards exist because people believe that wizards should exist. Whatever they think of wizards personally, most people see the world as having a wizard-shaped hole, and so wizards—generally with a lot of pushing and shoving—turn up to fill it. They’re inconvenient and dangerous and generally best for the world around them if they aren’t doing magic, but there would be something fundamentally disappointing about life if they weren’t there. This satisfies most people that they can’t do magic, because if they could they’d be off at Unseen University wearing a robe with stars on, and therefore keeps them from spending too much time secretly trying it in their bedrooms at night. And if they do, it doesn’t work, because some part of them still believes that they can’t, or at least doesn’t believe that they can.

Witches, by definition, aren’t bothered by that little nagging feeling. Witches exist because witches believe that witches should exist. They don’t see why they need anyone else’s permission to do so, seeing as they’re clearly here, and if anyone was going to stop them they’d already have done it. Doing magic isn’t really a requirement; a wizard is a wizard because everyone knows that special people can do impossible things, and a witch is a witch because they start doing what needs doing whether it’s impossible or not.

✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

✨ Artists and titles will be revealed with the full song after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update!