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Aug. 26th, 2016 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* "Venomous Snakes Ride Ocean Currents Around the World:" http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/venomous-sea-snakes-travel-oceans-miles/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20160823news-seasnakes&utm_campaign=Content&sf34181186=1
* "Biden reassures Baltic NATO allies of US fidelity:"
* "GOP establishment's chief antagonist is Trump's biggest backer:"
* I originally from the Philly area. Me watching the footage of Mike Pence awkwardly trying to explain to a barber in NORRISTOWN who he his because the guy had never heard of him and that barber's reaction to the Trump reveal: Bwahahahahaha! He went to NORRISTOWN and expected to find a TRUMP SUPPORTER. Bwahahahahaha!
Look, I did my internship at sixteen in Norristown. We called the zoo there "Grandad's Zoo" because it was the one Grand dad took us to often when he was alive (as opposed to the vastly bigger Philadelphia Zoo were Mom or school would take us). I had friends from Noristown who I used to drive home. My sister and her husband live there. This is not some sideways mock of Norristown. I'm just saying, ask any local where in Philadelphia and environs, you were likely to find the trump voters, not only would Norristown not be on the list, it would be on the short list of places one would assume Trump would lose in a landslide. Like, all they had to do was ask a local.
* "Hundreds protest over murder of trans woman in Istanbul:" http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/08/hundreds-protest-murder-trans-woman-istanbul-160821192103933.html
* "Diabetes Patients Are Losing Limbs And Sight Because They Can’t Afford Insulin:" https://consumerist.com/2016/08/23/diabetes-patients-are-losing-limbs-and-sight-because-they-cant-afford-insulin/
* "Lawmakers demand answers over soaring cost of potentially life-saving EpiPens:" http://www.cbsnews.com/news/epipen-price-hike-senator-amy-klobuchar-charles-grassley-martin-shkreli/
* "Charter Schools: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):"
* Tuesday night after swimming, I came down with pretty brutal food poisoning, hence the relative quiet between then and now.
* I'm only somewhere mid-season three of Shameless, so grain of salt, but I wanted to say how glad I am that they included Mickey Milkovich as a character, because you don't see guys like him on shows, and it matters.
To explain why I get so worked up about this, I need to explain something about the class geography of where I'm from. Right before high School, we moved out of a working class suburb (mixed houses and massive apartment complexes mostly full of minimum wage workers and new immigrants) into a house we inherited from my mom's Aunts (whom I loved dearly, BTW, but I write about that a lot and it's not pertinent to the story). There was this road next to the abandoned Catholic School a very short walk from my house, that was an invisible class divide. On the side where I now suddenly lived, were lower to upper middle people, with the occasional pocket of the rich. A lot of the middle class housing was bought by WWII vets with the subsidized loans that gave white vets in the 40's and 50's. The rest was mostly management, white collar workers, and people with professions. As I've mentioned before, I was constantly code switching growing up. Most of our immediate neighbors were skilled blue collar, my Mom and her family were middle class, My dad and his family were mostly unskilled working class (he was a scholarship kid and clawed his way up to a heavily mortgage house with scholarships), and I had a scholarship to a prep school. I was an accent chameleon and I needed to be if I didn't want to get beaten on a regular basis either at school or in my neighborhood. I also was oddly socialized for a variety of reasons I've written about elsewhere, and my sexual mores and attitudes to things like gender and orientation had way more to do with John Varley and other Science fiction writera and the rather relaxed attitude towards orientation one picks up in an institution that is very early in the process of switching from an entirely homosocial male environment to coed.
It was a whole other world on the other side of the street. It was the '80's, so the original neighborhood was breaking down. When my mom was growing up it was entirely ethnically self segregated, as in there were three Catholic churches: one for Italians, one for Irish, and one for Poles, and God help someone turning up in the wrong one for services. By my day, some of the churches were gone and the Italians and Irish had to share (but wouldn't cross the street to go to the Polish church because it was on the wrong side of another major divider), white and black Methodists were going to one church, the Eastern and Western European Jews were sharing a synagogue, etc.. Everyone except the African Americans and the Irish generally still had grandparents that still spoke yiddish or German or Italian or Polish or whatever, but people had started to buy houses or rent apartments in places they wouldn't have a generation before and people were surviving mixed marriages in place instead of having to leave for somewhere else.
