ThePrettiestOne

Two Lumps comic for Friday, August 28, 2015

Me: “I try not to reblog guilt posts.”
Guilt post: *reblogged an hour ago*
Me: “GODDAMMIT.”

So: I do genuinely try not to reblog posts that say “do this OR ELSE,” and when it happens, it’s an accident.  I am sorry if it caused you any distress, and I promise you, there is no OR ELSE coming based on whether you reblogged a thing from me or not.  I feed all the OR ELSE to the Corn.

“What did your white boy do this week?”

- James Rhodes (War Machine) to Sam Wilson (Falcon), at their weekly brunch on Saturdays. (via wannabe-a-statistical-anomaly)

“

I think that queer readers have trouble escaping into a world that doesn’t include queer characters, because we know that we wouldn’t be welcome there. In fact, SFF that create worlds without queer characters seem to suggest that we wouldn’t even be able to exist there: our existence is not conceivable in the context we are given. When we read a story that doesn’t include queer people, a world that doesn’t include queer characters, it comes with the nagging message You don’t belong here.

Whether it’s a horrific dystopia or a silly space romp, that implication makes it difficult to “escape”, because the truth is, we’re already all too familiar with that sentiment.

”

- “Why We Need Queer Escapist Lit” at The Lesbrary
(via fuckyeahlesbianliterature)

overlyobsessedfanqueen:

I’m fucking pissing myself.
You know how all of Jupiter’s moons are named after his lovers and affairs?
Yeah. NASA is sending a craft to check up on Jupiter.
You know what the craft is called?

JUNO.

Who’s Juno?

JUPITER’S WIFE.

NASA IS SENDING JUPITER’S WIFE TO CHECK ON JUPITER AND HIS AFFAIRS AND LOVERS.

FUCKING NASA

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, both tawny frogmouths, and that’s basically only because of a vague similarity I noticed between these two photos

so

Best mates for life

miggylol:

Dr. Temperance Brennan has seen some disgusting and horrifying shit over the years, but I think her daughter and her husband singing this horribly innacurate song might just top the list for her.

maggiemunkee:

tulipnight:

Female Pallas’s cat by Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr.

Patronus 😍

Reading the full expert analysis conducted by Fusion GPS into the "sting" videos by anti-abortion extremists posing as medical company reps and released by a group calling itself the Center for Medical Progress leads one to believe that these would-be stingers are not all that bright. Certainly they're not technologically adept. But most certainly, they are extremely arrogant in their conviction that they don't actually have to do it right. Republicans will run with it, no matter what.

Fusion GPS created three teams experts in "video forensics, production, and transcription." These teams reviewed the initial five secretly recorded videos. Their experts include "Grant Fredericks who is a contract instructor of video sciences at the FBI National Academy and one of the most experienced video experts in North America." They contracted with an outside transcription company to watch and transcribe the videos, and did not tell the company who they were working with, so no possibility of bias could be introduced there. What they found was some astonishingly sloppy work.

• Collectively, the five videotapes of Planned Parenthood staff have at least 42 splices where content is cut and edited together to make it appear to be a seamless conversation.
• In some cases, these splices completely change the meaning of statements. On one video, a Planned Parenthood staff member’s remarks about lab protocols were edited to make it sound like she was talking about changing abortion procedures. Phrases on the tape were isolated and removed, stringing together unrelated sentences to change the meaning.

  Anti-abortion activists used the doctored “quote” to support false claims that she was talking about changing how an abortion would be done, and the “quote” was published by mainstream media as if it were real.

• On one tape, a Planned Parenthood staff member in Colorado says 13 separate times that any arrangements related to fetal tissue donation need to be reviewed by attorneys and follow all laws—and all 13 are edited out of the video.
• On another tape, a Planned Parenthood staff member in Texas says nine separate times that there is no “profit” related to fetal tissue donation—and all nine are edited out of the video.

It's easy for the analysts to pinpoint all these discrepancies because the hidden cameras used had both time stamps and frame counters turned on. So they could clearly see where—in the long, supposedly raw and supposedly unedited—chunks were missing. There were instances where audio didn't match video, where camera angles and lighting changed in the middle of conversations, and time stamps revealed big jumps. These are not, the analysts conclude, the result of mistakes or using the equipment incorrectly. They are "intentional post-production edits" which "mean they have no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries," and that they "lack credibility as journalistic products."

