#if you pet the skeletons that acclimatizes them to human contact #and that can encourage them to approach unfriendly humans #which is not safe for them #plz restrict petting to domestic skeletons #:( @stalinistqueens

selfcare reminder: pet your skeleton. your own one. note: you to not have to remove it to do this. your skull is, like, pretty close to the scalp.

The UK government has got a survey on about reform of the disability benefits system, and has kept mega quiet about it presumably to keep responses down.

Please can we spread this? People who can fill it in: "Our approach must be informed by different views and opinions, particularly those of disabled people and people with health conditions."

This system has killed tens of thousands of us. Odds are they'll ignore the responses the same way they ignored the GRA consultation, but...

@clatterbane @overelegantstranger @heyatleastitsnotcancer @bellejanewednesday

Vultures are holy creatures.

Tending the dead.

Bowing low.

Bared head.

Whispers to cold flesh,

“Your old name is not your king.

I rename you ‘Everything.’”

Original post can be found here.

Gentiles are encouraged to read all the way through and reblog.

"Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: 'no one wants to work.' A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed 'due to NO STAFF.'

Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.

A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year. They find that food and agricultural workers morbidity rates increased by the widest margins by far, much more so than medical professionals or other occupations generally considered to be on the 'front lines' of the pandemic. Within the food industry, the morbidity rates of line cooks increased by 60 percent, making it the deadliest profession in America under coronavirus pandemic.

Line cooks are especially at risk because of notoriously bad ventilation systems in restaurant kitchens and preparation areas. Anyone who has ever worked a back-of-the-house job knows that it’s hot, smelly, and crowded back there, all of which indicate poor indoor air quality. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Environmental Protection Agency recommended increasing indoor ventilation to fight the virus, but such upgrades are costly and time consuming. There is no data available on how many restaurants chose not to upgrade their ventilation systems, but given how miserly franchise owners are with everything else, one could guess that many, if not most, made no upgrades at all.

Ventilation issues are deadliest for line cooks and other back-of-house jobs, but there are other reasons why food workers’ morbidity rates shot up. Food workers are much more likely to be poor and/or a racial or national minority, and poor people and black and Latino workers are much more likely to die of complications from the coronavirus.

Restaurants are often intentionally short staffed, making it difficult to take time off, so sick workers likely still came to work (and infected others in the process). Bars and restaurants are COVID-19 hotspots, and service workers and customers alike get sick after prolonged restaurant exposure. The difference is that many of those customers have health insurance and other safeguards to prevent them from dying of the illness; 69 percent of restaurants, on the other hand, offer their employees no health benefits at all.

When coronavirus is spread at restaurants, and restaurant workers make little money and rarely earn health benefits, it’s no wonder morbidity rates are so much higher for food service workers. But rather than collectively grieve the deaths of tens of thousands of the people who serve us and keep us fed, and keep such tragedies in mind when considering the state of the food-service industry labor market today, business owners and their political lackeys call these workers 'lazy.'

There are, of course, also living, breathing people who have decided they do not want to risk their lives for $7.25 per hour and no health benefits. That is a perfectly rational decision for the homo economicus to make. Given how dangerous restaurant work is during a viral pandemic, if restaurant owners really wanted more workers, they would offer living wages, health benefits, and adequate personal protective equipment. But all the wage increases in the world won’t bring back the dead.

There aren’t enough people working in the service industry, and service bosses have somehow turned that into our problem, into something we ought to be ashamed of. We shouldn’t fall for it. Profits accumulate because of labor — without workers to exploit, the owning class can’t get richer. Capitalists cannot exploit the labor of the dead, so when large swathes of the working class die, they turn their ire on the living.

This is a barbaric response to mass tragedy. Workers across the country and the globe are dead or grieving. We shouldn’t risk further tragedies for a paltry minimum wage."

- Sandy Barnard, "Service Workers Aren’t Lazy — They Just Don’t Want to Risk Dying for Minimum Wage." Jacobin, 5 May 2021.

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”

thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy

Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?

Oh heck yeah.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.

They died of AIDS because

Picture from 1993:

We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.

As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.

This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

AIDS is not just history.  Neither is homophobia.

Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth. I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.

Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.

This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Sing for two.

The fact that humans can be killed through physical means is so ridiculous to me

Like this sounds wild but like. hear me out. a person is such a ridiculously infinitely complicated web of thoughts and feelings and beliefs and such an unbelievably huge amount of knowledge and the idea that you can destroy that by holding a pillow over someone’s face for three minutes is absolutely surreal. The idea that you can remove knowledge and emotion and memory from the world with a physical object is literally unbelievable. people are literally infinitely huge and complex and the fact that you can kill the person by killing the body is wild. I’m sure this is incoherent but I hope you get it

It’s like. Imagine you threw a fist-sized rock at the empire state building and the entire thing and everything inside it collapsed into dust. That’s what the existence of human death feels like

The next update will fix it so that humans can only be perma-killed through the use of one particular magic dagger.

this intuition is exactly how we ended up with the idea of souls, spirits, ghosts, the afterlife,

If you genuinely think that there aren’t going to be a lot of deaths inside the US as a result of a war with Iran, then you better not come anywhere near me or any other middle eastern/north african immigrants–or muslims of other backgrounds–thanks.