The people with houses were also often WWII vets, but they were the guys that worked in the canning factory or as labourers, instead of the line boss or the guy running the construction crew or a plumber. It was small, but crucial. Or neighborhood was up on the Hill. The further down the hill you were, the poorer you were. The people at the bottom were barely scraping buy in shitty apartments that were very likely killing their kids with the mold and the peeling lead paint, and there were all these invisible boarders, like the road by the abandoned school. Class lines, what was left of the ethnic lines, culture lines.
My coming from the neighborhood I came from before where the class deciding road was a lot more permeable because we each had resources the other needed and people passed through each other's neighborhoods to get places they needed to go (We had the corner store, the only decent source of groceries in walking distance. They had a good playground and on the other side of them were things like the bank and the movie theater and public transport into Philly proper) did not prepare me for how impermeable certain of the lines were in my new neighborhood. This is the root cause of the tragedy.
So time passed, I got a job and a driver's license, and I started dating local boys, but my school was a 35 minute commute away each way on a good day (up two hours on a bad), which might have been on the moon for the culture difference. I didn't go to the local high school and I only knew the local boys from things like work. I didn't know the histories of the old feuds between individual families and neighborhoods. I didn't know every bodies siblings unless they worked there. My sister was 4 grades younger than me and going through her couple years of nearly dying thing and so that gave me no heads up.
I was immune to a lot of the social rules without knowing they existed because I lived on my side of the road. Oh, I had my share of fist fights at work and had my tires slashed and the like (I never swung first, but I would swing second and fought like a hellion until the other person stopped or was stopped. I'd then clean up and go back to work except that time they took me out in an ambulance), but I wasn't in the sort of danger my friends were. Down the Hill a mile or two they would beat the shit out of you for being LGBTQIA. Down by the river, there was a good chance they'd kill you. Gender roles were strictly enforced, though they were wider than they had been. There were Expectations. Unwritten cultural rules. Some of these rules were in forced by cops, gangs, and biker gangs depending on your geography. Some were enforced by the neighborhood people in general.
I wasn't willing to touch the dudes at my school for a whole lot of reasons, but I knew who was fucking whom and the whole incestuous history of the other 99 people in my graduating class. There was only one guy fully out as in used the bisexual label for himself, but the closet door was only ever half closed in an environment like that. With our sex ratio (80 to 20), it's basically a prison sex situation. You knew so and so had been with guys or with women or with both, but you didn't know if it was preference, availability, or a mouth is mouth, if you see what I mean. It was generally safe to assume bi unless otherwise stated.
Down in the neighborhoods it was different. Gay or bi could be a death sentence, see. So people you knew damned well were gay were careful to go around with beards. The bi boys kept it to themselves. People plotted escapes or didn't. A lot of people married right out of high school and the dating was a=intense as a result in a way that it wasn't at my school where everyone was going to college and no one married high school sweet hearts. My Sister and I were going to college. We never even questioned it, though my sister's school kept trying to force her out of college track into voc because she was disabled and every year my Mom had to storm over there and fight them tooth and nail for her schooling. For me, college was the way out. For me, dating was how I was filling time until I got the hell out of there. I would literally fuck all day or night given time and a chance. I certainly fell in love often enough, but I knew the exact date I was punching out of Philly and environs and I wasn't taking anyone with me.
I dated a few guys from my side of the line, but mostly I dated guys from the neighborhood because I couldn't even begin to realate to people wiuth normal childhoods who' never seen any of the dark shit. My boys went through different dark shit than I had, but we were veterans of a violent sort of world that moneyed people who had never really struggled couldn't understand or identify with. A lot of my boys had some brand of PTSD, various kinds of other mental illness like depression, etc.. Some of them had been through the court system. Some of them came from scary ass homes. One of my friends had a parent kill the other parent in front of him. My friends and lovers had scars both physical and emotional. For them, the closet was jammed closed and barred with furniture piled in front because anything else was suicide.
I got that on an intellectual level and I cared about them. I did my best to give them glimpses of the way out. I wasn't one of them. I was basically dating Mickey Milkovich either singly or in pairs from sixteen to eighteen. My Mickeys were generally a bit prettier, but they were coming from places like that. Dad's with baseball bats they were willing to use on all comers including their kids. The boy who kept trying to kill his dad because he couldn't take it anymore, etc. etc..
Boys like that will fuck women if they can and be seen to it openly for afety, and if they can't, they pretend they want to loudly and often. Boys like that don't say "I love you" to other boys.
