Do you remember when we met in Gomorrah? When you were still beardless, and I would oil my hair in the lamp light before seeing you, when we were young, and blushed with youth like bruised fruit. Did we care then what our neighbors did in the dark?
When our first daughter was born on the River Jordan, when our second cracked her pink head from my body like a promise, did we worry what our friends might be doing with their tongues?
What new crevices they found to lick love into or strange flesh to push pleasure from, when we called them Sodomites then, all we meant by it was neighbor.
When the angels told us to run from the city, I went with you, but even the angels knew that women always look back. Let me describe for you, Lot, what your city looked like burning since you never turned around to see it.
Sulfur ran its sticky fingers over the skin of our countrymen. It smelled like burning hair and rancid eggs. I watched as our friends pulled chunks of brimstone from their faces. Is any form of loving this indecent?
Cover your eyes tight, husband, until you see stars, convince yourself you are looking at Heaven.
Because any man weak enough to hide his eyes while his neighbors are punished for the way they love deserves a vengeful god.
I would say these things to you now, Lot, but an ocean has dried itself on my tongue. So instead I will stand here, while my body blows itself grain by grain back over the Land of Canaan. I will stand here and I will watch you run.
Miguel is right. The first time I watched it, I expected a later scene where Miguel was proven wrong or shown the error of his ways—one where it’s firmly established that adults might make rules that don’t make sense, but they have their reasons and it’s best to abide by their wishes.
But no. That doesn’t happen. Instead, we see that Imelda’s insistence on the music ban, and her refusal to reconsider, indirectly (or perhaps directly) land Miguel in even greater danger, as he wouldn’t have gone after de la Cruz were it not for Imelda insisting he give up music forever. The happy ending comes not when Miguel agrees to give up music to please his family, but when he defies the ban to save Héctor and restore Mama Coco’s memories.
I can’t tell you how many kid’s movies I’ve seen that would have taken “Family comes first” to mean “The adults’ wishes are paramount even if they’re unreasonable.” It would have been so easy to have Miguel simply go along with what Imelda wanted, but Pixar instead gave us a story where a child’s decision to contest an unfair rule is what eventually restores a broken family.
I’ve been on a Discworld re-read for about a year now, and it just struck me how Pterry gets progressively angrier and less subtle about it throughout the series.
Like, we start out nice and easy with Rincewind who’s on some wacky adventures and ha ha ha oh golly that Twoflower sure is silly and the Luggage is epic, where can I get one. Meanwhile Rincewind just wants to live out his boring days as a boring Librarian but is dragged along against his will by an annoying little tourist guy and honestly? Fuck this.
We get the first view of Sam Vimes, and he’s just a drunken beaten down sod who wants to spend his last days as a copper in some dive but oh fuck now he has to fight a dragon and honestly? Fuck this.
The first time we see Granny Weatherwax, she’s just a cranky old woman who has never set foot outside her village but oh fuck now she has to guide this weird girl who should be a witch but is apparently a wizard all the way down to Ankh Morpork and honestly? Fuck this.
Like, these books deal with grumpy, cranky people. But mostly, the early books are a lot of fun. Sure, they have messages about good and evil and the weirdness of the world, and they’re good messages too, but mostly they are just wacky romps through a world that’s just different enough that we can have a good laugh about it without taking things too much to heart.
But then you get to Small Gods, in which organized religion is eviscerated so thorouhgly that if it was human, even the Quisition would say it’s gone a bit too far while at the same time not condemning people having faith which is kind of an important distinction.
You get to Men at Arms and I encourage everybody with an opinion on the Second Amendment to read that one.
You get to Jingo, Monstrous Regiment, Going Postal (featuring an evil CEO who is squeezing his own company dry to get to every last penny, not caring one lick about his product or his workers or his customers or anything else and who, coincidentally, works out of Tump Tower. I’m not making this up).
And just when you think, whew, this is getting a bit much but hey, look, he wrote YA as well! And it’s about this cute little girl who wants to be a witch and has help from a lot of rowdy blue little men, this will be fun! A bit of a break from all the anger!
Wrong.
The Tiffany Aching books are the angriest of all. But you know what the great thing is?
The great thing is that Pterry’s anger is the kind of fury that makes you want to get up and do something about it. It upsets you, sure. But it also says It’s up to you to change all of this. And you can change all of this, and even if you can’t. Do it anyway. Because magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
It’s the kind of anger that gives you purpose, and it gives you hope. And that concludes my essay about why the Discworld series is so gloriously cathartic to read when it seems like all the world is going to shit.
