nonbinerdy:

Disability representation is one of my favorite things, but does anyone else get a little tired of the disability=superpowers things?

Like, this character has epilepsy, but don’t worry, they can see the future during a seizure! This character is autistic, but don’t you worry, they’re a super detective. This character’s psychosis lets them talk to elves! This character is blind, but they can see into the spirit world!

And it can be fun, don’t get me wrong. I love Akata Witch, where noticeable features or disabilities can influence the type of magic you have. My favorite book is Chameleon Moon, where a cure-all type medicine backfires and can give people either superpowers or curses.

 But sometimes I want to see myself without a justification. I’m autistic, but I could never solve a crime. My anxiety doesn’t mean I can see the future. I really want a paranormal, fantasy, Sci-fi, etc. book where the disabled character just is. They’re autistic and they can talk to plants, not they can talk to plants because they’re autistic. A character is epileptic but it doesn’t do anything for them, it’s just part of who they are. 

Does anyone else feel this way?

(via queercomicsconnection)

rosalarian:

ottomandias:

angelicfruitcake:

stormerskies:

hearteyes-peralta:

sounddesignerjeans:

anosognosic:

sounddesignerjeans:

theonlyleftydesk:

meropischao:

mesopelagic:

meropischao:

meropischao:

youd think horses were one of those animals that has horrible health due to humans breeding unhealthy animals to achieve a certain look but no they really are just naturally that fucked up

horses’ lungs bleed when they run at a certain speed

if their diet is too rich / low in selenium their hooves fall off

excuse me

The reason they have such poor health outcomes after breaking or otherwise injuring their legs is because their legs are actually hyper-specialized fingers; and as in human fingers, there is very little muscle supporting the bone, just a lot of cartilage and tendons and whatnot. You’d think an animal that literally evolved to run away to avoid being eaten would have ALSO evolved sturdier running appendages, but…

I fucking hate this post, it’s 1 AM I don’t want to know that horse legs are giant fucking fingers

holy shit

the homologues of the (human) knee and elbow on a horse are at the level of the ribcage. the “knees” in the middle of the legs are homologous to wrists on the front and heels on the back. anything below that is hand/foot.

I understood most of that but the diagram for me is what makes me never want to look at a horse again

arabian horses have been bred so badly that they have breathing problems because of the shape of their face

This is how horses are built compared to a human

I wish Tumblr would stop telling me things about horses

centaurs are real and they look like that last photo

Just when I thought I was finally getting the hang of horses, I find out I know nothing.

(Source: cheesepress, via rosalarian)

thecoggs:

enoughtohold:

inspirationawe:

disease-danger-darkness-silence:

bogleech:

enoughtohold:

it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.

which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.

it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.

Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison.

That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.

…and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like that’s the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight.

do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then

I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed - thank GOD - and it’s been erased - not so cool.

pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was awful.

my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and twice he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her. 

I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).

I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.

recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote

“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”

And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was THERE for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is our history and we need to learn it.

we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.

if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am absolutely willing to do a living memory.

they’re the only history books we have.

THEY ARE THE ONLY HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last.

Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about. 

okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right!

but you guys gotta know… they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books. just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!

i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are mostly history, and it is, at this moment, 239 books long. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.

obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!

so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, read a book.

---

^{p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense.}

I agree with all the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now:

• Here are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project
• Here’s the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts
• Here’s a list of a bunch of known oral history projects
  
• And this is the podcast Making Gay History, which is taped interviews done for the book of the same name (with a bit of context added beforehand)

(via hemelbeestje)

blondegingersaxon:

copperbadge:

ceescedasticity:

iguana-sneeze:

marzipanandminutiae:

derinthemadscientist:

bedlamsbard:

burntcopper:

meduseld:

penroseparticle:

My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big

“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner

A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’

‘…My school is older than your entire town.’

‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’

*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’

A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian.  We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary.  We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.

“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”

We all brace ourselves.  A long bus ride?  How long?  We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible.  We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.

The answer.  “Two hours.”

Oh.

English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing

a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”

to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country

China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.

My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone]

tenth century addition.”

My last boss was Chinese, and she said when her parents came to visit her from Beijing they pronounced Chicago “A very nice village.” 

This post keeps getting better

(via uirukii)

Racist YouTube Man Caught Being Racist in a Way That Can’t Be Misconstrued as Satire

cmder:

Fans are appalled, “We thought we could hide behind satire forever!”

(Source: e-seal, via heyfrankie)

Grants, Fellowships, and Residencies for Cartoonists!

pigeonbits:

Hey comic-makers!  Looking for funding or short/long term studio space to help you make your comics?  I put together a list of grants, fellowships, and residencies with an established, positive track record for accepting cartoonists!  (There are also many, many arts grants/etc. out there that have not accepted any cartoonists yet, and I absolutely encourage you to apply for those too!  But I’ll be limiting this list to ones that already have demonstrated interest in comics.)

I’m sure there are ones I’m missing, so feel free to drop me a line if you know one I should add!  I’ll keep updating the list periodically :)

GRANTS

Creators for Creators

Cupcake Award

The Dash

Fund the Change

Grants for the Arts

Grants for Artist Projects (GAP)

Guggenheim Fellowship Grants

Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities  

Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship

John Locher Memorial Award

Ontario Arts Council

PRISM Queer Press Grant

Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize

Society of Illustrators M Prize 

Speculative Literature Foundation

Sustainable Arts Foundation

FELLOWSHIPS AND RESIDENCIES

Arteles Comic Blast

Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence

Catskill Center Artist in Residence

Comic Art Workshop

The Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency

The Cornish CCS Residency Fellowship

CUNE Comics-in-Residence Programme

Donaldson Writer-in-Residence

Galveston Artist Residency

Inbound and Outbound TRANSIT

Kaunas Comics Residency

Liminka School of Arts

Maison des Auteurs  

Nordic Artists’ Centre

Sitka Artist Residency

Sundress Academy for the Arts

Thurber House Graphic Novel Residency

Trailer Blaze Residency

Tulsa Artist Fellowship  

US National Parks Residencies 

Last update: 8/29/2017

(via queercomicsconnection)