We’re about to start getting murdered for sport again. And every single one of us is intimately aware of that fact.

Just like we’re very much aware that  we’re not the “primary victims.” We don’t need your kindly reminders to fear for our familes and our homelands. We know already. We know. God, we know better than you probably ever will. We know exactly how lucky we are, and little safety that luck offers.

Because in the end, not being the “primary victims” won’t bring our dead back to life. It won’t resurrect those of us killed on US soil by racist mobs. It won’t resurrect our brothers and cousins and grandparents and friends and lovers killed in the places we came from. The fact that we weren’t the ones who were “supposed” to die won’t make it any better, so please stop telling us.

Please.

An assassination with an obivous intent to invoke a major war so as to speed the facistic centralization of power and inflame racial tensions within the US while also lining the pocketbooks of the ultra wealthy will have massive, life-shaking effects for people across the entire globe.

The racial stratification in the US is so violent and so cruel that while the US government is killing people abroad, the increasingly frantic, increasingly violent, and increasingly powerful private citizens in the US with a racial grudge to pick will keep killing us, killing more of us, just like they always do.

This is a complicated situation with a lot of horrific effects for a dazzling bredth of people, and acting like our fears are unfounded is so breathtakingly cruel.

Full disclosure, I don’t follow the Fantastic 4 much as a comic or as an IP, but I will love and defend Benjamin Jacob Grimm to my dying breath. And as suspicious as I am of comic book weddings, seeing him on the cover of the book in a kippah and tallis made my goddamn day. Thank you Marvel, for not brushing over the Thing’s Judaism.

LETS NOT FORGET THESE ICONIC PANELS. ESPECIALLY THE FIRST.

The Thing will ALWAYS be one of my favorite characters because OF THIS.

A Tale of Nine Lives by Akimiya Jun

I’m not crying, you’re crying!!

Couldn’t find the reblog button though all the tears in my eyes

Damn it all. ;__;

These aren’t tears in my eyes….Nope…Dust…Totally dust or an eye lash..

FUCK,

A good thread on whether “queer” is a slur and if it should be used or not.

“If I am unashamed of being queer, you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur.”

you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur

EVERYBODY WHO CAME OUT BEFORE YOU HAS TAKEN THE ROCKS AND BOTTLES AND MADE THEM INTO SHIELDS AND WINDCHIMES

Holy motherfucking shit. Don’t fucking come at me about Queer is a slur. I FUCKING KNOW IT IS. It was hurled at me like a fucking spear all through my youth. I know it’s a god damn slur. And it’s mine. You don’t get to take it away from me because you can’t take also away the scars it gave me while I was standing in front of my younger queer siblings in this community. 

always, always reblog this one.

If my enemy swings a sword at me and I take that sword away from them, it’s my sword now. And the person telling me I can’t use it because it belongs to my enemy and I have to give it back to them sounds quite a bit like an enemy themselves.

^^ god that analogy

Jon Pertwee on his friendship with Roger Delgado

I always get sad thinking about Roger, because his death was so tragic and untimely, but it’s also nice to remember that he still managed to live a very full life—he had by all accounts a very happy marriage, he had numerous hobbies he was passionate about (cartooning, cars, intellectual pursuits, etc.), he had a beautiful house he was apparently very proud of, he had good friends, a dog he seemed to adore, he was well-liked and respected by everyone who knew him, and he had his wish to appear on Doctor Who granted in a far bigger way than he ever could have imagined, by playing (and still being the definitive version of) one of the show’s most iconic characters.

HEY GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TODAY

The House of Representatives voted in favor of destroying key provisions of the ADA to allow businesses to continue, penalty free, to remain inaccessible, possibly indefinitely.

All y’all who like to talk about ableism on here and are eligible to vote in the US:

call your senators. Tell them no on 620. Tell them why accessibility and the ADA matter to you. 

Washington Post: House passes changes to Americans With Disabilities Act over activists’ objections

Newsweek: House Votes to Gut the Americans With Disabilities Act to Nip ‘Abusive Lawsuits’

Now with citation! (thank you!)

accessible background info + supports and alternatives for calling your senator (written before the house vote, with a new statement here)

find your senator’s contact info here

*sigh*…

The “Today” in the title of this post refers to February 15, 2018.

I’ve reblogged this thread before, but I’m doing it again.

I gotta say, as someone who has been disabled since birth, and has been advocating for my own rights since I was old enough to write letters in pencil on wide-ruled school paper (When sending a telegram.via Western-Union was the way to flood their offices), this is making me very, very sad.  …Especially the silence in the news media. 

It’s actually bringing back the emotions I had after the massacre in Tsukui-Yamayuri-en.

What with our wannabe Dictator-in-Chief sucking all the air out of the room over his completely invented crisis over immigration and scary brown people, even I only learned about this, thanks to ASAN and Tumblr.  So I can’t expect my Senators and Congressmen to know exactly what they’re voting on, and why it matters. 

That’s why contacting your Senators is so important:

If they don’t hear it from us, who will they hear it from?