Spencer Greenwood

is it possible to fancy someone but not necessarily want to have sex with them……i don’t understand why some people think fancying someone = wanting sex with that person…what about when we were 12 years old u guys

Last week, I raised with the Leader of the House the question of a statement by the Government on the future of the Chagos islands in respect of the feasibility of return report that has been done. The right hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that tomorrow I am attending a meeting at the Foreign Office with Mr Olivier Bancoult, the leader of the Chagos Refugee Association. Will he please ensure that between now and Dissolution, the Government make a statement on their policy on the right of return in order to allow the historical wrong of the expulsion of the islanders from those islands finally to be put right, as promised by his Government at the start of this Parliament. We were promised that a decision would be made in this Parliament. There is a week to go.

Aquamarine //

I think there’s some sort of “official” tumblr gemsona activity going on right now that I missed out on submitting for, but I’m catching up on the show and I wanted to draw one anyway.

I find the rough stone so much more visually appealing than the cut and polished gem.

STRONGER THAN YOU

“If you break us apart, we’ll just come back newer”

little twitter doodle of Garnet.  Been listening to that damn song on repeat.

starting to change my tune on this game tbh

~Paragon “Beliel”

jeffliujeffliu:

Here’s the demo I arranged for Stronger Than You! Rebecca wrote and recorded the vocal and omnichord tracks, and I put everything else together in Logic. We used this track to figure out the timing for the action sequence and for Estelle to sing to. Aivi and Surasshu then made it a billion times more awesome for the final version!!

The Stronger Than You DEMO! By me & Jeff Liu!

Jeff was helping me figure out this rhythm that I couldn’t quite pin down, you can hear me tapping it out on the table in the background of this track!

Some random angel thing, and also guess who’s finally watching Steven Universe

Please allow me to extend to you the most cordial and heartfelt invitation to eat my entire ass.

Ash

Jasper doodle. evil bara tiger wife 

surasshu:

This definitely qualifies as a career highlight for me! The song was composed by Rebecca Sugar, and an initial demo arrangement was made by Jeff Liu, which Estelle sang over. Estelle is one of my favorite modern R&B singers, so this was a daunting and yet enticing proposition to arrange.

Taking Jeff’s arrangement as a guideline, we really wanted to emphasize the euphoria of Garnet being reformed. Rebecca told us to capture the feeling of “there’s no way she could lose”. I also felt that the new Garnet design warranted a new Garnet bass sound (for those of you keeping score: where Pearl is piano, Garnet is represented by synthbass), so this was a great opportunity to showcase it. I also felt like the bridge needed a synth solo, so I went all out on this one!

Aivi did a fantastic job adding to this arrangement by making the string sections magical (especially at the end when the song turns dramatic) which were then beautifully performed by Jeff Ball. Everybody did such a great job with this song, and I’m extremely proud of the final result.

Thank you all for watching the season finale! Tune in tomorrow for Full Disclosure!

I’m overwhelmed, there’s too much to say about this song! Estelle gave me advice when it was still just a concept… after my first draft, Jeff made sense out of it… then Estelle sang it and took it to another level… then Aivi and Surasshu knocked it out of the park… I am so moved and so honored to be working with everyone who made this possible, thank you all so much

Me & Estelle

I fear for others. I fear for those who will be suckered in because the industry, both large and independent, want to seem diverse.

abandoningallosexuality:

(disclaimer: i don’t expect you to understand why i justify working hard on a relationship with someone across the country. it just makes sense to me / i drafted this post as it is now & made some minor adjustments. i originally planned on articulating these feelings a lot better but after i decided people might not understand anyways, i kept it as cryptic as it is.)

maybe nothing will get old / maybe nothing will go sour / ‘maybe’ / mini vacations with each other / planning perfect trips for each other / obsessing over tiny moments / existing where we need to be for ourselves, still being there for each other / anticipating a future together / rushing home to receive letters & packages / being alone in our beds, thinking about each other so hard we can feel/smell/taste each other / rushing to my phone to tell you i miss you whenever i feel like it / rushing to my phone to cry to you when i need to / selfies / reminding each other / driving each other crazy thinking about hands holding & other nonsexual things we’ve discovered we like / talking about non sexual intimate things we could try next time we see each other / slowly creating boundaries from far away / falling asleep over skype / waking up to each other over skype on weekends / asking about each other’s days / knowing each other’s plans/excitement/frustrations/worries/good days/bad days / only getting better at communicating every day / 

what the fuck about this distance could be so bad when she makes me feel this good? there is a constant in my life that asks me about my dreams and how my days went / who supports me / who i admire and who admires me / reminding me that our skin is beautiful / who is happy about things i’m happy about / always reminding me i deserve everything & more / who treats me the way i deserve to be treated / who insists i deserve to be treated even better / reminding me to never apologize / who makes me feel so constantly validated that it almost makes up for feeling so invalidated my entire life 

i’ve never had this before / i’ll take it no matter how far out of physical reach it is

This blog gives me an incredible amount of hope as someone who on more than one occasion has developed feelings for someone I met or only know online. Just being presented with the option like “long-distance can work” is such a relief.

latino-diversity:

The Muxes of Juchitán 

Juchitán is a towns in the southeast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The city which is largely inhabited by the Zapotec Indigenous people, has not only preserved it’s precolonial language and culture, but has also retained gender identities and roles that transcend the traditional western ones. Those which were subjected onto much of the rest of Mexican society by European colonizers. 

