Shakespeare Couldn't Spell His Own Name

A good video that accurately explains why stud is a term used for black lesbians only, not white, not poc, BLACK

the person in the video is a fem presenting black person in their car. they say “i love that you asked, lemme give you a little history lesson. full disclaimer, no hate to the commenter, i’m just giving everybody a bit of a debrief! now firstly, let’s talk about where the term stud actually comes from.

back in the days of slavery, when people still used to refer to us as animals, black people that were taller were known to be stronger because they could do more work. so down in the south, they started comparing us to horses. that then coined the term[s] studs for men, and stallions for females. like megan thee stallion. it was really big in the south. to compare us to animals.

but enough about the bleach brigade, let’s actually get back into the history. as you know, or if you don’t know, black women were not able to enter the working class until well into the 1960s. before then, there was a small populous of women that were still working, even though they technically were not supposed to.

‘how was it possible?’ these women would be dressing more masculine—using binders in order to help put down their chests, dressing more in a male form—and because of the fact that most bleach bandits believed that we, as black women, were already masculine, they got away with it. thus coining the term, in the black community, “stud.” because all the dudes knew, but she was one of the guys. so what did it matter?

any time the chlorine community would come up to black people and be like “hey! is that a female working!?” the guys would just save her and be like ‘nah, that’s a stud right there.” it was joke to them because they all knew. but as times changed and slang did too, the black community still keeps it close at heart. and yes, it was rooted in racism, but we’re taking it back for ourselves.

A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell

World Running Down by AL Hess

Coffee Boy by Austin Chant

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Chef’s Choice by T.J. Alexander (& others, ex. Second Chances in New Port Stephen)

The Chromatic Fantasy by H.A.

I thought I might share one of my new tattoos. A couple years ago, a dear friend and I coined the term “fish bag moment”

A fish bag moment might be sitting all alone in an empty new apartment after coming out and upending your life, or starting a new job in a brand new line of work because it’s closer to your dreams

It’s what happens when you take a leap of faith or make a hard decision for yourself, when the future is so hard to visualize and everything feels scary. You’re just a fish in a bag and you can’t see where you’re going

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

Check out my stuff!

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

They are not friends for a long time first before starting a physical relationship, as I've seen some people claim (largely to compare Kennedy unfavorably with Tara). Tara's decision to describe herself as "yours" to Willow in Who Are You? doesn't come out of the blue at all. Oz smelling Willow "all over" Tara when he comes back to Sunnydale in Bad Moon Rising isn't a strange misunderstanding or leap of logic. Willow and Tara have been "doing spells together" from the very first episode they meet, and it is not even slightly subtle what "doing spells together" is intended to be a metaphor for. Subtle enough to fool a TV network censor, maybe, but the intended audience are not meant to be under any illusions about what's happening.

By A New Man -- Tara's second episode! -- Tara and Willow are meeting in Tara's bedroom late at night to "get together" and Willow is promising Tara they'll "start out slow". Tara even lampshades this by asking "start out slow doing what?" What could it mean? Furthermore, this scene is explicitly juxtaposed with a scene in which Ethan and Giles -- who Jane Espenson, the writer of the episode, is on the record as writing as if they had a shared sexual history -- meet up at a bar to get drunk and discuss their past, with Giles indignant that somebody has recently questioned his masculinity and Ethan ruefully describing the two of them as "a pair of old ... sorcerers", musing that "the night is still our time" and (though it's played for laughs as a misdirection) seemingly telling Giles that he's "really very attractive". We know, too, from something Buffy says later, that Willow didn't go back to her room at all that night after casting a spell with Tara. Where did she sleep? Why is she embarrassed about it enough to lie when Buffy asks her where she was? For that matter, back in Hush, Tara's first ever episode, Willow and Tara do a spell together too. That episode ends with three parallel scenes: Buffy having a conversation with her future boyfriend Riley, Giles having a conversation with his soon to be ex-girlfriend Olivia, and Willow having a conversation with [... well, come on, what do you think this relationship is being framed as?] Tara.

