Help A Family Avoid Homelessness

Hey folks,

I have a family member who is very precious to me. She's a disabled single mom with five kids, four at home with her.

The family has been through a lot. Abuse, trauma, and poverty. PTSD, anxiety, and poor health have made it very difficult for them to move forward in life. (Everyone is in therapy and such it's just been A Lot)

This year alone:

Right now, thanks to the loss of a primary monetary provider in the house they're at risk of losing a place to stay. They need help.

They're getting help locally from organizations but it's the holiday season so it's difficult to get what's needed on time.

This family is a family of survivors. They are hilarious, sweet, wonderful, and creative. I want them to be okay. I want them to not have to ring in the new year living out of their car or worrying about living conditions.

They don't get enough in to keep bills paid and a roof over their heads. They didn't have enough for Christmas.

They need money for bills and rent for the coming month. Their social worker is making the effort to find them housing etc.

The immediate need is $500 but what we really need for the coming month is closer to $3000.

So far we're at 100/500

We've got until Friday for the immediate need.

If you can donate anything it will be much appreciated.

Donate Here

We also have a GoFundMe but Paypal donations help for immediate concerns.

When I say that I'll never forgive my high school for what it did to my joints, I mean this:

Nice to know that my experiences werent universal. Cool cool cool.

OP went to Wayside

As someone who likes architecture, my immediate response to this was to look into the history of the building, because my brain cannot imagine this having been a school for its entire existence.

Imagine my... disgust? at finding out that yes, it has, in fact, always been a school. Built in 1924 in honor of a poet. I dug around the address and discovered a nice little site that happens to document a large variety of historical school notes, and sure enough, found documentation of the newsletter for the  Class of 1930. 

I want to kill the architect, but I also want you to enjoy this little article title in a 1944 newspaper they have on file in their “High School High Times”:

update  lost 20$ billion

update David Zaslav ..fool no one,big moron never  we never seen

This is so sad

#QuietQuitting sounds like capitalists complaining about their waning exploitation.

We love Alex Hirsch

The best part about this is the current Pope would likely accept the challenge.

That is, in order, what you need to understand to get why this happens.

I hate correcting customers who call me ma'am and miss and honey over the phone, because only about 30 percent of the time do they apologize and start calling me sir, while 70 percent of the time they double down assuming I was trans and continue misgendering me on purpose to show how little respect they have for me as a human being. "Thank you, MISS."

I'm a cis man, for the record.

Whenever I correct someone and they keep it up, I simply refuse service. "Oh, I'm sorry, we're completeley booked up the day you wanted. Yeah, no, we're booked up on your backup dates too. Looks like our next opening isn't until, hmm, mid-November. Oh, but it doesn't have enough beds for your party. We could probably fit you in around New Years, but you'd have to change rooms every day. You might wanna try [more expensive motel] a few blocks north of us, they might have vacancies. Have a good day."

I've been able to dodge what few complaints we've gotten so far because they all tell my boss that they just spoke to a very nasty woman, and she has no idea who they're talking about. "You must have dialed the wrong number, because I'm the only woman here, and I didn't talk to you." That PISSES THEM OFF, and she doesn't understand why they respond with "well we've been staying there for years, but we're never coming back." They think she's protecting me, an afab trans man, and are disgusted by it, but from her perspective they're just crazy people who are complaining about made up bullshit; it doesn't even cross her mind that they're talking about me. Why would it?

My boss is like 70 or 75, and was a Republican until 2016. It's never come up in conversation, but something tells me she wouldn't exactly be a trans ally. I'm in a weird position here, and it's hilarious.

Holy fucking shit y'all.

ok but

Have some samples from the comments - 10/10 would recommend browsing them.

hello @sashayed your gay haunted wedding is doing numbers on tumblr as god or whoever intended

ghosts loved it btw 😌

TIL To create an accurate depiction of a black hole in the movie Interstellar, Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist, wrote pages of theoretical equations to help the VFX team. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insights, resulting in the publication of three scientific papers.

via reddit.com

because this and also because Jurassic Park–related advances in paleontology, et cetera, anyone who devalues the arts in favor of the sciences demonstrably has the wrong end of the stick

Science and Arts are not opposites, they are not rivals, they are the neglected siblings of the egotistical and over-indulged Sports and his best friend Money.

We, as scientist and artists, must unite. Science is an art, and art is a science. We hold hands and we make the world a much better place!

When Interstellar came out, every single undergrad at my university who was doing work for a LIGO project, half a dozen assorted physics majors, and half a dozen engineers all went out to watch it with the explicit intent to talk about the physics of it. It was at an IMAX and we were basically the only people there, and we asked the few who were if they’d be okay hearing us talk during the movie. (They said yes, I think they were interested in what we’d say.)