Head below the fold for more.

yrbff:

(by elaina wahl)

mattfractionblog:

happy birthday jack kirby

now let’s everybody get out there and make up like 170 new things

yburesque:

This is a lion tree. It’s where lions come from. You have to water them a lot.

bydaybreak:

liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike. let’s talk about their reactions here? because i 100% believe in my filthy trash bin of a heart that this episode was the point of no return for parker and eliot both, the point at which they both realised holy shit i am in way over my head. 

look at those reactions. like, it’s not simple relief, it’s relief and *total fucking whelm*. and neither eliot nor parker has–allowed themselves, maybe, the relative luxury of just thinking about what someone means to them. because it’s always been a liability. for eliot, caring too much about people would just be something that someone could use against him; for parker, it’s what archie’s cautioned her against a million times: we don’t get involved. 

and worse for both of them, really, is that they’re not–not too caught up in a job, not too wrapped up in their own reputations or…or things that could be forgivable, really. things that they could realise and chide themselves for and then pull back from, do better. no, instead they’re both of them way overinvested in another person, in a person who could be hurt, who could be taken from them because they weren’t good enough or fast enough or–or just because sometimes you lose. 

parker and eliot have always been aware of when they should cut their losses and get out. but this–this isn’t an acceptable loss. maybe neither of them can say the word love just yet, even to themselves, but this is where they realise it.

hardison doesn’t die, but he comes back to life anyhow, and when he does, the whole world changes.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Naturalist Brad Josephs posted a video of a grizzly bear that swatted his GoPro camera in Alaska.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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lotus-leif:

New urban fantasy theory:

Walmart hires vampires. This explains why it’s open 24 hours a day, why working there is often described as ‘soul-sucking’, and why there’s almost always no windows.

Most damningly, Walmart is one of the few stores that specifically hires a ‘greeter’ with no other job than to welcome every person into the store.

Because vampires have to be invited in.

priscellie:

ecnamor-lacimehc-ym:

gallifrey-feels:

sociopathic-italian-grandmas:

millshouse:

meganiun:

happyvegetable:

kennilworthy-thisp:

derinthemadscientist:

lumoslouis:

soloontherocks:

amour-vengeance:

later-homenuggets:

my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this

look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit

motherfucking australia

if there was a post to describe australia, this is it

wait. 

you mean to tell me this isn’t even a pet bird?

that in australia, you have wild birds that just fly from house to house with the express purpose of fucking shit up?

fucking HELL australia, what is wrong with you?

wake up australia 

That’s what birds do

They fly around and fuck shit up

Do you have some kind of mysterious nice birds in your weird foreign country

Do birds in America and England fly into your house and make the bed and tidy up the living room a little bit

It’s cold here, so they just bounce off the windows and lie there and twitch spasmodically while you look for the shovel.

Basically hurling themselves at windows is the worst thing birds do

yeah man a kookaburra literally flew into a classroom at my high school and just sat his smug ass down on top of the desk for a good 20 minutes

why has nobody mentioned the fact that in australia there are 3-4 months a year where everybody just accepts that they’re going to get attacked by magpies. It is literally called “swooping season” and these birds will fly down to peck your fucking face, and people get their eyes ripped out and shit, it’s fucking brutal.

My teacher had to go to hospital and have surgery because of swooping season. It was in the parking lot of school and all the kids would do a mad dash towards the car as the magpies tried to kill us.

no but when you’re 12 years old and riding your bike like mad on the way home from school with an icecream bucket on your head with like branches and shit sticking out if it to scare them off and none of this is considered strange

what the actual fuck australia 

I am pretty sure all of these Australia stories are a massive, globally-spanning trolling effort, and only the people who have visited the country are allowed to be in on the joke.

Nope.

Went there.

Parrots tried to take our car.

Came home IN A FUCKING HURRY.

Adult women are now the largest demographic in gaming:

“Congratulations, gamer girls—you’re officially at the top of the food chain when it comes to games. A new study released by the Entertainment Software Association has revealed that adult women now occupy the largest demographic in the gaming industry. Women over 18 made up a whopping 36 percent of the gaming population, followed by adult men at 35 percent.

