…you mean the chaos emeralds?

belated mermay 🧜🏻‍♀️

please keep talking about how Becky from Maryland doesn't like the rising gas prices. It's clearly the more pressing issue.

Raise India (Project Tapan)

— Katherine Mansfield, from The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (via lunamonchtuna)

Inspired by the "Triumph of Death" made by Pieter Bruegel the Elder circa 1562.

— Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), from a speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852.

We’ve all heard the “should you use modern queer labels or not” argument but honestly even when people go “true, they wouldn’t use the labels ‘aromantic’ or ‘asexual,’” so often the characters describe their experiences as “I never felt romantic attraction” or “I don’t feel attracted to anyone” in ways that makes me go. You are stilllllll thinking about this in an extraordinarily modern online way. That 19th century steampunk detective man will NOT be angsting about having never felt romantic attraction, he would be angsting about being unable to feel moved by the beauty or charm of a woman, or something. And I do think that “attractiveness” language is different from the identity-level idea of experiencing attraction—Sherlock Holmes does not talk about not experiencing attraction, but when Watson says “What a very attractive woman!” Holmes responds “Is she? I did not observe.” (And then Watson calls him an inhuman automaton and calculating-machine and Holmes calls Watson’s judgement biased). Never swayed by the attractiveness of a man or woman, never desirous of marriage, never charmed by the delights of love, all of these feel like some of the variety of ways that someone in this milieu might describe an ace- or aro-spectrum identity more than “never felt attraction” does. Mostly because, like the terms for aromantic and asexual themselves, nailing down an exclusively attraction-based definition of a-spec identities is a relatively new and extremely post-AVEN thing. And yet in fiction everybody knows to articulate their experience as feeling sexual/romantic attraction. And I always want to go nooo how would THIS character think about it?? Not how you think this character SHOULD think about it, how would THIS person in THIS context articulate their feelings?

I get that there are times we all get too overwhelmed and dysregulated to be fully there for somebody. That is normal and fine. There are ways to navigate that so that everyone gets their needs met. What is not normal and fine is putting up a permanent wall to everyone and guilt-tripping people using therapy speak for asking you to be even somewhat emotionally available. That is, in fact, kind of gaslight-y to try to make somebody believe they are in the wrong for wanting support in a time of crisis.

— Greg Santora