We also happened to love the movie along the way, but we got deep into the physics of it. Like, deep deep. General relativity shit, the math of causality violation, so much deep niche physics. And then one of the engineers casually commented, “Hmm. None of those are the big problem though.”

All us general relativity people: “Oh?”

Engineer: “Yeah. The real problem was that they needed the really big rocket to get off of earth but only those tiny itty bitty landers to clear a gravitational field so intense it causes massive time dilation.”

All us general relativity people: suddenly and intensely coming to terms with how obvious that was and how badly we missed it

Engineer: “Physicists.” (affectionately derogatory)

It recently came up in conversation with my toddler that some birds can talk, and this has caused her great concern.

See, we were talking about how movies are pretend and how in real life, animals don’t talk. I mentioned that there are some birds who talk a little bit, but not like the animals in movies, and she just looked at me like “???”

So I informed her that some kinds of parrots can copy sounds that people make, and can learn how to say words. I thought this would give her a giggle, as fun new facts often do, but she was just deeply perplexed and a little worried about this.

“Birds can talk?” “Do they ask questions?” “What do they say?” Why do they talk?” “Do chickens talk?” “What about Blue Jays?” “Why do some birds talk?” “How do they talk?” “Birds TALK???”

We showed her a video of a parrot doing the “Hello, pretty bird, give a kiss” thing, and she was dead silent the whole time, hugging her comfort pillow with her knees to her chest. We asked if she wanted us to turn it off, and she shook her head. But we also asked if she wanted to see another one, and she shook her head even harder.

I don’t know why it has distressed her so greatly to learn that some birds can mimic human speech; but then again, I don’t know why it doesn’t distress the rest of us more to know that some birds can mimic human speech.

I keep thinking about that post that’s like “The first person to hear a parrot talk was probably Not Okay.” Because that’s exactly what happened. She had never been introduced to the concept, and her entire worldview got SHOOK.

Part of why Ravens are considered Spooky Bad Things We Associate With The Faeries is because they can and do mimic human speech - but much, much better than a parrot. With a parrot, you can tell something is off about the sound. You can tell it doesn’t belong to a human. Ravens don’t sound like that, no, cause they’re overacheivers. (And passerines). They sound EXACTLY like the voice of whoever they are mimicking.

But more importantly they love the sound of human laughter. No one knows why. But it is totally, 100% possible, and it happens to this day, to walk along the paths in the Black Forest and suddenly hear a strange kind of giggling sound, or maybe even a very clear, definitely human sounding “hello?” “Hiiiii!” Or “let’s go!”.

However, it takes a lot of practice for them to copy sounds as perfectly as they do, so you’re equally likely to hear something that definitely sounds human-like, but the words make no sense and the sound is unlike any language you know.

Ravens at the Tower of London do this all the time. Theyre pretty sociable with humans though, so they do it quite openly. I have seen videos of people, mostly Americans, look absolutely spooked out of their skins when a big ol’ raven (mind ye, these are birds that are 2 feet tall with a 5 foot wingspan) comes waltzing up on the deck and starts talking to them.

And ravens, especially the ones there that have been bred and raised by humans for centuries, don’t just imitate - they have one of the same language processing genes we do, and they understand the way a toddler might that things, places, and individuals have names, and can string together basic sentences much like an african grey.

I know because I used to work with one, Darlene, who knew, quite well, what she wanted and how to ask for it. If you were preparing her breakfast, she would hop on up and investigate. She used to be an illegal pet, and had been taught “manners”. That is to say, if she went for something and you told her, sternly, “mind your manners missy!” She would stop, look at you, perhaps for up to a minute, and then point with her beak to what she wanted. If that did not work, she would ask, in plain English, “grape?” Or “Darl have grape?” And lord help you if you gave her anything less than what she asked for. She would throw it at you, and try to bite you, sometimes while saying “No!” In the same tone as I imagine she was reprimanded in her home.

So yeah. Parrots arent the only ones.

WHAT

Was anyone gonna tell me that ravens can talk or was I meant to read about it on a tumblr post?!

Talking Ravens has been a trope in fantasy for so long that people forgot that it is based in fact.

Fancy some berry juice? 🍓🍊🍑🫐✨

over the garden wall really just aired its 10 episodes once in 2014 leaving a whole generation with irreversible damage and then fucked off never to be seen again

my one skill is expertly manipulating the shape of the eggs I’m cooking so that they fit perfectly onto my toast every time

Bow down to your king

I can’t stop outdoing myself

Remember that post? The one that said “what if we all have super powers but they’re so mundane we don’t realize?” That post? This is proof that post was right

Energy company has got some sass

Duke Energy Fined $102 million for Polluting Rivers with Coal Ash

This is the best summary of the corporate deflection of blame for environmental destruction onto the consumer to save face I’ve ever seen