how the absolute FUCK am i supposed to live long and prosper in these conditions

thinking about how the act of bringing someone back from the dead comes from a desire not just to bring back the dead person but to have things return to the way they were before they died. which is, of course, impossible. if a haunting is an open wound, then resurrection is a knife widening the cut.

youre so fuckign right

dont you love (hate) how transandrophobia and aphobia almost always goes hand in hand?

Wow

Even when the word actually comes out of academia it doesn’t matter to them. It’s still “brain rot from tumblr”.

The fact they put amatonormativity in that sentence (ie. the word which comes from academia) is so telling.

I think people need to read more than Whipping Girl.

I've never read Whipping Girl, but I'm always going to advocate that people read more than a single book, and preferably read widely.

For instance, if you haven't read sociology or anthropology, you might be tempted to think there are new queer demographics under the sun, whereas if you have read in either field you will likely have the understanding that we have lost some of the queer terminology which would have been our birthright had imperialism, colonialism, and missionary zeal not destroyed so much in the way of culture and language.

anyway, everyone read Elisabeth Brake's Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality and the Law

i truly believe that if alloallo ppl would get off their high horse and realize that aspec ideas have at their core communication, mutual acceptance and understanding, rejection of heteronormative norms, redefining relationships and defining yourself as an individual outside your relationships, a lot of their problems would be solved

It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

It is genuinely baffling to me, in a very kind and positive way, especially coupled with the local news continually going several shades of 'wtf, this thing is a roaring success again and we don't quite get why'. They've already quadrupled their capacity for simultaneous clicks and it's still nowhere near enough and there's just... Bewilderment.

But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.

Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:

Foldit (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time

Species Watch (animal species)

BOINC’s Compute for Science

Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects

Label trees in aerial photos

Count cells in fossils and modern leaves

Digitize Atmospheric Data

Count penguins

US-based Citizen Science Database

eBird (bird identification)

Merlin (bird identification by sound)

iNaturalist (nature identification)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)

Smithsonian Archives Transcription Center

How to begin a sustainable way of life

This is a draft of something I've been writing for a couple months. It is mainly focused on the culture of the USA. Feel free to repost or otherwise share, with or without credit.

Do not tell people what to do—help them do it! 

Give the gift of relief from being forced to engage in society’s unsustainable ways of life. 

You cannot control others’ behaviors, but you can free them from being controlled. 

If you think to yourself, “But this would be so difficult to do!” ask yourself WHY? Why does your society coerce you into less sustainable ways of living, forcing you to consume excessively? After thinking about this, consider that it is less simple and easy than you thought to make more sustainable choices, so why would you judge others for not doing it? 

Do not act alone—act with others! 

Environmentally friendly behaviors that can be done alone, without collaborating with or consulting another person, are the least powerful of all. Whenever an “environmentally friendly” behavior is suggested, figure out “How can I give this as a gift?” or “How can I make this possible on the level of a whole community?” 

“Personal choices” do not work because every single person has to make them individually. If you are focused on making your own personal choice, you are not focused on others. If you are not focused on others, you are not helping them. If nobody is helping each other, most people won’t be able to make the “personal choice.”

You inherently share an ecosystem with your neighbors  

            Start with your neighbors, the people physically close to you. You live on the same patch of land, containing roots from the same plants and trees. You can speak to them face to face without traveling, which means you can easily bring them physical things without using resources to travel. 

            Always talk to your neighbors and be friendly with them. Offer them favors unprompted and tell them about how your garden is doing. Do not be afraid to be annoying—a slightly annoying neighbor who is helpful, kind, and can be relied upon for a variety of favors or in times of need is a necessary and inevitable part of a good community. If you make the effort to be present in somebody’s life, they will have to put up with you on some occasions, but that is just life. We cannot rely on each other if we do not put up with each other. 

Simply spending time with someone influences them for good 

Every hour you spend outside with your neighbor is an hour your neighbor doesn’t spend watching Fox News. Every hour you spend talking with someone and interacting with them in the real world, eating real food and enjoying your real surroundings, is an hour you don’t spend only hearing a curated picture of what reality is like from social media. 

            Isolation makes it easy for people to become indoctrinated into extremist beliefs. When someone spends more time alone, watching TV, Youtube, or scrolling social media, than they do with others, their concept of what other people are like and what the world is like comes more from social media than real life. TV and online media are meant to influence you in a specific way. Simply restricting the access these influences have to yourself and others is helpful. 

A garden is the source of many gifts 

If you grow a garden, you can give your neighbors and friends the gift of food, plants, and crafted objects. This is one of the foundational ways to form community. When you give food, you provide support to others. When you give plants, you are encouraging and teaching about gardening. It is even better when you give recipes cooked from things you grew, or items crafted from things you grew. You can also give the gift of knowledge of how to grow these plants, cook these recipes, or craft these objects. 

