sorcery

Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.

From ancient to abstract, this one sure got around.

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

In the 10 years that I have worked on sharing queer history, I have never been attacked as intentionally and with as much consistency as I have in 2026. Most regularly, I'm called a groomer or harassed for mentioning Palestine.

I joke about it to my friends, because I don't actually have anyone in my life under the age of 20, how could I possibly be a groomer? It is easier to cope with all of it when I can laugh with people. No one finds it funny anymore, not even me.

When the first waves came calling me an anti-Semite, I felt compelled to ask some of the Jewish people in my life whether there was something I wasn't seeing. They assured me that I was doing nothing wrong, and I dug further into my studies. The further I got into researching the accusations levied against me, the more I was harassed for the moments I shared of my journey.

As a 29 year old adult, when I share that I read queer (often specifically trans) books, the comments are predictable. When I share that some of the books I read include sex, things get worse. When I post a book that discusses the experiences of queer Jewish people during the holocaust, I know that there will be immediate backlash, and there is. Then I am asked to edit a book synopsis to remove mentions of genocide from a poetry book about Palestine.

All of this to say, I have experience in what upsets these people and it is books that are being targeted. It is reading, readers, and anyone who encourages literacy that activates the worst people to respond. Which is why I HAVE to keep pushing you to read more. Read widely, read anything, read books that disagree with you, read porn, read queerly, read physically, read ebooks, read audiobooks, and fight the book bans sweeping North America.

There's parts of this that are nice, but this is a colour-maxed pasta made for tiktok without much care for the flavour behind it. It looks great, very striking, I wouldn't get the same colour from my cooking.

But I would make up for that with an herb oil drizzled over top, (tasty and very green), with croutons that have more flavour (tight crumb like that makes for tough croutons that don't absorb flavouring), with actually incorporating that fond into my pasta (just put some more of the pasta water with the pasta and scrape the pan down with a rubber spatula), with a cleaner presentation, (probably a tighter clustering on bacon on top, and the croutons around the edge. A dallop of sour cream atop the centre).

I don't know that it does. I wish I had a more comforting answer, but anything else would be a lie. There are genuinely parts of queer history that I avoid learning about because I know how much anger and grief it will awaken within me.

My editor has taken me aside before and told me that I have been writing too many articles with sad endings and I need to remind myself of the beauty in queer history. In that act of care, I think there is an answer for you. It isn't about stopping -- it's about balancing it.

I have these waves of hurt that hit me when I think of certain stories, and I believe a part of my role in the queer community is feeling those feelings fully. Wanting revenge, mourning, even hating, for the people who didn't have a chance to defend themselves, for the people who were so sure that they were wrong that they never even considered protecting themselves.

This makes people very angry and panicky.

My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure ... Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.