Your web-browser is very outdated, and as such, this website may not display properly. Please consider upgrading to a modern, faster and more secure browser. Click here to do so.
I’m the world’s worse advocate for wasps. Everytime I see people repeating bees=nice good pollinators wasps=bad stinging meanies, I face a deep internal struggle trying to explain how they are important to the environment without explaining wasp facts that freak them out in ways they never even thought
“Bees might be cuter and make honey, but wasps are VERY important too, some of them are necessary as pollinators themselves! Hey anyways you wanna hear some fucked up things about figs?”
“You hate wasps? Well think of a bug that you hate more then wasps. There’s probably a parasitoid wasp that lays their eggs inside them and their babies to devour them alive from the inside, reducing that insect species’ population!”
“Your least favourite bug is parasitoid wasps now? Well you are gonna be THRILLED and CONFLICTED about the existence of hyperparasitic wasps.”
Streamer who says “And now just a little break for an ad read, sorry guys, brb” and then they just pull out a newspaper and silently read some of the ads while scowling because they don’t enjoy this, occasionally muttering “That’s not even a good deal” and then calmly folds it back up and starts playing again.
There’s something deeply political about which fears are normalized, regardless of how irrational or statistically unlikely they may be. To tell the truth I really don’t think much about crime. Have I lived an easy life? In some ways, but there are people with lives a lot easier than mine who are afraid to the point of total dysfunction of getting stabbed or mugged. Who then gleefully endorse the excessive isolation, codependence, and gender-based hierarchies that enable the more likely violence committed by people who actually know each other.
I told my bosses at my last job I was taking a weekend trip to Chicago and they said “gosh, be safe,” as if Chicago is nothing more than the Fox News “Chi-raq” depiction and not a multifaceted region with world-class museums, beautiful scenery, and endless joys and new experiences to be had, even (especially) outside the glitsy tourist areas. They are depraving themselves of all this joy and think all the sensory experiences they need can be found at an Olive Garden surrounded by a sea of asphalt.
Meanwhile, to be afraid of getting hit by a car is a problem for whiny libcucks who should just buy a truck instead, to be afraid when politicians and TV personalities explicitly call for your murder as a queer person is a matter of “hurt feelings,” and women are told to fear serial killers who jump out of alleys with zipties and told to get over their anxieties about intimate partner violence. None of it makes any sense.
Friendly reminder that Hozier’s first music video, in 2013, involved him literally taking his life savings and using it to make a protest video about anti-gay actions in Chechnya. This was not a popular position at the time, to the point that damn near every interviewer asked “so, are you gay?” because they literally could not figure out why he cared so much.
Incidentally, after the first few times of saying “no, I’m straight but it’s important,” he started saying “you can think that if you want.” ALSO not a popular position at the time. Adam Lambert’s entire career had been derailed only four years before because he dared to be openly gay and sexual about it.
He literally came out swinging like Muhammad Ali and hasnot stopped. And he finds it odd that people find it odd! Like he was asked if he was aware of his “lesbian cult following” and seemed genuinely puzzled why he has a lesbian cult following (and, later, just a massive queer following in general) and it’s like. Honey. You loved us first. You loved us more and harder than most people were willing to. When it was unpopular to even whisper about how maybe queer people shouldn’t be seen as inhuman actually, you grabbed a megaphone and screamed. You risked not just losing a career, but never having one at all, to stand by us. You loved us. We’re just loving you back.
FYI if your employer does this, if they have done it for a long time especially, you and your coworkers could be owed huge amounts of unpaid wages and it would be an easy suit if there is a paper trail like this and your employer is placing strict requirements on your behavior while not at work. Employment lawyers generally work on contingency. Just food for thought.
On how a video game about fucking a bear interrupted furry discourse
People don’t realize the absolute comedy that just went through Furry social media.
See, feral smut (i.e. smut of four-legged characters who otherwise satisfy the Harkness test) has always been a contentious subject in the furry fandom, due to how easily it leads to unwarranted real-life accusations of zoophilia. It’s an annoying bit of discourse that has been rearing its head every other year since the modern fandom began four decades ago.
Which, you know, pretty rich, coming from the fandom where a pretty large percentage readily admit to having had some form of sexual awakening over the TLK and MLP:FiM franchises.
And anyway, that discourse was exactly what was going on last week. People getting harassed on Twitter, as an extension of the whole “groomer” moral panic. A lot of fandom relative newcomers parroting arguments right out of the Burned Furs movement (a late 1990s/early 2000s movement dedicated to “purifying” the furry fandom from “perversion” and “degeneracy”).
And then, just as the discourse was at its most heated, Baldur’s Gate 3 entered the chat.
Suddenly, everyone was talking about the game that will let you fuck a bear. Yes, a bear, as in Ursus arctos. A Druid shapeshifted into a bear, to be fair (again: the Harkness test), but a bear nonetheless.
And mainstream media erupted with reports that the game’s sales skyrocketed based on that scene alone.
And the discourse suddenly screeched to a hilariously embarrassed halt.
ALT