More on gift-giving

            Some people are uncomfortable with receiving items or services as gifts. They want to feel like they are giving something back, instead of having obligation to return the favor hanging over them. 

            It can help to ask a simple favor that can be easily fulfilled. People generally like the feeling of helping someone else. 

When you give someone a gift, it can help to say something like “Oh, I have too many of this thing to take care of/store/eat myself! Do you think you could take some?” This makes your neighbor feel like they are helping you. 

When allowing others to borrow items, you might not get them back. Don’t worry about that. It just means the item found a place where it was needed the most. You can ask about the item if you think it might have been forgotten, and this can create an opportunity for a second meeting. But don’t press. 

If the person you give to insists upon some form of payment, this is a good opportunity to negotiate a trade. 

Ask to be given compostable or recyclable things 

Ask your neighbor to save compostable scraps, biodegradable cardboard and paper products, and any other items that might be put to use. Use them in your own compost pile. Or, start a compost pile at the edge of the yard where you both can add to it. Remember that “wet” compost like vegetable and fruit bits needs to be mixed with twice as much of “dry” and “woody” compost like cardboard, leaves, small twigs, paper and wood bits. 

Use the front yard for gardening

Overcome the cultural norm that the front yard is only decorative. Use the front yard for gardening so you can be seen by others enjoying your garden, and others can witness the demonstration of the possibilities of land. In the front yard, anything you do intentionally with your land can be witnessed. It also makes you a visible presence in your community. 

Grow staple foods 

Don’t just grow vegetables that cannot be the core component of a meal themselves. Grow potatoes, dry beans, black eyed peas and other nourishing, calorie-dense foods. Grow the ingredients of meals. You could even build a garden around a recipe.

Invite neighbors and friends over to eat food made from things you grew 

Be sure to send them home with leftovers.  

Grow plants for baskets 

Containers are one of the fundamental human needs. If we had more containers, we wouldn’t need plastic so much. You can learn to make baskets, and to grow plants that provide the raw materials for baskets. 

If someone rakes their leaves, ask to have the leaves  

If you see someone putting leaves in bags, don’t be afraid to ask if you can have the leaves. More likely than not they will be happy to agree. 

Collaborate with neighbors to plant things in the no-man’s-land of the property line 

In the border land between your neighbor’s yard and your yard, it is almost always just mowed grass because no one can plant anything without it affecting their neighbor. But these border lands add up to a lot of space. It would be much better if you talked to your neighbor about what would be nice to plant there, and together created a plan for that space. 

Give others the freedom to wander 

Make it clear that you will not get mad if the neighbor’s kids play in your yard or run across it. Invite the neighbors onto your land as much as possible. Tell them they are allowed to spend time in a favored spot whenever they would like.  

The power of the hand-made sign 

If there is a yard sale, you always know about it because of the hand-drawn signs placed around. Therefore, a cookout or unwanted item exchange can be announced the same way. In rural areas I have seen hand-made signs that say: FIREWOOD or WE BUY GOATS or EGGS. This is one of the few technologies of community that remain in the USA. If someone who looks to buy and sell can put up a hand-made sign, why shouldn’t you?  

Religious people or people with strong political opinions like to put signs everywhere. If they have the confidence and courage to do so, why shouldn’t you? 

So if there is a message you would like everyone to see, use the simple power of the hand-made sign. Proclaim “BEE FRIENDLY ZONE!” above your pollinator garden with all the confidence of a religious fundamentalist billboard. Announce to the world, “VEGETABLES FREE TO ALL—JUST ASK!” “WE TAKE LEAVES—NO PESTICIDES.” Instead of YARD SALE, or perhaps in conjunction with YARD SALE, you can write, PLANT EXCHANGE or SEED SWAP or CLOTHING SWAP. Who can stop you? 

Someone has to do it for society to change  

Some of these ideas might be eccentric, strange, or even socially unacceptable, but there is no way to change what is normal except to move against it. Someone has to be weird. It might as well be you. 

These are great ideas! I'd love to reflect/expand on them a bit.

It's not particularly glamorous work but I think a lot about my various community clean up programs over the years. It started as a prison abolition and community-sanitation project. See, where I grew up, "cleaning up trash outside" was a conviction sentence. In CA, a huge deal of essential services are performed by un-/under-paid detained people with no rights or safety protections. This meant that you would drive down the highway on the school field trip bus and see literal chain gangs being overseen by prison staff. It was upsetting to say the least.

