Award Winning Botswana Music Artist Lorraine Lionheart Sings Stunning Rendition of ‘A Life Lived With Grace,’ Official Commonwealth Song, For The Queen's Platinum Jubilee

Award Winning Botswana Music Artist Lorraine Lionheart Sings Stunning Rendition of ‘A Life Lived With Grace,’ Official Commonwealth Song, For The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

Award-winning singer-songwriter Lorraine Lionheart, a native of Botswana, will be the featured performer for The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Beacon Celebration on June 2.  Influenced by her Botswana heritage, Lionheart performs her stunning version of “A Life Lived With Grace,” the Commonwealth Song.  The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrates the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II.   This is the…

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One thing about canto VI is like. I see so many people predicting it'll be about Fighting Evil Wife or Breaking Codependent Toxic Relationship and I just kinda think that would suck? If the major theme isn't grief AND love and the way both are seen as like Kinda Weird/inappropriate in the setting of the city. Then I'll be very sad.

it feels a little silly to be so happy about something that, currently, just amounts to some free dance classes but I really, genuinely am just so joyful about getting this traineeship

RUH ROH AM I MOVING TO FLORIDA?

say what u will about that article, but I think this is true and something white women (like me) can apply in our actual, daily lives: "Women of color, particularly Black women, have been pointing this out for years: White women actively uphold white supremacy by staying silent when they could be vocal."

the lost city 2022 THE best movie ever made. all other movies should kill themselves i’m so serious it’s so good it’s fucking unreal

Officially ending my woe is me antisocial phase and actually having a life

my city is sooo hostile for any meaningful left movement to the point that if a fucking trot would create a newspaper stand or a protest, the liberal student org would co-opt their movement instead of the other way around!

City Life Org - Museum of the City of New York Mürekkepleri, Parham Santana ile Lisans Programı için Anlaşmaya Vardı

City Life Org – Museum of the City of New York Mürekkepleri, Parham Santana ile Lisans Programı için Anlaşmaya Vardı

Parham Santana – The Brand Extension Agency, bugün tüketici ürünleri marka geliştirme, perakende markalama ve lisans satışları için Museum of the City of New York ile yeni bir küresel lisans anlaşması yaptığını duyurdu. Parham Santana, Discovery Channel, Better Homes and Gardens, Turner Classic Movies, PBS Kids, UNICEF ve Corita Art Center gibi dünyaca ünlü küresel medya şirketlerinden, klasik…

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Want an AU where Dick beats the Joker to death and when Bruce tries to resuscitate him (to save Dick from the burden of having taken a life), it doesn’t work. Just like, he tries! It doesn’t take! The Joker is dead as a doornail at Nightwing’s hands and now the Gotham vigilante community has to deal with that!

Do they cover it up? Because ostensibly in-universe the Bats no-kill rule is part of how they’re able to operate in Gotham without their unmasking being a high priority for law enforcement. It also, I assume, makes them a lower priority for mafias to deal with than rival criminal orgs are. If word gets out that one of the Bats deliberately killed someone, that changes the entire board.

Does Dick try to turn himself in like he later does with the Blockbuster incident? How would that shake out? Yeah it’s a game changer, but also, out of everyone he could have killed, it was the Joker. No one wants to arrest him. No one wants to run that trial. Prosecuting the guy to finally kill the Joker would be a public relations nightmare for the Gotham city government.

Plus there’s bound to be some complicated feelings for Tim about this. Dick beats the Joker to death because he thinks the fucker murdered Tim! The kid who became Robin to prevent Bruce from beating people to death! Tim isn’t going to grieve the Joker any more than any other Gothamite, but the particular circumstance is a clusterfuck.

I’m not entirely sure where in the timeline this incident is relative to Jason’s journey. I know it’s after his resurrection, but is it before or after Talia heals him further with the Lazarus Pit? Because there’s a difference between being on a path of revenge and suddenly having to reassess all your decisions, and straight up coming back to yourself and immediately finding out your murderer is dead at your brother’s hands.

There are just so many complications here and I want to explore them.

