FanTAStic

Is

It is super poisonous

There is a reason we do not use it in make up any more

That orange box is how many moles of dissolved Cu++ Scaife got from sticking malachite in some water that had 0.171 moles NaCl/L (body salinity is about 0.154 moles NaCl/L so this is slightly less salty than people) at 30°C. He’s got no acidity in there, and again the salinity and temperature are slightly lower than people. But this is probably the closest we’re going to get to data on how malachite behaves in vaginas anytime soon, folks. From this we can take away that if you leave malachite alone in a vagina you’ll get AT LEAST 9.12 x 10^-4 moles/L, or 5.8 ppm, of Cu++ at equilibrium.  • Recall from above that most “malachite” isn’t actually pure malachite, it’s a mix of various copper carbonates & oxides. The EPA document elaborates: “[T]raditional ‘eyeball’ identification of malachite by its blue-green color is extremely unreliable, because almost all cupric hydroxysulfates, hydroxycarbonates, hydroxychlorides, and even fresh cupric hydroxide can be some shade of blue-green. … Thus, the uncertainty in the computed copper concentration in equilibrium with malachite is at least about a factor of 2 … until further experimental data focusing on this problem is generated.” In other words, “do your math and then double how much Cu++ you think is going to be in the water, just in case.” So that gives us 11.6ppm Cu++, at equilibrium, with malachite in a (til now!) healthy vagina.  • Next step: do we have any idea what happens to bacteria in acid conditions with copper? OH MY GOD WE TOTALLY DO. Gyawali et al 2011 checked this out in the context of “so what if we rinsed tomatoes with a solution of lactic acid and copper, because that would be a safe & organic way to get rid of E. coli?” So now this post has officially ruined stalactites, vaginas, and tomatoes.

You know, you'd think that someone who wrote an essay about queer people selling each other out for cishet approval would agree with this, and to a certain extent, I do, at least in the outcomes and effects, but this excerpt contains a number of deeply wrong and deeply fucked up things to say.

The big pushes for marriage equality and military service were responses to things done to us. They weren't the malicious behavior of a bunch of second-rate, shitty gays (holy fuck, what the fuck, measuring people's artistic prowess and social importance by how much they got laid? James, what the fuck). The push for marriage equality got bigger and louder because of the AIDS epidemic. Because we were denied entry into the hospital rooms and funerals of our loved ones. Because sometimes all families left behind when they cleared out everything in a shared apartment was a fucking box fan. Because people lost their homes when their partners died. Because people were buried under the wrong names, or unclaimed by family and unable to be claimed by the people who loved them.

The push for military service equality? That happened as a pushback against active campaigns to out queer people and drive them out of military service. Like it or not, military service has become (by intent on the part of the Department of Defense) a way out of poverty for a lot of people, and queer people? Well, we tend to be poorer than others. Protecting people's ability to serve in the military meant protecting that path out of poverty for a lot of queer people, meant protecting health care, meant protecting housing, meant protecting lots and lots of things.

A friend of mine was expelled from the military under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He'd been in almost long enough to have a pension, and he pissed someone off who knew he was gay. When I talked to him about it when DADT was repealed, he was still bitter about it -- he and his now-husband couldn't at the time get VA loans or any benefits for his years and years of service. There are at least a hundred thousand people who were expelled from military service for being gay from WWII until its repeal in 2011. Most of those people still have their records showing an other than honorable discharge, and so they and their families are not receiving benefits to which they are otherwise entitled.

Again, this push was a pushback against an active Republican campaign to drive queer people out of public life, one which was used by Republicans in order to stir up their base into a froth over the concept of gays tainting the pure American way of life. There were accusations of gays attempting to undermine the military in the 90s, lots of talk about how the very presence of queers in that space would sully it immeasurably, ruin the American way of life. (Lots of talk about 'combat readiness' and I heard people talking about not wanting 'faggots in foxholes.')

Sound familiar?

Is there a problem with respectability politics in the queer community? Yes. Does that problem with respectability politics undermine our ability to make meaningful change? Yes, absolutely. But we need to refrain from this absolutely fucking asinine and totally untrue reframing of the narrative to blame respectability politics for decisions made out of desperation by people under attack, and we one fucking hundred percent do not need this gross "the survivors were the losers who didn't fuck" narrative, as if one's sexual prowess has anything to do with one's worth as an artist or a human being.

That's fucking disgusting, and James Somerton should be ashamed for even thinking that, much less putting those words in that order and putting them out into the world. My worth as an artist -- and yes, a queer artist -- has nothing to do with who I fuck or how much I fuck or how many partners I fuck. It says a lot about the art world and who gets to rise to the top in it -- the pretty, the popular, the fuckable -- that people think so, though.

