being queer and seeing historical queer love is like a punch to the gut in a good way every time

crying and sobbing crying and sobbing etc

some more vintage photographs that make me weep and wail, now including trans people!

Rocky Horror is turning 50 next month and people still act like being gay was invented by Ellen in 1997

But honestly! Renowned French poet Théophile de Viau wrote the poetic ode to King James titled "The Duke of Buckingham," containing the immortal lines "One man fucks Monsieur le Grand de Bellegarde/Another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre/And it is well known that the King of England/Fucks the Duke of Buckingham" exactly 400 years ago and people still act like being gay was invented by Oscar Wilde in 1890

Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were buried together in the 25th century BC and people still act like being gay was invented by renowned French poet Théophile de Viau 400 years ago

Gilgamesh and Enkidu "loved each other like man and wife" in 2700 BC and ppl STILL act like being gay was invented by Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in the 25th century BC

Nearly every social species on the planet has a non zero frequency of homosexuality and most likely had for millions of years before primates first evolved and ppl still act like being gay was invented by Gilgamesh and Enkidu in 2700 BC

HAPPY 50TH ANNIVERSARY TO THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW!

Originally posted by hesawifebeaterdanusethegun

Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London June 19, 1973

wow i can't believe being gay is exactly 50 years old today that's wild happy pride month everybody

i was talking to one of my coworkers about my trip and she asked me where i was going and i said austria and she looked at me all confused and then she said “like…austria-hungary?” and i wasn’t quite sure how to break it to her

#i’ve been in a coma since 1914#i can’t wait to see my favorite modern empire (via elucubrare)

@badshah-cornelius

i'll never understand why some people have a problem with trigger warnings. if the content being warned for doesn't bother you then you can just use it as a recommendation. literally where is the problem. everyone wins.

content warning: this media contains excessive gore and violence that some viewers may find disturbing

me: how thoughtful of them to warn for that so that people can avoid or at least be prepared for things that might upset them

also me:

[ID: a link preview of a stock image coffee table with a laptop with the facebook logo on the screen with text on top that says 'anyone who used facebook in the last 16 years can now get settlement money. here's how." end ID]

Time Sensitive- Apply before August 25th, 2023 (8/25/23)!

Filing a claim takes less than ten minutes, and can be done HERE

Excerpt from article:

Anyone in the U.S. who used Facebook in the last 16 years can now collect a piece of a $725 million settlement by parent company Meta tied to privacy violations — as long as they fill out a claim on a website set up to pay out money to the social network's users. 

The settlement stems from multiple lawsuits that were brought against Facebook by users who claimed that the company improperly shared their data with third-party sources such as advertisers and data brokers. The litigation began after Facebook was embroiled in a privacy scandal in 2018 with Cambridge Analytica, which scraped user data from the site as part of an effort to profile voters.

Meta denied any liability or wrongdoing under the settlement, according to the recently created class-action website. However, the agreement means that U.S. residents who used Facebook between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, can file a monetary claim as long as they do so before August 25, 2023. 

Please reblog to signal boost this! As many people as possible should know about this to make their claim, if you don't do anything you don't get anything. It takes less than ten minutes to file and pick your payment option including pay/pal and ven/mo .

in for a penny in for a pound: I find a lot of this fandom’s attitudes towards lqr to be kind of. Reductive in general tbh?

There seems to be this kind of odd trend towards decrying any parent figure who isn’t immediately completely supportive of X thing child does as abusive, whether the thing the child did actually is idiotic/dangerous or not, or if the parent figure has no reason to support it (from lack of facts, lack of context, etc).

lqr is strict, and we can surmise from the canon that he’s strict because a) that’s how Lan clan is, and b) he doesn’t want his nephews repeating their father’s mistakes. His issues with wwx seem to stem from a reasonable level of “that little shit”, which didn’t exactly endear the little shit to lqr, and then grew - again reasonably - with him developing a form of cultivation that is, with the most basic level of education about how death and dead bodies are viewed in their culture, REALLY NOT COOL.

(Learning about this was actually how I came to accept the author’s note that wn would one day die properly, because yeah, he is basically trapped in the mortal world thanks to wwx.)

But people just basically saw one (1) crotchety parent figure and decided he MUST be abusive and homophobic - despite no particular evidence to that beyond “well he wasn’t immediately waving an ancient chinese rainbow flag behind lwj’s back when he started heart eyesing the resident Beacon Of Evil”.

Like…bro…come on…that’s one whole middle-aged gay despairing at his nephew’s terrible taste.

THANK YOU.

