Kyn-elwynn - Second Home

My second entry to the pokepunk art pack! I came up with these kittens a long time ago and they fit right in with the themes, so here they are <3

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I'll keep the full ress version of these pics exclusive to the art pack, so if you wish to have those, feel free to check the link above! Me and the many many artists in this pack will appreciate your support <3

the way sesame street, a pbs puppet show for literal babies, is pressing on with pride content despite vitriolic monsters descending on every post to insinuate they're pedophiles or demons while some of the biggest companies on the planet who could swim in olympic swimming pools of money like scrooge mcduck on steroids buckle and cave just emphasizes how completely and utterly pathetic these corporations are. they'd butcher a baby if it meant saving a penny.

Dudes shouldn't have to prove themselves by having spartan greyscale homes with dollar store rubber shower curtains and a mattress on the floor. Do you know what life is like with linen

Somewhat on the vibe of "your glorious revolution doesn't exist," I want to talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

That's an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer (~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department. Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs. insurance calculation to make sure they couldn't expell me from the program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.

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Some thoughts from Chinese Xiaohongshu users (text is translated and originally in Chinese)

On American soldiers serving during WWII:

“Sensitive” men often found one another while working on the extraordinarily popular “soldier shows” for which the USO provided the know-how and the materials. These shows were written, directed, and performed by men in the armed forces. Since there were no women in outlying camps, enlisted men would perform female roles in drag. Performances ranged from comic portrayals of burly men in dresses to realistic female impersonation. For actors and audiences, these performances were a needed relief from the stress of war. For men who identified as homosexual, these shows were a place where they could, in coded terms, express their sexual desires, be visible, and build a community. These lyrics for a “female” trio in a soldier show demonstrate how homosexual enlistees introduced their own humor into skits: Here you see three lovely "girls" With their plastic shapes and curls. Isn't it campy? Isn't it campy? We've got glamor and that's no lie; Can't you tell when we swish by? Isn't it campy? Isn't it campy?16 Later in the war, when WACs were available to perform with men, their involvement was limited; usually they worked backstage to help the men be made up as women. An indication of the popularity of female impersonation in soldier shows is evident in Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army. Written for an all-soldier cast, it premiered on Broadway in 1942 and a year later became a hit Hollywood film with Ronald Reagan. Both the Broadway and film versions featured soldiers dressed as women.

--A Queer History of the United States (2011), Michael Bronski; Chapter Eight: Sex in the Trenches

Fascists rely on a sanitized homogenized understanding of a hazily golden national history to hawk their wares to their recruits and dehumanize their enemies. Moral panics, too, rely on inaccurate popular understandings of history to promote attacks on their victims. Like every other human endeavor, these things spread themselves through stories.

WWII looms large in the American memory; we remember it as the last "innocent" conflict on our world stage, inaccurate as that is. (There is no such thing as an innocent player in a world war.) The military preoccupation with fascism and gender looms large, and WWII offers that for far-right ideologues searching for conformity, too: the masculinity of combat, the catharsis of the foxhole, the rigid conformity of the decades that follow. In the memory of such stand-up paragons of masculinity, the fascists will bellow, how can you permit the degenerate decadence of the modern drag queen, the obscenity of a trans woman being so much as permitted to exist? Surely the rejection of that masculinity would have disgusted and upset these fine soldiers, and how could you insult such icons?

But it isn't true. Drag, genderbending, and queerness were entertainments our grandfathers and great-grandfathers sought out, participated in, and shared with one another. Some of the queer ones fucked about it, and so did some of the straight ones, but not everyone. Some of the soldiers were playing, and some weren't. Either way, "female impersonation" was a staple of entertainment, both in the form of soldier-entertainers and for audiences back home. It continues to be a form of popular mainstream entertainment today, of course: only consider Mrs Doubtfire and Monty Python and RuPaul's Drag Race and Blackadder and MASH and Tyler Perry's Madea and Hairspray, to name only a few of many.

There's more than one way to knock down an image and an idol cherished by bigots, my friends. Don't forget that the stories the lazy fascists tell about how it was long ago and far away aren't the only stories left to tell. It turns out that the past wasn't any less full of degenerates and queers than the present is--or than the future will be.