Lordbleys - Undecided.

“You keep these kids ignorant and then suddenly they’re in a situation that they don’t even have the words for and they have no idea what to do,” she says. “They’re not taught how to ask for consent, how to give consent, how to revoke consent and stop mid-way through. They don’t know to use protection or to demand it if it’s absent, they don’t know this will spread STIs and pregnancy. They don’t know it’s not supposed to hurt. Can you believe that? So, so, so many people think that sex is supposed to hurt the partner with a vagina when they have sex for the first time. They think that’s just the way it is, that’s just how it goes. *That* is obscene to me. Enforced ignorance that inevitably results in physical and emotional damage, *that’s* obscenity.”

Rich Goldstein asked me what I consider to be obscene in his article on my work, ‘Oh Joy Sex Toy’: The Internet’s Most Radical Sex-Fueled Comic Strip (via erikamoen)

The Marvel Era, where Godzilla changed size to fit the story almost as often as he changed size in the cartoon.  Also, I own this issue. :)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters #20 (1978)

I have several friends who have passed, and a week doesn't go by when Facebook doesn't remind me of one of them.

In case you needed a refresher

Luke Cage was created in 1972. Four years earlier, in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed. Five years before that, in 1963, Medgar Evers was shot and killed. Eight years before that, in 1955, a young Black man named Emmett Till was tortured, then shot and killed. These events, and numerous others with frightening similarity, happened in a line, and in the early years of the first decade to reap the social benefits of the Civil Rights Movement, Marvel Comics gives the fans (and the world) a Black male superhero whose primary superhuman aspect… is that he’s bulletproof. Not flight, or super speed, or a power ring. The superhuman ability of being impervious to bullets. Superheroes. Action heroes. Fantasy heroes. Power fantasies. Is there any doubt the power fantasy of the Black man in the years following multiple assassinations of his leaders and children by way of the gun would be superhuman resistance to bullets? In American society, the Black man has come a long way from the terrors of the past handful of centuries, only to crash right into the terrors of the 21st century. Some of those terrors being the same exact ones their grandparents had to face and survive — or not. There are Black men who are wealthy, powerful, formidable and/or dangerous. They can affect change undreamt of by their parents, and their parents’ parents. Their children will be able to change the world in ways we can intuit and others we can barely begin to try and predict. But a bullet can rip through their flesh and their future with no effort whatsoever. And so we look at Luke Cage, a man who gets shot on a regular basis, whose body language is such that he is expecting to be shot at, prepared for the impact — because he knows he can take it. And maybe, in the subconscious of the uni-mind of Marvel Comics, is the understanding that Luke Cage may unfortunately always be a relevant fantasy idea for the Black man. 2012 – Trayvon Martin is shot and killed. 2013 – Jonathan Ferrell is shot and killed. 2014 – Michael Brown is shot and killed. 2015/2016 – Luke Cage premieres on Netflix. I look forward to seeing if the Luke Cage of that show will have a true understanding of his power and what he symbolizes.

Real Life Proves Why Luke Cage Endures (via comicberks)

Reading that was like getting kicked in the gut. And yet it feels like that’s not enough.

(via optimysticals)

Thank a Masshole

Watch Marriage Equality Go From Minority Issue To Majority Right In Just A Few Years

Get the full story here.

“What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.” What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.”

— I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is - The Atlantic

Star Wars Revenge of the Jedi teaser before the film was re-titled to Return of the Jedi.