If I may add, Lan Qiren was completely justified in his distaste for Wei Wuxian, but the fact that Wei a Wuxian is allowed at family dinners already implies that at some point post-canon, he is eventually accepted as part of the sect.

I love the extras for the fact that they do show wwx is accepted as part of the Lan sect after marrying lwj, rather than being ostracised or forcibly kept on the outside by lqr’s hairy eye.

I thought he was completely justified in distrusting/disliking wwx too. The kid is a nightmare in class, grows up to be a more literal nightmare, and lqr isn’t given good reason to trust resurrected wwx for a long while. And when he’s given that evidence he might not LOVE wwx, but he does at least acknowledge it and act on his side during the second siege.

lbr though, having to hear wangxian having very loud sex on a not-infrequent basis probably wouldn’t do wonders for their relationship as in-laws. I’m honestly impressed at how nice lqr is to wwx on that basis alone :D

This is complicated because in every version LQR is a side character so we only get to see so much of his behavior but I’d argue that this isn’t necessarily that black and white.

LQR is said to have added the GusuLan rule not to associate with WWX which is maybe not abusive per say depending on your interpretation of the power dynamics at play but it’s also pretty sketchy to say “no one may associate with my nephew-in-law, technically including my nephew who is married to him.”

Depending on the translation, the novel also says that LQR is the one who only allowed his nephews to see their mother once a month and who scolded LWJ for continuing to go to her house after she died. That’s not to say he may not have had reasons, we’re told that their mother was a murderer so it’s entirely possible LQR feared for his nephew’s safety to some degree and didn’t mourn his sister-in-law after her death. That doesn’t mean that his decisions weren’t arguably abusive.

As for CQL I’d argue the main point we see toward him potentially being abusive (in general, not necessarily toward his nephews) would be him throwing things at WWX during magic school. It’s generally understood that throwing things at teenagers when they question your infinite wisdom as a teacher is not okay and is flat out illegal most places. Now, it may be an acceptable reaction for the time and place that CQL is supposedly set but that doesn’t make it not abusive.

Even if you accept that LQR may be abusive, it doesn’t mean he was abusive toward his nephews and even if he was it doesn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t love them or was homophobic or anything like that. As much as people don’t want to think about it abusers are as complicated as any other type of people, you can’t just label them as “evil” and move on. But claiming LQR isn’t an abuser and people who think he is are doing it wrong is reductive and makes for bad meta.

I also kinda wanna add that it’s kind of weird to me to say that LQR initial dislike of Wei Wuxian was justified. At the time of the lectures in CR WWX was a child and yeah he may have been rambunctious and distracting but he was also a LITERAL CHILD. I don’t think his reaction to WWX question about resentful energy was at all understandable or acceptable. I think LQR already went into his interactions with WWX with a preconceived notion that he was a trouble maker (like his mother) and that he was beyond reach or teaching. Idk I may be misspeaking but I feel like his feelings of disdain for a literal child and then that being extended later to post burial mounds WWX was just an excuse to justify what he had figured from the very beginning; that WWX was a trouble maker and shouldn’t be associated with. I should also mention I don’t hate LQR but that also does not mean that his actions were just.

Lack of Tech in the Umbrella Academy Universe Makes It Hard to Be a Junkie (Other Meta on How The Academy Kids’ In-The-Moment Suffering Is Probably is All Reginald Hargreeves Fault)

no joke yall 

watch it again

no one uses a cell phone

no one uses a computer

there are multiple uses of pay phones 

there are no earbuds and we are in 2019 and Klaus here (and other characters in other scenes) are show using fucking walkmans

Originally posted by littlehobbit13

The world of the Umbrella Academy is a NOTICEABLE 20 years behind us.  

In this day and age, no self-respecting dealer would wait outside for a junkie -  he’d use a social messenging system to coordinate, meet up in a gas station parking lot, and move on like civilized members of the underworld. 

How is that we have Mom’s learning AI and Mr Pogo’s existence and Luther’s current predicament of biomedical engineering and an actual self-sustaining moon-base all of which …are just…literal impossibilities of science and yet Sir Reginald created them.

Originally posted by umbrellasource

Originally posted by takadasaiko

Originally posted by monringstar

And we have Hazel, Chacha, the Handler and the entire Commission (shout out to my main bitch Case Manager Dot - the MVP of the Apocalypse who clearly read UA: Apocalypse Suite on her lunch break and was like “nope, nope, that’s not an. acceptable outcome, we need to fix that shit” and got down to business - I got an entire thing on her LATER)

Originally posted by asleepinawell

Yet we are noticeably, glaringly, distractingly behind in technology in a lot of really visible ways that would have fixed the plot completely.  Imagine if  Allison could have texted Vanya that very important police record instead of having to show her in the car? Imagine if they could have done a google search instead of going to the library for any of the things they need to know? Imagine if they could have ever called each other from their various situations to coordinate ever? 

