A quick summary of the last 16 months

Fascism sells a synthetic nostalgia.

This is how I decided to come out as non binary btw

Quitting gender like quitting a bad customer service job

handing in your notice at the cis factory

I’d rather stop being male than stop enjoying food and drink.

*sip their lemonade and chuckles they-ly.*

Polar bears at an abandoned Soviet weather station on Kolyuchin Island, Dmitry Kokh

it’s not abandoned. the polar bears live there.

It should be zero. What good is extended copyright after death of the creator in the 21st century? The right to be asserted as the creator of a work should be separated from the economical value from that point. All it’s doing now is filling the pockets of greedy companies.

And it’s also feeding loved ones and children after the death of the person who made the art has died.

Here’s a blog I wrote long ago about creators having wills. And a sample will. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2006/10/important-and-pass-it-on.html?m=1

I like the idea of feeding Ash (he’s four and not yet able to work) with my stories after I’m dead. I’m not good with feeding my great grandchildren.

As an author, I don’t agree with this argument at all. Why should your past works support your family anymore than anyone else’s?

A man who works his body day in and day out and pays his taxes every year to support his family gets nothing when he dies. Most he gets is an insurance plan out of pocket.

Why should I get that sort of luxury? How am I better than the working man? How am I better than someone who worked dozens of times harder than me?

Even then, how are you sure the money is actually going to your estate? How would you make sure your family continues your legacy through hardwork, and not through old money?

It’s something I don’t exactly agree with. I think there are more ways to support your family after you’re gone, and I don’t know if extension of copyright is it.

So you’re arguing for a world in which no property of any kind, physical or intellectual lasts longer than the death of the person who bought it or made it? In which houses, stocks, comic book collections, all become part of the commonweal? Because right now, you can leave your property to your children or your loved ones. Touchable property and intellectual property. You can leave them money, too.

Anthony Burgess (who wrote, among other things, A Clockwork Orange) was told (wrongly) he had months to live. He wanted to support his family after he was gone, so he wrote books, fast and well.

He was lucky. It was a misdiagnosis and he didn’t die.

But I’m on the side of Anthony Burgess in this. I’m glad that Douglas Adams’ books took care of his daughter Polly when she was a small child whose father had just died, and more so when, a decade later, her mother died as well.

I’m a writer. What I do is write. I have adult children who are taking care of themselves, and a four year old who can’t. I’m in a couple of Covid risk groups, and could in theory be dead in a couple of weeks. (I hope I’m not.) PWhile there are “more ways to support your family after you’ve gone” that aren’t based around things I’ve made up and written down, I didn’t actually want to stop writing and making things up in order to do them.

I think the current copyright laws (death plus 70 for individuals, 90 years after creation for corporate things) are too long. But I don’t think you should lose your property, physical or intellectual, when you die.

I agree that copyright should last somewhat beyond the author’s death. Otherwise it sucks that money that would have been paid for this work is no longer being paid just because you’ve died. I think even 50 years is too long though. 25 years is plenty of time for dependents to find another source of income. Even infant children will be fully grown after that point.

I’d also be happier with copyright that counted from the creation of the work, rather than from the death of the creator. 50 or 70 years after the creation of the work will still do all that, avoid the sudden cut-off at death, and release creations into the public domain in a reasonable timescale.

Mm. I’m on the advisory committee of the Authors League Fund. We give money to authors in dire need. A lot of the authors who get the money are old. Some of them you’ve heard of.

I like the idea that when I’m in my seventies the work I did in my twenties will still be in copyright, and will still feed me and my family.

I don’t like the idea of creators in their seventies, eighties and nineties (or older) suddenly seeing their work put in the public domain and out there making money for other people, while they (possibly quite literally) starve. It seems both shortsighted and honestly a little entitled.

I feel like a lot of people imagine copyright running out as the work being put up in an archive where everyone can read it for free. And yes, works might end up on project gutenberg or something, but the reality is that they’ll also continue making publishers money. There’ll be fancy new hardcover editions, there’ll be audio books, there’ll be movies. All of this you’d still have to pay for after the copyright ran out, because you’re not paying for the story itself, you’re paying for the packaging or an interpretation of the story.

And all of that will be making companies money. So who would you rather want to make money from an author’s work? Some companies or the author’s children?

If you get rid of copyright after an author’s death, it’ll be the companies. And they’ll absolutely butcher the author’s work for profit, because that’s what big media companies do.

So if you want to enjoy people’s work for free, your problem isn’t with copyright, your problem is with capitalism

These are the five love languages:

1. Words of Affirmation

2. Acts of Service

3. Receiving Gifts

4. Quality Time

5. Physical Touch

How do you like/ need to be loved?

Yummy

You know what? Fuck it. *unwaters your melon*

The gorgeous black Calla Lily 🖤 Availlable here : ETSY

“There’s a cure?!” asked the girl that kills everything she touches.  “Hey shut up we’re perf” replied the girl that makes clouds. 

For real though. Storm has stopped an entire tsunami before. “Makes clouds my ass” she can conjure lightning and tornadoes and is revered as a god in her tribe. She literally changes atmospheric pressure and that’s how she flies. So fuck you. Storm is flawless.

I think you missed the part where the GIRL WHO KILLS EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES wants to NOT KILL EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES and everyone dismisses her incredible misfortune just because the lady who is the AVATAR OF THE STORM won the fucking SUPERPOWER LOTTERY

“Finally, a cure for my chainsaw hands!” decreed Chainsaw-Hands Joe.