That thing in the beginning of season three where Ian asks Mickey's sister how to tell if a boy likes you? Ouch. Because I'd seen mickey express his love in the most pinpoint way he could in season two. That thing were he goes back to jail instead of killing Ian's shitty Dad? I can't imagine a louder "I love you." It's in Mickey's eyes every time he looks at Ian. But he can't say it, because saying it is death. Ian can't see it because he's too young and insecure and inexperienced, but he also can't see it because he lives on the other side of an invisible line. His family has fucked up parents and is poor, etc., but his family loves him and keeps him safe. He has support. Mickey is the kind of alone there are no words for. To someone outside those neighborhoods, Ian and Mickey's families might look equivalent, but they aren't. Ian has a subtle extra bit of privilege he can't really see until they get caught, and even then, I don't think he grasps the weight of it, the pressure Mickey is under every waking second, the sacrifices he makes constantly to stay some approximation of sane, the sacrifices he makes for Ian.
I'm not romanticizing Mickey. He does some terrible things. I do understand him though.
I never made Ian's mistake about love, but oh did my flamboyant, ambiguous ass make the same mistake about the stakes. It's how we all ended up on trial by that biker gang. It's how I ended trading a couple of months of sex work for the life of one of the boys I loved. The two of us saw him and we wanted him and shut the world out, and people who wanted us got more and more jealous, and the three of us were so wrapped up in each other we forgot to be careful. We survived because I lived on the other side of the line and the boy who lived at the bottom of the hill survived because I used that privilege on his behalf and I was willing to sacrifice two nights a week for about three months doing something that literally made me vomit.
Mickey from Shameless breaks my heart. He breaksmy heart because I saw the tragedy in his eyes and in his bruises over and over before I left. It was in the disappearance (likely murdered, but no one official gave a fuck about a Puerto Rican Butch living in a foster home in 1986 inner city Philly) of my beloved Luz at 16, to whom I gave the first word for herself that wasn't a curse. It was in my broken boys. It was in the violence of the boy who attacked me at work to the point I had to go to the ER. It was in the endless over and over tragedy of the boys who never made it out and ended up addicts and/or homeless and/or in prison.
Gentrification ate the old neighborhoods, but the people had to go somewhere when they were pushed out. They say Philly is better now and gangs o cops don't go around group kicking gay men into the hospital, but I'll believe it when the police come clean about the police murder of Nizah Morris and arrest the cop that did it and every cop that destroyed the evidence.
I live in one of the safest states for LGBTQIA folk, but I never forget where I came from. I never forget how seeing how hard it was for boys like Mickey to touch another boy on purpose for the first time in a completely unambiguous context.
Mickey's story is not a pretty one. He's not a model gay or bisexual character. His story is an incredibly important one, because boys in homes like that and neighborhoods like that need to see themselves in media. Boys like that need to see that they aren't alone. Yes, there are white gay men on TV all the time, but nearly all of them present more educated, higher class, cleaner, more together. Mickey's struggle with himself, with his culture, with his father? That's a story that needs to be seen and understood, because boys like Mickey die. A lot. And they only way it gets better is if they can see that there are options like the ones Ian represents, and if their fathers and neighbors get used to the idea and stop killing them or driving them into the streets or to suicide either slow or fast.
* "This Game Of Thrones Theory Changes EVERYTHING:" https://www.buzzfeed.com/cassandra6/this-game-of-thrones-theory-changes-everything-1pp7z
* Current Tavy in characteristic pressed against chest cuddle position: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/149497305982
* How to Fix Olympics Opening Ceremony coverage: 1. Fire Matt Lauer and don't let Hoda anywhere near the place. 2. Hire a bilingual person from the host country as one of the commentators, preferably one well versed in the history, politics, and visual language of that culture (symbolism and the like can vary from culture to culture). 3. The second commentator must be a person of colour whether or not the first commentator is. 4. Subtitle musical performances not in English. Make sure all three commentators completely understand that not everything is about us.
* Aliens vs Wildlife: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/149495000282/shrewreadings-mehay1-slashersivi
* Props to Ripper Street for not only tying in Dracula with it's blood transfusions to a blood fusion case while also seeding the end with the demonstration that said who's blood type matched up between named characters at the precinct. That was some tight writing even without the B plot arc bits.
