Raven's Ramblings

To make a request, reblog this post with a photo of your pet. In the body of the post, include the pet’s name. If you don’t have that text in the body of the post, it makes it hard to find, and I might not notice that you added anything at all in that reblog. Valid requests will be drawn in the order they come in, with some rare exceptions (generally when I’m tired or I need a warm-up).

(If you were here for what I did in April, these are the same rules and methods, only now I’m hoping they’re written out a bit more clearly. Black lives matter, and trans right are human rights.)

Only one photo per request, and only one pet per request. Do not include multiple photos and tell me to pick one. If you give me a photo that has multiple animals in it, be very clear about which one you want me to draw.

Only one request at a time (but see number 5).

It has to be your pet, present or past; I won’t draw just random pictures you found online.

Vertebrate pets only.

If you want multiple things drawn, pick one to start with; wait until your first request is done, and then put in another. That is, you can only have one request “active” at a time.

Once it is no longer August 2021, I won’t be accepting requests reblogged on this post.

Black cats are good, and sleeping cats are good, and curled-up-in-a-ball cats are good; but sleeping curled-up-in-a-ball black cats just look like a black circle. Find a different photo for me to draw.

Answers to common questions are found below the read-more. You don’t need to read this before requesting, but if you have a question, check this out before asking me.

tumblr is probably gonna destroy the quality, but here’s a quick little comic i came up with last night! an asexual child of aphrodite asks for some guidance from her mom. 

(ACE EXCLUSIONISTS DO NOT INTERACT, THIS IS NOT FOR YOU)

my writing is a little bit illegible, so there’s a visual description with text under the cut: 

To make a request, reblog this post with a photo of your pet. In the body of the post, include the pet’s name. If you don’t have that text in the body of the post, it makes it hard to find, and I might not notice that you added anything at all in that reblog. Valid requests will be drawn in the order they come in, with some rare exceptions (generally when I’m tired or I need a warm-up).

(If you were here for what I did in April, these are the same rules and methods, only now I’m hoping they’re written out a bit more clearly. Black lives matter, and trans right are human rights.)

Only one photo per request, and only one pet per request. Do not include multiple photos and tell me to pick one. If you give me a photo that has multiple animals in it, be very clear about which one you want me to draw.

Only one request at a time (but see number 5).

It has to be your pet, present or past; I won’t draw just random pictures you found online.

Vertebrate pets only.

If you want multiple things drawn, pick one to start with; wait until your first request is done, and then put in another. That is, you can only have one request “active” at a time.

Once it is no longer August 2021, I won’t be accepting requests reblogged on this post.

Black cats are good, and sleeping cats are good, and curled-up-in-a-ball cats are good; but sleeping curled-up-in-a-ball black cats just look like a black circle. Find a different photo for me to draw.

Answers to common questions are found below the read-more. You don’t need to read this before requesting, but if you have a question, check this out before asking me.

And UCD reportedly payed $175,000 for this image to not appear when you search it on google:

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Without Muslims you wouldn’t have:

Coffee

Cameras

Experimental Physics

Chess

Soap

Shampoo

Perfume/spirits

Irrigation

Crank-shaft, internal combustion engine, valves, pistons

Combination locks

Architectural innovation (pointed arch -European Gothic cathedrals adopted this technique as it made the building much stronger, rose windows, dome buildings, round towers, etc.)

Surgical instruments

Anesthesia

Windmill

Treatment of Cowpox

Fountain pen

Numbering system

Algebra/Trigonometry

Modern Cryptology

3 course meal (soup, meat/fish, fruit/nuts)

Crystal glasses

Carpets

Checks

Gardens used for beauty and meditation instead of for herbs and kitchen.

University

Optics

Music

Toothbrush

Hospitals

Bathing

Quilting

Mariner’s Compass

Soft drinks

Pendulum

Braille

Cosmetics

Plastic surgery

Calligraphy

Manufacturing of paper and cloth

It was a Muslim who realized that light ENTERS our eyes, unlike the Greeks who thought we EMITTED rays, and so invented a camera from this discovery.

It was a Muslim who first tried to FLY in 852, even though it is the Wright Brothers who have taken the credit.

It was a Muslim by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan who was known as the founder of modern Chemistry. He transformed alchemy into chemistry. He invented: distillation, purification, oxidation, evaporation, and filtration. He also discovered sulfuric and nitric acid.

It is a Muslim, by the name of Al-Jazari who is known as the father of robotics.

It was a Muslim who was the architect for Henry V’s castle.

It was a Muslim who invented hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes, a technique still used today.

It was a Muslim who actually discovered inoculation, not Jenner and Pasteur to treat cowpox. The West just brought it over from Turkey

It was Muslims who contributed much to mathematics like Algebra and Trigonometry, which was imported over to Europe 300 years later to Fibonnaci and the rest.

It was Muslims who discovered that the Earth was round 500 years before Galileo did.

The list goes on………..

Just imagine a world without Muslims. Now I think you probably meant, JUST IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT TERRORISTS. And then I would agree, the world would definitely be a better place without those pieces of filth. But to hold a whole group responsible for the actions of a few is ignorant and racist. No one would ever expect Christians or White people to be held responsible for the acts of Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma bombing) or Anders Breivik (Norway killing), or the gun man that shot Congresswoman Giffords in head, wounded 12 and killed 6 people, and rightly so because they had nothing to do with those incidents! Just like the rest of the 1.5 billion Muslims have nothing to do with this incident!

Sources:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-islamic-inventors-changed-the-world-469452.html

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-01-29/world/muslim.inventions_1_hassani-inventions-muslim?_s=PM:WORLD

…to have a 15 year old who’s spent maybe 8 months being political and has never inquired about queer history anonymously message me, “EXCUSE ME QU**R IS A SLUR LMAO OMG EMBARRASSSING AN aCTUAL ADULT WHO THINKS IT’S OKAY TO USE QU**R!~!!!!”