Several people in the community decided to branch out in their more specific advocacy for prison abolition and seek to disrupt the ability of the state to force detainees to provide these services. There were a lot of ways they did this, depending on the service, but for this, they went the route of "at least we can make this a "prison job" with nothing to actually do". The hope was it would discourage continued reliance on these people in more dangerous clean up locations like highway on ramps so at least they could be less likely to be injured. I was young, as were the organizers, and i'm really not sure how meaningful we actually were in that, but nonetheless the clean ups were a HUGE success.

Something we noticed is that when the environment is more welcoming and comfortable, people are more likely to spend time in it TOGETHER in community with each other. This ALONE would have been worth it to us because it helped us recruit and empower new volunteers for future clean ups, it helped us direct people to aid resources and orgs we worked with, and it eased interpersonal tensions in the community for everyone to be in regular contact with each other. So ever since, my goals for community work have been as follows:

1) physically bring people together in shared space for An Activity

For me, this is usually a community clean up project, a meal, managing a community garden, or kids' programming. I find that when people are sharing space with purpose it can make it easier for everyone to give each other that unconditional regard that's essential to sharing space with love and respect

2) always be the first one to get your hands in the work

If you organized it, then you better be the first one getting your hands dirty before a single one of your guests. Facilitation is all about smoothing over barriers that may prevent others from acting on their own power. You are not there to teach, to do on behalf of, or to lead. You are simply there to perform the work, and in order to facilitate that performance, you have arranged and ensured the presence of others willing to do the same. If you boss people around, they will get annoyed and stop coming. If people feel overly confused and uncertain, the work won't get done and folks will stop coming. So do the work. Talk to others about why you're doing what you're doing as its happening so they can learn if they want, and be willing to answer questions or offer suggestions without pressing the issue.

3) always make sure people feel that you are excited to have them there, even if they only come for the photo ops, if they only come once a year, or if they only come to hang with their friends, the work is the point but the work goes beyond the tasks being performed. Never alienate a potential ally for their current level of readiness to act because this readiness is inherently changeable based on timing and circumstance.

Some of my gardest working volunteers over the years have been people who basically just showed up, ate the food, and listened to us talk for YEARS before actually doing anything.

But they LISTENED. If I had made them feel unwelcome because they weren't participating in the ways I wanted at the pace I wanted, they would never have spent the time with us to hear what we had to say. Facilitation means that the door never closes, no matter how long someone drags their feet about getting started, because you have to assume that they wouldn't still be gearing up if they weren't eventually going to get around to it.

So what am I doing right now?

The land we live on uses trees as plot markers. We've been starting up conversations with our neighbors to the tune of "hey, could we add some fruit trees to the line? You would of course be welcome to the fryit same as us!"

I'm using my garden as a pilot test bed for neighborhood hurricane resilience landscaping. We live in wetlands and flood horribly during hurricanes, which historically has devastated the neighborhood. We've been introducing storm gardens and restoring the creek with the goal of reducing the severity of storm and flood damage. Ideally as more neighbors agree to work with us, we'll be able to reduce the risk of the neighborhood pretty substantially!

Food fridges are a huge benefit to communities, especially those whose food pantries choose to or are required to means test their applicants. Food fridges are hugely effective at reducing childhood food insecurity, and at reducing the medical risks of food instability in a region. The nearest food fridge program to us is a 4hr round trip drive though. Longterm, we hope to have a community garden and multiple locations willing to host a "fridge" with food from that garden, but for now we're on the scale of a neighborhood.

I'm starting a mending and tailoring business! I've got some lovely little business cards with a website and QR code, and they're gonna go up all over town in the new year. People can call and ask for help repairing favorite or essential clothing items, and can make full new purchases from recycled fabric garments, etc. I used to do a stitch and bitch in person and for a hot minute I tried to do one virtually, but I think I might do something similar again here! Give people a Q&A space to come learn about sewing or mending or other aspects of the work while I deal with my orders.

The neighborhood trashcan is a classic. I've had one plenty of times and its always worth it. People are usually happy to throw trash where it goes! Assuming it HAS anywhere to go. So I buy those enclosed park bins from restaurant supply places online and park them on the sidewalk with a little sign that says to use it. Practically overnight the area gets prettier and cleaner.

I've stopped using pesticides, and while I can't control what my neighbors do, I can talk to them about what I'm doing and why. As my garden establishes and really comes together, I expect to get people asking after it. That's always an opening for me to share HOW my results are so good - functional planting blueprints based on forest layering, reducing the introduction of harmful materials and chemicals, increasing local bio-diversity through intentional planting and cultivation of volunteer seedlings, supporting the plants via inter-species and intra-genus environmental function planning, etc. I have a lovely, healthy looking "lawn" in the dead of winter while theirs are drowning in fozen mud sludge because I worked WITH my environment instead of against it, and if they like my results, well I would be delighted to show them how I did it. Historically, this has been pretty effective for me in getting people on board.