The Brooklyn Museum Presents Jimmy DeSana: Submission, the First Museum Survey of Work by the Pioneering Queer, Punk Photographer

The Brooklyn Museum Presents Jimmy DeSana: Submission, the First Museum Survey of Work by the Pioneering Queer, Punk Photographer

Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949–1990). Marker Cones, 1982. Chromogenic print, 21 3/4 × 26 in. (55.3 × 66 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Jimmy DeSana. © Estate of Jimmy DeSana The exhibition features more than two hundred works, which trace a career that bridged mail-art networks, New York’s 1970s punk and No Wave subcultures, the illuminating image-play of the “Pictures Generation,” and the various…

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Hey so here's a conversation you might or might not be interested in having but if you'd like to, it's been my understanding that you participate in the time honoured tradion of cruising (TM), so I was curious about how/why you first started engaging with that? Was it an intentional choice? Are there still live spots around where you live? Natural continuation from the grindr life? Feels like it isn't really a natural part of gay life for a lot of people these days and more of an active choice.

I do like having conversations like this! Now I do cruise, but not in the ways that first come to mind with the term "cruising." My experience is limited to bathhouses, bars, and parties with play spaces, but I haven't done it in, say, a park or a highway rest stop. Cruising refers to looking for sex in places known for the practice. Said sex does not have to occur there, so finding someone at a cruising spot and going to a second location is cruising, but a couple arranging to have sex in a park is not. There are definitely gray areas--is Grindr cruising, or is it an existential threat to the culture? What's the line between a plain old bar hookup and cruising? Is going to a cruising spot only to have sex with people you already knew cruising? Maybe someone reading this knows better than I do.

Knowing spots is and always has been a matter of word of mouth, but sites like squirt . org and Sniffies have made it a lot easier. People looking to cruise might look at these sites, or look for advice for their city in forums, or just know the right people who know their way around the "pickle parks." The spots I've been to are the easiest to find--obviously people are going to be having sex at a bathhouse. But there are other options--informal, discrete spots that don't (or can't) require an entry fee. You'd be surprised just how many there are, and not just in the cities you'd suspect. I just don't know much about this world, aside from the "official" brick and mortar spots.

I started going first out of curiosity, but then I kept finding more and more reasons. It wasn't a natural continuation from Grindr life but rather a reaction against it. I was sick of Grindr. I wanted to work on people skills, like dishing out and taking rejection respectfully, and without the ego-preserving move of a block button. I had a roommate and felt awkward inviting people over. I didn't have a car and had a hard time even getting to other people's places, and by the time I got there I'd lost my sexual appetite. I found being naked or in a towel in a space full of equally naked people helped me be at ease with my body. The men I had sex with couldn't find and contact me after the fact unless I deliberately gave them contact information. I felt more freedom to say no or change my mind in a place full of sexual possibilities than I would at someone else's apartment. I found a lot of reasons beyond finding voyeurism and exhibitionism hot--which I do.

I have learned not to focus too hard on the why. A lot of different types do it for a lot of different reasons, and that's part of the appeal for me. There are closeted and experimenting men, out and proud gays who view the baths as part of their identity, disrobed white collar professionals visiting my city for a conference, locals who can't host, and nobody's really asking who's who. This is the sort of contact that Samuel R Delany wrote about, overcoming the guiding rule of cities that we "don't talk to strangers." Michael Warner also has great writing on cruising and public sex, and challenges the idea that gay victory will look like normalcy and the end of cruising. Cruising is not as popular as it used to be, and I think it's important to acknowledge a lot of this comes down to policy and not a change in the gay conscience. Ironically, the very gentrification that scrubs away these spaces has made them necessarily through a tightening housing market where fewer people can host. I would not be surprised if I heard it confirmed that more gays lately are choosing to cruise--or already are and don't realize it. At the risk of over-simplified sentimentality, I'd be glad to hear it.

not that i truly care what rando losers on tumblr dot com think about me but i did just get an obnoxious as fuck message telling me about how internet activism and sharing things online isn't actually activism, trying to shame me into not posting as much or "torturing myself" by watching and sharing pictures and videos of what's going on in gaza. and it pissed me off enough to say this:

One, Palestinians have asked people to share and boost their content. That is a direct fucking ask from people in Gaza and Palestinians around the world. I will keep watching and sharing these photos and videos because it is what we have been asked to do by the people who are themselves experiencing genocide. Yes, it is depressing, yes it emotionally and mentally fucks me up. 100%. But i will keep doing it.

