Context: my teacher translated the verb “to grasp with one’s hand” as “to fist” since that’s kinda what it literally means, but you can’t translate it like that into English because “to fist” means something ENTIRELY different, but she doesn’t know that.
So she was explaining how they use the verb to describe the angel of death taking your soul — he rips your soul out of you with his fist. Now that’s pretty damn metal, but she said word for word “the angel of death fists you, and then you die” which is the single most terrifying and powerful sentence to ever grace my ears
Today at after-camp daycare, we played Life and Death and God.
Basically, it’s the Game of Life but with some alterations created by the six 8-10 year old boys that were there. I was designated writer of The List Of Stuff, aka the list in which anything we currently “possessed” (ie houses, children, pets, spouses, Gifts From God) was listed under our name so we could keep track.
God was played by the one boy who didn’t want to actually play. When I asked him how God was going to fit into the game, he said that God worked in mysterious ways so he could randomly give people News From God whenever he felt like it. We settled that if someone spun a three, they’d receive a miracle, and if they spun a seven, they’d get bad news, and at the end of every round (ie when everyone had had a turn) he could make a new rule for the world.
“Dude, you should’ve prayed more,” God told one boy as he spun a seven. “Your dog got possessed by a demon and ate your baby. You need to get an exorcism. That costs $50,000 and a life card.”
“Aww man,” the unfortunate demon dog owner said. “Not Shark Tooth Junior. She’s my only daughter.” Flips through his money “What if I don’t want to spend money to get an exorcism?”
God shrugged. “Then I guess you can keep a demon dog,” he said, “but it requires a human sacrifice every turn or it’ll eat you.”
The demon dog owner sighed and paid the money, and I crossed off both Shark Tooth Junior and Chicken Strip the dog off his List Of Stuff.
“Congratulations!” God said on another turn. “You’re pregnant!”
“But I’m a man.”
“That’s why it’s a miracle,” God pointed out. “It’s the next Jesus! Also you have to name him Jesus The Second cause I’m God and I say so.”
I was blessed with the ability to turn water into wine at one point, and started a winery as a side business. Both were added to my List Of Stuff.
At one point, not long after he’d had his first child, one of the boys’ mom came to pick him up.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to go.”
“Give me a minute, Mom,” he called back. “I’m dead. We have to read my will.”
Thus proceeded the reading in which I read through his List Of Stuff one by one and he declared who each item/ability/person/animal went to and I then transferred each thing to other Lists Of Stuff.
“Your wife,” I read. “Elizabeth.”
“I’m leaving her to,” he trailed off, tapping his chin as he considered his options. “You, Kee.”
“You can’t give Kee your wife!” another boy protested, one who had already received three of the dead boy’s children. “That’d make her gay!”
“Kee can be gay if she wants to be,” the dead boy pointed out.
“Yeah,” the boy agreed, “but she’s already got a husband.”
“She can have a husband and a wife,” God declared. “It’s called being bisexual. It’s allowed. Plus I’m God, so that makes it double allowed.”
And that was how I ended up receiving everyone’s wives in their wills, and ended up married to my original husband, Lizard, and my four wives, Elizabeth, Lizzy, Eliza, and Shark Tooth (there was a theme that God had declared we had to follow in naming our spouses, a declaration which came after one of the boys had already married Shark Tooth). I had no children of my own, but had eventually received dozens in wills, as I ultimately ended up as the last person left in after-camp.
And yeah. Life and Death and God was definitely a fun time, and I feel like we’ll be playing it again in after-camp tomorrow. It felt a little like dnd, tbh, with God being the dungeon master, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to spice up their Game of Life. You could probably add in a drinking game aspect if you’re not playing with small children, or make like God Cards or something for people to pull from if no one wants to be God.