* Louisiana is having a major flooding disaster, the worst disaster in this country since sandy. Want to help? http://thewightknight.tumblr.com/post/148963870683/the-lonely-one96-almalexiaslouisiana-is
* California is now an official disaster due to out of control fire made worse by the drought. https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.comhttp://www.cnn.com/2016/07/28/asia/indonesia-drug-executions/
* "Biden reassures Baltic NATO allies of US fidelity:"
* "GOP establishment's chief antagonist is Trump's biggest backer:"
* I originally from the Philly area. Me watching the footage of Mike Pence awkwardly trying to explain to a barber in NORRISTOWN who he his because the guy had never heard of him and that barber's reaction to the Trump reveal: Bwahahahahaha! He went to NORRISTOWN and expected to find a TRUMP SUPPORTER. Bwahahahahaha!
Look, I did my internship at sixteen in Norristown. We called the zoo there "Grandad's Zoo" because it was the one Grand dad took us to often when he was alive (as opposed to the vastly bigger Philadelphia Zoo were Mom or school would take us). I had friends from Noristown who I used to drive home. My sister and her husband live there. This is not some sideways mock of Norristown. I'm just saying, ask any local where in Philadelphia and environs, you were likely to find the trump voters, not only would Norristown not be on the list, it would be on the short list of places one would assume Trump would lose in a landslide. Like, all they had to do was ask a local.
* "Hundreds protest over murder of trans woman in Istanbul:" http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/08/hundreds-protest-murder-trans-woman-istanbul-160821192103933.html
* "Diabetes Patients Are Losing Limbs And Sight Because They Can’t Afford Insulin:" https://consumerist.com/2016/08/23/diabetes-patients-are-losing-limbs-and-sight-because-they-cant-afford-insulin/
* "Lawmakers demand answers over soaring cost of potentially life-saving EpiPens:" http://www.cbsnews.com/news/epipen-price-hike-senator-amy-klobuchar-charles-grassley-martin-shkreli/
* "Charter Schools: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):"
* Tuesday night after swimming, I came down with pretty brutal food poisoning, hence the relative quiet between then and now.
* I'm only somewhere mid-season three of Shameless, so grain of salt, but I wanted to say how glad I am that they included Mickey Milkovich as a character, because you don't see guys like him on shows, and it matters.
To explain why I get so worked up about this, I need to explain something about the class geography of where I'm from. Right before high School, we moved out of a working class suburb (mixed houses and massive apartment complexes mostly full of minimum wage workers and new immigrants) into a house we inherited from my mom's Aunts (whom I loved dearly, BTW, but I write about that a lot and it's not pertinent to the story). There was this road next to the abandoned Catholic School a very short walk from my house, that was an invisible class divide. On the side where I now suddenly lived, were lower to upper middle people, with the occasional pocket of the rich. A lot of the middle class housing was bought by WWII vets with the subsidized loans that gave white vets in the 40's and 50's. The rest was mostly management, white collar workers, and people with professions. As I've mentioned before, I was constantly code switching growing up. Most of our immediate neighbors were skilled blue collar, my Mom and her family were middle class, My dad and his family were mostly unskilled working class (he was a scholarship kid and clawed his way up to a heavily mortgage house with scholarships), and I had a scholarship to a prep school. I was an accent chameleon and I needed to be if I didn't want to get beaten on a regular basis either at school or in my neighborhood. I also was oddly socialized for a variety of reasons I've written about elsewhere, and my sexual mores and attitudes to things like gender and orientation had way more to do with John Varley and other Science fiction writera and the rather relaxed attitude towards orientation one picks up in an institution that is very early in the process of switching from an entirely homosocial male environment to coed.
It was a whole other world on the other side of the street. It was the '80's, so the original neighborhood was breaking down. When my mom was growing up it was entirely ethnically self segregated, as in there were three Catholic churches: one for Italians, one for Irish, and one for Poles, and God help someone turning up in the wrong one for services. By my day, some of the churches were gone and the Italians and Irish had to share (but wouldn't cross the street to go to the Polish church because it was on the wrong side of another major divider), white and black Methodists were going to one church, the Eastern and Western European Jews were sharing a synagogue, etc.. Everyone except the African Americans and the Irish generally still had grandparents that still spoke yiddish or German or Italian or Polish or whatever, but people had started to buy houses or rent apartments in places they wouldn't have a generation before and people were surviving mixed marriages in place instead of having to leave for somewhere else.
The people with houses were also often WWII vets, but they were the guys that worked in the canning factory or as labourers, instead of the line boss or the guy running the construction crew or a plumber. It was small, but crucial. Or neighborhood was up on the Hill. The further down the hill you were, the poorer you were. The people at the bottom were barely scraping buy in shitty apartments that were very likely killing their kids with the mold and the peeling lead paint, and there were all these invisible boarders, like the road by the abandoned school. Class lines, what was left of the ethnic lines, culture lines.
