can we have ‘classicists against white supremacy’// ‘classicists against patriarchy’ // ‘classicists against eurocentrism’ // patches
because we’re actually at the ground of what the hate groups and right parties are trying to claim as their own and use as a weapon against others – so it’s time to take back that narrative.
Okay, I thought I was going to wake up for like five seconds and then go back to sleep but I started fucking around with this and I really got into it so now I’ve been working on this for an hour and I’m not done.
First, I want to talk a little bit about the symbol I chose, and of course I’m open to suggestions. While the owl is often known because of its connection to Athena and is thus often seen as a symbol of wisdom, in this case I also picked it because of its dual – and much wider – association with death. This is a worldwide association; though not every culture associates the owl with death and destruction, many more associate it with death than associate it with wisdom. I thought that was a very potent symbol for what’s being expressed here: what ‘classical’/white thought has expressed as wisdom is often death and destruction to other cultures, as well as the fact that what is being expressed here is a death or destruction to a supremacist way of thinking.
Second, the layouts here use a font called Norse. There are a LOT of other fonts that I can choose, and I am going to do a few more mock-ups with those in a bit. I really like Norse, it stitches very cleanly, and it has the added benefit of looking a) ‘generic classical, like it was cut in rock,’ and b) also looking pretty Norse if you realize that yeah I’m probably thumbing my nose at the people ruining Norse mythology and symbolism. (I’m open to font suggestions.)
I’ve listed this in the shop; it should stitch without an issue, but I’ll be testing it once the current run finishes. (Yes, my machine’s been running all night, the DE Punk Rock Flea Market is in a week, I’m busy!)
Thanks for tagging me in on this, I hope this is something people like. As always I am a one-person shop manned by a queer Jewish disabled person, so if you do choose to pick one up, thanks for supporting independent artists. 🙂
😀 😀 😀
A medievalist friend of mine requested an additional one and so I am adding:
😀
wow 💖💖💖
Image is a drawing of three awards. One on the left with a medal with ribbons, one on the upper right that is a rectangle with a straight border, and one on the lower right that is round with a bumpy border. Artist’s signature is in the middle.
Left award: Tried to be cool and was absolutely not
Right top: Felt like mental health stuff was going to kick your ass but you kept on fighting
Right bottom: Faced emotions even though they suck but you did it anyway
Queer is actually different word with a different history than some words in a similar category. It’s been used politically as well as personally and it a word with a militantly inclusive and affirming background – whatever it may or may not have had in other countries years ago.
The ‘queer is a slur’ crap was started by TERFs, apparently in the 70s and 80s – although I can only find examples in the 90s and 00s. I had to learn about its history too – because in Australia, it’s not a slur at all! It only surfaced as ‘a slur’ and something to demand people tag and to attack people over about a year ago on Tumblr. I will not buy into that loaded rhetoric.
Please think critically about why you are asking ACTUAL QUEER PEOPLE to slur-tag their own identities because it’s a really transparent power-play and logical fallacy. Why? Because Xkit and a couple of the other add-ons with blacklist etc remove posts with key words in them ALREADY. WITHOUT you needing to tag them. If someone is hiding ‘queer’, there is NO REASON for them to ask a blogger to ALSO tag ‘q slur’, unless their reason has nothing to do with being protected from triggers at all.
it’s a powerplay. It’s coming to someone’s blog to subtly let them know that you don’t like the fact they use the word. It’s a subtle move to make the word less acceptable. To make someone else feel ashamed of a word YOU don’t like and YOU don’t have good associations with. For some people it’s, “My pain and experiences are more important than anyone elses, and everyone is required to change their lexicon for ME.”
Nope. Just nope. This is a queer blog, I am queer, and I’m not tagging ‘q slur’ for someone who doesn’t want to research their history, think critically, and would rather be a mindless attack mob for TERFs, aphobes, truscum, and other exclusionist groups of people that benefit from an inclusive word like ‘queer’ becoming a no-no in our community.
This is exactly why I won’t tag it – if you need the word to be tagged, that BY DEFAULT means that you are using a blacklisting service, which means YOU CAN JUST BLACKLIST THE WHOLE WORD.
Like, I blacklist the word “diet” because I need a little buffer between myself and the concept sometimes when my eating disorder is acting up. I blacklist things like ‘fitness’ and ‘weight loss’ – because that’s what I need to avoid to keep myself healthy. I don’t ask people not to post about their fitness goals when there is a perfectly easy way for me to avoid it.
There’s even! a browser extension! that replaces certain words! You may have seen people jokingly using it to replace “Millennials” with “Snake People,” for example. You could also use it to replace “queer” with “gay” or some other word if you needed to.
There are lots of ways that people use every day to protect themselves from easily avoidable words and topics – so coming onto someone’s post, when they are using the word as self-identification, especially, and calling it a slur? That’s fucking RUDE. The first time I self-ID’d as queer in the mid-00s, do you know what happened? A straight TERF came onto my LJ post comments and told me I couldn’t use it because it was a slur.