So go. Read them, get angry and then get up and fight. Fight for truth. Justice. Freedom. Reasonably priced love and, most importantly, a hard-boiled egg.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
Can asexuals understand that when they are raped, it is because of misogyny???
is this about the asexual survivors who state openly that their attacker said it was to turn them straight?
because. “This will turn you straight” isn’t something a rapist says when it’s just misogyny.
and..sexual assaults caused only by misogyny don’t have male victims.
you dumbasses will literally preach
“SOMETIMES PEOPLE WITH STRAIGHT PRIVILEGE GET ATTACKED FOR NOT HAVING STRAIGHT PRIVILEGE!”
“Sometimes people with straight privilege get attacked by people who want to turn them straight! Corrective assault happens to EVERYONE!”
before you admit the actual cause of these assaults.
because admitting the factual cause of these assaults would:
1. involve admitting rape survivors sometimes tell the truth
and
2. allow society at large to start combating the cause of the assaults.
and you guys Can’t Have That can you.
like. this “IT’S JUST MISOGYNY!” shit has been debunked by actual material studies, showing asexual women are assaulted at higher rates than other women.(x) (While that article merely mentions that asexual rates rival those of bisexuals, and glosses over the discrepancy between the assaults faced by asexual women compared to the rate of the assaults faced by non-ace women, I encourage you to look into the Human Rights Comission’s 2017 study directly.)
but accepting reality just isn’t worth watching those rape statistics drop to you proud pro-rape folks, is it?
I used to have geese so here’s a tip for everyone:
If a goose is attacking you, don’t run. No matter what, stand your ground. They can fly but when they’re mad, they don’t usually try to fly. Hold your hands in front of you, ready to grasp. When the goose gets close, grab it by the neck bit closest to the head and squeeze. Not tight enough to choke the goose, but tight enough so they can’t break free. You can hold them until they calm down or just do the next step right away. The next step is literally just to chuck them as far as possible and run for your life. It makes the goose know you’re in charge and you have a better chance of getting away. Trust me I’ve done this so many times that I’ve lost count
I can’t tell if this is a shitpost or actual advice. But I do know geese are the fucking worst.
Actual advice! Just yeet a goose
AGGRESSIVE REMINDER THAT DUMB GEESE HOLD NO POWER OVER US
This is really solid, good advice until the “toss” bit. If that’s a heavy breed of domestic goose, it’s going to get hurt if you toss it. The legs of geese can be very fragile. Once you damage a leg, it’s one foot in the grave, so to speak. I hate to imagine my geese attacking people (which is why I wouldn’t let anybody near them that didn’t know how to handle them), but I also hate the idea of having to euthanize an otherwise healthy goose because somebody didn’t know how to handle it right.
If it’s a domestic goose, and you can pick it up, the best thing to do is pick it up and make sure you have control of the neck, body, and wings. Walk around with him a bit. He’ll know attacking you gets him nothing he wants.
OP is right in that you should never run from a goose. They are very much bullies, and running from them reinforces bad behavior.
NDP justice critic Murray Rankin tabled a private member’s bill earlier this month calling for the government to expunge records for possession of cannabis for recreational use.
Rankin said Wednesday he is pleased the Liberals accepted the thrust of his idea but is “very disappointed” that Goodale ruled out expungement of cannabis convictions.
“He claims there is no historical injustice,” Rankin said in a statement.
“I completely disagree. The disproportionate impacts felt by Indigenous people and racialized communities represent a deep historical injustice and one that should be addressed immediately.”
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a University of Toronto professor and the director of research for a campaign called Cannabis Amnesty, agrees pardons do not go far enough.
Black, Indigenous and marginalized Canadians are disproportionately burdened by criminal records for cannabis possession, he said, adding an individual’s record could in fact be reinstated if it is only suspended rather than expunged.
“I believe others believe that there is an inherent injustice there and that inherent historical injustice should be addressed by the government,” Owusu-Bempah said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted to smoking cannabis as an MP, he said, adding the prime minister has not had to deal with the consequences of criminal record while many Canadians have.
“Let’s recognize the harm that’s been done … to a large number of people in our society,” Owusu-Bempah said.
hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code …
The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function.
You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity.
They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a
publicly accessible budget – waaaay more info than most charities, in
fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are
vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much
servers/hosting costs.)
In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy.
I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason
it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text
based rather than video.
AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.
Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.
It sees about 6 million people a day.
About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running
searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per
search. The demands involved are astronomical.
JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.
It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?
Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.
Care to guess its budget?
Double that of AO3.
AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
It’s
absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
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