But no one does any of those. I’m pretty fucking sure they cant do it. 

Why?

Where’re pagers and cell phones?

Where are CD players and DVD players and smaller headphones?

Where are computers and mp3 players?

Where is the fucking internet?

And if all that is missing, how can Sir Reginald Hargreeves do the absolutely impossible shit he can do and teach a fucking genetically engineered chimp to do it too?!

You wanna know what I think? I’ll tell you what I fucking think

And watch the fuck out because Thar Be Fucking Spoilers For The Finale

I think that 

1. Reginald Hargreeves is from the fucking future rather than outer space like he is in the comics. Otherwise, you explain to me how Sir Reginald comes from a “Long Ago” that has rocket ships that are evacuating AND goddamn violins of human make that )I assume) are Stradivariuses AND how Sir Reginald knows what to warn Five about regarding specific dangers of time travel as a child AND how Reginald would know that he needed to adopt these kids to save the world AND how he would know when it would be happening so as to take drastic measures at the exact right time? Not even being part of the Commission ties up ALL those threads without him leaving the time stream which - as far as we know - he did not.
2. I think Sir Reginald is a goddamn CHEATER who took his future tech skills and knowledge back with him to the 18mumblemumbles and isnt as brilliant as he likes to pretends. True story, I can type about 80-100 WPM  and carry a. conversation with a client while capturing basically everything they say. It makes me seem VERY fucking impressive. The number of clients who have remarked on it is high. But I started learning how to type in 1st Grade and unlike most of those clients, I’ve been practicing hours on end - sometimes 8-16 hours at a stretch because I like it. A skill looks impressive as hell from the outside. If you’ve been practicing it for 25 years and grew up learning how to do it on top of that? That’s not brilliance. That’s training and practice. If you compare that to someone who didnt have access to EITHER of those things tho? Then fuck, if you dont look like a wizard. Think of every person you know who speaks multiple languages, everyone who plays an instrument, everyone who can do a sport, who has a skill. Think how long they’ve been at it. I think that’s what Sir Reginald has going for him with tech. DAMN is he impressive if you dont know what he’s working from. It’s a lot less impressive if you think about him growing up with that technology the way we grew up with cars and elevators. Who knows how to work those? Everybody. Yeah? Well 100 years before that everyone knew how to behave with a horse. I’m just saying. The time you’re in influences your skill set.
3. I think he MIGHT be a former member of the Commission. Whether he was a part of the Commission or not, he absolutely knew of it’s existence and he knew what 1)their objectives were and 2)what the concrete dates were that were not to be changed [with the exception of the apocalypse, obvi] . My favorite theory atm is that he’s a retired member of Upper Maanagement who is (at this very moment still) playing the long game to change one VERY key event (possibly not even the apocalypse but thats the best guess I have right now) to change that mass exodus that got him separated from the woman - who I’m just gonna assume is and refer to as the very briefly referenced Stela from Hotel Oblivion until canon tells me differently - he loved. He knows what he can’t manipulate because it would draw the attention of a case manager (again, big ups to my woman Dot seriously) but everything else was fair game and he knew it.
4. He rigged the game to give himself the most possible power and advantage humanly possible and he did it by manipulating the growth of technology. We don’t see this happen, but the humanity in The Umbrella Academy isn’t where we are in the real world and I think it’s because Sir Reginald got to the past early enough to get established and, using his combined knowledge of the way things should go and the way things could go, shaped history to his liking. Over and over we see and hear what a ridiculous egomaniac and manipulator he is but also, we learn that while major events are not malleable the fabric of reality itself is. Five’s Eyeball of the Apocalypse never finds its home in that important skull. The Hindenburg has lots of ways it can go down, the details are something Five and the Handler debate. The Kennedy Assassination happens whether Five shoots him or not. For whatever reason the Briefcase was primed for a trip to 1968, Klaus traveling there for almost a year left a marked change in the world but not enough for the Commission to actually try and take him out (although that could be argued possibly because him going their and getting Dave killed was already fated, possibly because Dave was going to be killed by Hazel and Chacha anyway, i mean, he did land at the foot of Dave’s bed, and possible because it didn’t fucking matter - genuinely no way to know)but point stands - shifts still happen. If Sir Reginald is from far enough in the future, he would know that. He would know that if he got in Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak or Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing or idk whoever invented the CD player’s way even if by offering them something interesting “free trip to bali on this specific date” or “a lucritive research opportunity.” or fuck I dont know “Eduardo Saverin I like what you do with the weather forecasting. Let