You know what I did? I fucking blocked her. My sentiment has not changed in 12 years. It’s my word, the only one that really fits me, and if you don’t like it, I’m all right with you leaving to protect yourself. You do you. But I’m gonna do me.
When Petunia Dursley refused to take Harry in she forfeited his birthright protection, so Dumbledore took the baby to the safest place he knew: Hogwarts.
The applicable staff (mostly just… not Snape) took Harry in on a rotating schedule as he grew from baby to toddler to child. They traded extra credit for babysitting among the older students, and Harry grew up knowing a few dozen different laps that were safe and warm to nap in.
This was a Harry who grew up among books, among old transient walls and learned professors. They gave Binns night duty sometimes, and let him talk young Harry to sleep. This was a Harry whose world changed, on principle, daily. The stairs moved. The walls became doors. You had to keep your eyes open–you had to pay attention. So he did.
He grew up in a school. Knowledge was power, but knowledge was also joy. This was his sanctuary. There was magic in his world from birth.
“The castle will keep him safe,” said Dumbledore, when McGonagall came into his office to complain for the eighth time about Albus’s rather cavalier take on child-rearing. “That’s what it does.”
“Then why do we bother with chaperones ever,” McGonagall said, tempted to shriek it. “Should we let all the children run about willy-nilly at all hours, or just the orphan waifs?!”
“He’s not a student. He’s a ward of Hogwarts. It will take care of him, Minerva.”
McGonagall walked off fuming. A cat with spectacle markings followed Harry almost constantly from ages three through four. At some point McGonagall was far enough behind on her paperwork, and had seen enough suits of armor carry the kid back to his room, enough draperies lift off the wall and tug Harry away from edges, and enough stairs creakingly shift their slope for his tiny toddler legs. She gave a grumpy sigh, stole some of Albus’s lemon drops, and resigned herself to a magical world.
The Grey Lady, the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower, didn’t really like boys but she liked children. She especially liked patience, and politeness, and Harry had been raised by McGonagall’s stern table manners, by Victorian portraiture and quite a few House Elves. He said please, thank you, and ma’am, and as a child he was very cunning in how he got bedtime stories and bedtime snacks out of most every adult he met.
The Grey Lady told the best stories, you see, the ones with riddles in them. You had to think and ask questions to get all the way through them. So he hunted her down with big patient eyes and plates of very smelly cheese, and she told him stories that made him think.
When Harry was stable enough on his feet to walk, and then to run, Sir Cadogan would race him through the castle, the knight scattering banquet tables and galloping across landscapes, twisting through the abstract gallery up on the seventh and a half floor. Harry stumbled and sprinted up stairways and didn’t notice for years the way Cadogan waited at the end of corridors for him to catch up.
Harry was a chubby-legged toddler, in this world–cute cheeks and stubby limbs. It’s a cute image, yes– but this is important. He was a chubby kid. He ate in a high chair on the teacher’s dais, getting peas and mashed potatoes on the adults beside him– Sprout laughed. Snape didn’t.
But this is important–Harry filled his plate. He wobbled up on little legs and grabbed biscuits from the table, slurped his soup, got marinara sauce on his chin and forehead and somehow behind his ear. When he was hungry, he ate. If he snuck down to the kitchens at night, it was for the adventure of it and nothing else. When he was hungry, he ate.
When he was four, they started letting him go sit down with the students. Bill Weasley, on route to be a prefect next year, took him under his wing and scrubbed his face down after meals. Harry was passed around the Hufflepuff table; theirs was the House Common Room he most liked sneaking into, with its barrels and cozy warmth. Nymphadora Tonks turned her nose a dozen different shapes to make Harry laugh, gurgling, as a toddler (and then a child) (and then for the rest of her life, honestly–it never stopped being funny).
The whole Ravenclaw table got distracted from meals, trying to solve riddles from a book one of their Muggleborns had smuggled in.Harry pushed his fork through his gravy, trying to draw out his thoughts but only making squiggles.
It was years before Harry sat at the Slytherin table for the first time–no one had ever set him down there, like they had with the others. But he liked green–it was the color of Professor Sprout’s greenhouses, where he went and napped sometimes in winter. It was the color of his mother’s eyes, from the little book of moving pictures Hagrid had given him when he was three.
All the Slytherin kids seemed big, but everyone Harry ever met seemed big–except for Flitwick, who was seeming smaller with every growth spurt. He leaned forward, teetering on the bench, and grabbed a chicken drumstick. “Hi,” he said, because he’d had a childhood full of tea parties with high portrait society– the French nobility and the tired housewife from the third floor and an old witch with her sleeve on fire but very particular table manners. “I’m Harry. What’s your name?”
By the end of the meal, they were flicking peas across the table with their spoons, like catapult projectiles. Harry had been unwelcome in so few places in his life, after he’d left 4 Privet Drive, that he simply didn’t expect it. He asked Warrington, a Slytherin with shoulders like a bulldog’s, to help him with the juice, which was too unwieldy for his kid-sized wrists. Harry sat there blinking, smiling, until Warrington took the jug and poured him a brimming glass.
