a magpie's hoard

she was talking about like, gender diversity and the ways in which that fits into liberation and the ways it hasn't always been included, and she was positioning herself in that space as someone who did a lot of EXTREMELY important work that made a huge impact, but she did not imply that that meant that those coming after her owed her writing and perspective deference on every level. which was such a wonderful thing to hear as someone who read some of her early statements about things like queerness many decades ago and felt disappointed and hurt by what she said about it. she said "we are all building on the work done by those who came before us. we all stand on their shoulders. many people stand on my shoulders, and often those people know more than I do about certain subjects, and it's important to me that I am able to learn from them." she was saying like, "yeah, my work often benefits people who come after me and who have more knowledge than I do about a component of what I am discussing, and their perspectives in turn enrich my own frameworks," and I found that really encouraging as a way to look at this. not "this activist's work was imperfect and that means it is bad," and also not "you young people don't understand what it was like, and your perspective that I have overlooked things or gotten things wrong is a threat to my work and my legacy," but "this is a collaborative effort between countless individuals over a long span of time, and we all enrich each other's frameworks with our knowledge and experience"

no one person can outline All Oppression in one perfectly informed way -- we are all cobbling together a big picture based on all of our personal experiences and our perspectives that are based on those experiences. many people stand on her shoulders, and some of them know more about some things than she does, and she values what they add to what she has done. she thinks it's important to learn from them like they have learned from her.

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

This is a literal "Hammerhead" shark created by artist Matt Sanders.

The sculpture is made from 685 reclaimed steel hammer heads and weighs 500 lbs (about 227 kg). It took approximately 2,500 hours of work to weld together. Sanders even used sledgehammers for the eye sockets and ball-peen hammers for the eyes to give it a realistic look.

The stories you hear of people dying from rationing, this is what happens to their body.

Affordable insulin isn’t just a right, it’s a necessity.