This contrasting expression of gender that survives among the Zapotec and Mestizo communities of southern Oaxaca, takes its form in the concept of the muxe. Muxe is a term used to refer to those assigned male at birth, but who identify either as women or as a distinct third-gender. They are an intrinsic part of Zapotec society, and highly respected for the roles they play in families, such as taking care of their elderly parents, when their siblings have moved out of the household. Despite the acceptance of them in many rural areas, they face discrimination in more urban areas, mainly by non-Indigenous people who have inherited the Spanish cultural attitude of machismo. 

I wanted to go for something really specific for Pearl’s tears in Scabbard – Raven and I teamed up on this and traded thumbs and boards back and forth. The first frame here is by Raven and the subsequent poses are me. 

Thanks for watching! Please tune in tomorrow night at 5pm for another new episode, The Message!

“

I live the life of a career sex worker who is black, a woman, and transgender. Blacks, women and transgender people are three marginalized groups and often the thought of encompassing all three is overbearing. I’ve looked for purpose in the eyes of strangers—whether they sat behind a desk, confused as they dissected my qualifications and wondered about my gender identity, or loomed over me, swollen with the often lethal combination of lust and disgust.
Job discrimination is a form of violence. Denying anyone the right to support themselves legally and then criminalizing the means to which they turn to sustain themselves is inhumane and deplorable. For many of us, sex work is a job of last resort. The fact is that we are rarely given an alternative. Many employers simply will not hire trans workers for fear of losing customers. Another act of violence often overlooked is theft of service, typically defined as, “knowingly securing the performance of a service by deception or threat.” This is also an act of violence. When theft of services happens to us, it is rape and the damage goes beyond the monetary value of what we’ve lost. I have been the victim of both. Like many of us, I considered rape one of many occupational hazards and did nothing about it when it happened to me. How do you report something like this, and to whom?
…Four years ago I climbed into a stranger’s car, like I had so many times before. I began to direct him toward a crowded movie theater parking lot which provided the privacy and safety necessary to conduct my business. When I noticed that he was deliberately missing turns, I attempted to open the car door while at a red light. It wouldn’t open from the inside. I turned to look at him and was met with a swift blow to the mouth. I looked up to see the barrel of a pistol. I should’ve been afraid, but I wasn’t. This was not the first time a gun had been in my face. In fact, it was the fourth. I’d never been hit and they usually wanted money, sex, or both. However, I was always able to talk myself out of the situation or escape somehow. What I lacked in strength I certainly made up for in cunning. This time was different.

“I already had to kill my best friend’s mother tonight over drug money… don’t make me have to kill you too.” He said this in a monotone and shifted his eyes back and forth like a snake. Still not grasping the full extent of the danger I was in I joked that he was good looking guy and could easily get any girl he desired without all this drama. He did not laugh. He only drove. Four hours later, having seduced him, apprehended the gun. and having jumped from a moving vehicle, I was battered and bruised, barefoot and carrying a gun that I later discovered was fully loaded. I was alive and filled with gratitude. Little did I know my victimization would continue.

After this ordeal, I woke up in the hospital bed with my arm handcuffed to the bed. Apparently, I’d failed to appear in traffic court for a minor offense. I hardly thought the cuffs were necessary. The SVU detective was standing over me. “Rise and shine,” he said in a condescending tone. Right off the bat, he accused me of prostitution. He said that my injuries must have been the aftermath of a “transaction gone wrong.” They weren’t. In fact things went south before we got to negotiate a price. He mentioned that he was reluctant to pursue the incident considering that, I “was transgender and in a known area of prostitution.” He told me that nobody would believe me and I understood that to mean that they would think I deserved this.

”

- A, Passion reflects on her experiences with violence in “One Black Trans Sex Workers’ December 17th" on Tits and Sass today (via marginalutilite)

The idea of the Economic Man forms the cornerstone of orthodox economic thought, Katrine Marcal, a Swedish journalist, argues in her newly translated book - Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? The bulk of women’s work: caring, cleaning, child-rearing is excluded from the idea of the economic man, who acts out of rational self interest, and must then be incentivised to work through monetary remuneration. Marcal argues that when looking at how Adam Smith’s dinner arrived at the table: through the baker, the butcher, the farmer, all of whom carried out their work due to rational self interest, economic theory overlooks the final stage - his mother, who lived with the unmarried philosopher for his entire life, cooked his dinner, and did so because of love, and familial ties.

