Someone asked me a few years ago, so I did my usual quick research to see what it was and make a joke. I couldn’t quite figure it out at first, there were many plotlines and characters and concepts. I learned a bunch and found only more, and more. I tried reading the real thing but found it to be far too large to read in one lifetime, let alone for a factoid post. In the years since, I have learned more and more yet still know nothing. Knowing a finite portion of an infinite thing is like dividing by zero, it equals zero. I know much, but know nothing, for the amount of info required to explain Homestuck is just not possible. Even still people tell me, oh, that’s a Homestuck meme but there is no rhyme nor reason as to what might be from Homestuck. No limit.
Homestuck is beyond my understanding. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe my mind just isn’t solid enough to handle the weight of it. Also wtf is this thing???
hot girl throwing up in a dumpster outside the club
okay so decided to reverse image search and it’s apparently a memorial to unborn babies lost during or immediately after pregnancy due to genetic defects (website says trisomy 18 specifically)
so as much as I love to make a joke on here, I’m going to retract my last comment and replace it with:
fuck you, that’s absolutely ghoulish behavior to co-opt someone else’s grief, strip it of context, and warp it’s meaning to fit your personal beliefs i hope you die in a car fire
Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa?
Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now?
On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…
And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.
We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.
As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.
I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.
… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.
Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.
This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.
No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.
Purity is one of the worst, most harmful myths humans ever invented.
Rebloging for this amazing reply telling us how to actually handle this, because yeah, sometimes I’ll simply shut down trying to find something that doesn’t cause harm to anyone
hey y’all, I made some discord emojis who properly convey how I feel sometimes. I can’t really feel these emotions in the other ones. feel free to use them!
i am a firm supporter of changing your name to whatever you want regardless of your gender. if a woman wants to go by matt then matt she shall be. godspeed
I can absolutely Feel the anger radiating off this person and I am For it
In america before Stonewall, the big movement was “Homophiles” (they didn’t use homosexual because they didn’t want to be seen as all about sex). Cis, well off, lesbians and gay men, whose whole thing was “were just like you, and we just want to do our gay thing in private.” Their galas were rich people only. If you didn’t have a suit or dress, and if you didn’t follow gender norms, fuck you, you’re out.
Stonewall, the rioting of the poor queers, absolutely shattered their movement. We were out and proud. “We’re here, we’re queer, deal with it”. The concept of coming out was born.
Seeing this resurgence in what is essentially the homophobe movement is disturbing.
