IN A RARE GOOD BIT OF AMERICAN NEWS, THE SUPREME COURT'S REACTION TO THE NORTH CAROLINA CASE OF "WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WANT WITH FEDERAL ELECTIONS, ACTUALLY" WAS BOTH KEPT BY THE COURT AND DENIED WITH A FAIRLY RESOUNDING "YOU KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF"

This is huge. Every court watcher was predicting that the bench would side with the NC Republican Party because at least 5 justices had authored opinions supporting ISL theory. Not only have they struck it down, they’ve also established judicial precedent to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act more rigidly than ever before with  Allen v. Milligan. Alabama has been required to create a new black-majority congressional district, and the court just cleared the way for the same thing to happen in Louisiana. The Milligan decision establishes a very aggressive interpretation of the VRA’s ban on racial gerrymandering, essentially requiring states to factor in the proportionality of their non-white population when drawing congressional districts. And now with the Moore v. Harper decisions, state courts have the power to enforce that ruling and invalidate a LOT of the congressional maps in the US on the grounds of racial gerrymandering. This is a body blow to institutional racism that cannot be understated. And it came from the most conservative bench in modern history. Who would’ve thunk it?

I stated this really off the cuff and flippantly because I wasn’t expecting it to break containment, but this is a great actual breakdown of the situation for Americans who do need to know this and keep an eye on this, and also for anyone internationally who might be interested.

Hate when people post these videos with "ethnic" tag and leave out who these people are, what their culture is or even what they're singing in.

Anyway, this is probably one of the best bands of this decade and they're Otyken!

I can't recommend My Wing enough. Their songs are so much fun - Genesis is also a blast. Go listen to them!!!!

I would need to buy an extra suitcase before I stepped into this store

@netherworldpost Atty you gotta see em, this guy sells halloween stamps based on vintage halloween art

when u reach a certain friendship level w me u unlock me sending u posts that fit ur aesthetic/interests. its honestly an entire love language

[Image description: a meme that shows a simple diagram indicating how a thought changes when it’s put into words. The thought says “I love you so much. I value our friendship deeply and I care about you immensely. You are important to me and I wanna see you happy”. After moving from brain to mouth, the thought has turned into the person saying “this post is youcore”. End ID.]

requested by anonymous:

RATING: RELIABLE

The above is from this article from The Guardian.  The images are from MYA Network. The caption on their website reads:

Source: ‘When a sperm and egg get together, the body creates tissue in order to support the developing pregnancy.  Here are photos of that tissue from 5-9 week pregnancies.  This is called the gestational sac, and it’s like the “house” for the pregnancy. Inside this sac there are cells that have the potential to become a fetus but there is no visible embryo at this stage. We rinsed off the blood and menstrual lining (decidua) for these photographs.’

The published images sparked a lot of debate, leading to the story being picked up by other news outlets. For example:

Source: ‘Last week, the Guardian published images of pregnancy tissue after abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The small size and appearance of the tissue were shocking to many. We have all absorbed, knowingly and unknowingly, the pervasive anti-abortion narrative that a pregnancy resembles a tiny baby starting in the earliest weeks. Though an early embryo can be seen under the magnification of ultrasound, it can take months for it to be perceptible to the naked eye.’

Source: ‘People have responded in disbelief, citing the (magnified) images they’ve seen on ultrasounds. […] ”Think of the illustrations on pregnancy and medical websites. The Mayo Clinic, one of the preeminent medical organizations in the country, shows week-by-week illustrations of embryonic and fetal development without any context of scale, like the rulers in the MYA photos.’

As stated in the article, whilst people talk about a ‘heartbeat’ at 6 weeks, there is no heart developed at this stage - only a group of cells that will become part of the heart.

Source: ‘But what exactly do we mean when we talk about a “fetal heartbeat” at six weeks of pregnancy? Although some people might picture a heart-shaped organ beating inside a fetus, this is not the case. Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect “a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby,” said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future “pacemaker” of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.’

