GOD I FUCKING;LOVE. CHARACTERS

i see this resonated with a lot of you

The number of people in the notes of this being like “lol i’m the motorist” with 0 sense of shame or self awareness is crazy. You should all get your licenses taken away

I get anxious around cyclists so I made this

okay so............ they've had this PLANNED

i think tumblr should have an option to follow someone without it giving them a notification. namely for when you realise you accidentally unfollowed a mutual quite possibly several days or weeks or months ago and you need to quietly rectify that without them noticing your shameful little crawl back to their side

just saw a fanfic on ao3 have a dedication for chatgpt... that section is meant for your horny perverted mutual who proofread your work, you violated sacred law and you will be torn apart and laid bare btw

anyways, if you feel the need to use ai to do your work for you, consider this: get a new hobby because this one isn't for you

Consider this. Not everyone has that time, or energy. Again, I just don’t understand this whole thing of “effort is important”

if it were, capitalism wouldn’t work.

not to point out the obvious but capitalism doesn’t work or people would have the time and energy to sit down and put effort and even enjoy their hobbies?

ai gets trained on real people’s effort and most of these companies are stealing content that was posted online, for you to just sit there enter a shitty prompt and bam, you get a picture of a big titty girl with 8 fingers or a story that is made up of cliches and patterns.

answer me this what do you get out of doing nothing to achieve a mediocre result from ai when the joy of creating comes from the act of figuring it out and doing it yourself, honing your skills?

“Not everyone has the time or energy to” ok that’s a you problem my favorite author posted a 30k word chapter after their house burned down and then got the bubonic plague. ur just not built for it

Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.

I know there is a lot of discourse (tm) around this right now but listen to me

sometimes you do just have to lie to children.

If, when my toddler is, you know, toddling around saying “mama? Big ball?”

If I were lean down and say “unfortunately the big beach ball for some reason fills you with such an unadulterated rage that is beyond human comprehension that you scream until you pass out, so mama had to remove the beach ball from the premises until you can better regulate your emotions” she would simply stare at me like I had 3 heads full of equal betrayal.

So, for now, instead “big ball went night night!”

Please understand when I say “removed the ball from the premises” I mean I popped it in a fit of exhausted confusion. I murdered the beach ball.

See I’ve lied to you all too and it was better this way.

you can’t just leave this in the tags etc.

You can’t be funnier then me on my own posts, I’m in tears from laughter

[ID: tags: "#that wasn't a lie though the big ball did go night night #it went to the great night night that awaits us all" /end ID]

ok sure fine

something incredibly American about an Allied trooper yelling brand names at Soviets until they recognize him as an ally.

introduced in August??? Why hasn't it moved through yet??

He's literally me fr

How many times do you think he has to do this a day with how popular his game is

why do you think deltarune chapter 3 is taking so long...

∴ᒷ ᒲ⚍ᓭℸ ̣ ⊣╎⍊ᒷ ⍑╎ᒲ ℸ ̣╎ᒲᒷ…. リ𝙹, リ𝙹ℸ ̣ ⎓∷𝙹ᒲ ᒲᔑꖌ╎リ⊣ ⊣ᔑᒲᒷ, ʖ⚍ℸ ̣ ⎓∷𝙹ᒲ ⎓ᔑリᔑ∷ℸ ̣ ʖᒷᓵᔑ⚍ᓭᒷ ⍑ᒷ ʖ𝙹⚍リᓵᒷᓭ ℸ ̣𝙹𝙹 𝙹⎓ℸ ̣ᒷリ

⍑╎╎╎ ⍑ᒷꖎꖎ𝙹 ⍑╎

oh ok

HELLO HAIII !!!!!

⍑ᒷꖎꖎ𝙹!!! ⍑╎╎╎ ⍑╎!!! ᓭ𝙹∷∷|| ⎓𝙹∷ ᓵ𝙹リ⎓⚍ᓭ╎リ⊣ ᒲ|| ℸ ̣∷ᔑリᓭꖎᔑℸ ̣𝙹∷ ʖ∷𝙹ꖌᒷ↸!

ITS ALL GOOD ^_^ YAYYYYYY

reminder about aziraphale and crowley:

they're male. they're female. they're both. they're neither. they're more. they're lesbians. they're gay men. they're queer. they're bisexual. they're butch. they're femme. they're androgynous. they're masculine. they're camp. they're fluid. they're genderless.

they're anything and everything you can imagine because they've been around for all of it. and most of all, they're not real - so there's no 'wrong' way to draw them, to write them, to talk about them, or to think about them in terms of their queerness, as long as you acknowledge they are fundamentally queer.

thank you for listening. as you were

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