The Unfinished Library

rosalarian:

littlefroggies:

bisexual-community:

Common Myths About Bisexuality from the lovely Webcomic “Jesus Loves Lesbians, Too” by bi blogger & author Maria Burnham (writer/memoirist) and Maggie Siegel-Berele (comic artist). 

I usually don’t reblog stuff like this because this is my art blog but this hit close to home and reminded me of so many conversations that made me feel like garbage.

It always makes me see red when I see lesbians (and gay men) treating bisexuals this way. I don’t think I can even type too much more without quickly reaching a point where I just smash my head into the keyboard.

(via misspixnmix)

thestarlighthotel:

Kirsty Mitchell’s late mother Maureen was an English teacher who spent her life inspiring generations of children with imaginative stories and plays. Following Maureen’s death from a brain tumour in 2008, Kirsty channelled her grief into her passion for photography.

She retreated behind the lens of her camera and created Wonderland, an ethereal fantasy world. The photographic series began as a small summer project but grew into an inspirational creative journey.

‘Real life became a difficult place to deal with, and I found myself retreating further into an alternative existence through the portal of my camera,’ said the artist. (read the rest here).

(via scribofelidae)

masterkfox:

tastysynapse:

Zen Pencils Comic: 50. NEIL GAIMAN: Make good art

Some days this quote is what keeps me going.

(via wordscount)

avatarsnowy:

bradofarrell:

I didn’t want this to show up in the reblog notes for this picture but I also wanted to give credit to the artist because it’s really good art. But I see this picture on my dash all the time and it’s really upsetting because it’s promoting and glamorizing behavior that is really unhealthy. It needs an additional 8 panels where they try to talk but they don’t have anything to talk about in person and they have no chemistry and they can’t kiss without it feeling weird and then it takes less than 4 hours for them to decide they’re better off being just friends.

When you talk to someone online for years and meet them for the first time in person you’re basically setting yourself up for an extremely awkward but extremely well researched blind date. Almost everything that matters in a romantic relationship is not something you can gauge by an online relationship. Things like how a person holds themselves in conversation and how they smell and how tall they are and how easy it is to hang out on the couch with them and how a solid week of hanging out together would unfold are all things you can not know from talking to someone online for years and they make up like 60% of what a relationship even is.

Pretending a relationship is “all mental” and assuming that if you get along on chat you’ll get along in person is really juvenile and unfair to yourself. Even if you’re gay. Even if you’re a sexual minority. Even if you think there is no one in your home town you can date, and even if you’re right, it’s still not smart to put all your stock into someone over the internet.

I mean it makes sense if you’re young and in high school because it doesn’t matter as much as your friendships with class mates don’t matter. But please please please don’t, like, not date people in your real life because you think you’re dating someone online or god forbid move to their city without spending several weeks with them first.

If you’re in a place in your life where you think you need to be in an online relationship the healthiest option is to tough it out until you can change your situation to the point that real life relationships are available to you. But by letting yourself fall in love with someone online (which is SUPER EASY when you don’t have to deal with the very real barrier of “chemistry”) you’re setting yourself up for this weird thing where one of you has to make a big move to live with a stranger, which is always a bad choice, or for the thing to just fizzle out anyway.

Don’t do that. Move to another city. Go to a queer bar. Meet a nice real human being.

Also I’m not going to actually argue against anyone in this post because I guarantee if you’re getting mad about reading this you’re going to realize I’m right a few hours after your awkward airport hug because I’m speaking from both personal experience and the aggregate experience of every one of my friends who’s tried to do this.

It doesn’t work, man, the internet is a venus flytrap for your heart.

I’m sorry your experience sucked so much but your assumption that your experience is applicable to everyone who has been in an online relationship is one of the most hilarious things I have encountered this week, so kudos on that front I guess.

Now that I’m over the hilarity, though, I gotta say that this entire freaking post is ridiculously dismissive. There’s a lot of queer people for whom online relationships are literally the only safe, healthy, viable option. There are queer people who have virtually no one in their area who is also queer, particularly those of us who live in rural areas. At 22, I can probably count on two hands the number of queer people I know personally that live in the same county as I do, and I can count on one hand the number of queer people from my home county that I could viably date. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a terribly unusual predicament. 

And yeah, now that I’m 22 and I have a car and a license, I can drive forty minutes one-way to the nearest gay bar with my straight friends where I know no one and feel awkward and spend more money than I can afford to spend on a minimum wage salary and then come home in more or less the same position that I was when I left. Lather, rinse, and repeat about four times a year if I’m lucky because driving that far just to go to a bar or a club is expensive and I have to carpool and I have to coordinate with my friends. For some people, queer bars are viable options for meeting other queers. For me, they are not.

If you’re closeted it’s even WORSE. There are closeted people who would be in VERY REAL DANGER if they were to go to queer bars or even interact with queer people in their community in general. There are people who live in households where they would be cast out if they were discovered to be queer. There are people who go to religious universities whose academic life is on the line, who would risk expulsion if they were discovered to be queer. For them, going to queer bars or trying to find other queer people and risking being seen by someone who could jeopardize their living situation, their safety, and their future is simply not worth it, and meeting people on the internet is literally their only option.

