was waiting on an emergency plumber, decided to smoke by my car instead of stare at my fucked up kitchen. he pulled up next to me, leaned out the window and goes "i'm assuming you're the client" like yeah buddy, read that one right

honorary best friend, mike the plumber, has saved the day. "don't worry, i've got pvc couplings you've probably never even seen before." brother, i wasn't aware that was something i could worry about

layssoli

Ever since starting to publish romance novels I’ve been checking out the romance books at the thrift store specifically for the clinch covers, as a reference for what I might want to do with my own books.

As a culture we mocked these to extinction but I think we were just afraid of their power. The modern clinch revival still hasn't reached the heady heights of what they were doing in the 80s! The vintage covers can be really quite explicit. These ones in particular were steamy enough they had to be hidden on an inner flap.

This episode of the Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast where they interview Shirley Green and Sharon Spiak, who were romance novel cover artists in the 80s, is a fascinating look at what a huge industry these covers were. Did you know they had whole photography studios full of props to make these? They’d take photos and turn those over to a painter who’d make something like a couple of these a day. They had it down to a science.

Here is a particular favourite of mine, also by Sharon Spiak!

Being 30 is fun. I was discussing anime with a teen at work and asked her how much of bnha she had watched. She had trouble answering and wasn't sure how to approach it. I said "better question was who was your husbando" and she turned bright red before mumbling an answer. They never expect me to know how deep their love of anime boys runs....

One time she said she used to be into BL and another employee down the hall asked what BL was and I yelled back "ITS YAOI" which reduced the teen to yelling "ITS SOFTCORE! SOFT CORE!!" So I yelled back "ITS SOFTCORE YAOI" anyway I get why dads are like that now

I seem to be living a very expensive lifestyle called eating food regularly

— Hbomberguy on plagiarism.

i ultimately don't think the way japanese media treats women is all that different from how western media treats women, it's just not christian about it

in a lot of ways it's generally more openly sexual and less judgemental of sexuality, at least within the context of fiction. i think it tends to rub up against western christian ideas in a way that makes white people get a little scared. other than that almost every present issue of misogyny is just as pronounced in western, especially american media.

a lot of shounen anime treats women badly, unlike american action films, which has historically been hyperfeminist i'm sure :)

Image Source: The Brown Girls Project

What bothers me the most about this heartbreaking death of yet another Black woman's death from childbirth complications is that Dr. Green Smith was literally a midwife. She was educated in and worked in the field that killed women who looked just like her, that killed her, to make it better and safer. I can't help but think about how if someone who knew just how bad it could get still can fall victim to it, God knows what the rest of us are walking into.

Here's the GoFundMe linked in the article to help support her husband and their newborn.

The worst part of those stepparent forums is that they refuse to admit that being a stepchild sucks. Not because you want your mommy and daddy to get back together soooo bad or because you’re jealous that you’re not daddy’s only baby in the world anymore. It sucks because you are a child with absolutely zero agency. It sucks because you have no say on who your parents choose to bring into your life and you can’t do anything about it if that person hates you, mistreats you, has beef with you, a literal child. It sucks because you can’t even choose where you lay your head at night, you are bound by court order to go stay in a house you know you are not welcome in. It sucks because adults often take their hatred of another adult out on you and there is nothing you can do about it. Being a child sucks in a lot of ways, beyond the childlike wonder and the lack of financial responsibilities. It really does suck to be dependent on the adults in your lives and have them fail you. Being icy to your dad’s girlfriend of the month is sometimes the only way you can exert your power and hopefully warn her to get away, even if you can’t.

Discussions of trans women in sports often focus on elite/professional sports which honestly I find it hard to care about but the more common scenario of “we’re going to legally ban a high school girl from playing sports with her friends because she’s trans” is just profoundly evil

i remember when utah's (republican) governor ended up vetoing a law banning transgender students from playing high school sports when he looked at the numbers, and there were only four trans students in the state playing sports at all. he released a clumsily worded but surprisingly compassionate statement about the decision.

of course, it didn't amount to much. they overrode his veto. it's just so cartoonishly evil. an entire state's political body so desperate to terrorize this one little trans girl.

I’ll bring it up every time: I used to play mixed-gender soccer, and until the end of high school, there wasn’t a significant disparity in terms of size and skill between the sexes. When I was in 8th grade, the smallest person on my team was a boy named Spencer who had ADHD (so of course we got along great), and one of the taller and sturdier people was me (a cis girl).

The biggest difference I saw was between a subset of girls who had been socialized that it wasn’t cute or sexy to be aggressive, and everyone else.

you watch heated rivalry and you're like well i wish i could see the stakes more but sure it's men's sports and then you read anything at all about elite north american men's hockey in real life and it's like we have invented rituals of social pressure heretofore unseen to destroy young men's bodies and crush their personalities to dust. the worship of violence and conformity at all costs has wrought of this game a hell for generations. tickets available for tuesday

Like the NFL, the NHL has a history of denying that the game gives you permanent brain damage in the form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Navessa Allen (of Lights Out fame) has a romance novel (heterosexual, sorry) about a former hockey player who’s dealing with potential CTE. I appreciated her look at the realties of the sport.

I can’t speak for other social media webbed sites but I really enjoy how tumblr seems to just completely spin a wheel on whatever media is hot right now. Like yeah sometimes it’s a new show that’s big and actively coming out but also sometimes there will be a solid month where half my dash is Columbo memes. Defy authority. Get really into an book from the 1800s. Watch shows that haven’t aired in 40 years. Celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. Become unmarketable

oh shit i almost missed it!

Make sure you have the LUCE hotline number saved and keep your eye out, if you speak Vietnamese, Cantonese, Nepali, Bengali, Khmer, or Cape Verdean Kriolu they are actively looking for hotline operators with those languages