not a furry just an ally

Today (July 19th) is Changing Places awareness day!

[Image description: a photo of the changing places toilet with the features listed below /end ID]

What is a changing places toilet?

A changing places toilet is a toilet which can be used by disabled people like me who can’t use a standard accessible toilet. This may be because someone needs extra equipment, and/or room for carers to help them. The main features of the changing places toilet are:

Why raise awareness?

The lack of changing places toilet means it’s hard for disabled people like me to leave the house. It’s limits our ability to socialise, access work/education, exercise, travel, and even attend hospital appointments. (In the UK there are only 93 hospitals with a registered changing places toilet).

I have to plan my entire life around the few changing places toilet that exist, which massively shrinks my world. It’s incredibly difficult for me to travel (less than 2% of train stations in the UK have a changing places toilet), go days out, visit the hospital, and otherwise experience the world outside my house. Hopefully one day every event like Pride or music festivals will have a mobile changing places toilet, and there will be public changing places toilet with 24/7 access in every town, as well as changing places toilets in public buildings like leisure centres, libraries, museums, cinemas, tourist attractions and shopping centres.

More info including what you can do to help the UK campaigns for more changing places toilets can be found at changing-places.org

i was interested to learn more about changing places outside of the UK, and i found, from what looks like the same organization, this international map + this Florida/Georgia/Alabama project to install more, in case anyone is in the same area and would like to learn! we apparently only have one in my city, seven in my state, which is absolutely not enough to let people go about their days freely.

This is approximate since calculations vary, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution have come from destruction of terrestrial ecosystems—wetland destruction, deforestation, degradation of grasslands and so on

Soil, soil communities, root systems, carbonate rock, wood, living plants, and peat in wetlands—all holds carbon

Now consider what plants do for you

The mere sight of plants and trees improves mental and physical health. I won't elaborate much more upon this, the positive effects are incredible and overwhelming.

Trees and vines that shade your home and outdoor areas: reduce the cost of cooling, meaning less electricity is used. Shade reduces the risk of death in extreme heat events.

(Trees also reduce light and noise pollution)

Edible plants (many wild plants and many plants you can grow): provide you with food reducing your dependence on industrial agriculture and cars to reach supermarkets

Community gardens and orchards: creates resilience and interdependence among small local communities, reducing the power of capitalism and increasing the ability of individuals to organize and create change. Makes more sustainable and plant based diets accessible to people for whom they would ordinarily be inaccessible

Compost piles for gardening: less greenhouse gas emissions than result from waste breaking down anaerobically in landfills

No more traditional lawns: much less use of gas powered lawn mowers, weed whackers etc. which are, by themselves, significant contributions to carbon emissions and urban pollution

Crafting and creating using plants: Locally available wild plant species can be used by local crafters and creators for baskets and containers, yarn, fabrics, dyes, and the like, resulting in less dependence on unsustainable and unethical global industries

More people growing and gathering edible and useful plants and using them = larger body of practical, scientific and technological insights to draw from in order to solve future problems

In conclusion: Plants

Articles and websites focus much on feedback loops with bad consequences (such as the Amazon rainforest degradation potentially accelerating climate change).

We need to focus more on feedback loops with good consequences (such as the restoration of a keystone species increasing the resilience of the ecosystem)

One of the most powerful of these cascade effects is this one: anything that increases the stability and safety of a community of people, will increase the ability of those people to act in a positive way and fight against the forces that oppress them

Isolated, scared, constantly threatened people who depend on Buying Product for all their needs = Unable to easily change, most energy goes to survival, cannot advocate for things bigger than themselves

Community of people caring for the ecosystem that surrounds them = Buffered against the threats imposed by capitalism, stronger sense of efficacy, Sharing of knowledge and wisdom instead of individuals struggling to learn from the hostile and dishonest internet, growing some food and other useful plants creates a slight safety net, can organize and therefore harder to defeat

^^^Everything about the ideal of life under capitalism...is made to STOP you from doing this

Whenever you learn something, teach someone else. Especially plant identification. And grow something you can give as a gift to a neighbor.

A dear friend made this 👌posted with her blessing

Air biscuits

Just your resident fat, black Queen looking ethereal AF.

Photographer - Linda Blacker (@LindaBlacker on IG)

Model - Me! (@nerdabouttown on IG)

Renegades. San Francisco: Queer Life in the 1990s | Chloe Sherman | Hatje Cantz | 2023

The accompanying exhibition is on show at f3 - freiraum für fotografie in Berlin from 30 June - 3 September 2023.

It is 1880s America, you are about to spawn as a Historically Significant White Guy. Choose a class:

TROUBLEMAKING FRONTIER PREACHER

MANICALLY AMBITIOUS CON ARTIST

EUROPEAN NOBLE FAILSON

DOOMED FRONTIER EXPLORER

summer beach 🏖️

its a little rough but thought it would be fun to draw the gems in the late 60s with some random rose's love interest

i want what david cronenberg has

I would like to share with you all some absolutely raw advice my mom gave me about my anxiety today

Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.

The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.

And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.

I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.

Let me tell you a story.

Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.

Seaside, FL

Seahaven

And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.

reblog to enlist your mutuals in building the House :)

Tubi is the best streaming service because it captures the feeling of a video store, but not a corporate video store like Blockbuster, or even a good indie store, but a rundown video rental place under a overpass weeks away from closing down. You'll find, like, 2001: A Space Odyssey next to a unwatchable copy of a 70s exploitation film and a micro-low-budget indie and a movie called STRIPPER VAMPIRE MASSACRE III but you can find no evidence of STRIPPER VAMPIRE MASSACRE one or two existing.

This is a real, commercial streaming service and they've uploaded films with the DVD menu visible for the first few seconds bc it's a recording of a DVD copy. What a titan in the landscape of streaming

The way I see it, kink is about camp and metaphor. If you are writing callout posts about how pup play is beastiality and "daddy" is pedophilia/incest, you take everything too literally and are starved for poetry. Please, satiate yourself!