me send you to singapore to do financial management for me. I think that Zuckerberg might be a bad influence on you. Won’t your father be proud?” then Sir Reginald could have shut a bunch of innovations down and released them at his own pace. The man is a control freak to a degree that is grotesque and to think that it only goes so far as the children, Pogo and Grace is a bit narrow. I think this for many reasons from the fact that it is just so on brand for this particular kind of asshole and fits in with a story that hinges on time travel and I also just finished watching Future Man which as me thinking about timelines and the manipulation thereto a lot before I even started TUA but the thing that put the pieces together for me on this theory was stumbling around tumblr @carol-on who seems very cool and was in the writers room for  TUA. That’s all very interesting, but what struck me was the way at the top of their tumblr it says “Every Billionaire is a failure of policy” - Diego Hargeeves probably and when I saw that I was like “HOLY SHIT. THAT FUCKING CHEATING BASTARD. OF COURSE HE SET THIS SHIT . UP.” 
5. Billionaires, in our actual real world, control 99% of the resources if we accept that money is the key to resources without legislation and policy. If there is a policy failure, someone can manipulate that failure and become a billionaire and access resources that should otherwise be regulated. They can do shit like…oh I dont know, BUY CHILDREN. And then ANNOUNCE TO THE WORLD THAT THEY BOUGHT THOSE CHILDREN. Yall, for gods sake. He said it. Out loud. TO THE GLOBAL NEWS MEDIA. “[Their parents] were suitably compesnated.” I just want us all to understand that when someone moves a human being from place to place, particularly across borders for money 1) thats human trafficking and 2) when someone makes that human being work for them without a choice in the matter and without compensation when they ask not to(remember Klaus screaming? remember Ben asking to go home?) after having paid money for their services to someone other than the people providing the service, we’ve moved past the act of trafficking and are in actual slavery. And before anyone says to “but he was their father and when they were adults he let them go” I’ll be happy to point out to you just how many Black slaves were owned by their fathers in America less than 200 years ago, some of whom (not many but few exist on record) were even emancipated upon reaching majority. This is hardly a foreign concept for the world and possibly not for a guy who did land somewhere in the vaguely 18mumblemumbles - not to say we don’t still have slavery in America because we do boy howdy. Don’t forget - he can say it was for unity but Sir Reginald marked them for life as his property when they were children with his actual company logo using tattoos. Romans did that to slaves. And 3) when what someone chooses to do with the human beings bought like properties who are children forced to work without compensation is to make then fight bloody battles that can end in other people dying because of them, well then that person isthe general of an army of child soldiers just like the ones you see in those documentaries and all the slavery, abuse, brainwashing, human trafficking, and psychological trauma that implies. 
6. The point is that a SINGLE WHITE MAN out of NOWHERE appears with 7 kids, 2 of them girls, 3 of them people of color, one of the from the Soviet Republic in the fucking EIGHTIES, and got up in front of the world and said “I bought them. They’re going to fight evil, pay no attention to the corpses.” and faced absolutely no repercussions from that. 
   Yeah, fuck that, asshole. I remember the fucking Michael Jackson trials even if he was found innocent - someone famous cant show up with kids I’m sorry but NO.  And I remember when we started seeing footage of the emotional devastation  left on child soldier survivors from Central Africa who were kidnapped and drugged and forced into fighting whether they wanted to or not and people watching around the world at the very least had opinions even if they were hollow. Whether these - and so many other terrible things - in our. world have stopped or gotten worse because of mass media and rapid communication - people knew that they were being watched for how they behave.
7. Sir Reginald acts with this attitude of impunity like he knows he’s NOT being watched. 
   You cannot, absolutely cannot convince me that the larger lack of technology - specifically communication technology - is not something that Sir Reginald wanted and engineered himself. You control information you control everything, including your own invisibility. Which if he is retired Commission, would be valuable, of course, but he, the Handler, Chacha Pogo and Five all are playing the same style of controlling bullshit on similar macro scales. No witnesses is a big plot point for the Commission- could cutting the world off be Reginald’s verion?
8. Cuz yall, he’s got the technology. He’s sitting on it. With Mom. With Pogo. With his ability to communicate directly to the fucking moon and back directly via text. He is a perfect billionaire because he hoardes like all billionaires hoard - wealth, secrets, influence, power - like the dragons hoard. Only this particular one instead of attacking the environment or the institutions of government attacked the worlds ability to talk to each other. For good for for ill, if he’d had less of a strangle hold on the whole world, maybe things would have gone differently for their family. 

