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I need help

So i haven’t been on here in a while, so I realize this is a complete shot in the dark. But I need help. Earlier this month I was scammed in a bad way. My bank went into the negative and now I’m late on rent. I’m asking for help, and if you’re able to give it I’ll be eternally grateful. https://gofund.me/f9a13557 Also kind of doxing myself here, but couldn’t figure out any other way to do it on the gofundme website. so oh well.

So i got a message from my landlord tonight demanding payment asap. I know I haven’t been active here in a while, but if anyone can help I really truly, appreciate it. 

Gonna go ahead and share this again. Again if you can help in absolutely any way, it is immensely appreciated. 

Reblogging this again. Thank you so very much to everyone who has either donated or shared. It means a lot. I’m so very close to my goal and the stress is going down. Thank you again for all of your help.

reblogging once again. Again, thank you so much for anyone who has already donated or shared. I’m so close to my goal and I want to thank you all so much.

My hometown flooded Monday night.

Vermont has flooded.

My family and home are fine because the 7.8 inches of rain that fell in a day didn’t cause our house to slide of the ridge it sits on, but less than a thousand feet away roads have been washed out and homes are being condemned. Yesterday, our congressional delegation, the governor, and a FEMA representative, toured the town - focusing on the non-profit cat cafe turned hazardous waste site thanks to a basement full of red diesel fuel and the neighborhood that includes a ten story, low income, senior and disabled apartment building where the blacktop of the road lifted and peeled away in huge sheets. There is still only one route out of town to the interstate due to landslides and flooding. In every direction I can point to there are towns going through similar things. Our capitol, Montpelier, flooded causing most of the state government to shut down and move essential operations to a nearby airport. Many farms were in the path of flood waters and lost most of their crops. Vermont has the second largest population of unhoused people per capita, second to California, with many of them camping in the woods along our rivers. They have lost everything.

In short, we need help.

I gathered some resources if you need an updated news source or are able to donate.

It’s raining again.

I’ve also collected some photos of the flooding and it’s aftermath

It’s started raining again. We may get another two inches.

Please donate if you are able and share this post to help our brave little state.

your favorite youtubers and content creators are about to be offered some tantalizing tv/streaming deals so we're all about to find out who the real working class allys are

someone's gonna get cancelled doing this and they're gonna cry crocodile tears over how difficult it is to make a living as a content creator and i'm telling you right now we are NOT going to buy it, got it? scabs deserve no sympathy

It is hard making a living being a quote unquote "content creator" still not an excuse to be a scab

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This.

Trying to make a living from YouTube is like constantly running along the edge of a knife in clogs, it is incredibly stressful, it is mentally destructive and you do a truly obscene amount of work for genuinely very little compensation relative to the hours put in.

A big one-time payout from a streaming deal from some desperate studio jackoff could be life-changing, but it does not come for fucking free. The money they are offering you is money they have ripped directly from the hands and mouths of other creatives.

If you saw someone rip food out of someone else's hands and then offer it to you, you wouldn't fucking take it, would you? If you have a shred of decency you'll tell the guy to give the fucking food back and go get fucked. And if you were the one getting food ripped out of your hands, you'd reasonably expect the people around you to have that same solidarity with you and not accept it.

The industry will try to abstract this as much as possible - they're doing it in the press right now, "oh it's just a bunch of rich, selfish Hollywood elites making a play for more money!" is EXPLICITLY an attempt to get you to see the union members as something other than your fellow workers - and they'll try to pull shit like "oh the strike has nothing to do with you, you're not a member of the union and you won't see the benefits so why should you sacrifice this opportunity for them" and so on.

They're trying to make the issue more distant and abstract, to alienate you from your fellow human beings. And in response we must make it closer and more concrete.

The money they offer to a scab is taken from the hands of a union member. They are offering you a union member's student loan payments, their rent, their food budget, their kids' college funds.

Do not take it. It is not and can never be worth it.

Oh, yes.

A few years ago I went to pick up a woman I met on OKCupid for a date, and a friend of hers was there. They kind of over-explained “Oh, she just showed up to say hi” and there was a vague nervousness in the air that even my autistic ass was picking up on. Her friend was playing conspicuously with her phone. I went “Ah, the safety. Need to get a picture?”

Dead silence for about a second and a half, then the friend took a picture, looked at my date, and said “Have fun” and walked out the door.

(I would ordinarily have been clueless, but I’d just been asked to be the safety the previous night.)

