Shuck's Blog

I've mentioned before how deeply traumatic that word is for many of us. It carries a stigma that exists just as strongly as it did when we were featured in circus freakshows (which I've seen billboards for in my lifetime), because that's where people know us from and there hasn't been a movement to change that. We're still portrayed in media as freaks and villains, using our appearance to shock you. You're supposed to see us as evil, abusive, manipulative, and never worthy of redemption, because they don't expect for you to see those characters as human. If you can't think of any examples, check out the TV tropes article for Albinos are freaks.

I've experienced endless bullying and harassment, adults calling me disgusting and a freak, physical violence, and had my sunglasses and hat taken on multiple occasions (both are necessary for me to be able to see outside, essentially blinding me and leaving me downtown somewhere). I've been discriminated against so many times I can no longer remember each detail. This is what albino means to me: being subhuman.

I will never see albino as a positive word, even when people mean well. Getting people to care about us is like pulling teeth; I'm not saying this is a slur and you're a bad person if you ever say it. I'm asking for some common respect, and for you to learn about us before you talk about us and make your OCs based on more than just looks.

There's a lot more I could cover but ultimately I'd really like the word albino to fade out of our lexicon. I don't really care what you call animals, although albinistic is the scientific term.

When 43-year-old Sophie Djeme-Mi Koumazock was told her incurable metastatic breast cancer was no longer responding to her medication, she was reassured knowing she had another option.

Her doctor said her profile made her a candidate for the drug Truqab. While it wouldn’t cure her, it would give the Quebec City mother of four young kids more time with her family.

But her hope didn’t last long.

Costing up to $12,000 a month — double her previous medication that had been covered by her insurer Canada Life — Djeme-Mi Koumazock was shocked to learn she wouldn’t be reimbursed for the new treatment.

“It’s destroyed me. I didn’t know what to do,” she said.

While Quebec's health insurance board covers Truqap under exceptional circumstances, federal public servant Djeme-Mi Koumazock is enrolled in the Public Service Health Care Plan (PSHCP). Administered by Canada Life, the federal plan does not cover the drug.

Djeme-Mi Koumazock contacted her employer and union. While her union is helping her with her case, she's been told the decision is policy. She's now forced to pay out of pocket until she finds a solution.

Full article

This is why universal healthcare has to include pharmacare.

We'll figure out what's wrong with you for free, but if your insurance doesn't cover the medication you need then fuck you?

People here love to talk about how people in the States die or are crushed by medical debt due to the cost of healthcare. But the same can and does happen here due to the cost of medications.

and as your local ace i understand why such advice is appealing because i have been 13 and feeling a rising panic that i would answer "wrong" and bad things would happen. however as an adult i now understand that most people asking this are just asking you a question on par with asking what movies/music/whatever you like. they're not testing you, and if you give a fake answer, you're going to end up fielding follow-up questions or being sent memes or whatever, because they're trying to engage with your answers. just say a celebrity that you actually like (regardless of if you find them attractive or have a "crush"), or if you don't have one, say you don't pay attention to celebrities

A 'no questions asked' food pantry means no questions asked.

When we're stocking our pantry, we are not looking at a person's clothes or their accessories or what kind of car they drove there in. We are HAPPY to see it BEING USED AT ALL.

I don't know anyone's situation. Maybe they got that designer bag at a thrift shop. Maybe its a knockoff. Maybe it was a gift. Maybe they got it when they had money and now they don't have money. Maybe they're getting stuff for a friend.

Maybe they have plenty of money, don't need to be taking stuff from the pantry, but they are anyway because we said-

NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

Do you know what happens when someone takes from our pantry when they don't need it? We're down one item. But maybe they tell someone that the pantry is there. Or maybe they come back to it when they need it. Or maybe they throw a dollar in the donation box. Or maybe they put an item on the shelf. Or maybe they come to our food drive.

WE DONT CARE.

We don't care who used it.

We care that it was used.

financial abuse is an incredibly discreet and pervasive form of ‘no-marks’ abuse among otherwise “respectable and well-to-do” couples, ESPECIALLY single-income families or ones where only one spouse controls all the finances.