He claimed he wanted to help the world but in trying to make it so HE helped the world, he deprived the supposed saviors of what they really needed in the moment - a way to communicate quickly and find information quickly. I mean imagine if Vanya could have sent a text to Allison in Ep 9 or 10 or asked google who is Leonard Peobody? Hm?

But no. Thats not how it works when you horde something to control it utterly and keep it all for yourself to have your desired outcome (which Five learned at his knee and does time and again - and so does the rest of the Commission which is why I think he might be one FTR). That’s not how being a dragon - i’m sorry, a billionaire works. 

ラウルさま

may the light of blessing grant you the strength you seek!

So here’s a fact about the Tokyo Ghoul fandom; if you want to see the absolute worst element of it, talk about Juuzou’s gender. 

However, I’ve recently been seeing yet more posts in the tag about it, and since I’m working on a fic right now, I’ve been re-reading certain chapters. Something stuck out to me this time. 

In Chapter 55, “Plan,” Juuzou meets Maruda. Maruda is generally an obnoxious guy, and sort of annoys everyone around him. He has a pretty interesting ability to sort of say the thing that will frustrate a person most - for example, he chides Amon by saying he shouldn’t “play with his toys” like Mado did, which pisses Amon off. When he’s done with that. He turns to Juuzou. Before the exchange, Amon tells Juuzou to behave himself, essentially, because Maruda is an important guy. 

So this is how it goes down:

In this panel, Juuzou seems curious, and a bit dismayed. Maruda says “A girl?” though by the size of the text, I’m guessing he says it softly. Still, Juuzou undoubtedly heard him. As we see in other places, Juuzou has very keen senses, and picks up on small details.

Okay, so here we have a case of Juuzou looking down, clearly nervous. I think that Shinohara is probably trying to discourage Maruda from focusing too heavily on Juuzou by reminding him that he’s already been discussed and they can move on. This tactic doesn’t work.

Clearly, Shinohara really, really does not want this to turn confrontational. And clearly, he knows that comments about Juuzou’s gender presentation (and anatomy) are a quick way to make him explode. His reaction pretty much shows that he’s been in similar situations with Juuzou before, and they’ve not ended well.

But there’s no need to worry about him snapping, because Juuzou’s locked-up. It’s clear that in the second panel, his eyes are sort of greyed-out. He’s not really responding at all, at this point. In my opinion, he appears to have been triggered. 

He continues to be locked-up for the next panel. Then…

We have this. Previous to this panel, Amon asks where Juuzou is. Shinohara says, “I dunno, someplace high up?” Which is another indication that this has happened before. He’s seen Juuzou get triggered, and he knows what Juuzou does in these situations: he reverts to behavior similar to what he did when he was a child, in the “care” of Big Madame. He talks to himself (as Rei), just as he does in the chapter about his past, after he’s been given “good boy points,” aka, after he’s been tortured.

I want to really stress this point. In the manga, we only see Juuzou displaying this behavior when he’s faced with his past traumas. In other words, being treated that way forced him back into those traumas. Being called a girl and asked about his anatomy forced him back into those past traumas. And that, my friends, is a trigger. 

In other words, being misgendered is traumatic for Juuzou. And clearly, he considers himself to be male. If he didn’t, why would Shinohara refer to him that way? Why would he refer to himself that way? There’s no neutrality in Juuzou’s gender, nor is there anything outside of the binary. What he does have is a boatload of trauma related to both his physical body and his gender identity. 

The representation that Juuzou provides is amazing, but it isn’t representation of non-binary genders. 

and when i start screaming?

Zhang Zhehan case sources

I just wanted to put together a post of currently (January 2022) relevant articles / accounts and pages to follow when it comes to Zhang Zhehan’s still developing situation.

Timeline of the whole case by softforwangxian:

QuelleVous’ toolkit with factual talking points for Zhang Zhehan’s case:

Zhang Zhehan Incident Talking Points

Flora Lee’s daily updated timeline of events since the start of Li Xuezheng’s involvement:

Justice of the People Timeline

Teddyfoxfluff’s blog with clarifications of Zhang Zhehan rumors, translations and other explanations:

Clarifications for Zhang ZheHan

Published articles:

Cyber Bullying and Fake News: What You Should Know About the Zhang Zhehan Story (December 16, 2021, teddyfoxfluff)

Zhang Zhehan denies entering Yasukuni Shrine, says he’s willing to be investigated (January 11, 2022, Lim Yian Lu)

Catharine Orange’s Youtube video debunking many of the rumors in a very effective way:

Defaming Zhang ZheHan | Defamation Case Recap

My carrd link list with all of the above (+ the more major news), that I plan to keep updating:

Informative social media following current developments: