“Floating islands are common in Minnesota; it’s the size of this one that’s causing all the fuss. Sue Galatowitsch, a wetland ecologist at the University of Minnesota, says the island likely weighs at least 1,000 tons and could extend 30 feet below the water. Technically, it’s a floating bog. A natural assemblage of peat moss festooned with cattails and tamarack trees, the bog is more than four acres across—that’s about 64 tennis courts. ‘A bog that size,’ Galatowitsch says, “can kind of do whatever it wants.“
hot take but maybe those white boys going around shooting everyone shouldn’t have friends
sound like the kinda person that would be dangerous to be friends with cause you know they think it’s okay to shoot people to death when things aren’t going their way.
you know who else doesn’t have shit going their way who are bullied even more? black kids, jewish kids, trans kids, gay kids, native kids, and i can fucking go on.
you know who aint doing all these shootings? yeah, you fucking know.
drag me but i don’t respect these mass shooters and ain’t going to tote around the idea that they deserve friends and that it would have saved people.
people shouldn’t have to be friends with dudes that think its ok to murder innocent people
like how absolutely disgusting is it to demand friendship at gunpoint
I’m going to say something here, but before I do, I think I should qualify the following: I am a cisgendered white male, who in my high school years, identified as completely straight, as I was still not fully aware of demisexuality.
I was also very heavily bullied. I came from a poor home, with divorced parents, my dad was an abusive alcoholic and my mother lived with a fucking heroin addict who regularly stole the grocery money to feed his habit. I was also seeing the school counselor regularly because I was in a constant depressive state, with a side of anxiety. I was basically the poster child for everything the far right wants to portray as the things that make a school shooter, i.e; unstable home life, bullied, loner, poor, & mentally ill.
I want to make it clear, though, that I agree with everything stated above. Bullying made me angry sometimes, sure, but not once did I ever decide “Hey, killing everyone would solve my problems!”.
These mass murdering fuckheads are the problem. Stop blaming it on the people who won’t be friends with them, and start blaming it on the people who think that murder is an acceptable response to loneliness and/or bullying.
This is something fundamentally wrong with the shooters, not something wrong with the people around them. Blaming it on the kids who didn’t make an effort to be friends with the guy who thinks murder would solve his problems is the laziest possible way to avoid discussing the real problems aside from saying “thoughts and prayers” and then never discussing it again.
I think it’s also important to point out most of these people ARE THE BULLIES. The reason they don’t have friends isn’t random: they choose to be unlikeable people by being bullies.
I feel torn about tumblr’s love of southern gothic. There’s a lot of cool stuff in that genre to be admired, but I feel like sometimes those posts (especially when made by people who don’t live in the south- and hey, neither do I) come across as “aren’t poor people spooooky?”
As a born-and-raised southerner, I was surprised to discover this literary convention because a lot of modern southern gothic fantasy written by southerners focuses on old-money families who turn out to be [witches/werewolves/vampires/etc]. I didn’t encounter the “scary redneck mountain people” variant in non-fantastical media until later, and it baffles me because the modern southern elite are TERRIFYING.
Endlessly smiling hypocritical senators in tacky palatial houses with wives who espouse “traditional values” while being poisonously sweet and cutthroat? Those make much more frightening antagonists for gothic heroes/heroines to fight. If you live in the south you will probably never meet backwoods demon sibling-spouses but you’ve definitely seen the void staring out of a “Live, Laugh, Love” picture frame.
ACCURATE
Tumblr inherently misunderstands the function of Southern Gothic literature and has appropriated it for its pervasive almost supernatural poetic style. They don’t understand its themes, why it was written, or how to properly write it. Actual Southern Gothic literature is not as melodramatic as one might think and it isn’t about aesthetic style points. It’s style is actually scathingly sarcastic in a nearly caustic way, and it’s meant to amplify structural violence by turning upstanding members of society into villains. It does make the poor grotesque at time, but in the same novel also redeems them by showing how societal ills have painted an unfair picture.
Southern Gothic is a genre for the poor, the colored, the queer; it’s not about signs that say “Hell is here” or forcing tired stereotypes that fundamentally misunderstand poverty, racism, and homo-/transphobia onto the South in a sweeping sensationalist way. Appropriated Gothic Americana aesthetic takes the voice from Southern authors who want to talk about real systemic wrongs and evils in a way that provides accurate social commentary.
That’s not to say that the neo-gothic Americana style that Tumblr has no merit; it’s just difficult as a southern writer to watch people play around with serious topics for the sake of dramatic aesthetics and not realize that they’re being harmful and sort of mocking a tradition that they haven’t bothered to really study.
30k comments in and somebody finally understood what I was getting at.
1.) one or both of people you see as a “straight couple” could be pan/bi/poly/ace
2.) one or both of them could be trans or non binary
3.) you could be misgendering someone
4.) They could be there to give moral support to a queer friend or family member who didn’t want to go alone.
Number four is important
5. They could be there because they support the cause stop fucking gatekeeping
6. They could be there in memory of a loved one, don’t forget Pride used to be a memorial as well as a celebration. I know a good number of straight people who go to Pride to celebrate the lives of friends and family who have died because they want to remember them as they lived, happy and joyful and surrounded by a community that loved them.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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