Lynne's Thoughts...

A monk based on a European Christian archetype. They have sworn a sacred oath to defeat the giant snail plaguing the countryside.

A dragonborn desperately trying to convince the party that they’re really an aarakocra with a skin condition that made their feathers fall out.

Your standard horny bard, but they play a washboard. 

A sentient hat piloting a mannequin.

A dark elf who’s afraid of the dark, and terrified of spiders.

A peasant farmer who joined the adventure because they’re going through a midlife crisis and want to ~find themself.~

A druid who got involved because they’re the party’s weed dealer.

guess who ingested some foreign objects!

yes my cats name is The Void and for good reason because most of the pictures we try to take of him end up like this

and yes he is in that last picture ^^ youre gonna need to jack the screen brightness up to find him

or alternatively:

“USWNT defender Ali Krieger issued a strong rebuke to President Donald Trump after he tweeted about teammate Megan Rapinoe on Wednesday.

“In regards to the ‘President’s’ tweet today, I know women who you cannot control or grope anger you, but I stand by (Rapinoe) & will sit this one out as well,” Krieger wrote.

“I don’t support this administration nor their fight against LGBTQ+ citizens, immigrants & our most vulnerable.”

On Wednesday morning, Trump sent several critical tweets about Rapinoe, who had previously said she wouldn’t visit the White House if the U.S. won the World Cup. Trump wrote, in part: “Megan should never disrespect our Country, the White House, or our Flag, especially since so much has been done for her & the team. Be proud of the Flag that you wear.”

Read the full piece here

“In regards to the “President’s” tweet today, I know women who you cannot control or grope anger you, but I stand by @mPinoe & will sit this one out as well. I don’t support this administration nor their fight against LGBTQ+ citizens, immigrants & our most vulnerable”

-  Ali Krieger 

GODDAMN THESE WOMEN ARE AMAZING.  

Megan Rapinoe: “I’m not going to the fucking White House.”

US lesbian soccer star refuses to sing national anthem to protest Trump

And Ali Krieger too :D

BOTH OF THESE WOMEN ARE FRICKING AWESOME

Source

It was spring 2014, early in the week.  Pretty sure it was a Tuesday, but it’s been awhile.  It was so dead in our store, I hadn’t seen anyone in over 40 minutes.  Eventually, in comes this mom and we start chatting.  She said she was here to buy her son a game he wanted, Grand Theft Auto 5, and could I help her find it?

Now, I’m sure many of you are aware how awful Grand Theft Auto 5 is in terms of violence, gore, and sexism.  But in case you don’t, the Grand Theft Auto series has always been one of the most violent series that you can buy in stores.  The very first GTA was banned in Brazil and condemned in several countries, GTA 5 has a graphic torture scene that is player initiated.  GTA: San Andreas had the Hot Coffee scandal which happened in 2004 when modders found unused code in the game for a sex minigame that was player controlled.  And that’s only the beginning of the controversies surrounding the GTA series (click here to read more! X X X X X X X )

Anyways, back to me and the Mom.  Who will now be referred to as Mom because she is that awesome.  Since I was behind the counter I pulled a copy of GTA 5 from backstock and started ringing her up while making polite chitchat, the usual cashier stuff.  But everything changed when I asked for her ID because of the M rating.  At first Mom replied, “Oh sure thing let me grab it.”  And started digging in her purse.  But then what I said registered with her and she paused and looked at me.

“M rating?  What does that mean?”

“Oh GTA 5 is rated M for violence, gore, bad language, and other stuff”.  I won’t bore you with the whole spiel I go into when I’m asked about the M rating but basically I just explain why the game is rated M, what the M rating means, and that they can go on ESRB.org to see why it got that rating. 

So I tell Mom about the website and she whips out her cell phone and gets on the site and starts reading.  And she got MAD.  She starts telling me about how her son knows she doesn’t like this sort of game and how he is going to be in so much trouble because he knows better than to ask for this sort of thing as she doesn’t tolerate this in her house.  And he is so grounded for thinking he could get away with this.  Then, Mom looked me in the eye and asked me to look up several other games for her to see if he’d done this with any other games.

“Yea sure thing, which games would you like me to look up?”