“There is no cure,” said Johnny Five-Dicks. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”

The last comment literally always cracks me up

The X-Men are an extremely good metaphor for oppressed minorities until they are suddenly an extremely terrible metaphor for oppressed minorities.

The scale on which the first reply misses the point literally never ceases to awe me.

I gotta say, though, this is a place where the X-men are being a good metaphor for oppressed minorities.  Specifically, in this case, the disabled community.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” says the girl with depression.  “Cure for what, motherfucker, I’m not sick,” says the person with autism.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” I say, with my fibromyalgia and random bad pain days.  “Yes, because it’s easier to talk about eliminating us than talk about teaching sign language in school,” says the Deaf person.  “‘Cure’ is violent rhetoric.”

The problem is, of course, that a vast number of things have been aggregated under the label of “disability,” and many of them don’t even resemble each other.  Depression sucks in an objective fashion, whereas autism is just a way of being (which, like many ways of being, may suck at some times, and generally sucks worse when not accommodated).  Similar deal with chronic pain versus the Deaf community.  These things really should not be grouped together, but they are.  And since they are grouped so haphazardly, they will often be at cross-purposes.

It is ridiculous, in the X-men universe, to classify all “mutants” as one group.  You have ridiculously powerful people with little downside, you have powerful people with a major downside, you have people with very limited powers but few drawbacks, you have people with limited powers and massive drawbacks, and that’s not even getting into other divisions, like whether you look like a baseline human all the time, part of the time, or none of the time.  “Realistically,” if you can apply that word to a fantasy universe, Storm and Rogue belong to completely different minorities which should require completely different approaches.  But society has grouped them under one umbrella, or forced them to group themselves for self-protection, and thus you have conversations like the one above.

So it’s actually not a bad take.  Mind you, the X-men have had bad takes, and will do so again, and I’m skeptical about whether “powers” of any kind even work for a metaphor about minority representation—but this particular vignette has something useful to say.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly what bothers me about purely social analyses of disability.

And even if you look at the mutants as being all one group, it’s still a useful metaphor.

Put another way:

“They can cure us?” asks the autistic person who struggles to think clearly, can’t form full sentences, is overstimulated at the drop of a hat and misses out on a lot of things they’d otherwise like to do because for them, autism is literally crippling.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” I say, as a person with autism who has a job, car, excellent communication and coping skills and a relatively normal life, because for me, autism is a thing I’ve adapted to and worked around.

(And yes, autistic people in the first category do exist. I’ve encountered a few right here on Tumblr and seen more than one say “don’t forget us in your autism activism because we aren’t ‘just a little different,’ this is a genuine problem for us.”)

Or perhaps:

“They can cure us?” asks the amputee who has never fully adapted to the loss of her arm below the shoulder, and gets by okay most days but very much misses being non-disabled.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” says the person who was born with only one arm and has never considered it any kind of deficit because it’s just how things are.

Different people will experience the same disability in different ways. It may have to do with how they were diagnosed, or how they came to be disabled; it may have to do with complications related to the disability (not to use the same metaphor twice, but someone whose arm was crushed and experiences terrible phantom pains daily probably feels a lot more negatively about their lack of an arm than someone who was born without it and has no phantom limb to feel sensation in). It may even be because of how other people around them treat the disability! A blind person treated with dignity and appropriate accommodation is probably going to feel very differently about their disability than someone with the same kind of blindness, but also a bunch of condescending pricks who want to make it into a terrible tragedy.

The metaphor still works even within any given subgroup of disabled people, and I think we need to remember that in our activism, too.

A fine reminder that there can be those within minority groups themselves with far more privilege than others

Feline witch with her blob-demons🖤

This looks more like a how-to by @5triderofthenorth or @instructor144

One of the easiest and most gratifying restorations a person can do! About half my cast iron is salvaged, the rest was new.

A great YouTube channel for cast iron cookware, restoring, collecting, cleaning & cooking, is Cast Iron Cookware.   The guy is incredible.  

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO7aRkmQGejiKrXhAniOVnw

is that the reason that these oldschool pans never have a wooden handle? So you can treat them in the oven like this without destroying part of them?

Yes, thats why. Also so you can cook food in them in the oven or on an open fire without damage.

Always wipe clean with a wet rag or sponge after cooking, minimize scrubbing, simmer water in the pan to soften really stuck bits. Then dry fully and put just a smidge of your oil/fat of choice on it before putting the pan away. And liberally re-season (the coating with oil/fat and baking at 400 part) as needed if you notice things sticking more!

These pans will last multiple lifetimes, as evidenced by the video above.

This is always useful info. You never know when you’re going to come across a cast iron pot in need of a good home and some TLC.

So you don’t have to watch the video every time you need one of these hacks immediately:

1. If you feel nauseated, smell rubbing alcohol.

2. If you feel like throwing up, start humming.

3. If you have a runny nose, put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and press your thumb to your forehead for about 20 seconds.

4. If you have a headache, pinch the webbing between your fingers and rub it back and forth for about 1 minute.

5. If you’re lightheaded from standing up too quickly, clench your butt cheeks.

6. If your arm’s dead/has the pins and needles feeling, rock your head back and forth.

7. If you need to pee badly, think of sex to trick your brain and relieve the pressure.

8. If you have a migraine, stick your hands in ice water.

9. If you wanna calm your racing heart, blow on your thumb.

If you're lightheaded while standing up, opening and closing your fists is also something to do. Also try stretching before getting up!

(These are vasovagal syncope tricks, to get the blood pumping where it should be)

Thanks for adding another hack!

I used the humming one when I randomly started dry heaving today, and that shit worked so fast!👌🏼

its lonely here without you