My advice to male-presenting folks: recognize that this not your problem. By which I mean, this sort of security check isn’t a problem for you. It doesn’t hurt you. You aren’t being insulted or disrespected. And if you treat it like what it is– a reasonable adaptation to an unreasonable situation– and just roll with it, your dates will be more comfortable, and you will have a better time as a result.

The same applies to phone calls mid-date. Let them answer the damn phone without drama.

They aren’t accusing you of being a dangerous person. The very fact that they are willing to go on a goddamn date with you means that they have extended a certain level of trust. But the fact remains that there isn’t really a way to distinguish between “a man who isn’t dangerous” and “a man who knows how to behave like he’s not dangerous.”

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there isn’t really a way to distinguish between “a man who isn’t dangerous” and “a man who knows how to behave like he’s not dangerous.”

Fun fact - if you flip out, make a big deal, act insulted, go on a rant, or whatever about these kinds of safety measures, you’ve just proven that you are the sort of person that those safety measures are needed for.

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I was gunna put this in the tags but it’s a lot. When i first started going through the process of getting a diagnosis, i was labelled with ODD. I immediately took issue with this, it seemed like an unfair diagnosis based entirely on the session the psychiatrist had with my parents (which mostly consisted of “my child is being really difficult on purpose”), and Hoo Boy when i tell you ODD immediately strips you of your ability to call out anyone on anything, that would be an understatement. I couldn’t even disagree or bring up my concerns about the validity of MY OWN DIAGNOSIS without it being labelled as oppositional defiance. Whenever i displayed any negative emotion the “treatments” did so much more harm than good. When you label someone as ‘defiant’ (ugh), when that word is put on their medical record, that person is never allowed to complain about anything again. Knowing that POC are disproportionately affected with this diagnosis makes me feel sick, i can only imagine what’s being swept under the rug as someone just being “defiant to authority”, not even just in the medical field but as justification for police brutality and mass incarceration. When i say medical racism kills people, this is what i mean.

this is so fucking important. reblog.

My queers, we really need to put the "no men" thing away. Men are not inherently bad. There are queer men. There are questioning men. There's men that are just plain cool. Denying these men a space at our table is not helping - except the TERFs. I just came off the back of reading a transphobe gleeful rant about the need to have pride without men - They of course mean me. This kind of stuff is damaging to me and I really need us all to take a step back and maybe kill this "men dni, men not allowed" stuff. What you mean is "no men who are going to do mean stuff to me." And frankly those men won't give a shit about that kind of boundary.

But I promise you there's a fleet of good honest men who will see that and be sad they're not allowed in your version of queer spaces.

PATRIARCHY is what you hate. Dni Patriarchs.

"Men DNI" in a blog's header gets an immediate block from me. If you're going to reject--wholesale--roughly half the population, I don't want to know you.

Honest, I don't know the intent but cosigning for me as a translady who always gets weirded out by em.

First of all, there's trans men. That's obvious. Trans men are some of the most wonderful people on this god damn planet. And second, there are some very cool, very kind, very compassionate cis men out there. And if you're saying "no men", you're gonna miss out on some of the most wonderful people you could ever hope to meet. The no men thing is broke

Sometimes it says no cis men but that doesn't make it feel any better tbh.

Not to MENTION that the kind of people who say “no men”? It’s 99,6% likely they include trans women in “men”. <.<

Some of you might remember a couple of years ago when Scarlett Johansson sued Disney because she was making significantly less money for Black Widow than was guaranteed in her contract because so many more people watched it on streaming than in theaters, how there was a massive misinformation campaign from Disney that a ton of people on this website (and Twitter and other social media) bought into: That she was a greedy bitch who didn't respect people who needed to stay at home during the pandemic (I believe the word "ableist" was thrown around with aplomb) as opposed to someone who just wanted to be paid what she was owed. What was literally in her contract!!! And where everyone who took more than a couple minutes to actually look into and think about the situation could figure out that her issue wasn't with streaming itself, but with how little streaming was allowed to get away with paying her and other actors. But of course, a lot of people just saw the chance to dunk on a rich woman, and didn't think about it beyond readying some snarky tags and hit reblog. And in doing so, threw their support behind a much wealthier, greedier studio head who is already using similar language to describe the current strike.