Remember how women couldn’t have their own bank accounts once? Even when they were finally allowed to have jobs? Who do you think handled their money, do you think?

There are STILL people living off “allowances” from their partner, and frankly it doesn’t always make ends meet.

More than half of Canadian daily newspapers are owned by Postmedia, giving the MAGA-aligned newspaper chain enormous influence over the flow of information and how current events are perceived across the country.  In addition to its explicitly Conservative flagship national newspaper, the National Post, Postmedia has a monopoly on major daily newspapers in Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Saskatoon and Regina, in addition to owning the Toronto Sun and Montreal Gazette.  “In the last 10 years, they’ve been imposing an ever further right-wing agenda on their newspapers,” Marc Edge, author of the Postmedia Effect: How Vulture Capitalism Is Wrecking Our News, told Ricochet.

Read more.

take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)

the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it

but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first

comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now

We generally find two models of history dominating popular discourse: a heteronormative model, in which only male/female relationships may be readily accepted as romantic or sexual and so all same-gender relationships must be read as socially normative friendship, or an amatonormative model which, in being open to the possibility of same-gender romance or sex, reads all intimate friendship as actually romance in disguise. The latter is an understandable compensation for the former, which dominated much 19th-20th century scholarship, but is just as essentialising and limited.

But the more I allowed that openness to lead me to consider how relationships were actually being constructed, rather than just how I expected them to be constructed, I also found myself doing the opposite: considering the ways in which marriage was constructed to resemble these specific kinds of friendship.

This is the thing.

Common friendships can be shared. In one friend one can love beauty; in another, affability; in another, generosity; in another, a fatherly affection; in another, a brotherly one; and so on. But in this friendship love takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway: that cannot possibly be duplicated.

Montaigne, M. de, Screech, M. A., & Montaigne, M. de. (1993). The complete Essays. Penguin Books, p. 215.

THIS IS THE THING.

Although Montaigne distinguishes this model of loving-friendship from pederasty, he connects it to marriage

Haggerty, G. E. (2012). Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship. The Age of Johnson, 22, 331–XIII.

THIS!! Is the thing!!!

Throughout the late eighteenth century husbands were encouraged to be friends with their wives, to be as close to their wives as they had been to their intimate male friends. The effusive rhetoric of friendship was not modeled on that of romantic love, but rather romantic love took on the semiotics of friendship.

Tobin, R. (2000). Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15sk9bt, p.37.

This is not the only thing, and marriage is also an imperfect analogue for these relationships.

and yes! the label of 'romantic friendship' (or even just 'friendship') has absolutely been used to erase the queerness of relationships that were they heterosexual scholars would be SHOUTING romantic relationship or lovers at. things like shakespeare's sonnets, to use my personal favorite example, or hamilton and laurens. and yes! it is also my personal opinion that a not insignificant amount of romantic friendships contained what we would nowadays call romantic and or sexual feelings that were expressed through the model of romantic friendship because that was the model they had (which, despite it being due to homophobia, is a fundamentally different model of relationships to ours, which is by no means the Best one Ever, etc etc), and replicated perfectly into a 2025 setting they very well might have dated.

but! ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIPS WERE REAL GUYS. this was a REAL historical social structure and it should be treated as such. and many of these relationships do not fit neatly into modern 'romantic' or 'platonic' because they are NEITHER. they are their OWN THING. they are ambiguous! they vary from 'modern-day-besties' to 'qpr' to 'qpr with benefits' to 'passionately in erotic love' to 'intimacy born out of circumstance' to 'lovers' to 'modern-day-married'. and most of the time you, the historian, cannot definitively tell the difference. just like how you cannot really definitively tell the difference between what we would nowadays call a trans man, a lesbian, and a girl who just really hated the patriarchy and decided to make her own way through the world. because all of those concepts are MODERN. deciding that the historical figure in question HAD to be one or the other erases very real nuances and very real histories, and it serves as a 'fuck you' to every single person who sees themself in that story and history but who isn't the identity you've decided on.