By The I In Team -- only Tara's third episode! -- Tara is very explicitly being written as though she's a girl Willow is regularly hooking up with in secret but isn't ready to introduce to her friends yet. She's trying to gift Willow emotionally significant old family heirlooms and looking hurt when Willow doesn't want to accept them. She's saying suggestive things like "maybe tonight, if you're not doing anything, you could come over and we could ... do something" and getting (justifiably) upset when Willow tells her she's already made plans "with people" whom she's clearly not ready to introduce Tara to ("it's kind of a specific crowd ... you might feel out of place"). And Willow does end up going to see Tara that night, when Buffy in turn brushes her off to go and hang out with her boyfriend (and the rest of the Initiative). What do you think is happening when Willow knocks on Tara's door late that night and asks if she "still want[s] to do something?" and the door closes behind them? Were they staying up late to read a book or play checkers, do we think?

This is the wider context in which we're meant to understand the conversation Willow and Tara have in Goodbye Iowa. Willow wistfully says that she "had so much fun the other night, those spells...". before rushing to reassure Tara that "I hope you don't think that I just come over for the spells and everything. I mean ,I really like just talking and hanging out with you and stuff." Or Tara saying in response she's okay if that's the only thing Willow wants to do tonight and shyly admitting that she's "been thinking about that last spell we did all day." They are emphatically not friends who later fall in love and start a physical relationship. That's exactly backwards. They start off fooling around "doing spells" together, then they quickly develop deeper emotional feelings for each other. The magic -- and everything that represents -- explicitly comes first.

Yes, it won't be until New Moon Rising that Willow tells any of her friends about Tara as a possible rival or replacement for Oz. It won't be until the end of that episode that Willow will tell Tara she loves her (indirectly, at that), and it won't be until the following episode The Yoko Factor that Willow will describe Tara as "my girlfriend". And, as I said above, we won't see them so much as kiss on screen until well over halfway through Season 5. It was the early 2000s -- it was, in fact, literally early in the year 2000 -- and there were very clear limits to what the writers could actually get away with showing on network television. Not only was this fifteen years before gay marriage would become legal across the country, it was three years before Lawrence v Texas. Multiple states still had laws prohibiting same sex relationships. To modern eyes it's all a bit tame and understated, sure, but the writers were trying to be as clear as they thought they could be!

But every now and then I read posts that seem to just ... ignore all of that subtext entirely. That seem to proceed on the basis that Willow and Tara were just good friends who, sure, secretly got together at night and did spells together, but seem entirely unaware of the mere idea that this could be read a metaphor for anything. That assume because they aren't officially a couple until the end of Season 4, they can't possibly have been doing anything physical before that (as if this season isn't full of examples of the rest of the core four Scooby Gang members having casual sexual relationships with people they've yet to formally label as their boyfriend or girlfriend). Posts where people complain that Kennedy and Willow got together too quickly, in contrast to Willow and Tara who -- they seem to think -- had a much longer period of getting to know each other as friends first (when? I always want to ask, when do you think this happened?). Posts where people think Tara's just being weirdly intense when she tells Willow "I am, you know. Yours" in Who Are You?, as if the two of them hadn't been symbolically (and presumably literally) sleeping together for weeks by this point. People for whom the central metaphor of Willow and Tara's relationship -- something the show itself introduces and repeatedly calls attention to throughout Season 4 -- just doesn't exist. People who assume Willow is just randomly awkward about introducing her new platonic friend to Buffy or Xander, in a way she's never been about any other friend she's had (witch or otherwise) and that there's no deeper meaning to it than that.

And, well.

On the one hand: so what, right? People have lots of odd takes on this show. This isn't even the most egregious popular reading of Buffy I can think of. But I guess this bothers me more than some other readings I dislike because it doesn't seem like a deliberate attempt to ignore canon, the way some takes that rub me the wrong way do. People aren't reading the show this way because they want to downplay Willow and Tara's relationship: on the contrary, the people who post this way are fans of that relationship. And yet, to me, it just makes the whole thing feel ... I don't know, kind of chaste and bloodless. I mean, in this reading, Giles and his "orgasm friend" Olivia are having sex throughout the first half of the season and Buffy and Riley are having sex throughout the second half of the season (especially so in one particular episode) and Anya and Xander are having sex pretty much all season and meanwhile Willow and Tara are ... what, holding hands and looking at roses and thinking pure, innocent thoughts? I just find that kind of grating.