“Bioshock 2.”

“I can already tell you without looking that Bioshock 2 is rated M.”

“MY CHILD IS SO GROUNDED FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR.  What about the first Bioshock?”

“Yep, that’s also rated M.”

“OH MY GOSH, what about Gears of War?”

“That entire series is rated M.”

To spare y’all from another 10 rounds of that, basically take every popular M rated title from the last 5 years and insert them in the above dialogue. 

Eventually, Mom says “Oh my gosh, you must think me a horrible parent.  I can’t believe I let him have those games.”

“Ma’am, I don’t think that at all.  The fact that you’re concerned about this tells me that you are a good parent.  And just so you know instead of throwing out those games you’re more than welcome to trade them in here and get some store credit or cash back for them.”

“Really?  I’ll have to do that, I don’t want him playing those games anymore.”

“Yea, we also take gaming consoles, iphones, and tablets too!”

“Oh that’s wonderful!  Thank you for being so patient with me and telling me all about this. I’m going home and to go through his gaming collection right now!”

And off she went, leaving me bored till I finally got to leave for the night. 

BUT THAT’S NOT THE END.  THIS IS WHEN SHIT GETS AWESOME.

The next day I’m working again, bored out of my goddamn mind.  There’s only so many times you can alphabetize the store before going insane.  As I’m looking out the window I see a car pull up and Mom hops out and then pulls out two huge duffel bags and walks in.

“Hey welcome back to Gamestop!  What can I help you with!”

“Oh I’m so glad you’re here!  So last night I went through my son’s game collection and most of them are rated M!  So I decided to teach him a lesson about why you don’t lie to your mother.  Seeing as I bought him these consoles and most of the games were bought with my money, his game consoles and games actually belong to me.  Therefore, I would like to trade in all this.“  And proceeds to pull out his XBox 360, PS3, and every game he had for both consoles (over 50!) as well all the extra controllers and headsets he had. 

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.“  I will never forget her smile when she said this nor the look in her eye.  This is not a woman to be crossed.

So I traded everything in and she got back over $300 in store credit for everything.  And with it she bought a Wii, a couple extra controllers, and a couple games rated E.  Then she looked me in the eye and asked if we had any extra boxes laying around for the XBox One and if so could she have one?

“Are you going to put the Wii in it and give it to him?“ 

“Yes.  Along with a note saying that this is what happens when you abuse the trust of your mother.  I’m going to make sure this never happens again.“  It is at this point that Mom ascended to God Tier status with all Gamestop employees falling to their knees for a chance to bask in her glory. 

I got her an XBox One box and sent her on her way after asking her to take the survey on the receipt. 

“Oh of course dear, you’ve been such a big help.  Let me write down your name so I don’t forget it.”

“Of course!  I’m Lexi, but if your son asks my name is Deegan.“  (Deegan was my store’s manager at the time. 

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

Soon, by asking around, Hermione amasses a list of spells for Ron to try - some stilling the page, some changing the font of books for easy reading, some going after Ron’s temporal lobe directly. 

Somewhere in West Tennessee, not far from Graceland, nine women – or “The 9 Nanas,” as they prefer to be called – gather in the darkness of night. At 4am they begin their daily routine – a ritual that no one, not even their husbands, knew about for 30 years. They have one mission and one mission only: to create happiness. And it all begins with baked goods.

“One of the sisters suggested that we should all start doing our own laundry and put the money we saved to good use. I admit, I protested at first. There’s just something about laundering that I don’t like. But I was outnumbered! So among the nine of us, we’d put aside about $400 a month and our husbands never noticed a thing. Their shirts looked just fine.”

And then the women started listening. They’d eavesdrop – all with good intentions, of course – at the local beauty shop or when they were picking up groceries. And when they heard about a widow or a single mom who needed a little help, they’d step in and anonymously pay a utility bill or buy some new clothes for the children. [x]

The Nanas would find out where the person lived and send a package with a note that simply said, “Somebody loves you” – and they’d be sure to include one of MaMaw Ruth’s special pound cakes.

No cat, …….you are a carnivorous predator.

You no eat bread

So when this other cat came up I was like oh you wanna sniff the bread right? Here it is so you can sniff it. 

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.