Mostly lemon based

Category: Tumblr crossposts

Crossposts from tumblr (for posterity)

  • fuck-me-barnes:

    carmanitaknits:

    wagrobanite:

    think-progress:

    Members of Congress are living off food stamps for a week to protest Republican cuts. It’s a challenge for them, but GOP cuts would hurt millions of everyday Americans. 

    Why does this not have more publicity. This needs it!

    I want a reality tv show where politicians have to live in poverty for a month. They have to live in Government housing, shop with food stamps, and get only a limited amount of money for clothes. Because here, they still have all their trappings, lilke nice cars and thousand dollar suits. I want them in Walmart jeans trying to determine if they can afford a carton of milk. 

    Give them a full calendar year. I want to see them confident in January, and sometime around June choking back tears at the Safeway because they are tired, so tired, of eating 25 cent cup noodles, eyeing other peoples’ full grocery carts with a dull bewilderment.

    Let me see them despair because they have a persistent nagging cough that won’t go away and might be turning into pneumonia but the minute clinic is $60, which might as well be as six million dollars, either way they ain’t got it to spare – and that doesn’t count the cost of prescriptions. Let me hear them tell people about the muscle cramps they get at night due to eating non-nutritious garbage for months, the weakness from persistent hunger. 

    Let them know the shame and frustration of only owning one pair of cheap polyester pants for work and one pair of thrift-store jeans, and both persistently have ripped crotches and seams coming undone, no matter how many times they get sewn back up.

    Let the women know the particular sort of despair that comes once a month when you can’t afford even the cheapest pads or tampons.

    Let them understand the frustration of being charged a $35 fee for a $2 overdraft. Let them watch as the bank holds charges from different days in “pending” till they all come through on the same day, and the bank charges them four times for a single overdraft because “the charges all cleared at the same time”. 

    I want them to know the particular pain of having to decide between food for the week, or transportation costs to and from work. You can’t have both. Choose wisely.

    You do not truly understand poverty until you’ve lived it and a month isn’t enough to encompass it. Not even close.

  • Untitled post 15043

    tanngelo:

    this is it

  • Untitled post 15046

    mortiferamorphasmus:

    wetwareproblem:

    opalescentlesbian:

    wetwareproblem:

    runkjat:

    wetwareproblem:

    runkjat:

    wetwareproblem:

    runkjat:

    wetwareproblem:

    vergess:

    wetwareproblem:

    barbidreamdumpster:

    bifoxstiles:

    adayinthelesbianlife:

    The first Pride was a riot.

    Wall sticker in Marlborough lesbian pub, Brighton.

    i’m actually realizing this now

    but the original poster said “queer power” and someone erased that and replaced it with “gay power”

    real classy

    this real

    Well. I’m not exactly an expert at image analysis, but the bottom text in the first one looks much cleaner than the top text while the second one matches better. Also, the creases in the second one on the Q and U seem like the sort of detail that wouldn’t be faked. Finally, this actually matches up significantly better to “queer” politics than “gay” politics; it was always queers who advocated and took the front lines in direct action.

    If you put the image in an editor or just view the full size of the first image, it becomes very obvious that the text on the bottom was added later: all of the vertical lines in every letter are pixel perfect straight lines. That is basically impossible with a photo of a poster that is both visibly at an angle, and has paper weathering and other distortion. Look at the verticals of the white text to compare. The only distortion of the text is the jpg artifacts we would expect in that level of contrast. There is no lighting on the pink text either, another highly suspicious trait.

    Additionally, if you crop out the pink text in op and run an image search you get the second photo, as well as four or five other photos of the poster, all reading “queer power.”

    With the pink text left in, however, the only version of the poster is this exact image, sourcing to op.

    I want every single person who ever argued with me on That Queer Post to take a long, hard look at this. I have been told at least dozens of times that “nobody is saying you can’t identify as queer,” that I’m “ignoring history,” that they’re not trying to shift back to gay, etc.