“plus i’m God, so that makes it double allowed” is the best sentence i’ve read all day
When you hit your elbow against something, but that specific point of your elbow
it’s…called your funny bone…
that gif tho
It’s not a bone actually- it’s a nerve that is exposed, specifically the ulnar nerve. The reason it feels so weird to hit it is that it’s not designed to deliver pain signals, so when you hit it it just wiggs out and sends Garbage signals to the brain, and the brain is just like “uh, dude- Ulnar, what the hell is this garbage?? You’re supposed to curl a finger and a half, and move some muscles in the forearm, why are you sending me this crap? How am I supposed to make this into sensory output?” And the Ulnar nerve is just like “dude dude dude, brain- what the hell is going on?!?” And the brain goes- “idiot. Fine. You’re on fire, freezing and being electrocuted. Happy?” And the Ulnar goes “holy crap brain!! I’m on fire, freezing and being electrocuted! What am I going to do!!??!” And the brain says “you’re an idiot ulnar. A damn idiot.”
[image description: a screenshot of a tweet by Students for Liberty @sfliberty that says, “Bruuuh” with an image of an owl whose eyes are rolling back in it’s head. Over the owl is text that says. “When someone praises socialism”.
Below that is another tweet that is responding. This tweet is by Dr. Owl @USdotard and says, “Owl expert here! (Ornithologist) That owl is in fact orgasming”]
I promise I’m not trying to be rude with this very brisk response. I haven’t eaten yet, and I’m quite tired as a result, and then I just spent basically all my energy for the morning being delighted by the existence of flags.
For further research, the keyword you’ll want to look for is “leather culture.” Generally, research tagged with BDSM will be about the psychological impacts of BDSM, the difficulties it can present to relationship therapists, etc. Leather culture will tend to be specifically about the historic interrelation of queer and kinky identities.
* Sorry about this one, it’s a pay-to-access article that I read in college years ago, and I haven’t the slightest idea where to get it for free today. But if you have a student email, you might be able to log into your databases and find it there.
A couple of quick things to add to this, if I might?
First: transgressive. It’s something I’m finding myself coming back to more and more when I have to give talks that deal with anything historical. It often has slipped people’s minds that at one point holding the hand of your boyfriend (as a guy) in public was transgressive. It was often akin, and I mean this sincerely, and in fact I recall people treating it as if we were – having full on sex in the street. It’s often important to remind myself that there was no differentiation. We had sex with people of our own gender and thatwas kinky. So we were fair game to speculate. A looot of people did the whole thing of “but… how do you… you know.” And from that came a lot of “well, I bet they screw sheep, too!” and kids and we had whips and everyone was into watersports and…
Anything outside the missionary and we probably were all doing it, and like rabbits. And my, Betty, wasn’t that just horrid?
Part of the power move a lot of people I know used (and still do) is to use the thing people don’t dare talk about and secretly spend all their time thinking about against them. We showed up in leather. We made out in public. We were raunchy as hell at protests because it set people off.
We weren’t ashamed of liking sex. If y’all were, well then… watch this.
There were always people who have felt that who they are in bed with makes them no different than anyone else. We were not loved by our own community during the heavy protest days because we were different. And some felt, feel, that kink, leather, drag and so on was too in your face, too visible. That it did too much away from assimilation into society.
Kink is a sliding spot on a spectrum that is changed by where you stand. When I first came out kink was This Thing that was ritual and dark corners and not talked about and a club I wanted to join without knowing what it was. After some time I still thought… well, I’m not that kinky. But then I realized to some straight people screwing around with a guy was kinky. And then to some gay guys my leather made me kinky. And then to some guys my D/s relationship made me kinky. But to others it was just barely kinky.
It often seems less that there is a specific group in our community that came forward as much as the label slowly wore off the bulk of it as assimilation / acceptance (rough though it may be) progressed.
But that’s mainly personal opinion and should not be seen as “This is historical fact”.
This is what my experiences with the kink scene were like as well.
I remain troubled by the weird idea on here that transgression is bad, that shocking or startling other people sometimes is evil, etc.
I think it’s also very important to talk about the MASSIVE cultural shift that took place when kink changed from mainly a queer thing united around the word ‘leather’ to a predominantly cisgender heterosexual culture united around the term ‘BDSM’.