My coming from the neighborhood I came from before where the class deciding road was a lot more permeable because we each had resources the other needed and people passed through each other's neighborhoods to get places they needed to go (We had the corner store, the only decent source of groceries in walking distance. They had a good playground and on the other side of them were things like the bank and the movie theater and public transport into Philly proper) did not prepare me for how impermeable certain of the lines were in my new neighborhood. This is the root cause of the tragedy.
So time passed, I got a job and a driver's license, and I started dating local boys, but my school was a 35 minute commute away each way on a good day (up two hours on a bad), which might have been on the moon for the culture difference. I didn't go to the local high school and I only knew the local boys from things like work. I didn't know the histories of the old feuds between individual families and neighborhoods. I didn't know every bodies siblings unless they worked there. My sister was 4 grades younger than me and going through her couple years of nearly dying thing and so that gave me no heads up.
I was immune to a lot of the social rules without knowing they existed because I lived on my side of the road. Oh, I had my share of fist fights at work and had my tires slashed and the like (I never swung first, but I would swing second and fought like a hellion until the other person stopped or was stopped. I'd then clean up and go back to work except that time they took me out in an ambulance), but I wasn't in the sort of danger my friends were. Down the Hill a mile or two they would beat the shit out of you for being LGBTQIA. Down by the river, there was a good chance they'd kill you. Gender roles were strictly enforced, though they were wider than they had been. There were Expectations. Unwritten cultural rules. Some of these rules were in forced by cops, gangs, and biker gangs depending on your geography. Some were enforced by the neighborhood people in general.
I wasn't willing to touch the dudes at my school for a whole lot of reasons, but I knew who was fucking whom and the whole incestuous history of the other 99 people in my graduating class. There was only one guy fully out as in used the bisexual label for himself, but the closet door was only ever half closed in an environment like that. With our sex ratio (80 to 20), it's basically a prison sex situation. You knew so and so had been with guys or with women or with both, but you didn't know if it was preference, availability, or a mouth is mouth, if you see what I mean. It was generally safe to assume bi unless otherwise stated.
Down in the neighborhoods it was different. Gay or bi could be a death sentence, see. So people you knew damned well were gay were careful to go around with beards. The bi boys kept it to themselves. People plotted escapes or didn't. A lot of people married right out of high school and the dating was a=intense as a result in a way that it wasn't at my school where everyone was going to college and no one married high school sweet hearts. My Sister and I were going to college. We never even questioned it, though my sister's school kept trying to force her out of college track into voc because she was disabled and every year my Mom had to storm over there and fight them tooth and nail for her schooling. For me, college was the way out. For me, dating was how I was filling time until I got the hell out of there. I would literally fuck all day or night given time and a chance. I certainly fell in love often enough, but I knew the exact date I was punching out of Philly and environs and I wasn't taking anyone with me.
I dated a few guys from my side of the line, but mostly I dated guys from the neighborhood because I couldn't even begin to realate to people wiuth normal childhoods who' never seen any of the dark shit. My boys went through different dark shit than I had, but we were veterans of a violent sort of world that moneyed people who had never really struggled couldn't understand or identify with. A lot of my boys had some brand of PTSD, various kinds of other mental illness like depression, etc.. Some of them had been through the court system. Some of them came from scary ass homes. One of my friends had a parent kill the other parent in front of him. My friends and lovers had scars both physical and emotional. For them, the closet was jammed closed and barred with furniture piled in front because anything else was suicide.
I got that on an intellectual level and I cared about them. I did my best to give them glimpses of the way out. I wasn't one of them. I was basically dating Mickey Milkovich either singly or in pairs from sixteen to eighteen. My Mickeys were generally a bit prettier, but they were coming from places like that. Dad's with baseball bats they were willing to use on all comers including their kids. The boy who kept trying to kill his dad because he couldn't take it anymore, etc. etc..
Boys like that will fuck women if they can and be seen to it openly for afety, and if they can't, they pretend they want to loudly and often. Boys like that don't say "I love you" to other boys.