    Now, here’s this post, in which queer people are having their art defaced in order to rewrite their identity. Where they’re being forcibly rewritten as gay. Where history is being literally goddamn erased. It’s got three times the notes of That Queer Post, and as far as I can tell, @bifoxstiles is the first one to challenge this narrative. And I’m not gonna hold my breath on y’all to call out OP.

    They’re literally stealing our history, rewriting it into a new version that excludes more than half of the community. And nobody’s challenging this. You’re too busy trying to shut down inclusive, egalitarian language.

    Shame on every last one of you.

    Queer is a slur and not everyone wants to identify as it stop using it as an umbrella term

    MOTHERFUCKER don’t you start that here.

    The people who made this poster? They wanted to identify as queer. How do I know? Because they fucking did. And now you’re supporting someone coming along after the fact and literally stealing their identity from them.

    Here’s a better idea: I will continue using “queer” as an umbrella term for groups of people who happily identify as queer, and if you don’t like it you’re cordially invited to never talk to a queer person again.

    Stop stealing our identities.

    You are welcome to identify as queer if you reclaim it, and many ppl do, but that doesnt change the fact that there are plenty of lgbt ppl who think of it negatively (personally i am not one of these ppl so i cant speak for them, but i respect their wishes and i hope u will too). A better umbrella term to use is LGBT, imo.

    That would be a lot more reassuring if you hadn’t shown up specifically to defend taking the word queer out of someone’s mouth and relabeling them as gay.

    LGBT is a shit umbrella term. It prioritizes the historically-centered parts of the community over historically-marginalized groups, it completely leaves off swathes of the community, and these days it’s habitually used by the sort of gatekeepers who want to actually throw out sections of the community.

    Again: If you don’t want to identify as queer, you don’t have to. But you don’t get to take that word away from any member of the community. If you don’t like it, just walk away and make your own shit.

    I never thought I’d have to say this to members of the community, but: We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.

    I’m not trying to take it away from people. If you want to reclaim it then good for you, but I’m just saying that not everyone wants to be called queer and using it as an umbrella term to include those who are potentially triggered by it or just dont like it is shitty.
    Also did u practically just say “Im using this slur as an umbrella term and if ur uncomfortable with it then get over it and walk away” or am i reading that wrong

    You literally showed up to defend someone who had taken away a queer person’s words to put gay in their place. Stop pretending otherwise. If people don’t like that word, they’re fine not using it – but they can create their own works, rather than stealing and defacing ones made by queer people to erase us from them.

    No. I said that if you’re not comfortable with someone using queer as an identifier, the responsible thing to do is disengage from them and make your own art, your own statements, instead of stealing and relabeling theirs.

    If you’re not comfortable with someone else labeling you “queer,” you have zero right to label them “gay” without their consent.

    I feel the nuance that people keep missing here is that queer is not only acceptable to reclaim on a personal level, because queer groups exist. Groups that gather under that label exist. It is absolutely an umbrella term for those groups. Honestly people hear “umbrella term” and they lose their shit because they think umbrella terms can only be used to encompass the entire community instead of subsets of it, so that must be what you mean, and how dare you! :/

    But, honestly, this isn’t a nuanced discussion – it’s an insistence that if you use queer to refer to more than one person at a time and that person is not your own self, you’re coercively labeling other people who don’t want that label. Except… this is incorrect. It is so incorrect it erases swaths of queer people who have been gathering in groups under the label for the last 100 years. It’s a push to eliminate the label altogether, by reducing it to something you have to keep to yourself.

    The only coercive labeling going on in this entire post was the OP who changed the poster (and a little the person insisting on using LGBT). Queer is not a super-private self-identifier only that isn’t allowed to be used for finding community, ffs.

    I would add something here, but there’s nothing left. @opalescentlesbian nailed it.

    Not Gay as in Happy, But Queer as in Fuck You!
    Every time I think about the Queer Community this is the phrase that I think of.

