A Fantasy Story Of A Hero On An Epic Quest To Recover A Memory That They Have Lost - The Wizard Who Wiped

In King Ludwig II’s defense, if I had basically infinite discretionary funds, was accountable to absolutely no one, and was king of a country full of picturesque landscapes, you couldn’t stop me from building myself a big gay fairytale castle on a mountaintop either.

I love my people and it's amazing to see so many of us turn up today, but it's like herding very friendly cats 😂

Chinese weighlifter Li Wenwen successfully defended her title, winning the gold medal in the women's over 81kg category at the Paris Olympics on Sunday!

In her private life, Li is actually a fan of traditional Chinese Hanfu.

(source)

(Saw this post on Facebook and loved it, and since Facebook always steals Tumblr posts, I figure I can do the reverse and steal this Facebook post)

:(

sobbing actually

Getting married has been something I’ve always wanted and simultaneously knew I would never have. I’m not the easiest person to deal with. I’m particular as shit, ornery and I like my space, my independence, my solitude. But at the same time- well. Everyone wants to love. To know and say they have a family that loves them. And my birth family might’ve said they loved me. They certainly loved their daughter. 

It turned out they didn’t love how she insisted she was their son. 

You know how that kind of thing goes. It really doesn’t have too much to do with this story except giving me a complex about belonging to a family that wanted me for myself.

When I saw the ad on Craigslist, I was looking for used furniture. Scrolled too fast, accidentally opened up domestic gigs. The first listing caught my eye.

“Wanted: Compassionate man to marry our recently deceased daughter.”

The initial click was just out of morbid interest.

It read, simply enough, “Our daughter wanted to be married and we want to keep our promise to her that she would be. She has passed away, and we are seeking a kind and compassionate man to engage in a quiet, non-legally binding ceremony and become our in-law. 

“This is not a joke and we are in bereavement. Please keep this in mind when considering your reply.”

It got taken down within the next five minutes, either by the family or moderation, but I’d already texted the number provided.

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i wish i was pretty so badly

I talk frequently about how ignorant most Global North citizens are about the immigration policies of their own and other countries. When my husband and I (Global North citizens of different countries) got married, we had conversation after conversation with people who assumed that by producing our marriage certificate we could simply become residents of each other’s countries— and that we could not be refused residence in each other’s countries, as separating a husband and wife could surely not be allowed. 

More interestingly, a lot of people seem to refuse knowledge about immigration, perhaps because it can’t be integrated into some deep and important picture of the world that they have. My parents can’t make themselves believe that my British husband would get in trouble if he overstayed his visa “just a couple of days” in the US, or that I (an American) would ever get deported from the UK, no matter what the circumstances. This is not only because they believe that British and American citizens, as Global North citizens, are specially exempt from the systems that are “meant” to regulate other kinds of people, but also because fundamentally they believe that government and its processes are rational and just. They must believe that government and its processes are rational and just, because otherwise their whole picture of the world— the means by which they understand it— would collapse.

This is all fairly simple and obvious. What is not so simple and obvious is the way that their privileged ignorance, the hothouse resilience of their fantasy world, is part of a mechanism through which the “work of knowing” in our society is outsourced to the underprivileged. (The privileged do not have to know in a way that disrupts their fantasy, because not-knowing has no consequences for them.) This is an interesting dynamic, because many postcolonial theorists (Sara Ahmed, Dipesh Chakrabarty, etc) have explored how the Global South is typically portrayed as that-which-is-known-by-the-Global-North, and therefore as not capable of knowing. So what does it mean that the tools of regulation remain in the hands of the Global North, but that the knowledge of regulation is a burden borne by the Global South? There is an element here of knowing as knowing-your-place, for sure— learning to be interpellated as the illegal and the undesirable. The knowing that is happening also constitutes the production of the illusive “just and rational” world that sustains the Global North. I’m interested in the way that the dehumanization of the Global South therefore serves to sustain the rational and just Human and humaneness of the Global North. There’s an abjectification that is necessary for this— as anyone who has experienced universal healthcare knows, more just and equitable care/distribution of resources often means that more privileged people get less-nice things than they have been led to expect, so if they want to continue to enjoy the same standard of living allowed them by unjust and non-equitable care, they must rationalize this somehow. And how does one rationalize having been, by chance, born in the right geographic area? One can’t. One must, instead, believe that this is not how privilege is allotted, which required not-knowing that this is how privilege is allotted.