It should also be noted that the images show an embryo, not a fetus, until the 9th week.

Source: ‘In human pregnancies, a baby-to-be isn’t considered a fetus until the 9th week after conception, or week 11 after your last menstrual period (LMP).’

The co-founders of the MYA Network responded in a New York Times article.

Source: ‘Many people, even those who support abortion rights, did not believe the photos were accurate. Some insisted we had deliberately removed the embryos before taking the photos. The images weren’t consistent with those often seen in embryological textbooks, magnified on ultrasounds or used in anti-abortion propaganda; these enlarged images are not what you see with the naked eye after an abortion. A Stanford gynecologic pathologist has validated our photos, but many people could not believe the pictures were presented unaltered.

I’ve never seen pictures like this.

DOCTOR WHO | 1.13

Just turn around

The companion piece I did

Due to some stuff brought up in recent posts I believe it is time to once again extol the virtues of Ms-Demeanor's Patented Where Did I Put That Fucking Paper Organizational Binder.

Hello! I am a disorganized adult! This is the system by which I manage my important shit like pink slips for my car and medical records and tax information.

You're going to need:

So the way this system works is you put the sheet protectors into the binder. You can either use the dividers to divide the binder into sections or you can label some of the sheet protectors to make different sections but what you are generally going to do is make sections of the binder labeled things like "taxes" or "vet" or "doctor" and put a few sheet protectors in each section.

Then all of your papers with important information get crammed in that folder. You don't organize them, you don't sort them by date, you don't alphabetize. You put things vaguely relating to taxes into the sheet protectors in the taxes section. You put things relating to cars in the cars section. You don't even attempt to make this readable - you're not using sheet protectors so that you can read each page and keep it legible, you're using sheet protectors because it's a cheap plastic bag that will sit nicely in a binder.

You CAN put stuff into the individual sheet protectors when you get it, but let's be realistic you probably WON'T do that, so just tuck individual papers into the front of the binder until you get to a critical mass of paperwork then take an hour to sit down and sort into categories and put it in the binder once every six months to three years (depending on how frequently you get paperwork). Sometimes these sections will outgrow their original allotted space - since my spouse had a transplant surgery the medical section has had to become its own folder - and that's okay. If you end up with multiple folders just keep them together (this is why the backpack is an option, and one I strongly recommend).

Because yeah, if my organization system relies on opening up a drawer and putting something where it belongs as soon as I get the paper, I will simply not be organized. It's not going to happen. But I can handle a messy stack of paper that sits in one place and grows until it is time to shove it into a binder. I can't organize things for thirty seconds a day every day but I can organize things for an hour once every year or so (maybe two hours every five years when I sort out stuff I don't need like copies of warranties for parts on a car I don't own anymore).

When my mom died she had about fifty pounds of paper files in her office that were neatly organized in a system that didn't make any sense to my dad, my sister, and I. I ended up sorting through those files for twenty hours, tossing out copies of paid invoices from ten years ago and student handbooks from my junior high school. I reduced one filing cabinet, two desk file drawers, and a foot-high stack to a six inch binder that I gave to my dad. My mom died five years ago; two months ago my dad asked me about a medical document and I was able to tell him to go look for it in the medical section of the binder. It was there, because ALL IMPORTANT SHIT GOES IN THE BINDER.

Where is my birth certificate? In the binder. Where is my tax return from 2017? In the binder. Where is the record of my dog's last rabies shot? In the binder. Where are the records for my life insurance? In the binder.

A lot of what people consider "being organized" breaks down to whether or not you can find the specific things that you're looking for. Does my binder look nice? Is it aesthetic? Does it have color-coded tabs and papers all laid out neatly? Absolutely fucking not. But if you ask me where to find a paper I know that I can do so within about five minutes of shuffling through the pile of letter-folded sheets that I pulled out of the appropriate section of the binder.