    Thank you @wetwareproblem for standing up for the rest of us.

  • unreconstructedfangirl:

    sandandglass:

    Samantha Bee
    explains why the outcome of the Brexit referendum makes it even more important
    to reject Trump his racist sentiments in November

    Amen.

  • On Math and Cosplay

    tinierpurplefishes:

    shadesofmauve:

    pacificnorthwestdoodles:

    dangerous-ladies:

    Drafting and sewing are technical skills. Seamstresses are engineers of fabrics. Seamstresses can turn 2D shapes into 3D objects and vice versa and can visualize this. The other day I watched Christine draft our Sailor Scout skirts on paper and translate it to a draft in fabric in one shot, and while it took her an hour or two, it was all math and angles and technical skills that you just cannot figure out without a good foundation in math (or at least some serious prodigious visualization skills.) Anyone can modify an existing pattern, but when you’re making these weird-crazy anime-video-game-whatever designs, you’re sometimes making things that were not designed with real life production in mind. That’s mind boggling to me!

    Most seamstresses are women. Women who were told growing up that boys are naturally better at math than girls. It’s a hugely loaded topic wrapped up in ideas about gender and performance anxieties and self-fulfilling prophesies, but I see that same attitude floating around on tumblr sometimes.

    Anyway. I tell you this because this morning, despite having made a zillion pleated skirts before, I had a moment where I fumbled with math for fabric allowance + pleat size + pattern and thought, “Man, I’ve fucked this all up. I’ve totally screwed it up. I better redo this.” Fortunately, I did this before I cut the fabric, so no harm was done, but then I muddled something up again, this time on the fabric itself. Sigh. I had to rip out a line of stitches three times and redo the pleating a number of times before I finally got it right. I went back and double-checked my numbers, and sure enough: I hadn’t been accurate enough, so everything got jumbled.

    And I thought, “I’m so fucking terrible at math.”

    And then I thought, “I’m working on what I remember from high school when I graduated six years ago, and what little I’ve actually practiced since then.”

    It’s not at all that I’m terrible at math: it’s that I’ve never really put my mind to learning it, probably because at some point it stopped being presented as puzzles/challenges and started being presented as tedious number work. I also had a few teachers along the way who made me feel bad when I struggled. I also fell back on that horrible old “girl aren’t as good as boys at math” adage as an excuse. I floundered in math, got lousy marks, and often caught onto concepts two weeks after the test. 

    But the problem there isn’t that I’m any less capable of math or somehow wired to be bad at it. I think I have the same potential as most people do. The problem is that I use this “it’s okay to be bad at math because [excuse here]” as a crutch instead of challenging myself to transcend that. I should be challenging myself instead of just “winging it” and ending up with wonky pleats because I’m too lazy to figure out the math to make it perfect.

    I know it’s cool to act like you hate math or play up how bad you are at math, but to be a good seamstress you’re gonna have to face your fears and learn to work with it. Some people I have told this in the past have freaked out in a “but I’m baaaad at that” sort of way, and hey, I’ve said that so many times in my own lifetime, but you have to look at is as a life skill and a way to improve your cosplay.

    Math is a great skill for a seamstress to have. If nothing else, it’ll prevent you from staring in confusion at your skirt trying to figure out how to turn 94" of fabric into an evenly pleated skirt with zipper.

    – Jenn

    Skills my dad taught in his math class. He had students work with fabric on one unit. Other units he had them cook or build a birdhouse.

    That’s a fantastic way to teach math!

    I hear and read lots of people saying some variation on “I haven’t used algebra since I graduated, it’s so useless”, and it makes me think they were never taught how to apply it properly. If you’re comfortable with it, you can take tthe guess work out of lots of daily things that would otherwise have to be solved using trial and error or brute force. In fact, trial-and-error is how one of my design coworkers figures out the things that I figure out using algebra. 