But this could be changing, with big implications for women. Late last year, the UK’s Office for National Statistics announced unpaid care and housework would be included in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) calculations, classed as “unpaid GDP”. Essentially, if the task carried out unpaid could have been carried out by a worker, be it cleaning, childcare or elderly care, it will be given a value. This is no small move: the estimated value of unpaid GDP (still predominantly the burden of women) £440.2billion. Cleaning and laundry alone was worth £97.2billion in 2012, the equivalent of 5.9 per cent of GDP. Unpaid childcare was worth £343billion when calculated in 2010, which represents approximately three times the contribution of the entire financial services industry in the UK.

Depending on your position in the economy, the relation between your motivation in work and how much you’re paid differs wildly. A recent undercover investigation revealed British MPs Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind on camera negotiating cash for access to senior politicians, with journalists posing as senior executives of a fake Chinese firm. In response to the scandal, other politicians clamoured to defend the eye watering sums many command in second jobs and nebulous consultancy roles, arguing that an MP’s flat rate of pay, excluding expenses for travel, accommodation and living costs, is £67,000 a year. To attract the best, the public were told, the salary needed to rise.

At the opposite end of the scale, the story is different. Across Europe and the United States, wages have stagnated for the poorest post-crash. The austerity project filters down to the pay checks of the ordinary citizen, but somehow the highest paid have plead extenuating circumstances and lobbied for higher pay. The average FTSE100 chief executive is now paid 130 times the salary of their average employee. To keep these people working, they need to be paid exorbitant sums. Meanwhile, the UK government have increased the rate of sanctions on unemployed people’s subsistence benefits. For the poorest, the stick remains, while the rich hoard carrots.

For once, women have been relatively cushioned from part of the blow, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies: because women are more likely to work in public sector jobs, and wages have been more protected through unionisation, than they would be in the private sector.

But part of the reason women’s pay has dropped at a lower rate is because women were paid less to start with: income tax receipts returned to the UK Treasury have been lower than expected, this year, which impacts on growth. This weathering only applies to women in employment however - for unemployed women, especially single mothers and disabled women, the story is very different. And as Marcal points out, the “invisible labour” that remains largely the women’s realm, is absent from free market economic thought.

“The truth is, we are all dependent and therefore society’s task cannot be to separate those who nourish from those who consume”.

“Housework is cyclical in nature. Therefore, women’s work wasn’t an economic activity. What she did was just a logical extension of her fair, loving nature. She would always carry out this work, so it didn’t need quantifying.” This attitude carries across into paid work. When teachers and nurses pay is squeezed, their hours lengthened, it’s assumed that the work they carry out, with it’s direct impact on young or vulnerable lives, will be carried out regardless: there’s too much at stake for a nurse not to administer care, or for a teacher to deliver a lacklustre class or spend less time marking and lesson planning.

Employees in male-dominated roles on the other hand, are compensated for their greed. Ministers and MPs clamoured in the wake of the Straw/Rifkind scandal for more pay to attract “the brightest and best”. Whereas when care home abuse scandals are revealed, the answer seems to be more surveillance: installing CCTV in rooms, rather than asking why skilled carers for the most vulnerable are paid so little. “Economics should help us rise against fear and greed. It should not exploit these feelings,” Marcal argues. The reaction to the cash for access scandal from MPs, that the answer to greed is to institutionally satisfy the money grabbers rather than discipline them for unethical and corrupt behaviour makes little sense in this respect.

“There is nothing in a woman’s biology that makes her better suited to unpaid housework. Or wearing herself out in a vastly unpaid job in the public sector,” Marcal points out. But biological essentialism is helpful for free market economics - if you can argue women are naturally suited and predisposed to the jobs that are paid less, or even nothing at all, you can do without examining why the value we have placed on these roles is so low. If women spend time caring anyway, why pay them as though it’s a professional, learned skill? The structures that mean the economy systematically places a lower value on female-dominated jobs and roles can therefore continue unexamined. Historical oppression of women is seen as a case of evolutionary biology, rather than a systemic worldwide injustice. That women globally were increasingly participating in the workforce, until the global recession, then took the hit, shows that progress in economic equality is still at the behest of historic structural oppression, snapping at the heels of women’s emancipation whenever times get tough.