You’ve heard the story: Honeybees are disappearing. Beginning in 2006, beekeepers began reporting mysteriously large losses to their honeybee hives over the winter. The bees weren’t just dying—they were abandoning their hives altogether. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder, soon became widespread. Ever since, beekeepers have reported higher-than-normal honeybee deaths, raising concerns about a coming silent spring.
The media swiftly declared disaster. Time called it a “bee-pocalypse”; Quartz went with “beemageddon.” By 2013, National Public Radio was declaring “a crisis point for crops” and a Time cover was foretelling “a world without bees.” A share of the blame has gone to everything from genetically modified crops, pesticides, and global warming to cellphones and high-voltage electric transmission lines. The Obama administration created a task force to develop a “national strategy” to promote honeybees and other pollinators, calling for $82 million in federal funding to address pollinator health and enhance 7 million acres of land. This year both Cheerios and Patagonia have rolled out save-the-bees campaigns; the latter is circulating a petition calling on the feds to “protect honeybee populations” by imposing stricter regulations on pesticide use.
A threat to honeybees should certainly raise concerns. They pollinate a wide variety of important food crops—about a third of what we eat—and add about $15 billion in annual value to the economy, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And beekeepers are still reporting above-average bee deaths. In 2016, U.S. beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies over the previous year, the second-highest annual loss reported in the past decade.
But here’s what you might not have heard. Despite the increased mortality rates, there has been no downward trend in the total number of honeybee colonies in the United States over the past 10 years. Indeed, there are more honeybee colonies in the country today than when colony collapse disorder began.
Beekeepers have proven incredibly adept at responding to this challenge. Thanks to a robust market for pollination services, they have addressed the increasing mortality rates by rapidly rebuilding their hives, and they have done so with virtually no economic effects passed on to consumers. It’s a remarkable story of adaptation and resilience, and the media has almost entirely ignored it. …
Bull fucking shit.
As a beekeeper who’s been following this very closely, the bounce back has been after awareness of the dangers of neonicotinoid pesticides to pollinators in general and bees in particular, which has led to decreased use of them and straight up bans in some areas.
Those pesticides were approved even after research had been done proving they could be harmful to pollinators because pesticide companies could make a holy fucking shitload of money off of them, and they knew it, so they paid off the people they needed to pay off to get them approved anyway.
And the reason there are more colonies now than 10 years ago? Is because of people who rose to the challenge to help bees, but it wasn’t pros (who helped in their own way, but they can’t take credit for this).
It’s because ordinary people who don’t make squat off bees started caring, and keeping them as a hobby. There’s more new beekeepers now than there’s been in decades. I know because I bloody well helped train a good many of them in my area, and because over the last 10 years of registering my hives with the Iowa DNR I’ve watched the number of registered hives on their sensitive crop pesticide restriction maps spike drastically, from maybe like 2 or 3 in my area ten years ago to several dozen when I logged on to renew my registration this April.
(you cannot legally apply pesticides or herbicides to any crops within 1 mile of a sensitive crop (bees are classed as a sensitive crop) without notifying the keeper of the sensitive crop beforehand, and then you can only apply at night.)
And it’s all hobbyists. Not pros. Not beekeepers who sell pollination services. People, like me, who end up sinking as much cash into the hobby as we earn.
Capitalism didn’t do shit. Ordinary good people who were concerned did, and paid for it out of their own bloody pockets, with no thanks to bloody capitalism.
I just got back from the ER because my body decided that it was going to make my breathing do horrible things that required getting an expert opinion on what the fuck, and now I have cough suppressants and some other instructions on getting better, including not to be working for the next four days – so, no cleaning the apartment until the weekend.
*wraps self up in a quilt and a comforter, and makes up a pot of tea with a very large amount of honey*
autistic people using big words and “clinical” sounding language because they feel it to be the most effective means of communication is so often perceived by allistics as pretension. autistics are then made fun of for this use of language which can be incredibly damaging and often causes autistics to retreat further into themselves as any attempts they make to communicate with allistics cause them to be punished
so in general if you don’t like the way someone speaks (especially if you know for a fact that they’re autistic) maybe don’t make fun of them and instead do your best to understand and communicate with them in a way that’s beneficial to you both
But there was one scenario in which the Autistic people left a positive first impression: when people read a transcript of their words instead of seeing and hearing the Autistic people saying those words, observers rated them as more likable and more intelligent. In fact, in the scenario where observers just read the written words of Autistic and non-autistic people, they rated both groups the same. For non-autistic people, the written transcripts were their lowest-rated mode of communication, although only by a small amount. For Autistic people, the written transcripts were their highest-rated mode of communication by a very significant margin.
Written communication is the great social equalizer.
Remember this if you start to fear your Autistic child is spending too much time interacting with others online and not enough time interacting with others face-to-face. Online communication is a valid accommodation for the social disability that comes with being Autistic. We need online interaction and this meta-study demonstrates exactly why that is the case.
Autism and the Burden of Social Reciprocity | Sparrow R. Jones unstrangemind.com
There's a Mirror on the Wall 