My local craigslist free section is a glorious place. I can find people giving away decades old stores of craft supplies, recycled wooden shipping pallets and fire wood, chickens for the flock or for butchering, furniture or clothes, practically anything you like as long as you can come haul it. Right now, I just make a day of things, rent a little uhaul truck, and snag what I want, but eventually I want to have my own little pull behind hauling trailer so I don't even have to do that.

Did you know that you can buy clothes from the thrift store, alter and repair them, and then give them BACK to the thrift store? Now, granted, your work DOES need to actually be able to sell back to gen.pop., so depending on skill and what you're doing, this may not be a good plan lol. But I like being able to give a lot of plus size clothes to the thrift shop since I know they cycle faster, and it's pretty easy to take damaged or slightly marred straight size clothes and upsize them. Once when I was in high school I briefly had a deal with the local thrift shop that any donation clothes they received that could not be put on the shelves, I could have as long as I turned at least some of them into new garments they COULD sell. Got me a steady supply of recycled fabric I didn't have to pay for, got them an atypical garment supply source they could use to round out their stock. Another option for this is finding someone who sells fabric scrap by weight. There's a few shops I use that will send you 10lbs of fabric scrap for the cost of shipping, and that's a great way of getting inexpensive fabric stores for whatever I like.

Anyway, best of luck to anyone figuring out what they have room to do or room to facilitate in their lives. I believe in yall

(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)

technically we’re ALL, always LARPing, because the Self is only a construct,

I want a new character

Then make one.

Everyone talking about posts that changed their brain chemistry seem to be leaving out this classic, which probably propelled me into activism and more self confidence in a way that I cannot put into words.

alright trans ppl we're returning to the fucking sea until shit gets better lets go everyone

this is awesome

trans pride flag colorpicked from this crab (i swear all those colors are on the crab itself)

sweet-tart:

whoever came up with the phraise "eepy" i hate you because its so cringe and embarassing but its the first word that comes to me when im feeling eepy

fuck you

cranky because you're eepy aren't you

ummmmm excuse me Human, i am noticing we are not petting me? i am a little baby of seven (7) years old and i have never been loved in my whole entire life (tragedy.) your eye balls must not have seen when i ran in front of your legs six times in a row. i will now Scream until this mistake is fixed

UM GUYS. I JUST NOTICED A CRAZY ISSUE W THE TUMBLR UPDATE.

YOU CAN SEE THE ICONS OF ANONS SOMETIMES.

The way I was able to recognize several anons in one of my inboxes bc of this error. Oh my god. Guys. This isn’t supposed to happen.

Weighing in to say:

YES, I SEE THIS ON MOBILE. HOWEVER I DO **NOT** THINK IT'S SHOWING THE ANON'S REAL IDENTITY.

The profile pictures I see next to anon asks are profile pictures that belong to other, non-anon asks in my ask box also. Some info

I think the bug is the inbox INCORRECTLY attributing anons to neighboring, logged-in asks.

Which is still a bad bug! Considering it makes it look like a long-time follower of mine sent me a spam ask.

And is worse if, say, one of these was anon hate.

But it's NOT the anon's real identity. It's a neighboring ask asker's identity

So if you have anon hate in your inbox that looks like it's attributed to your dear friend, who sends you lovely asks all the time, it was Not them.

CONFIRMED THE BUG IS INCORRECT ATTRIBUTION.

Thanks @thepatchycat for being a test subject. As you can see the icon being attributed to this ask is NOT the patchy cat

The pictured icon belongs to @watchingforcomets who sent me a nice ask about nail polish yesterday which I have not yet answered!

"Rationalism" is up there with "Objectivism" in terms of "definitionally funny things to call your own belief system".

"Yeah man I've been doing some thinking and philosophy and I've come up with a framework called Being Right"

It’s always “phones are ruining our brains” and never “the virus known for post-viral cognitive decline, which causes short term memory loss, brain fog, and decreased spatial reasoning, that we let run rampant through our communities for years is ruining our brains”

Ao3 version that lets you open the 'director's cut' where I, the author, explain every detail in excruciating detail to you and what it is in reference to.

@bonsaibovine being absolutely correct in the tags

Legit. Ask me anything you want to know about my fics.

let’s pour one out for all the janitors who clean and never get enough appreciation

Don’t they gotta clean up what we pour out

fuck stop it everyone the post is cancelled everyone please stop fuck what have I done