Adventures of a landlocked octopus

    Betty relaxes against the plush comforter of her bed, she closes her eyes and attempts to control her breathing. She focuses on the calloused fingertips running over her body, gentle but firm, soothing her tense muscles to relax. 

    She can feel the slightly scratchy rope working its way across her sensitive skin, the friction it creates causes goosebumps to erupt in its wake. Jughead’s nimble fingers begin wrapping and looping the rope in intricate designs across her pearlescent skin.

    She sighs contently as her hands are bound together above her head, fingers clasped tightly together in a sinful prayer. The slightest movement she makes sends waves of pleasure thrumming throughout her body. With each snap of his wrist the rope grows tighter around her, causing her skin to pucker and redden. The rope tied tightly against her slit grows darker in color as her slick begins to seep out of her, the twine disappearing between her two lips as she thrust her hips upward against it. 

Crowley surrenders; Aziraphale won’t let him fall

the interior of a girl in love

Idiocy

Muscle

Beefiness

to thousands of people making phony images and replying to them with their passionate desire to have them as a tshirt to overload the bots with nonsense and junk and send out warnings to shoppers like this:

and now we even have people replying to pictures of baby yoda with “i want this on a tshirt” knowing how ravenous disney is being with copyright in hopes to get the stores taken down altogether

the water warriors fighting for access to clean water for all

the teenagers imprisoned for fighting back against oppressive regimes 

those fighting for access to education for all

for the future of the planet 

for gender equality 

for safety and protection from gun violence

for governmental representation and engagement for youths 

for the rights of immigrants 

for syria and the rights of refugees 

for literacy and the representation of WOC in books

for trans and queer rights 

for protection of girls against forced marriage and child slavery

i hope that one day we live in a world where children are allowed to just be children, where they dont have to fight tooth and nail for their rights and their futures, but i could not be prouder of this generation 

femme and butch are both historically lesbian terms that are used very specifically for lesbians. a femme can ONLY be a lesbian bc it is an identity specifically abt subverting gender roles assigned to by men and performing femininity for other women, completely rejecting men. it can only be for lesbians bc its abt being attracted to only women. 

I have also seen those posts say that biphobia is a myth, and that lesbians who reject bi women for being bi are a “lesbophobic myth”. The reality is, the elimination of bisexuals from our own narratives, the myth that you can source 1950s slang in a pure lesbian-only, never-looked-at-a-man mythic past, goes hand in hand with modern biphobia.

This post was written specifically counter to the concept that “femme” is a lesbian-only word.

If you want a pure lesbian term that has only ever been used by someone who is never attracted to men, I suggest you go plant a flag in a term that ISN’T used my MLM. Because “femme” has been used by gay men to describe themselves and each other for decades. 

It isn’t just innocent “We want our own vocabulary!” when you’re claiming one of the most common adjectives used for gender presentation in the English language, and when you cite a specific provenance for it, it is a provenance that bisexual women are equally entitled to inherit from.

And the answer is that a lot of these kids are very isolated: they don’t have a robust, expansive adult queer community around them or accessible to them, for all the same reasons that teens have always not got to have that, ranging from one just not existing through to not being able to go to it due to parental prejudice or even just not being the kind of person who feels comfortable showing up to a new place.

So they find tumblr and tumblr is the first place that they find any non-straight “community” at all and then run straight into TERF-y bullshit but the people peddling that bullshit are telling them that This Is The Real History.

And they’re teens: no, they don’t necessarily know how to swim through the vast internet and actually evaluate the available sources, and the JSTOR articles often require an account and sometimes a paywall and are pretty inaccessible to your average teenager trying to figure out history anyway, and the books aren’t available (and you can find just as much TERFy bullshit in some of the books) and … so on.

It’s why this shit happens on tumblr: it gets very little traction in face-to-face spaces, and the big players - the adult women pulling this shit and pushing this shit - damn well know it, and know that if they show up to, say, Vancouver Pride with their exclusionist bullshit they’re going to get a bunch of fully adult angry LGBTQAI2S+* people in their faces, many of them able to go I WAS THERE DON’T TRY THAT SHIT ON HERE.

But if they can find the teens who don’t have a face-to-face community right here on tumblr and other online spaces? Well then. They get to have all the authority of having been The First Lesbian Adults/Voices those teens hear, of being the ones who set the tone and “establish” what lesbian history is, and voilà, you get sixteen-year-olds telling women who’ve been living as “butch” and “femme” for three, four, five decades that no!!!! those are LESBIAN ONLY TERMS!!!! et cetera.

And unfortunately, given that we’re still fighting to even let schools have fucking GSA/QSA spaces in so much of even the most “progressive” parts of the world, there are a lot of those isolated kids, and it’s not like they HAVE ever had the opportunity to learn anything else.

It’s a shitty situation. Unfortunately.

John Barnett had a three-decade career as a Boeing quality manager, but after he was transferred to the Charleston, SC production facility for the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner,” he became a whistleblower – now he’s been forced out of the company and is waiting for various federal agencies to rule on the complaints he brought against the company.

Barnett says the 787 facility was run by a new leadership team that had been transferred in from St Louis, MO, with a background in overseeing military contracts, and that they prioritized production speed over airworthiness and safety.

He says that the culture of poor safety began in 2011 or 2012, with top management ordering employees not to document defects, but that this graduated to “ignoring safety issues and the defective parts.” Barnett pursued this internally, exhausting every internal process and facing workplace retaliation before going to federal regulators like the FAA and OSHA, which resulted in even more retaliation, and, eventually, blackballing across the aviation industry.

Barnett’s description of the safety issues is terrifying. For example, the process of tightening the titanium nuts on the floorboard-bolts caused 3"-long, razor sharp titanium slivers to cascade into the compartment where all the sensitive avionics wiring ran. Though the FAA eventually ordered Boeing to stop shipping planes whose wiring compartments were full of loose, razor-sharp metal shards, the company had already shipped 800 planes by that point and has not recalled any of them, so every Dreamliner in the sky today has this problem. Some of these shards have already caused fires in 787s.

He also says that 25% of the oxygen mask systems are defective, and that the planes had a large number of parts that were known to be defective at the time that they were installed, but that the company installed them anyway so they could meet their production deadlines.

The interview is genuinely chilling, and it puts the scandal of Boeing’s lethal 737 planes in perspective as not an unfortunate design error, but the actions of a company that is essentially self-regulating, where production quotas matter more than safety because managers are rewarded for meeting deadlines, but never punished for cutting corners on our safety.

this is a rare pride staryu