Howdy

so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation. the goal, for them, was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-deprivation that so many of us learned to rely on.

and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to

with musk and trump gunning for social security, now seems like a good time to remind everyone that social security isn’t like government charity or something. it’s fully paid for. always has been. corporate media loves to parrot the conservative lie that social security is running out of money without ever mentioning why: congress stole the money. they literally robbed from peter to pay paul.

the whole idea of social security was always that you pay into it your whole life, and then when you retire the government gives you that money back. it’s your money. always has been. like sure technically the money being paid by working age people now is going to the people who are retired now. but social security was started in the 30’s, the people who are collecting benefits now paid into it their whole lives. the idea was to be a retirement savings account that the government keeps safe for you because it’s almost impossible for working class people to save for retirement under capitalism.

the problem is that congress looked at all that money just sitting there and decided to use it as a slush fund. and never paid it back. because it’s easier to steal that money than it is to raise taxes for new spending. so yeah, it’s a problem now that there are more old people retiring than there are young people working, but only because congress stole the money it was supposed to be saving for the people now retiring. all those savings could have actually earned money for the people who can’t pay in due to disability etc by being used as a massive investment fund. instead it’s the classic austerity misdirection: sabotage a useful functional government program, then claim that it doesn’t work and is too expensive. and the media never talks about it.

domestic animals who would tell me riddles

cats are really good at looking at things. very useful

having two cats essentially means you have a bug and rodent triangulation system. if they are both looking at something you know for damn sure there is some unauthorised fucking thing there.

sorry for shooting your dog with a crossbow you have to understand Im american our education system is in the gutter most of us were never taught that killing peoples beloved pets with medieval projectile weaponry is wrong and we're all too burnt out to research it on our own time

THIS BLOG IS SO BACK, BABY! (Sadly, that means that we are all experiencing the emergence of a dystopian hellscape. But hey, look at this funny trader. He's so sad. Haha.)

For those of you that may have just finished watching Cory Booker’s record-breaking senate speech and are inspired to “get in good trouble”, you have a great opportunity for it this Saturday!

On April 5th, numerous advocacy groups are banding together into one nation-wide rally that will be held in major cities all over the country - you can easily find a participating location here!

www.handsoff2025.com

I’ll be volunteering as a safety captain at my own local rally, and I encourage all of you to go out there too and get in some good trouble as well!

for the record when I say a lot of major cities I mean a LOT of major cities :P

I will be hitting up one of our Twin Cities rallies tomorrow representing the Great Lakes. Let's get out there and raise hell!

1272 protests listed for today. 686 were counted in the women's march in 2017, which was 1% of the population. 🎉

Bastille was right. How am I gonna be an optimist about this. Also right about eh eho eho.

Please never forget that ēheu, what the background chorus is repeating in Pompeii, just means ‘alas’ or ‘oh no’ or perhaps ‘shucks’ in Latin, which is of course the correct response to realizing you’re right next to where a volcano is exploding.

fucking gotem lmao

“I give white radicals the tools to work with, a theoretical framework, and some analysis of racial oppression. I cannot, however, make them take the steps to actually use in dismantling racism inside radical movements. I just tell them that their lip service and feeble attempts to this point are unacceptable, and one day it will all be taken out of their hands. So they had better act now, or they will find themselves on the wrong side, when these decisive battles take place.”

-Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

i spot a plus size honey across the bar and start to chat her up until her bisexual boyfriend with a magic the gathering tattoo comes over and starts yelling at me so i turn him sideways so he can't make another action until his next turn

Rough out there for bisexual Alex

I like reading DE fanfic but imo the characterization of Harry and Kim is like several steps away from canon in the majority of fics. There is a dynamic that writers tend to favor that is Harry as expressive, clingy, does dumb and impulsive things for the sake of it and Kim the stoic, patient, empathetic minimalist.

And in canon Harry pretty explicitly struggles to form regular facial expressions while Kim has to put substantial effort into controlling his. Harry can choose to go off without Kim or attempt to drive him away while Kim will very rarely leave him alone. Kim is also almost always the one to initiate physical contact between them. Harry typically has some sort of internal reasoning behind his actions, even if they seem nonsensical to an onlooker, but Kim will often do things or agree to plans just because it amuses him.

The biggest thing that bothers me is that in fics Kim often takes on a role of a sort of mediator, settling disagreements, deescalating situations, clearing up misunderstandings. I think that in many ways, that’s the kind of person that he aspires to be, but canonically he has pretty fucking awful people skills. He can barely have a conversation without putting on the role of Cop. I think that one of the main things he admires about Harry is his ability to read people and connect with them.

Idk man. Let Kim be a socially awkward dork and let Harry have more depth than a golden retriever archetype