Mistress 9

if you have a well funded library you might even have access to maker spaces that have 3D printers. or video/audio recording equipment. libraries aren’t these tomb silent homes for books any more. they’re community spaces. they’re full of life and things. 

- wifi hotspots that can be checked out for weeks so you can have internet on the go or at home

- CDs, DVDs, blurays including usually multiple copies of new stuff

- A tech lab with a 3d printer, computers for graphic design and game dev focus, VR headsets, and a soundbooth for recording

- Study rooms for solo or groups

- Printers, copiers, faxes, and scanners for just about anything you need taken care of.

- Including a new printer big enough to make giant posters, maps, and business-grade ads.

- A seed library, both floral and food-related.

- A computer lab programed to erase your data and reading history so you’re never at risk while visiting sites like domestic abuse hotlines

- Laptops pre-programmed with Adobe and Office software so you don’t have to buy them

- Monthly author visits

- Ebooks including comics on tons of various platforms

- Classes for those who want to learn how to or better their computer skills

- Art you can check out to hang on your wall for as long as it’s available, including the work of local artists who get paid for their art, especially if it gets popular and we want even more of their stuff.

- Monthly papers ranging from local newspapers to multi-national magazines on just about any topic you can imagine.

- We used to offer food and drink at a loss but You Know ©

- Notaries with extensive legal knowledge including renters rights, getting you in contact with immigration protection, and contacts with pro-bono lawyers.

- A connection with all the libraries in the state, so if we don’t have something, we can have it shipped to you within a matter of days.

- Books translated into multiple languages

- A donation bin for old books/DVDs/VHSes that often turn around and get sold for two or less dollars

- A food donation site for local food banks

- A “suggest a purchase” section on our site where you can support your favorite indie writers/musicians by suggesting their work if we don’t already have it

- We’re growing butterflies this year, and in prior years we hatched chickens! \o/

- An outreach program for the elderly and disabled who hand-deliver almost everything I’ve just mentioned

number of checkouts

Program attendance (my system is holding fewer programs atm, but in addition to book clubs and author readings we’ve hosted cosplay panels, d&d, craft nights - lots of stuff)

number of reference questions (this includes book recommendations, computer questions, and lots of other stuff, and if we have a conversation where you ask follow-up questions, those count too)

Door count (literally how many times people walked in the door. Even if you only stood there for a few seconds and left)

Well maybe I'm the faggot America

I'm not a part of a redneck agenda

I don't know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I've never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don't know what it's like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.

And it's hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren't slurs when I was your age.

I was 17 when this song came out. "Gay" was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn't like. "Pop quiz? That's so gay!" A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. Her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow "nobody saw". The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn't do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be "endorsing homosexuality." My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she "wasn't supportive of Catholic values."

The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard's murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn't finish a play titled "The Lemon Tree" about two girls whose love for each other couldn't survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn't like I was losing anything, right?

I didn't have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society's homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.

(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang's sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn't get radio play here when I was young.)

And yes, "faggot" was worse than "gay". "Gay" just meant, you know, "bad", but "faggot" meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.

So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day's anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn't believe that for once somebody was on my side.

Green Day's image was tough and angry and loud, and it's an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying "maybe I'm the faggot" was them saying Come and get me. You can't scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I'll own it, and I'll use it to lure you into punching range. You're wrong and I can fight you and win.

Putting your entire fanfiction blog behind a paywall is like pointing a neon sign saying "please sue me". I bring this up specifically because tumblr mentioned fanfiction in the post that they made and that is going to leave a lot of people misinformed.

Remember: Do NOT paywall your fanworks.

As you might have noticed, we’re beta-testing something new: Tumblr Post+. What’s Post+? A big deal, for starters.Tumblr’s Post+ is our new subscription tool that allows creators to make some of their posts exclusive to paid subscribers, and allows users to support their favorite creators. Fear not, Tumblr will always be free to use, this is just an added, optional feature you can take advantage of to empower your favorite artists, fanfic writers, or maybe even that one mashup Supernatural/Studyblr blog you’ve been following since 2016.

Artist:  daliamallet