I've discussed the Where Did I Put that Fucking Paper Binder before, but now it is time to expand that concept to the Backpack of Important Shit.

You likely have Important Shit that does not fit in a binder. Some of my Important Shit that does not fit in a binder is stuff like jewelry and the spare key for my car. Other stuff - the reason I decided to bring this up at all - includes my backup hard drive and packaging (including product key codes) for pretty much all of the software that I own. This is also where I store printed out copies of the recovery codes for most of the online accounts that I have.

There's a lot of weird fiddly shit that we have to have that we might not access all that often. This is the kind of stuff that might end up in junk drawers or under sinks or in disused laptop bags or kicking around under a bunch of papers in a desk drawer.

It doesn't matter so much when that weird fiddly shit is a set of hex keys or a utility knife or a protractor or a copy of a student handbook but it DOES matter when it's something that you might need to put your hands on in a hurry. If your computer crashes, you're not going to want to track down the software in the back of a filing cabinet and the backup drive from somewhere in the bowels of your desk. If you lock your keys in your car you are not going to want to figure out if your spare is in a junk drawer or the old purse where you keep semi-important stuff or the tin on your desk that has buttons and pins and headphone covers. Just put it in the Backpack of Important Shit and when you need it you know where to look.

So anyway, if you are a person who is a minor disaster who has trouble finding important things when you need them please don't think that you have to get your life together and have a nice organized filing cabinet or clear plastic bins full of documents or a neatly divided storage closet where everything from board games to backup drives has its own neatly labeled place. Just assign ONE LOCATION for important shit and start putting the important shit there. It doesn't matter if you have a filing cabinet where you keep old copies of homework and printouts of online orders and family history records - you do not need to keep everything that is file-able in one place and depending on what level of catastrophe you are it might be detrimental to you if you try to do that. It doesn't matter if you have a jewelry box where you keep your collection of gauges and wrist cuffs; if you are going to stress out about where grandma's ring is when you're digging through your collection of cheap earrings and silver pendants then *do not keep grandma's ring or any other Important, Vital, Cannot Be Lost jewelry in with your day-to-day wear*.

I live someplace that has fires. My binder got upgraded to my Backpack of Important Shit when the fires were getting uncomfortably close to the house I was living in and I wanted to have one bag to grab if we had to get out fast. Once I did that, I never took the binder out of the backpack and the backpack has now made three moves with me and has meant that I've had my birth certificate handy when I needed it in the middle of a move between two states, I was able to provide a history of my cholesterol panel going back six years to a visiting nurse, and I was able to give the exact names and contact info of my spouse's previous surgeon to the hospital when I had unexpectedly moved to a new state with three bags and my work computer at the beginning of the pandemic.

Get yourself a backpack of important shit and a folder of where the fuck did i put that paper. It is so much easier to search a backpack for important shit than to go through an entire house and it is so much easier to flip through a binder than it is to dig through a filing cabinet.

Anyway good luck and happy adulting.

Criteria for determining what is important shit:

Keeping paperwork is not a matter of sparking joy, it is a matter of covering ass. If you had to move to a new state on the other side of the country and establish yourself there for everything from getting an ID to requesting a pet license to applying for a loan or opening a bank account to proving your income history to a landlord, would you have the documents you needed to get it done? If you have those documents, they go in the folder.

Actually the real funniest thing about SuperWhoLock in retrospect is that fast forward 10 years from its heyday in 2012 and you got people writing impassioned essays about how an extremely dry and homophobic gay confession scene was the pinnacle of queer media on Supernatural and people writing impassioned essays about how BBC Sherlock was secretly a gay love story despite being also dry and homophobic but no one is writing an impassioned essay about how you can queue up an episode of 2007 Doctor Who on HBO Max from the comfort of your home and see John Barrowman walking around saying “I ❤️ Cock” repeatedly until someone shoots him. And them he doesn’t die because he can’t die. He cannot die

Source

All hope is not lost

Also what I haven't seen people talking about is the other changes he made to student loan repayment that are NOT affected by the SC ruling. IE He halved the required payments for the income based plans from 20% of "Discretionary Income" to 10%. And if that isn't enough to cover the interest, the government will be picking up the tab on that interest now instead of it being added to the principal. The quiet, policy wonk shit is what will actually get changes made. He was smart, he used the forgiveness to distract the republicans from what he was actually doing. I'd bet good money that everything was already written for the HEA approach well in advance.