But actually, none of this is inevitable. During the Greek snap election in January, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras announced that if elected, Syriza would reinstate 595 cleaners, all women, who had been fired by Antonis Samaras’s coalition government. Syriza would achieve this by instead laying off some of the countless financial advisers crowding the Greek parliament’s corridors. The move, which came to pass, was dismissed as “gesture politics” by some on the right. But all politics concerns gestures, and laying out ideological battlelines. And Syriza’s promise made clear that they viewed the women, symbolic of the fact middle-aged Greek women have been particularly hard hit by punishing austerity measures, as more important than the financialisation of the country.

This argument isn’t new, but it’s rare to see it formalised even in so small a way in state politics. Selma James’s Wages for Housework campaign sought to draw attention to how domestic labour, and the affective labour routinely the domain of women’s work is systematically undervalued and excluded from dominant arguments on economic compensation for labour. A report in the US in 2013 by the National Domestic Workers Alliance showed that 95 percent of domestic workers were women, 51 percent were women of colour, 36% were undocumented immigrants, and the vast majority didn’t have health insurance or sick pay. Unpaid care [https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/kate-donald/unpaid-care-missing-women’s-rights-issue] continues to exacerbate and entrench women’s poverty, but a slow sea change in attitudes seems to be emerging post-crash. With the Office for National Statistics accepting that a large part of the country’s productivity is down to women’s unpaid work, and that unpaid work which forms the bedrock of society is a natural resource in itself, the theoretical argument that only cold, rational self interest can keep an economy going looks increasingly precarious.

With a broken and unequal economic system, focussed on wealth transfer from the rich to the poor, the time is right for a reexamination of who gets paid, and for what. Slowly, the value of women’s unpaid and undervalued work is beginning to be appreciated: and once valued correctly, the opportunity to argue for fairer remuneration has to be snatched.

Sideboxes

blackcontemporaryart:

Juliana Huxtable
UNTITLED (FOR STEWART), 2012

M.i.A. - “CanSeeCanDo” [2015]

M.I.A.’s first new track since Matangi that I know of.

Is there anyone with a vocal performance as icy as M.I.A.? Who floats so effortlessly above the mix? It’s like she’s dancing with her voice…….

She is the best at using anti-rhyme. She interrupts her own schemes and creates a disorienting moment.

One of her other talents is making mundane statements like “Yeah. Of course. I’m sure about that.” seem super hard.

So yeah, about that deadline…

I wonder whether my hon. Friend would go further and say that we should not have subsidies in the energy market at all and that it should be a proper free market, with providers getting a market price and consumers paying the market price, rather than additions for what the Prime Minister once described in fairly fruity terms in relation to greenery.

sir-p-audax:

racieb:

strange-circumstances:

It would be rad if the spider side of Tumblr can reblog this with some spider paws.

wow this photo is nearly 8 years old, this was my first spide and her paws

Ophelia is the queen of the spide paw

How am I supposed to deal with these spide paws on a hot pink background as if it weren’t 100% my aesthetic

Here’s Flemeth, the actual Shan Van Vocht of Thedas (“poor old woman”, for real). I give her to you Origins-style, all innocuous and full of spoilers yet to come.

This is one of those unexpected deadline weekends, and I feel like I should be making statements along the lines of, “no more fanart until it’s handed in,” or better yet, “no more until this issue is done”. But that’s like an invitation to rebel against myself, so no promises, gentle internet… no promises.

dion-thesocialist:

No one here seems interested in the grimy parts of mental health. Everyone wants to talk about mental illness as quiet introverts drinking tea and nervously stuttering over words. No one ever talks about symptoms like paranoia or hallucinations or hypersexuality or compulsions or homelessness or drug addiction or delusions or psychosis or violent urges. Every time a clearly mentally ill person commits a crime, and someone says, “Hey, maybe this is a sign that we need to improve mental health awareness in this country,” everyone goes to screaming: “This isn’t about mental illness! Mentally ill people aren’t violent!”

But yes, sometimes mentally ill people are violent. Sometimes we are bad people. And even those mentally ill people are in need of advocacy, maybe even more so.

When you post “Protect people with mental illnesses at all costs,” do you mean all of us, or just the cute ones?

Yes you read that right. Iain Duncan Smith is giving a speech about compassion to Canadian Conservatives in Ottawa, today. You can read more about it  here . For any readers in Canada, who don’t know that Iain Duncan Smith is a serial liar  and what Iain Duncan Smith says, and what Iain Duncan Smith… Continue Reading Iain Duncan Smith is giving a speech in Ottawa …… about compassion #MNC2015 #CDNPoli

Sputnik Dog Simulator is a game about being a dog in space by Reed Erlandson.

Play Online

Why Try It: Unusual and interesting narrative & design structure.

Mood: Sad

Author’s Notes: “Be sure to right-click and enter fullscreen mode before playing! Use the scroll wheel to move, hold the left and right mouse buttons while scrolling to adjust speed.“

You Might Also Like: Stowaway, The End of Us