Two, literally none of you have ANY fucking idea what i am doing in real life to fight for Palestinian liberation. I don't need anyone on tumblr dot com's validation or approval and i'm certainly not stupid enough to dox myself online when every zionist shitbag, the police, and every employer out there is already trying to do that. but believe me when i say i have dropped pretty much everything else in my life to fight as hard as i fucking can to stop this genocide and work towards the Palestinian liberation.

Three, everyone needs to be doing shit in real life to fight to end the genocides going on right now. Only posting online does not count as activism, true. So take your conversations offline as well. Talk to people you know about Palestine, Sudan, and Congo. Read books and learn the histories. Write to and/or call your elected officials and government leaders and even the fucking bureaucrats. Join local solidarity and action groups working towards Palestinian liberation: Dissenters; DSA; JVP; SJP; AMP; IfNotNow are all US based groups that have local state chapters (idk too many groups outside of the US, sorry international friends). Participate in BDS, personally boycotting brands yourself, demanding your schools, workplaces, organizations, institutions, and governments divest from Israel. Attend rallies and protests and disruptions and vigils. Write to your local, state, and larger newspapers and demand they cover this genocide without bias, call them out for their shitty zionist reporting; write op-eds and letters to the editors. Sign up for webinars. If you can't leave the house or attend in-person events, you can make signs and banners for people and groups who can go. Start or join a campaign to pass a ceasefire resolution in your town/city; testify at town/city council or public comment about it & write to your local elected leaders. Donate to Palestinian and and relief orgs and charities if you can. And yeah, keep fucking sharing and uplifting and boosting Palestinian posts and voices online. The media is trying to repress the fuck out of them, so you we need to do our part to make sure their voices are seen and heard as widely and as loudly as possible.

And four, don't be a pretentious dick to strangers on the internet. You don't know shit about what people are doing in their real lives. This is just common fucking courtesy

Free Palestine 🇵🇸

While I do think the internet has the unique opportunity to amplify brain-poisoning, I wish discourse wasn’t so heavily split into “online vs irl” when it’s much more an issue of…exclusionary politics and idpol hierarchy brainrot.

“This doesn’t happen offline” the problem is, it does. Because people who captain themselves the arbiter of validity on tumblr dot org are possibly also going to be a self-righteous dorkass at your DEI training, or when organizing lesbian night at the bar, or being president of a queer org on campus, or running LGBT orgs people rely on for survival. Many of the most exclusionary queer spaces were made offline first. Offline spaces organized by young folks from online spaces with no grasp of offline history are going to be just as rife with “terminally online” takes as any website.

Your local steel mill line is both likely to be violently homophobic out of bigoted ignorance AND supremely immune to microidentity politics because it means absolutely nothing to Joe Factory, who will shrug and go “hey man whatever makes you happy.”

Your liberal arts college is both likely to be aware of the niche politics of queer identity and will have heard of and be welcoming to your set of neopronouns AND will find new and cruel ways to be bigoted while smiling in your face because their flavor of queer is celebrated by the city mayor and so LGBT-phobia (please don’t say q***r) ended with marriage equality.

LGBT community that refuses intersectional lenses will always be rife with bigotry, both directed at minorities within this space and indirectly hitting people they think belong (ie assigning masculinity to Black queer women due to racism but then also exhibiting butchphobia/antimasculism at all masculine women, man-hating directed at cis men to “punch up” being weaponized against trans folks, etc)

Cishet society is still not safe for LGBT people, but has gotten better in some areas and worse in others as visibility has increased. Which means micro-infighting potentially is a non-issue in a space that is tolerant to other (more visible) forms of queerness, AND if there is a problem there with family friendly gays and lesbians then they will absolutely take issue with polyam genderfluid aces.

“In real life” has near nothing to do with it. If your space, online or in real life, is neither radically intentionally inclusive or tolerantly indifferent it’s gonna be bigoted—intentionally or not, queer or not.

i think pensblr needs to put the honeytrap jokes away for a moment and realize how kyle dubas completely changed the leafs organization from the cesspool of paranoia, old boy's club mentality, and dyed in the wool haughtiness about their fading, decrepit legacy that it was around lou lamoriello's time

off the top of my head, there is legitimate concern, hurt, anger, and confusion kyle's sudden dismissal brought to the org. staff members who were willing to ride the year out with kyle without future prospects were persuaded by kyle to accept the 1 to 3 year bridge deals he negotiated on their behalf for their and their family's security. team members spoke anonymously about their—to put it mildly—disappointment with how the brief negotiations shook out.

that's because kyle, from the moment he was promoted to AGM after helping the marlies win the calder cup for the first time in franchise history, has always placed an emphasis on fostering an environment in which every person is valued, and given the best conditions to thrive in. to him, it's simple: value your employees and players, and they will give you endless passion.