Yes, the community has a problem with respectability politics -- I have been loudly saying so for years -- but the response to that can't be grading people by their transgressiveness and fuckability. It just creates a new metric by which you can be found a Worthy Queer.

"General employment discrimination wasn't all that important to them."

YOU FUCKING LIAR.

Executive Order 12968 was signed by U.S. President Bill Clinton on August 2, 1995. ... Executive Order 12968's anti-discrimination statement, "The United States Government does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation in granting access to classified information." responded to longstanding complaints by advocates for gay and lesbian rights by including "sexual orientation" for the first time in an Executive Order. It also said that "no inference" about suitability for access to classified information "may be raised solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the employee."

You can find this shit is fucking wrong on fucking Wikipedia, you goddamned rotten cabbage.

For clarity and conciseness, I've included only those advances made during the worst parts of the AIDS Crisis: 1982: Wisconsin: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1983: New York: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Ohio: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1985: New Mexico: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Washington: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1987: Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1988: Oregon: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1989: Massachusetts: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1990: Colorado: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1991: Connecticut: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Hawaii: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Minnesota: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1992: California: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Louisiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           New Jersey: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Vermont: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Oregon: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 1993: Minnesota: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in all employment 1995: Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Rhode Island: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1996: Illinois: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Louisiana: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment 1998: New Hampshire: Sexual orientation protected in all employment 1999: Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity protected in state employment           Nevada: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Ohio: Sexual orientation no longer protected in state employment           Delaware: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Iowa: Sexual orientation and gender identity no longer protected in state employment           Montana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment 2001: Indiana: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Maine: Sexual orientation protected in state employment           Maryland: Sexual orientation protected in all employment           Rhode Island: Gender identity protected in all employment

Do you think all of those things were just magically fucking granted by the benevolent cishets? No. Each one of those advances came with long, tedious, brutal fucking fights, with people risking their careers, their livelihoods, and sometimes the possibility of criminal charges by coming out and fighting.

The idea that "general employment discrimination was not on the agenda" is such a bald-faced fucking lie that I can't even see past the goddamned red mist in my vision. I highly, highly recommend reading that page if you don't understand what an ongoing fight antidiscrimination laws have been. Several states have gone back and forth several times on whether or not employment and housing discrimination is banned, making it especially fucking risky to get involved in those fights, but the boring gays did it anyway.

Fuck, I am angry. That is just a bunch of self-congratulatory bullshit, and it doesn't do fucking anything to talk meaningfully about what AIDS took from us.

like

my good bitch

And also, like, we're taking the words of Fran Lebowitz as meaningful?

This Fran Lebowitz, talking in 2010?

"Candy [Darling, a trans woman] was a man who wanted to be a female movie star," says Fran in the opening of the under-three-minute teaser. "And you know, fell into the clutches of Andy [Warhol] who told her she was."

"A 25-year-old man who becomes a 25-year-old woman is not a woman at all, because a woman first has to be a little girl. Candy was never a girl."

Or maybe this from 2021's Pretend It's A City?

"I said to this little girl, 'you are not a woman.' Now you can't say that to anyone. [derisively] If someone says, 'I'm a woman,' you're a woman, okay? You can be a three-year-old girl, a 70-year-old man, you could be a giraffe. You're a woman? You're a woman."

Or how she repeatedly compared being trans to having a headache?

Who you choose to cite and who you choose to view as an authority tells people a lot about how and where you've formed your opinions. James leaning into this garbage tells me a lot about him, unfortunately.

A lot of people in the notes of this post keep saying that those of us pissed off by this garbage "don't get it" or that those of us pissed off by the post don't understand bla bla bla creating systems of support of our own outside the system bla bla bla now people are just trying to fit in to the system bla bla.

And first of all, it's fucking exhausting to see comments like that from people half my fucking age who didn't live through this and don't know fuck all about fuck all. But second of all--

-- how do you create meaningful and durable systems of support in a capitalist society if you have no form of steady income or cannot be certain that if something happens to you that the resources you've built up will be passed to the people that you want it to go to rather than being stolen by people who hate you? How do you create stability for the next generation, how do you raise kids or provide shelter and stability for young people fleeing homophobic and transphobic bio-families, if you don't have a stable home yourself or if taking in someone you're not genetically related to can cause you to lose your home?

It pisses me off to have to grab people by the neck and say "fucking stop it, we were forced into this fight to protect ourselves," because there is a lot that we lost when we had our backs put to the wall by the AIDS crisis and by the endlessly aggressive Republican attacks of the 80s and 90s, and there are a lot of things we had to give up on as priorities because we were trying to protect our right to employment and a steady place to live, and still are! It fucking sucks that we have to do this. It fucking sucks that as a community we are going to look back in 20 years and see what we could have done if we hadn't had to spend so much time and energy protecting the basic right to bodily autonomy and continually re-fighting the same fucking fights. I know that it will because I feel that way about how shit was when I was 20, and I see history not repeating but rhyming the way that it does.