Because the young LGBT people that don’t feel safe around BDSM? They’re not all just conservative sex-negative people. That discomfort is there with some pretty good reasons. Young people that go to a BDSM event these days get into a completely different culture from what existed in leather culture.
The leather culture was a very broad sex-positive space that embraced things like anal sex, watersports, anonymous hookups in darkrooms, bondage, pet play, masochism, diapers, rubber, etc, etc, etc. But none of these sex acts defined leather culture. You could do none of the things that currently make up the BDSM acronym, and still be a part of leather culture.
And more importantly, leather culture was shaped by queer people, often the most marganilized queer people, and as such it was about subversive living. Redefining beauty standards, fucking over gender roles, queering everything. Leather culture was a big ‘fuck you’ to everything ‘respectable’ and as such it went hand in hand with all the movements that wanted to bring down the oppressive systems of our society. .
BDSM only became a popular term in the mid-1990s and it is defined specifically by the sex acts of the BDSM acronym. So here you have a subculture that is all about power and control and full of mostly cisgender heterosexual dominant white men forming the most important leaders and culture definers. When I look around an average BDSM space now, I see shit like:
a blatantly sexist overlap between what is considered masculine and feminine and what is considered dominant and submissive
a false ‘BDSM vs. vanilla’ binary as if all the other kinks no longer matter
a pretty strong ‘more intense BDSM is better because vanilla is boring’ culture that encourages people to ‘push their boundaries’ (jikes)
a lot of unquestioning reproductions of rape culture and an obvious assumption that everyone gets off on these same images
a complete denial that maybe some of this attracts people who really aren’t into this whole consent thing
(the old ‘no true scotsman’ thing: “Yes, Danny over there is creepy and pushy but he’s a Dom so we let him and all the subs just warn each other about him behind his back)
a tendency to hide rapists and silence victims because talking openly about rape in BDSM communities might damage the reputation of BDSM
a looooot of racism (white folks having slave auctions for fun? hello…)
a lot of commercialisation (owning all the right toys, going to all the right clubs, getting that premium membership on that dating site)
Homophobia, transphobia, classism, you name it
So, ya know, BDSM culture right now feels extremely unsafe to many andthe important part is that is not because it’s kinky, it’s because it’s a culture build by and still mostly run by cisgender heterosexual white men who get off on dominating women. Which is, ya know, not the most subversive demographic out there. Bringing down the oppressive systems of our society? Not on the agenda.
BDSM culture is either apolitical or focussed on assimilation and absolutely celebrates the dominant paradigism in society.
Leather culture
wasn’t perfect by far, but it was about breaking down
standards of what beauty and sexuality looked like,
rejecting dominant paradigism in society and that united it with all the struggles against oppression.
Which is why I’d loooooove for queer spaces to become more sex-positive and kink-positive again but I’d haaaaate for them to ‘ally with the BDSM movement’ or reproduce the shitty culture that BDSM has cooked up in the last 20+ years.
BDSM culture right now feels extremely unsafe to many andthe important part is that is not because it’s kinky, it’s because it’s a culture build by and still mostly run by cisgender heterosexual white men who get off on dominating women.
i’ve seen this post a couple of times and probably reblogged it before without this last bit of commentary but that last addition is so so fucking important so please have it again.
(also, this post is a super good articulation of why I feel deeply uncomfortable in kink spaces that are run by and/or focused on cisgender heterosexuals, especially those who fall into the dominant man/submissive woman dynamic. especially in nyc, where those are the places that get you all the attention and backpats. i can’t do it. i’ve tried and i feel sick and frightened and anxious and deeply unwelcome the whole time, and i don’t think i’ll ever again engage in a kink space that isn’t by and for LGBTQ people. in fact, the only spaces in which i personally consistently feel safe are, surprise coincidence, those which have explicitly stated that cisgender heterosexual people are not allowed.)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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