A phantom sensation 🍂

Some alts:

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.

Time to drop some links again.

– https://searchmysite.net/ Search engine for the indie web, personal websites, digital gardens. You can also find them in websites like Neocities, Indieweb, Blogarama, and write.as. There is also a big list of personal websites.

– https://search.marginalia.nu/ Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.

– https://www.worldcat.org/ Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)

– https://scholar.google.com/ Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines A list of academic databases and search engines.

– https://tineye.com/ Reverse image search alternative to Google’s. Also, P.S.: Please stop using Google, and start using more privacy focused search engines, like DuckDuckGo or SearchX (opensource; personally haven’t used it yet, but it looks promising for privacy-focused users)

queer is such a good word. im queer as in fuck you. queer as in odd. queer as in fucked-in-the-head. queer as in i hope you choke on it. queer as in a slur i laugh at. queer as in not like you. queer as in none of your business. queer as in a line in the fucking dirt. queer as in we’re here. get used to it. queer as in this is who i am and what i am. queer as in im different and i dont fucking care. queer as in with or without you i exist and ill keep doing it. queer as in queer

FAMOUS AUTHORS

TEXTBOOKS

MATH AND SCIENCE

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

PLAYS

MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

HISTORY AND CULTURE

RARE BOOKS

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

MYSTERY

POETRY

MISC

… and here is a gift for all of us.

So I can find this again! Great list!

They are not as high-profile as the WGA, but I would like to bring everyone's attention to the imminent strike action by thousands of hotel workers in Los Angeles. They are set to go on strike tomorrow, July 1st, 2023.

More than 15,000 hotel workers are seeking higher pay, better benefits, and working conditions. This includes an across-the-board $5 an hour raise, as well as affordable healthcare and better pensions. They also are seeking a ban on the use of E-Verify, which is used to deny employment to undocumented workers and workers involved with the criminal justice system. You can follow what is happening at their Twitter.

well,

Everytime I see posts like this I get filled with such profound sadness

Cause you know who has the same brainrot as you? The same unhinged feelings as you after you've read the fic? The person who always wants to scream about the fic with you?

THE PERSON WHO WROTE IT

I never used to leave comments but since I got into the habit of commenting on everything i enjoy it's been incredible. Especially when the author gets back to me about it and we get to have a discussion of what other ideas they had. One writer replied to my comment with a 5 paragraph essay detailing the Floorplan of the building the characters lived in and it was incredible

Anyways this is all to say that if you find a fic that just makes you want to scream from the rooftops, leave a comment saying that to the author and maybe they will join you and you can scream incoherently together

It's also important to know, this feeling of isolation is what the author feels but ten fold. It's the exact reason writers are begging for comments. It's to talk about the story with someone. That story that's taken up your life for a few hours, or perhaps days, has taken up the author's life for weeks, months, and - very often - years. There's a very good chance these authors are dying to talk to you.

So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.

Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”

It’s a reminder, I guess, that they’re coming for all of us. The fash and the white supremacists will not make nice distinctions between the queers when they put us up against the wall. There is no gatekeeping, no label-policing, no purity-purging and no assimilation that any of us can do that will save us. They want us dead, and while they’ll start with whoever is most vulnerable at any given time, they’ll get around to all of us eventually.

Queer solidarity means all of us because the fash are coming for all of us.

All Dividers are Feds. Stand united or die separately.