today’s mood is wandering around my living room, gently rocking my cat and singing “there’s some paws in this house” whilst he begrudgingly tolerates me
Me, whispering: I said certified cute. Seven days of snoot.
??? someone broke into my grandmas house while she was gone & shaved the matted fur off her cat
i want to emphasize that the cat was the only thing altered here
would also like to add that this occcurred sometime between 11 pm & 9 am. we have no leads. the cat is fine & probably appreciates not having a huge mat on his neck, but, like, that’s a really weird kind of vigilante justice, still
I had a professor in college who used to start solving every problem with the same dialogue.
Proff: What’s the first step to solving any problem?
Class: Don’t panic.
Proff: And why is that?
Class: Because we know more than we think we do.
I think about that a lot tbh. It didn’t occur to me until much later that he meant for us to apply that dialogue outside of the classroom to any problem. Because we always know more than we think we do. We are all an amalgam of random information that ends up being relevant with surprising frequency.
Stealing this for my Biology class and their diploma exam.
Stealing this for the poor kid that works for me in data processing
stealing this for myself, because i just have a lot of problems.
It does… but also it doesn’t, and certainly not on a one-to-one level. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a staunch conservative/proto-fascist former friend recommend to me Lois McMaster Bujold’s books; he was quite in love with the military sci-fi aspect, but not so much the liberal outlook that her stories are steeped in. The same former friend also recommended to me Seanan McGuire’s books, which are also decidedly more on the liberal edge of things.
I wouldn’t have had to kick a Trump supporter off of my Discord server who basically saw my alternate history fic and was enamored to the point of joining, but ignored all of the liberal and leftist mindset I have steeped into it.
Going bigger, Paul Ryan, who is a political sociopath and hypocrite on a scale that is mind-boggling, liked to say that Rage Against The Machine was his favorite band–while the band members basically said that he was the personification of the machine they are raging against.
And how many hardcore conservatives willfully misinterpret Star Trek’s messages of inclusiveness and “we can be better”? Or Star Wars’ pointed comments on fascism and authoritarians? Or the mindset encapsulated by this picture?
So, yes, fiction can affect people’s mindsets. But it’s not a mold into which a mind is pressed, stamped out and formed into identical models, as some people seem to think it is. No, it is sowing seeds into fertile or barren ground, with the possibility of it taking root or not. And even then, what takes root there depends on how nurturing the existing environment is, and further cultivation.
god this is a big ask but I really wish there were like….. a site where you could plug in your state/district/whatever and tick some boxes on issues you prioritize and then the site would give you a rundown of the potential candidates in your area and where they stand on those issues in like….. clean simple bullet points. gimme the cliffnotes, I literally do not have the time or energy to comb through god knows how many articles and shit to figure out who to support, just tell me what their stance is on X, Y, and Z, and that’s gonna have to be enough.
It goes through who’s on your ballot and explains things like that based on your address.
this is really great. it gives you bullet points on what each candidate has said and done on each issue.
very illuminating, frankly, seeing the candidate’s own words and actions. for instance, under ‘defense/veterans’ the republican candidates almost always say something about a well-funded military, and the democrats almost always say something about getting veterans the medical care they need. makes it pretty obvious that republicans don’t care about soldiers once they’re done with them.
go vote kids, no excuses
If your ballot info isn’t ready yet, put in your email address so you get notified and don’t miss it when the info goes live!
Also the form of estrogen they prescribed trans women in the 90s, Premarin, looked like this.
And lest there be any remaining doubt.. remember the blue pill? The pill Neo could have taken to forget the truth, bury his troubles and go back to living a normal life, without fearing a system that wanted to destroy him? The pill that was easy, perhaps cowardly according to some, but comfortable?
Here’s Prozac.
For a trans woman in the 90s, where the choice was be safe, suppress, cope, and pretend everything is still how it was, or embrace the danger, accept the truth, realize your full potential, and transition into a world that still thinks you’re a joke and would rather have you dead…. well. The metaphor is pretty fucking clear.
Y’all
Lana came out as a woman after Speed Racer in 2008, and Lily eight years later after the release of Jupiter Ascending (2016), so if you see original home copies of the Matrix (pre-2008), they are referred to as the WachowskiBrothers on it. It was a branding thing, like the Coen Brothers. That’s how they were called, because they were still presenting as male to the industry and the industry sold them as a creative unit.
I remember after Lana came out, the boxes switched to calling them just The Wachowskis, so I imagine now it’s the Wachowski Sisters.
So, yes, they’ve always been sisters, but if you didn’t know that, it’s not your fault. It’s been a long process and I’m glad they did it on their terms in their time.
Before Lily came out but after Lana did they were often credited as
The Wachowskis siblings. So some places may still refer to them as such.
I was actually unaware that Lily was also trans so thank you for that info!
This is a good post but it is worth noting as always that they most certainly did NOT come out “on their terms in their time”. Lana was forcibly outed by Buck Angel, and Lily came out when she did in order to pre-empt tabloid press speculation and intrusion into her personal life. We should rightly celebrate them as trans success stories, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of erasing or ignoring the gross transphobia and specifically transmisogyny that they have been subject to.
Brilliant African-American women who worked at NASA, when their color and gender were not welcome,now can see their story in the movie and inspire other people to be brave and never give up!