But this bullshit "we lost the artists because they were the Bad Boys who fucked and that's why it's sad" shit that also contains a lot of absolute fucking lies about what "the community" did 30, 40 years ago is just not the fucking way.

The human cost of the AIDS crisis is incalculable, but not because we lost the "radical artists" and everyone else who remained was the losers who suck (a pretty ironic thing to say when you're one of the ones who lived, Franny). It is horrible because people fucking died due to active attempts to use this disease to exterminate us, because of the malignant neglect of the people in power, because people fucking died.

Not artists, not radicals, not ... whatever. We didn't lose martyrs. We lost people.

And like... this bullshit about how addressing general employment discrimination wasn't on the table? Shut uuuuuuuup. I mean, look at that list. Look at Oregon alone. In 87, sexual orientation protected in state employment (you'll see this as a first step in many states as it is easier to argue and sets the stage for general discrimination to be outlawed). In 88, that goes away bc of opposition. It doesn't return until 1992, 5 years later. Go back further, and you see that Oregon went back and forth five fucking times on the question of whether it was legal to castrate or sterilize queers during the first half of the 20th century, during which time almost three thousand Oregonians, many of them women, were either castrated or had oophorectomies performed against their will for being "moral degenerates or sexual perverts."

Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care in a society that will forcibly remove parts of your body for being queer. Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care when you can have anything you establish ripped away from your hands because your job is gone, because you're a pervert who doesn't deserve a job or the ability to rent or buy a home with both names on the deed or the ability to get a mortgage (because they COULD discriminate against your ability to sign a mortgage together, and if you don't have both incomes, you might not qualify and even if you do, if lightning strikes the property owner, well, now it belongs to their shitty homophobic family).

All of these advances in our basic rights that James fucking lies about so blatantly are the necessary ingredients for existing in this society as it is established. You cannot create these alternate family forms or alternate systems of care in a way that is stable, livable, and able to be protected without those basic rights, and the fact that so many young people take that shit so much for granted is both wonderful - because all of them have never really experienced the world that I and other older queers grew up in - and so so frustrating, because they really don't understand that all of those basic rights are written in blood.

I am deeply frustrated by the way in which a lot of the big rights organizations can be really really short-sighted and focused on the rights of cis queers, and I'm extremely frustrated by respectability politics. The solution, however, is not shifting the goalposts so that the "acceptable" queers are the ones who are sufficiently radical in visible, tangible ways. Like, what the fuck. The solution has to be actual solidarity between the radical gays and the "boring" ones, and you don't get there by lying about hard-fought history or quoting TERFy McTERFerson Fran Fucking Lebowitz.

That being said. From personal experience? Immunizing myself to all my discomforts by browsing through pixiv and kink memes with raised eyebrows while searching for things I am interested in back when tagging was non-existent has really made my fandom experience much more pleasant nowadays.

I have preferences, for sure. But I have no fear. I have no cringe. The filthiest, grossest fanwork holds no powers over me. I am a god.

That being said. From personal experience? Immunizing myself to all my discomforts by browsing through pixiv and kink memes with raised eyebrows while searching for things I am interested in back when tagging was non-existent has really made my fandom experience much more pleasant nowadays.

I have preferences, for sure. But I have no fear. I have no cringe. The filthiest, grossest fanwork holds no powers over me. I am a god.

So, may I recommend:

Here's his actual website which I feel is easier to navigate than the YouTube channel on its own and organizes things in a way that's easy to understand. He explains everything you need to know about the routine and each individual exercise has both a text description and a video tutorial

In their reply to the audience they then say they are picking her up from middle school, again implying that their girlfriend is underage, but quickly state she’s grading papers letting us know she’s a teacher, definitely an adult, and there no reason to be upset.

The rollercoaster gif portrays how switching from upset and worried to relieved in such a short period of time feels emotionally.

lost if Tumblr goes through with

their “no more threads” plan.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘DRINK SOME JUICE’

WHAT IS ‘LOW BLOOD SUGAR’

WHY IS THIS WORKING

“What do you mean I don’t have to burn half my blood to create a fireball?”

“Why can you teleport more than once without vomiting? WTF is ‘quantum displacement awareness’???”

“You know HOW many spells? HOW? ... What do you mean ‘my spell book’?”

but holy hell I love it

when bots run amok

It has been literal years but every time I see Martin’s tweets posted somewhere and his word is shared as truth while her post is not shared it sort of reiterates the fact that we trust men to speak about feminism more than we believe women who experience it. 

Adding screenshots of her post. His whole post is there without needing a link. Hers should be, too.