Teenage boys, who are often stereotyped as the biggest gamers, now lag far behind their older female counterparts, making up just 17 percent of the gaming demographic.

The picture that emerges from the study is one of expansion across the board. More people are playing more games of various genres across more platforms, with social games on mobile and casual games on PCs emerging as huge leaders.

All of that means that stereotypes are breaking fast in the gaming industry, particularly the longheld stereotype of the adult woman as an outlier who sticks to mobile games and “social” games on Facebook while the more hardcore gamer, the “serious” (male) gamer, goes for console games.

Though this stereotype has long persisted, and even been used as a hiring tactic, the new data suggests there’s little if any truth to it—especially not when you consider that the average adult woman has been gaming for 13 years.

And while the total audience for mobile social games is now bigger than ever, the audience for computer and video games is now an even 50-50 split between male and female genders.”

Read the full piece here

Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post has written one of the most important investigative journalism pieces of 2015. While I'd love to give you Cliff's Notes version of it, this is one of those times where you actually need to go read it, then come back and see my thoughts, or vice versa. Either way, please take some time out of your day to take a deep dive there.

Titled "How companies make millions off lead-poisoned, poor blacks," McCoy's article has unveiled a ugly part of America that most of us didn't know existed. I didn't and I make it my business to track racial injustice of every kind.

As you may know, I'm a Christian. In my faith, we say the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. I apply that idea to most of the injustice that I study and talk about. Faith aside, I believe that a money trail exists for nearly all injustice, so I regularly ask myself, "Who's profiting off of making this group of people, in this place, miserable?" An answer always exists.

McCoy found that in Baltimore and many other cities like it, poor African Americans are suffering from lead poisoning. Yeah, that's still a thing and it's not just making people cough here and there, it's causing permanent brain damage and ruining people's lives. For real.

So companies who are responsible for this, are having to pay people relatively small sums of money as a settlement for what the damage it's caused. For instance, some people with permanent damage are being award between $100,000 to $150,000, but here is where it gets nefarious.

Victims who receive the settlements are rarely given them in one lump sum, but must agree to receive it over a period of decades. They are then being tracked down by companies that are kind of like the cousins of predatory payday lenders that offer them paltry sums up front, like $10,000, in exchange for agreeing to give them all of their remaining checks in perpetuity.

If that's not crazy to you, then we can't be friends. It's absurd and shouldn't even be allowed, particularly since we are talking about women and men who are actually suffering from brain damage and long-term health deficiencies. The company behind this is named Access Funding and it's profited to the tune of millions and millions of dollars off of this.

The stories and the narratives that McCoy tells in his longer piece are heartbreaking and one of them that you will find in there is Freddie Gray—yeah, that Freddie Gray. Before he was killed by Baltimore police, he had suffered lead poisoning and received a settlement. Like many of his neighbors, he too, was preyed upon by Access Funding.

Sometimes we only know racial injustice that looks like a cross-burning in a front yard, but this, in my book, is just as nefarious, maybe even more so. It's legal and parades itself as a service to the community.

He’s the monster that the GOP created, and the monster that the GOP deserves.

thesanityclause:

damnitfeelsgoodtobeafangirl:

A Death Metal Magical girl to go along with my viking ladies [x] [x]

Despite the fact that my original viking magical girl was me sharing some personal feelings about how I feel about my favourite genre of music, I got of bizarre hate or at least a bunch of people getting super snotty at me about that Valkyrie Yuuki comic existing already. Because hoW DARE I do my own version dealing with my own personal feelings about how I feel. 

So since viking/pagan/folk metal is where I got when in a good mood, death metal is where I go when I’m pissed. So I like this idea of these magical girl being the cavalry that gets called in when she gets tough. She’s fly in when she hears someone talking shit, spit blood in their face and then deliver the heads of her enemies to the feet of all our lovely viking girls.

[tagging for blood and gore. Let me know if I need to cover any more tags] 

I’m just pointing with my mouth open in joy.