That thing in the beginning of season three where Ian asks Mickey's sister how to tell if a boy likes you? Ouch. Because I'd seen mickey express his love in the most pinpoint way he could in season two. That thing were he goes back to jail instead of killing Ian's shitty Dad? I can't imagine a louder "I love you." It's in Mickey's eyes every time he looks at Ian. But he can't say it, because saying it is death. Ian can't see it because he's too young and insecure and inexperienced, but he also can't see it because he lives on the other side of an invisible line. His family has fucked up parents and is poor, etc., but his family loves him and keeps him safe. He has support. Mickey is the kind of alone there are no words for. To someone outside those neighborhoods, Ian and Mickey's families might look equivalent, but they aren't. Ian has a subtle extra bit of privilege he can't really see until they get caught, and even then, I don't think he grasps the weight of it, the pressure Mickey is under every waking second, the sacrifices he makes constantly to stay some approximation of sane, the sacrifices he makes for Ian.
I'm not romanticizing Mickey. He does some terrible things. I do understand him though.
I never made Ian's mistake about love, but oh did my flamboyant, ambiguous ass make the same mistake about the stakes. It's how we all ended up on trial by that biker gang. It's how I ended trading a couple of months of sex work for the life of one of the boys I loved. The two of us saw him and we wanted him and shut the world out, and people who wanted us got more and more jealous, and the three of us were so wrapped up in each other we forgot to be careful. We survived because I lived on the other side of the line and the boy who lived at the bottom of the hill survived because I used that privilege on his behalf and I was willing to sacrifice two nights a week for about three months doing something that literally made me vomit.
Mickey from Shameless breaks my heart. He breaksmy heart because I saw the tragedy in his eyes and in his bruises over and over before I left. It was in the disappearance (likely murdered, but no one official gave a fuck about a Puerto Rican Butch living in a foster home in 1986 inner city Philly) of my beloved Luz at 16, to whom I gave the first word for herself that wasn't a curse. It was in my broken boys. It was in the violence of the boy who attacked me at work to the point I had to go to the ER. It was in the endless over and over tragedy of the boys who never made it out and ended up addicts and/or homeless and/or in prison.
Gentrification ate the old neighborhoods, but the people had to go somewhere when they were pushed out. They say Philly is better now and gangs o cops don't go around group kicking gay men into the hospital, but I'll believe it when the police come clean about the police murder of Nizah Morris and arrest the cop that did it and every cop that destroyed the evidence.
I live in one of the safest states for LGBTQIA folk, but I never forget where I came from. I never forget how seeing how hard it was for boys like Mickey to touch another boy on purpose for the first time in a completely unambiguous context.
Mickey's story is not a pretty one. He's not a model gay or bisexual character. His story is an incredibly important one, because boys in homes like that and neighborhoods like that need to see themselves in media. Boys like that need to see that they aren't alone. Yes, there are white gay men on TV all the time, but nearly all of them present more educated, higher class, cleaner, more together. Mickey's struggle with himself, with his culture, with his father? That's a story that needs to be seen and understood, because boys like Mickey die. A lot. And they only way it gets better is if they can see that there are options like the ones Ian represents, and if their fathers and neighbors get used to the idea and stop killing them or driving them into the streets or to suicide either slow or fast.
* "This Game Of Thrones Theory Changes EVERYTHING:" https://www.buzzfeed.com/cassandra6/this-game-of-thrones-theory-changes-everything-1pp7z
* Current Tavy in characteristic pressed against chest cuddle position: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/149497305982
* How to Fix Olympics Opening Ceremony coverage: 1. Fire Matt Lauer and don't let Hoda anywhere near the place. 2. Hire a bilingual person from the host country as one of the commentators, preferably one well versed in the history, politics, and visual language of that culture (symbolism and the like can vary from culture to culture). 3. The second commentator must be a person of colour whether or not the first commentator is. 4. Subtitle musical performances not in English. Make sure all three commentators completely understand that not everything is about us.
* Aliens vs Wildlife: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/149495000282/shrewreadings-mehay1-slashersivi
* Props to Ripper Street for not only tying in Dracula with it's blood transfusions to a blood fusion case while also seeding the end with the demonstration that said who's blood type matched up between named characters at the precinct. That was some tight writing even without the B plot arc bits.
* Louisiana is having a major flooding disaster, the worst disaster in this country since sandy. Want to help? http://thewightknight.tumblr.com/post/148963870683/the-lonely-one96-almalexiaslouisiana-is
* California is now an official disaster due to out of control fire made worse by the drought. https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* A list of LGBTQA Charities: http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.comhttp://www.cnn.com/2016/07/28/asia/indonesia-drug-executions/