When S4 was on the air, one of the big megachurches told the congregation to leave messages on The Bronze, which was the online posting board for Buffy fans, condemning the show for promoting homosexuality. This started well before the "I'm yours" moment so it went on for months. We'd be having a normal day chatting about whatever and them some random post often spewing the most vile shit would show up.

This was before social media as you know it existed. You couldn't just find a public page on the internet to leave a nasty message for a public figure. But it was known that the cast and crew including Joss Whedon not only read the board but would post there. (During breaks in filming Joss would sometimes randomly show up and do the equivalent of an AMA.) So in addition to thousands of letters that were sent to the studio objecting to "glorifying lesbianism," the online community also got bombarded with shit.

For months. Long before Willow and Tara would kiss on screen for the first time. Everyone understood what was happening, including the people who were furious. NOBODY THOUGHT THEY WERE JUST FRIENDS. This relationship was historic for US television. Xena and Gabrielle weren't on a network in the US, but Buffy was. There were multiple firsts for Willow/Tara. There were essays written about the use of magic as a metaphor for discovering that you're queer. This was a landmark moment and a lot of people were very angry about it.

We had a troll come to the Bronze one day, much more erudite than the drive by bigots we were getting. His name was Morgan. He seemed reasonable at first, but he was saying the same thing as the others, just in prettier words. We argued with him for hours to no avail. Someone who ended up becoming a friend of mine delurked for the first time that day and just ripped Morgan to pieces. It was a spectacular piece of writing that I wish I had saved.

Amber Benson (the actress who played Tara) showed up and argued with this guy too. The cast and crew knew about the posts just like they knew they were getting hate mail.

Morgan wasn't deterred though. He kept coming back. No matter how thoroughly he got proven wrong, he wouldn't stop. So finally another friend of mine, who I knew offline, pulled a Spartacus and said, "Well Morgan, I'm gay and I disagree with you." She wasn't, AFAIK, but that wasn't the point. So I posted it too. Then someone else, and more and more people. That wall of solidarity finally drive the asshole away. "Gay for a Day" went down in the history of the Bronze. It wasn't the end of the shit but it was a message to the queer members of our community that we were on their side.

When the "I'm yours" moment happened and the relationship went from being alluded to as subtext to just the text, some of us from the Bronze went a little crazy. We bought Joss Whedon a toaster. (Yes, I know what you're thinking, but we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes back then.) The episode of "Ellen" where she comes out involved a joke about getting a toaster for "converting" enough women into bring lesbians. That episode aired in 1997, the year BtVS premiered. That was another big first for network tv and the Ellen show was cancelled after the following season partly due to the backlash. We had raised enough money that we also got the toaster engraved with the dialogue and the date the episode aired.

After we sent the toaster, Joss posted on the Bronze that his Emmy nomination paled in comparison to the toaster. He showed it to the cast and crew. Another message in the barrage of hate that we all understood what was happened we supported it.

Plural self advocacy is exactly what it says on the tin: plurals taking control of our own lives and being in charge of how we’re represented. It’s what happens when we speak for ourselves instead of letting singlet academics do it for us. Plural self advocacy has a long history that stretches before the existence of the internet, and it has made a difference. Here are some notable milestones, and what they’ve done for us.

1987ish: Truddi Chase is giving interviews (x, x, x), very openly insisting that her headmates are real people and that integration is not a solution for them.

February 1989: The first issue of Many Voices is published. This newsletter for and by trauma survivors with dissociative disorders is likely one of the first places that plurals could speak about their experiences on their own terms. It would run for over 20 years until 2012, when it was bequeathed to the ISSTD so that the issues could be made publicly available.

1993: Richard P. Kluft’s ‘Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder’ mentions Truddi Chase’s outspokenness against integration, disdainfully. ‘Some perceive the alters as real people’, it says. This paints a clear picture of how multiplicity was perceived at the time.

1995: Astraea’s web is created. This site continues to be one of the biggest plurality resources out there, and Astraea themselves have had a wide reach in plural activism - they’ll come up several more times in this article. They have curated a wide selection of sources on early accounts of plurality, plural involvement with legal issues, and the struggle against psychiatric abuse by all kinds of neurodiverse people, not just plurals.

1998: The Vickis begin to compile experiences of the ‘midcontinuum’, giving us the first terminology to describe median experiences. This is also, as far as we’re aware, the origin of ‘plural’ as an umbrella term.