Anyway we're going to see a lot of that from studios now, especially now that actors have joined with the WGA and it's easier to sell them as rich and greedy than writers, because of this cultural stereotype we have of all Hollywood actors as celebrities. Don't fall for it. SAG-AFTRA represents people like Tom Cruise and ScarJo but it also represents the kind of people who played a Borg in two episodes of Star Trek: Voyager in 1997 or who had one line in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as an enthusiastic audience member. Most actors are not crazy wealthy, and in fact, if you're a big TV fan (especially older TV and genre TV) that likely includes some actor names that you know, who played supporting roles in your fav shows, or who were even a star in something decades ago but haven't done anything major since. The AFTRA side also represents people like radio broadcasters. But even beside that, all workers deserve to be fairly compensated for the work they do, and the threat of replacing them with AI, or real actors being required to sign contracts to allow their likenesses to be used by AI forever without paying them, is an existential threat to acting as a profession in general. The actors are in the right. The writers are in the right. The studios are in the wrong. The studios have exploited new technology to get away with horrifying labor practices for years and their feet need to be put to the fire. Circulate the articles about how poorly the Orange is the New Black cast was compensated for making one of the defining shows of the early streaming boom, and of the studios saying they want to force writers to starve and lose their homes. Don't get distracted by propaganda aping progressive-sounding language about wealthy celebrities. Focus on the real enemy, the truly greedy fat cats who care more about money than people and art: the studios.

I had this work friend at my previous job who was gay. Lovely kid, from a kind of traditional family.

He hadn't told anyone he was gay, because he was scared of being judged. But... thanks to the resident lesbian, he was outed to everyone without his knowledge because she clocked him and asked everyone about it while he was off work.

Everyone then put the clues they'd noticed on their own together rather than what they were doing beforehand, that being remaining blissfully and politely unaware of how his variety of behaviours linked back to him being gay.

Had I already clocked him? Absolutely. But I should not have been told about him, before he chose to come out to me.

This pride month, remember that even in the most accepting of environments, even if you personally feel comfortable being out where you are, that doesnt mean someone else around you is too. Do not assume that someone is comfortable with everyone knowing, or that everyone knows.

Because we might not have known. That person might not have told us yet. We might have been politely ignoring the signs because we didn't want to assume.

It's not your place to tell everyone someone else's business.

In before I start seeing people bitching about rainbow capitalism MY favorite rainbow capitalism story is about Subaru. Yes the Japanese car company.

In the nineties, they were struggling. They were competing with a dozen other companies targeting the main demographic at the time: white men ages 18-35, especially after a failed luxury car launch with a new ad agency. “What we need is to focus on niche demographics,” they decided, and then focused on people who enjoyed the outdoors. The Subaru was excellent at driving on dirt roads that many other vehicles couldn’t at the time, so it was perfect for all those off-road campers; they started making all-wheel drive standard in all their cars to help with that. And the people who wanted cars to go do outdoor stuff? Lesbians.

Okay. Of course it wasn’t only lesbians buying Subarus. They’re on the list with educators, health-care professionals, and IT people. But the point is, this Japanese car company interviewed this strange demographic (single, female head of household) and realized one important factor: They were lesbians. They liked to be able to use the cars to go do outdoorsy stuff, and they liked that they could use the cars to haul stuff rather than a big truck or van. Subaru had a choice to make then. They had four other demographics they could market to, after all–the educators, the health-care professionals, IT professionals, and straight outdoorsy couples. Their company didn’t hinge on this one “problematic” demographic.

And they decided “fuck it,” and marketed to lesbians anyway. This included offering benefits to American gay and lesbian employees for their domestic partners, so it didn’t look like a cash grab. (This was not a problem. They already offered those in Canada.)

Yes, there was some backlash. They got letters from a grassroots group accusing them of promoting homosexuality, and every letter said they’d no longer be buying from Subaru. “You didn’t buy from us before, either,” Subaru realized, and ignored them. It helped that the team really cared about the plan, and that they had many straight allies to back them up. There was also some initial backlash when Subaru hired women to play a lesbian couple in the commercial, but they quickly found that lesbians preferred more subtlety; “XENA LVR” on a license plate, or bumper stickers with the names of popular LGBTQ+ destinations, or taglines of “Get out. Stay out.” that could be used for the outdoors–or the closet.

Subaru said “We see you. We support you.” They sponsored Pride parades and partnered with Rainbow Card and hired Martina Navratilova as spokeswoman. They put their money where their mouth is and went into it whole hog. In a time where companies did not want to take our money, Subaru said, “Why not? They’re people who drive.” And that was groundbreaking.

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Subtly on license plates.