For me when I was 18 and in the closet with no car and no license and even less money than what I have now and not allowed to legally drink and with perhaps two queer friends who lived in this area (incidentally the same number of people who I knew for a fact to be queer in this area at that time), meeting and being with queer people in my area would have been virtually impossible. I mean, I have a series of circumstances that make me pretty lucky as far as this shit goes at this point in my life. I’m out to my household, I have a relatively steady job, I have a means of transportation, and I’m of the legal drinking age. With all that going for me, I STILL don’t have any real, viable means of meeting other queer people in my general area, so I don’t know what the hell jobless, carless, closeted, 18-year-old me was supposed to do besides find other queer people on the internet, which is what happened, albeit unintentionally on my part. 

Story time! I have had several close friendships in my time online. One of them has been going on since I was 16, and I’m still friends with the person in question. When I was 17 or so, I realized I had a crush on her. Thinking she was straight, I was forthcoming about my feelings but didn’t expect reciprocation. It wasn’t until much later that we realized that mutual feelings existed.

A few years passed, and in the summer of 2011, she came to visit, staying at the house of a mutual friend. My friend and I met her at the airport, and the first moment I saw her in person is still near the top of the list for being one of the best moments in my life. We hugged a lot and it was awesome. I think I was in danger of squeezing the air out of her, so unwilling was I to let go, but I’m pretty sure it was mutual. 

While she was in this state, we were nigh inseparable. We held hands most places we went together, we hugged a ton, we cuddled while we were back at the house, and we slept tangled up together in the same bed most of the nights she was here. To reiterate, this was the first time we had met in person. There was absolutely no awkwardness. We acted around each other like we had known each other in person for years instead of just through the internet. The transition from online to offline was blessedly, wonderfully, unspeakably natural, and many of my friends who saw us together later asked me if she was my girlfriend or guessed correctly about our feelings for each other.

After much discussion, it was decided that we wouldn’t pursue a relationship further, but that had absolutely nothing to do with our meeting; in fact, I think if it was left up to our interactions when we met offline, we would be together. But there were some personal obstacles that it’s not my place to disclose, among them distance (we live in different countries and that’s unlikely to change), and it was just for the best if we were friends. That didn’t make our time together offline any less magical to me, that doesn’t make her any less important to me, and it wouldn’t hinder my desire to see her again if the opportunity arises. Without disclosing too many things that simply are not the business of anyone but her and I, the issues that prevented us from being together were issues that we would have had if we had met and developed feelings and initiated or attempted to initiate a relationship in a purely offline setting. The fact that we met on the internet had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Conversely, I personally know of more than a few romantic relationships that started online where both parties have met each other offline for the first time, interacted naturally and happily, are still together, and intend to stay together. They are willing to make personal adjustments for each other and compromise, just like you would find in any offline relationship, and they are as healthy and happy and in love as any offline relationship I have encountered. Many of these people are queer, and for some of them, they never would have had the opportunity to be in a queer relationship thanks to the reasons I outlined earlier. Internet relationships gave them opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise, and they are happy and they are healthy and there is no awkward learning curve.

I guess it sucks that your experience and the aggregate experience of your friends has been so irredeemably shitty that you feel the need to go off and act like everyone who will enter into this sort of relationship will meet only doom and gloom and heartache, but in spite of the fact that I’ve never been in an online relationship that “made it”, my experience and the aggregate experience of my friends has been overwhelmingly positive, and I take issue with anyone who tries to dictate how good or bad our relationships will be or what kind of options we have when they don’t know us just because they had a piss-poor time with the entire thing. Sorry, not at all sorry! 

P.S. LOL @ “meet a real human being” what are we robots

+1000 Internets to the second commenter. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences with making friends and pursuing romantic relationships online…sorta like the experiences I’ve had in “real life”. Definitely my online relationships were and still are incredibly important to me.

Also: There’s nothing in this three-picture set to imply that these two ladies are meeting for the first time in the third picture. For all we know, they were unavoidably separated for a long period and are reuniting in that third one. But even if they are meeting for the first time, there’s clearly still chemistry there, and no awkwardness, so who the fuck are we to judge them for being happy and making it work? Relationships are hard, online or off, and there’s no magic answer to make them work, other than both parties being willing to try and overcome obstacles.

(Source: the-humans-from-wall-e, via walpurgisnuit)

theartofanimation:

Megatruh

(via joeydeleen)

lisafer:

missmisandry:

Two of my favorite Disney fan art series’, together at last.

Jirka Vinse’s  Real Life Disney Girls and David Kawena’s Disney Heroes

Hyper-realistic women and hyper-sexualized men 

I may have posted this before… Chances are I will re-post it every time I see it.

Ok, this is really kinda cool.

(Source: marrymejasonsegel, via lalunetteprismatique)