2001?: darkpersonalities publishes ‘why we are not MPD/DID’, generally regarded as the first known instance of a system explicitly separating themselves from the ‘disorder’ definition. The empowered multiplicity movement grows from this. While many people take a cynical, bitter view towards people who still identify with their diagnosis, it begins to be associated with more sympathetic stances as it develops (x, x, x). Many of us look back disapprovingly on darkpersonalities’ attitude towards triggers and survivorship, but their role was still foundational to the concept of empowered multiplicity.

2002: Tim Bayne writes on the moral defensibility of forced integration, laying out a grounded  philosophical argument for considering non-host plurans autonomous people. It’s unknown what influenced him to write this paper, or whether any plurals were consulted.

2002?: The activist group Pavilion is formed. Their activities include outreach towards mental health professionals and academics, interviewing for radio stations, creating informational pamphlets and compiling resources for plurals and interested singlets.

2003: Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order, acknowledges Astraea and a plural friend-of-a-friend for introducing him to natural plurality and the idea that plurals don’t have to integrate, inspiring his book.

2011-2013: The Coalition for DSM-5 Reform writes launches a campaign to urge the DSM taskforce to change much of the proposed writing. This gets a lot of attention from plurals, and as such the DSM-5 revises its definition of DID to include distress/impairment, and for the first time accepts the self-reporting of plurality as valid evidence (x, x). It’s worth noting that this is an incredibly small step - as Astraea’s web says, ‘It was not proposed because therapists are beginning to recognize that non-disordered multiplicity exists; it was proposed in order to accommodate members of cultures and races where being more than one person is contextually normal.’ But it’s a step, nonetheless, that begins to recognize that plurals are the ultimate authorities on our own experiences of ourselves.

May 11, 2015: VICE interviews systems including Astraea and Oure Gaiya for a piece questioning if plurality is always a disorder.

2016: The plurality playbook is published internally at Google. It covers advice for plurals on succeeding in the workplace while dealing with the specific challenges that plurals face, and advice for singlets on respecting and assisting their plural coworkers.

January 18th, 2019: The Double Gears system (well known at the time as streamer and speedrunner protomagicalgirl) disclose their plurality on Hbomberguy’s DK64 stream for Mermaids. The hashtag #pluralgang trends on Twitter as a result, encouraging many people on twitter to come out as plural and many more to realize they’re plural by being introduced to the concept for the first time. #pluralgang has been a consistently active hashtag for the year since its inception and continues to be used to share resources, organize meetups, promote activism and generally remind plurals that they’re not alone.

The plurality playbook is also publicly published around now. In the new foreword, the Lizzes cite the activity surrounding #pluralgang as their motivation for this.

March 2019: The first Plural Positivity World Conference is held. It was created as a counter-conference to the one hosted annually by the ISSTD. The fees for attending the World Congress on Complex Dissociation and Trauma start at $200 for just one day, making attending near-impossible for the lay person. As the Crisses put it, “The ISST-D holding meetings, disseminating information, creating policy, teaching new standards for treatment, discussing new options, or sharing their research findings about us should not be done in a place that by design excludes us.” The Plural Positivity World Conference will run again in 2020.

December 25th, 2019: Power to the Plurals announces The Plural Association, a peer network for plurals which intends to provide phone, email and live chat helplines.

To this day, the overwhelming majority of plural activism has happened outside of the medical model. Improvements in the treatment of plurals have come from us being seen as people, and singlets seeing us as people has come from us viewing ourselves that way - by making spaces for us to understand ourselves and create narratives that aren’t bounded by pathology. Even changes within psychiatry have mostly been motivated by pressure from plurals demanding fairer treatment. It is good, and necessary, for us to speak for ourselves. We have done so much, and still have so much more to do.

This month’s article was written by Joey, one of our community mods and volunteers, and voted on by our Patrons. You can write for us by applying through our volunteering page, and decide what ideas we tackle by pledging $5 or more a month.

And well beyond organic life, modern society's great human invention is the Electronic Magic. Our greatest minds invented the Electronic Magic and it sends information around the world instantly. Our infrastructure our economy our modern life, minute by minute by minute, hinges on utilizing the great Lighting Technology.