Source: The National Network to End Domestic Violence  

I just ran all over my house trying to find my phone because I could hear it ringing, but no matter which room I ran into it sounded like it was right in the next room and I started to suspect that Victor had my phone and was running around with it just to fuck with me.  Then the phone stopped ringing so I asked Victor to call me so I could find it but it still sounded muffled like it was hidden under something big so I was lifting piles of books and looking under cats and then I noticed that Dorothy Barker was following me around and I was like “DID YOU EAT MY PHONE, DOG?” and she looked at me like this:

And Victor said, “The dog is smaller than your phone.  What is wrong with you?” and I was like “I’M BEING HAUNTED BY MY OWN PHONE.  THAT’S WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME” and then Victor sighed and got up to help and started picking up all the shit on my desk because it sounded close and then I bent over to look under my desk and it got louder and louder but nothing was there but the rug, so I pulled back the rug and slowly put my head down on the floorboards and I was all, “Uh.  I think it’s coming from under the house” and Victor shook his head at me and I may have screamed, “MY PHONE IS THE TALE-TELL HEART.  HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?” and Victor was like, “It’s not possible” and I yelled: “TELL THAT TO MY UNDERGROUND PHONE, VICTOR” and that’s when I felt this buzzing on my leg and I thought it was a bee and I thought to myself, ‘First I lose my phone and now bees?  Is this a plague?’ Then I slapped at my leg to stun the bee and that’s when I realized that my phone was in my dress pocket and had been following me around while I looked for it, and when I pulled it out Victor was like “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” and no – no, I was not.  But then I was like, “Well at least it wasn’t bees, Victor” which probably would have made more sense had I explained that I was on the floor punching myself in the leg because I’d thought there were bees in my dress.  Or maybe not.  It’s hard to tell with Victor.

And that’s pretty much how my whole week has been.

Sumptuary laws are the quaint old laws which made it illegal for peasants to look, eat, or travel in more style than the upper classes. They make for very interesting reading. They’d probably be even more interesting if they were introduced today.

Read more...

soph-okonedo:

Kravitz, now 26, doesn’t take any nonsense. She can’t afford to. If her celebrity parents (Lenny – Grammy award-winning musician and Hunger Games actor – and Lisa Bonet, film actor and former star of The Cosby Show) didn’t invite Hollywood bigwigs to make assumptions, her gender, heritage (African-American and Ashkenazi Jewish) or appearance (septum piercing, multiple tattoos: feather, anchor, hawk) would. In an industry that rarely shows black women as anything but, in her words, “best friend of the white girl”, Kravitz works hard to give weight to her flimsy blockbuster roles. There’s often not a lot to work with. In the Divergent series, she played Shailene Woodley’s plucky ally, Christina. In X-Men:First Class, she was Angel Salvadore, an insect-winged mutant who moonlights as a stripper. “I ask writers and producers: ‘Why don’t you have any black people in your film?’, ‘Why do stories happen to white people and everyone else is a punchline?’,” she says. “What I’m finding is that a lot of people don’t see it’s an issue because it’s not their story, unless they’re black or a minority.”[X]

naamahdarling:

rockees:

a ferocious beast

i will reblog these everytime i see them because she is just such a precious little ball of predatory fury

<img src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/M2Fw.QpuRFFHxPepSRTa6w--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9NTQwO2g9MzcyO2lsPXBsYW5l/https://s.yimg.com/cd/resizer/2.0/FIT_TO_WIDTH-w540/48226bfae453a7579d8f748d79a566914bfaa795.jpg" class="StretchedBox W(100%) H(100%) ie-7_H(a)">

Donald Trump and Mike Tyson at the March of Dimes Gourmet Gala at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1989. (Photo: Ron Galella/WireImage via Getty Images)

Over the years, though, some of his comments and business practices have raised questions about his, shall we say, commitment to equality. Early in his business career he was sued by the Justice Department, which charged that his company discriminated against minorities in the huge outer-borough real estate empire Trump inherited from his father; the case was settled with a consent decree in which Trump did not admit wrongdoing. One person who knew Trump well in the 1980s said he seemed to have no African-American business associates in those years — except for the boxer Mike Tyson — although that would not have been unusual in the context of the times. He hasn’t disputed a quote, attributed to him in a book by a former colleague, that he didn’t want “black guys counting my money.” He preferred, he said, “little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” African-Americans may not have been reassured by his remarks to a radio interviewer in 2011 that “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”