SPEAKING OF WHICH

"the passion": it's in kyle's blood. it was in him as a child, crying about another leafs exit;

it was in him as as a first time gm of the sault ste marie greyhounds in 2011, when he wanted to capture "the passion, energy, and enthusiasm of the organization and the city of Sault Ste. Marie" through The Rising, the 100-page blueprint in a binder that presented a vision of a memorial cup-winning greyhounds;

it was in him when he talked to brendan shanahan (boo tomato tomato) for nine hours and convinced the leafs pres that he was somebody who would make the leafs "a better organization if he joins us."

he wanted to see this passion reflected naturally in his staff and especially his players.

developing players, for kyle, was never just about their on-ice performance. their immersion and willingness to be in the community they play for, especially for marginalized sectors, and seeing that they play for more than a logo was important to kyle. he wanted them to develop as people too—leaving books in player stalls aside—because he cares for them as much as he cares for his staff.

just look at him staying at the hospital with ilya mikheyev for three days in new jersey when mikheyev's wrist was slit by a hockey blade

or him flying to switzerland to talk to william nylander and his camp about his contract, and telling him multiple times that "as long as he’s here he’s not going to trade me.”

or defending mitch marner against the maddened mob, time and again

OR him running down from the press box, hurriedly calling aryne tavares as he rushes to where john tavares was laid out on the ice, because he "would never want the family to not be aware of what was happening."

(or kyle offering jason spezza a position in the front office, possibly before retirement, and engendering such loyalty in him that spezza walked out after him)

how his players feel is important to kyle as it affects everything about their performance: "...we want to convey to the players is that, yes, we’re here to try to maximize their potential as players and as athletes, but players aren’t going to be able to maximize their potential if the person is not at their best, whether it’s because of relationship issues or mental health issues."

building a holistic hockey team has been kyle's dream since he woke up one day unable to pursue a career in hockey on-ice. once it was clear from age 14 that he will never play professionally, he poured his life into winning the cup from the office.

he believes it's his sole responsibility "to combine wanting to be an organization that's about getting the best out of every single person, and being able to parlay that into the organization having its greatest amount of success". he wants everyone to see how their individual contributions, no matter how small, impact the team at large.

analytics and this set of personal criteria set the bar for his hires. and once he sees a person buy in, he buys in to them too.

maybe to a fault.

kyle considered moving his core back in 2021, despite stubbornly fighting for them for years, acquiring mentors who would teach them how to ground themselves, coaching each player to block out the external noise of pundits and malicious fans—to believing in themselves and the team they are a part of.

"the time for sentiment has come and gone," he said. he's learned, year after year, that hard work hardly works. that, perhaps, he should not be as loyal or patient to the vision he shares with his team.

but these very traits—loyalty, patience, hard work, passion—lead to the maple leafs making it out of the first round of the playoffs for the first time in 19 years.

19 years. the age kyle was when the leafs fell to the flyers in the second round in 2004.

and yet, for everything he did. well.

we did our raging. our complaining. but you would never see kyle do the same.

"“What makes him unique is that he’ll never sit back and complain about something,” said Megan Dubas, who worked alongside her brother as the Greyhounds director of game-day operations and community relations. “He’s always so positive. He’s never made excuses for himself if he failed. He would never blame anyone else. He would take the responsibility for that. And his ability to learn and take everything in is unbelievable.”

the pens are inheriting this man. this man who wants others to believe in the tean who believes in them. who understands how your humanity can transform the space you are in. who knows, intimately, that you need to be patient, push out of your comfort zone to do your best work, make people feel how loyal you are to this dream you are building together.

the passion that will see you blaze a path to your destiny.

and given how the pens core are shaped by these qualities, i think our team is in the right hands.

