It’s my grandpa’s birthday next week and he said “I don’t want to be 85” and my grandmother, his wife of 59 and a half years, said “well your only alternative is to die”, I can’t believe how affectionate they are
I was having lunch with them today and my grandpa started throwing napkins at my grandmother, and she balled it up and looked all set to throw it back but then she put it down and said “I will not throw it because I was brought up properly, you were dragged” she has spent ¾ of her life with this man
I thought I’d let you know how they’ve been getting on during lockdown, so here’s some of the FaceTime conversation from today:
“My goodness, the way technology is advancing - in 20 years we’ll be able to shake hands through the screen!”
“Rex, I don’t think we’ll be here in 20 years.”
“Well you make your own plans, I shall only be 109.”
telling ppl attracted to men that there are no good men out there or that men canât love only normalizes poor treatment from men & doesnât do anything helpful
#the idea that all men are naturally garbage is super unhelpful#because it absolves awful men of the responsibility to be better
#it also discourages men who do want to improve their behaviour but donât know how
#by convincing them that theyâll be reviled no matter what they do
#learning how to change involves leaving confort zones
#and making yourself vulnerable by approaching other peopleâs spaces for advice
Also also it perpetuates internalized hatred and low self-esteem in men who are genuinely good and it leads to poor mental health and the sense that as a result of being the gender they are they are automatically to be reviled.
It can also make trans men feel bad or guilty about being men.
Favorite part of this post is that when you reblog it you also get funny brainworm asks as freebiesÂ
Saying all men are garbage also puts people who are questioning their gender, or genderqueer and masculine, or can be easily misgendered as men by strangers in a very awkward spot. Anyone who presents in a way similar to the masculine binary gender presentation. Because depending upon the perspective of the observer, if all âmenâ are garbage, they start to ask themselves, âdoes that include me? Does that except me? If I relate to the gender partially but not 100% does it include or exclude me???â It just generally sucks and should have just been a joke, but no thereâs a ton of toxic folks out there who genuinely believe it and itâs not funny anymore. It just hurts.
To those who do: you should genuinely feel bad for bullying folks. Abusers arenât abusers because of gender, so take a step back and try to stop becoming one yourself.
i learned about Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who began taping whatever was on television in 1979 and didnât stop until her death in 2012.. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV. They are being digitized by the Internet Archive. (x)
i feel like this is selling her a bit short tbh. Itâs not like she was a random woman who decided to tape âwhateverâ was on television. She was a civil rights activist and archivist, who was extremely concerned about preserving history. She believed that, by taping television, she would be preserving history EXACTLY as it was perceived at the time; she didnât want the detail in the news to disappear with time. And she was RIGHT.
Like I said, she didnât just tape âwhateverâ was on television. It was extremely targeted towards news stations. There were 8 VCRs running at all times in her home. Her lifeâ-and her familyâs livesâ-were centered around 6 hour blocks, since that was the amount of time that a tape would record for. Her collections were also extremely organized.Â
A documentary of her life,Recorder: the Marion Stokes Project, was released in 2019, and seems to have good reviews, though I have not yet seen it.
From archive.org (Internet Archive) - The Marion Stokes Papers contain documents related to the life and activism of Marion Stokes (1929-2012), civil rights activist, feminist, and news archivist. Stokesâ social activist career began in the 1950s, and encompassed many areas of left politics during a particularly transformative time in America. Her groundbreaking television show (co-produced with her husband John S Stokes Jr), Input, addressed many pressing issues, and much of it remains relevant today. Additionally, Stokes amassed a huge archive of videotaped television news, which is slowly being made available through the work of the Internet Archive.
Every time I am reminded about this archive I think about how cool it is, and how useful it is for so many purposes. For example, a lot of period pieces end up as caricatures of the eras they portray based on a telephone game through history books and fictional works, but this gives you thousands of hours of examples of what media from the time looked like, how people dressed, how events might have been perceived by the general public, etc.
[Image Description: A photograph of an 80s television next to a stack of magazines. On the screen is a closeup image of Marion Stokes, a Black woman with dark hair, wearing an outfit with a wide red collar. /End ID]
