@vespertineflora / vespertineflora.tumblr.com
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Well it's OFFICIAL. I have over 40 complete MDZS fanfictions posted on AO3, including a host of wangxian and 3zun (all combos)! I made some nice, summarized list of my fics to date, for easy browsing:
3zun I’ll be trying to keep these lists updated as I continue writing :)
when i go in a room and forget what i needed i become a point and click protagonist. [water bottle?] that’s not helpful right now. [socks?] i don’t know what to do with that. [charger?] that’s not helpful right now. [scissors?] i can’t do anything with that. [water bottle?] that’s not helpful right now. [lone paperclip?] that’s not helpful right now. [water bottle?]
Wait so you’re telling me my only options for letting people know I’m having a hard time in real life are 1) telling them (won’t happen, humiliating) or 2) public mental breakdown (also won’t happen, more humiliating)
I’m in one of those “broke my ankle in a cave oh you poor beautiful thing” moods. Dreaming of waking up in the hospital cured by the Vitamin.
lesbian thoughts → lesbian thoughts ↓ ↑ lesbian thoughts ← lesbian thoughts
anyway tbh i love how horny cameron perpetually is. she checks out patients. she is in deep inexplicable lust for house. she is sexually harassing chase long before it was cool. when she has to give a teenager a mnemonic she uses a horny one. she makes multiple sex jokes. she's just living here wearing adorable little tennis outfits and objectifying men and that's great
how did i make this post and forget her “a healthy marriage includes threesomes” stance. i didn’t even talk about her fwb insanity and absolutely canon getting caught kink. her first idea to trick house is to kiss him with tongue. she is a cartoon wolf….. cameron i could never hate you
Just wanted to share some shockingly good news in these difficult times. The full article is really worth reading. [Find it here]
This also goes to show that, yes, it is in fact productive to argue your case. It isn't a waste of time to reason with your opposition. It may never upend their entire worldview but it can change the course of their moral choices.
There is no crime where torture is an acceptable punishment.
There is no crime where sexual assault is an acceptable punishment.
There is no crime where slavery is an acceptable punishment.
"Well obviously people arrested for drugs and other non-violent crimes shouldn't be forced to work but—"
No! There is no but!! There is nothing in the world that makes slavery okay!!!
I could talk about people being charged for crimes they didn't commit. I could talk about coerced confessions. I could talk about people being charged with more extreme crimes than what they did to fill prisons. I could talk about how making slaves out of certain types of criminals creates an incentive to charge more people with certain crimes.
But I'm not going to actually talk about any of that because it doesn't matter. No one should be enslaved. No one should be defending or justifying slavery. This should not be controversial.
"But they're destroying their bodies for a fetishhhhh" wow great opinion, where did you get it from? Your mom who told you that your new tattoo you got for fun and joy ruined your sacred body?
Additional point: people have a right to autonomy, meaning if they want to "destroy" their own body for literally any reason, then they have a right to. If it's a sex thing that's not any morally better or worse than anything else like ballet, taking steroids, or starving.
YES excellent fucking point, health is not a moral issue and addressing it as such is less toeing the line into ableism and more doing a cannonball in
The thing is lads I cannot think of a better use for my tax dollars than feeding children. I want my taxes to give the single mother of three healthcare. I want my taxes to take care of the elderly and the disabled. I don’t care if they’re citizens or legal residents or whatever. I want my taxes to help people. Because we’re trying to live in a goddamn society. Instead my taxes go towards bombing schools and hospitals and refugee camps. Billions and billions sent to proxy wars. And still people quibble over whether we should feed children. What are we doing here. Feed the kids.
There's a difference between "disabled" and "legally recognized as disabled," and I just want to give a shout-out to all the other disabled people who don't have formal diagnoses, who don't have access to benefits of any kind, who don't have the ability to use even the shittiest and least-helpful resources, because the process of getting legal recognition for disability sucks ass.
And another shout-out to all the disabled people who purposely avoid getting diagnosed, because official diagnoses can be used against you, and you're unable or unwilling to risk it.
maybe im just a weirdo but does anyone else hear an interesting or relevant conversation behind you in a way where you think if i’d been a cat my ear would have done this just now
lately my kids have been playing Baby Knife, which consists of somebody acting as a baby with knife hands chasing people while going "baby knife baby knife" over and over. is this a thing or are they just insane
we have a new teacher this year who has never had kindergarten before & she rounded em all up & told em No Baby Knife and No Zombies and idk how to tell her that 1. all kindergarten recess games boil down to Give Birth And Kill Each Other and 2. the absurd vaguely inappropriate games they make up are usually better than when they try to play an Actual game like soccer
Baby Knife is straightforward. theres a baby knife. baby knife chases you. thats about it. when they try to play Real Sports every single child is playing by a different set of rules unbeknownst to the others and none of them are playing by the Actual rules. everybody is mad at everybody else and running up to tell on their colleagues for cheating every 3 minutes. this doesnt happen when they play Baby Knife
see the THING IS I don't feel like I ever worked hard enough to have "earned" the burnout, which is. probably how we got here.
of the 5 teslas in the parade, one turned off so early we didnt even see it, one had to turn off after someone cracked its windshield, and one had to turn off after it got a window shattered. further down from us people were fully throwing garbage and beer bottles with the intention of breaking glass. only 2 of them made it to the end of the parade, having been jeered end to end.
if this was supposed to be a temperature test- because people are speculating this was a test ride for the military and tesla having a partnership, no one knows why on earth these things were in mardi gras to begin with- then they certainly got an idea of how people feel.
@woodsywizard LITERALLYYY
I have been thinking about them fleeing to metairie all day. elleauxelle
This disciple may be a little clingy
[ID: A Scum Villain comic. First, Shen Qingqiu pats disciple Luo Binghe on the head. Luo Binghe happily exclaims "Shizun!" as Shen Qingqiu thinks, "I can fix him."
Then we see Luo Binghe as an adult, looming over Shen Qingqiu and crushing their faces together, lovingly exclaiming "Shizun" while manically smiling. Shen Qingqiu makes eye contact with a very tight smile and thinks while screaming and cursing, "I made him worse!!!" End ID]
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Some documentaries:
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
Looking at the digital quilt is heartbreaking. So many of mi gente, dead.
I’m in tears after reading some of that quilt
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop. The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be.
–The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
i think about this quote a lot in relation to HIV and my history.
Incidentally, this is why condoms are free. Because condoms prevent the transmission of HIV more than any other method. Because even with new medications like PEP and PrEP (which incidentally require you to be monitored and tested to make sure that they’re working and that your kidneys are still healthy), you still need to use condoms for them to be as effective.
I know that sometimes there’s this “why are condoms free and tampons and pads aren’t?” mentality. That’s why. Because the alternative was people dying because they were too afraid or too poor to walk into a drugstore to buy condoms.
–BB
and this is still affecting the community.
I grew up in a university town with a lot of queer people. And there were a ton of older lesbians, but only a few older gay dudes. Because a lot of the gay guys of that generation had died from AIDS. Women died too, but at a much lower rate.