    My dad had a math block. For whatever reason, he decided he was Bad at Math in high school. As an adult, he uses a hell of a lot of math, and understands geometry really intuitively – he does major construction as a hobby, you have to be able to do some math. But it took ages for him to realize that what he was doing was math, and he wasn’t innately bad at it. And I think that kind of block is really common in math, for some reason.

    There’s also a big difference between being bad at math and bad at arithmetic. I’m bad at arithmetic. I make all sorts of stupid mistakes, and working problems fast was never my strong suit. I was always really good at math, though – understanding how you can set up a numbers problem using what you have to figure out what you need to know. 

    It’s 2016. If you’re bad at arithmetic, don’t kick yourself – use the calculator on your phone. 

    Yes! Math, fundamentally, is about recognizing patterns, and then using those patterns to do things. There was actually a bit in one of my textbooks when I was in college about how many people are capable of doing surprisingly complex math when it’s in a context they know. A seamstress working on a pattern, or a construction worker with a concrete form to fill, for example. But if you hand them the same problem as pure numbers, they’ll freeze up, because they’re “bad at math”. They’re not actually bad at math, they were just taught it badly.

  • thefutureisbroken:

    theladydracula:

    poinko:

    man this is way better than that garbage fallout boy cover

    Much better

    WHY COULDN’T THEY HAVE BEEN THE ONES WITH MISSY AS THE MAIN THEME

  • Untitled post 15072

  • rememberwhenyoutried:

    It looks like we really are just going to sleepwalk out of the fucking EU with everyone in power blaming everyone else, with public services already cut to the bone by the Tories suffering further cuts, while immigrants, muslims, and people of colour have to somehow survive through a historic uptick in violence and prejudice with no idea as to how this will affect even their ability legally to stay in this country because no-one in power can make a fucking decision.

    At the last election we voted in a bunch of Eton debate club fuckwits who are discovering what real consequences feel like for the first time in their lives and are running scared.

  • Untitled post 14917

  • Untitled post 14919

    overtophidian:

    followthebluebell:

    faetouchedinthehead:

    followthebluebell:

    faetouchedinthehead:

    followthebluebell:

    amusementofaprincess:

    emmersdrawberry:

    followthebluebell:

    Look! Him pants!!

    who told him its ok to match neutrals 

    JONAH GOT PANTS! Good for you Jonah. Next week we’ll work on shoes

    why are you two always so critical of his choices :(

    How does that even….

    Genetics are weird.

    Oh, this isn’t genetics! c: Jonah had a pretty major leg surgery a few months back—a FHO, or femoral head ostectomy.

    For a while, he looked like this:

    Now his pants are coming in nicely!

    (unless u mean his coat pattern.  That’s all genetics.)

    OHHH, I see it now!

    For a minute I thought he just had fur that changed color/pattern right on his hindquarters. Buh, I have no brain.

    Poor baby, I hope he gets well soon!

    ‘no brain’, NO WAY. 

    Comments like yours are legit some of my favorite because I get to talk about COOL COAT PATTERNS IN CATS.  There are cases where shaving a cat has resulted in a drastic coat pattern change.

    SAY HELLO TO QUATTRO

    Before he was shaved, his fur was pretty typical siamese: all creamy with just his legs, face, and tail dark. But now his whole flank is dark.

    Why?

    Because Siamese points are actually a result of temperature-dependent albinism! :D Also known as
    acromelanism, this is a neat little mutation in which a specific enzyme (tyrosinase, which is responsible for melanin production) stops functioning at a normal body temperature, but will function when it gets cooler.  So in cool zones on a cat’s body (face, ears, tail, feets), melanin production is normal.  The warm zones develop in a lovely cream.

    Since his butt is cold, it has normal melanin production.  Once it gets all fuzzy and starts a typical shed pattern, it’ll come in cream eventually.  Until then, he’ll have weird pants.

    Genetics are weird and AWESOME.

    It got even better