AEIWAM question:

The Soul Society has the ability to interact with the human world physically, and wildly more firepower than pre-dead people have. Is there a particular reason the world of the dead hasn't pulled a colonialism or other form of resource extraction on the world of the living? Is there a reason the warlords on the fringes of the rukongai don't set up in the world of the living instead of the spirit world's most marginal land?

Why haven't the dead colonized the living? The dead have not pulled a colonialism on the living world because (and IIRC this is canon but it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment) while Shinigami, Arrancar and other dead spirits CAN go hang out in the living world for brief periods of time, if forced to STAY in the living world, their superpowers rapidly degrade because the ambient spiritual energy in the living world is so low. That's why Rukia wasn't *immediately* suspicious when her powers weren't coming back after activating Ichigo's, and why the shinigami that visit Ichigo's school during the aarancar arc don't stay after the battle- they can't heal effectively. There's also the whole "Balance the total number of Souls between the living and spirit worlds" thing. I'm not sure what the dead having permanent residency in the world of the living would do to that balance, but it's probably Not Great.

Why aren't there fringe district warlords or other countries? Great news! THERE ARE. They're just not human. Hueco Mundo used to be the bulk of the West 80th disctrict, but then it got lightly dimension'd off by the noble houses after they stole the Soul King's bodyparts, and the partition between Hueco Mundo and Soul Society is made of the Soul King's toes. Heck, it's even got a capital city- Las Noches! Las Noches used to be drastically more populated before Barragan took over and murdered the shit out of everyone he could find, because there's a BIG difference between not being able to let go of the living world and actually resorting to cannibalism, and I think there used to be a TON of hollows like Dondochaka and Pesche who just subsist off the ambient Reishi and do whatever instead of eating people. The Eastern 80th district is the land of the Beastfolk- Spirits like kitsune and tanuki, the ghosts of ancient and venerated trees, the sort of thing that appear in Mononoke/Mushishi/Princess Mononoke etc. and the wolves that Komamura is descended from. They're not as organized as the hollows so they didn't get ghetto'd like Hueco Mundo, but neither is the Soul Society able to tangle with them,. See, the entire Court Guard System and Central 46 was founded SPECIFICALLY to end and prevent the warring clans that had dominated Soul Society for so long. So the Central 46 and yamamoto are very much erring on "Don't let any extant clan or district or whatever political org gain too much power, and for the love of god, don't start a war", so the East is heavily protected by the sanctions that keep any clan from raising an army to invade another clan (much smaller than what would be needed to invade the east), the fact that the gotei-13 recruits very nearly all spiritually powerful people away from joining that kind of force, and Yamamoto's personal connection to Komamura's wolf clan (Major spoilers for the fic but the upshot is that he will NEVER tresspass on Wolf land, and the shinigami are also forbidden from doing so) The North is uncolonized for roughly the same reason antartica is uncolonized- most of it is straight-up inhospitable to human life, or all but a handful of beasfolk and hollows. In fact, the only thing that "Lives" up there are Kami- Serious Kami, like The Firebird and other personifications of Major natural disasters or philosophical concepts. The ONLY reason to go to North 80 is if you want to pick a fight with a God, and why would you do THAT when one of them just moved into the court guards? (That isn't quite true, actually- there are quite a few humans living on the southern edge of the Zaraki District- but they live in isolated villages that change locations every few decades and don't appear in Soul Society census data. They don't pay taxes, but neither do they demand services. The court guard is aware of the tribes living up north, but so long as they don't start shit, the gotei-13 is willing to ignore them.) The South 80th district is... well, it's 95% ocean, for starters, and many of the lovely tropical islands in there are active volcanoes and/or hellmouths. There's quite a few humans living in South 80, but the overall population is even smaller than the tribes in North 80, and many of the islands are "Uninhabited". I use quotes because those volcanoes are the result of Hell cracking under the strain of not being able to pass souls through it fast enough, and making incursions into other dimensions. The Demons that live on the spirit world side of these cracks have no beef with soul society- if anything, they're very pleased with it!, but they're busy trying to prevent a dimensional collapse or mass prison break, and tend to chase off any curious humans, so the closest thing to a "real" government is the Dimensional Crack Stabilization Project Manager, and the Law of Hell is mostly OSHA.

Thank you, that was a very helpful question!