As per @bisexualturin's request

Do not attempt to out-malicious-compliance the staff at the malicious compliance conference.

Some dipshit decided to pay the conference fee ($250) in quarters. He handed us a wrapped plastic bag full of loose change. "It's all there," he said with a shit-eating grin, "you can count it."

Oh buddy. We're going to count it. What were you expecting?

At about the time I got to $60, he offered to give us $300 collateral so he could get his badge and go to the conference.

No, bud. You get to watch the most dyscalculic staffer count to a thousand while all your friends go in to the breakfast and find seats for the first talk.

"Ruining someone's day" is the favorite hobby of everyone here. Why would you hand us the perfect opportunity to wreck your shit and think that was an own? Half the con is calling him "Untraceable," the other half is calling him "Quarter Boy" and nobody cares what he says his handle is.

I spent an hour counting that and made him go fetch me baggies to hold it every fifty dollars.

This ended up being a good bonus prank for me too, because when the counting was done I wrapped the bags in gaffer's tape and spent the rest of the day handing it to people very casually while saying "oh here, hold this for a sec" and then watching they weren't ready for the weight (I only did this to people I know well enough to know this wouldn't hurt them).

It's an infosec conference, so it's a weekend in a hotel full of people whose favorite thing is breaking the law and whose second favorite thing is following the letter of the law while cheerfully violating the spirit.

Thank you, that means a lot coming from you, @unyanizedcatboys

They're calling him 'untraceable' because he was hanging out at a hackerspace and talking about how he didn't want to pre-register for the con because that could be traced back to his real name, so he was going to pay cash. Then someone else was like "bills are serialized, if you really wanted to be untraceable you'd pay with dollar coins like Redacted did a couple years ago," and Quarter Boy was like "I have an even BETTER idea. I'm going to double down for the meme potential," and then put a note in his bag of quarters that said "Blame Redacted, I had to beat his high score," so this wasn't even an *original* troll. He wanted to be a legend and instead became a cautionary tale. He wanted to get laughs and instead he got laughed at. He wanted everyone at the con to know who he was, and now everybody knows he's Quarter Boy.

Legitimately I don't have any idea why he thought this was a funny joke that would make him look good, and there are very few things you could do that would draw more ire from attendees than inconveniencing the volunteer convention staff during the registration rush when everyone just wants to get through the line (and in spite of diverting me to counting quarters and loudly explaining the reason for the delay to the massive line, we managed to get 150 attendees checked in over the course of 25 minutes while ALSO selling 50 shirts).

And I mean. Of course we could have put him aside and counted the quarters later, but then fewer people would have witnessed the legend of Quarter Boy, the untraceable hacker who realized exactly how much he'd fucked up about four minutes into hearing us answer "what's with the quarters?" with "some asshole thought it would be funny" over and over and over again.

You know what *was* a good joke this convention? One guy made stickers that were almost-but-not-quite exactly the logo for a hackerspace (one letter off) and stuck them all over the convention area, prompting outrage and a spur-of-the-moment Easter egg hunt from the hackerspace guys that escalated until he was covering their logo on their merch with his stickers and was using sleight-of-hand tricks to sneak his stickers into their pockets and bags.

Any news article involving Musk automatically becomes a series of punches to the face.

"Surely it doesn't get worse than misquoting someone to make fun of kids with cancer

"Ah"

here’s the quote for those interested:

“ “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” the viral quote, shared by Musk, says.

The quote also includes text at the bottom making a joke about being unable to criticize “children with leukemia.” “

i swear the attitude some people have towards medication that is then somehow everyone else's fault

"i throw it out like terms and conditions" girl that is a whole drug you are putting in your body not a twitter account

a) no it "quite literally" fucking isn't any given drug can kill you 100 different ways appointments LITERALLY are not long enough. think for 5 seconds yourself, genius. if that could all be covered the pamphlets wouldn't exist would they

b) the pamphlet is the basis of informed consent you fucking goon. you read it before you take it. if you have concerns after reading you raise those WITH A PHARMACIST NOT A DOCTOR THE DOCTOR KNOWS LESS ABOUT DRUGS THAT IS NOT THEIR JOB before you take it. you refusing to read it doesn't mean you weren't given informed consent. it means you WAIVED informed consent and jumped to uninformed consent of your own free will and

c) anybody this blasé about WAAAAAAH WHY WASNT I SPOONFED EVERYTHING THIS IS EVERYONE ELSES FAULT even if told (by a pharmacist not a doctor because, again...) would have not listened and then claimed to not be told. the venn diagram of people who don't read anything like the info should be beamed directly into their brain and the people who refuse chats with the pharmacist is a circle.

i'm helping out at a creative writing workshop for uhhh i think 10-12s? 10-14s? idk. but that age range. and anyways

a) i forgot how fun this is

b) it's really hard not to like, re-write for them and stick to just "hey add descriptions here, change this grammar, really cool ideas!" bc i'm an adult and not trying to talk over/railroad these kids, but i'm just so excited for their ideas!!!

c) little boys write cool stuff like "what if we went to mars but it sucked so we left, but left behind all our technology and the technology rose up and created its own society and then went to war with us for abandoning them? what if transformers had 100x the war crimes? what if the earth blew up. what if we were the robots all along?"

d) little girls out here writing like "aunt melanie's skin was sloughing off the bones as her beloved dogs tore her apart, turning on her in blind animal instinct. the second she stopped providing food, she became food." and a lot of body horror and dark themes about group pacts and betrayals and ritualistic murder/sacrifices. like a lot

there's a board filled with dozens and dozens of little construction paper thought bubbles that have some pretty generic plot points in them (what if there were aliens? what if you time travelled? what is true love? what if you could talk to animals? kinda stuff) and we encouraged them to write at least a paragraph for each one and not just pick the one that sounded coolest, just to see what sparks inspiration.

EVERY single little girl took the 'fall in love one' and did something unconventional with it.

some of them were stories about self-empowerment and falling in love with yourself, or falling in love with the mundane, life itself, a pet, a garden, a hobby, just loving being alive! (😭🥺🥰)

but a lot of them were deeply fucked up stories about like "what if you fall in love with a guy but he doesn't like you the same amount back, so you biopsy his liver (??) because you found an old polish love potion/spell, but it backfires like some kinda djinn wish and you actually mind control him and it takes you years to notice that you're whole love life has been a deception bc you accidentally turned on god mode without realizing it, and now you're questioning if you're even lovable at all bc this is the only person you've ever allowed to love you, and it wasn't even real, so now you're spiralling into a breakdown, but that old polish spell book you buried under a tree is whispering your name so you try to fix it and make everything worse?"

me, turning to the teacher who is also doing this: hey so, i'm personally really cool with the tone and direction these girls take, but is any of this? how you say... a red flag?

teacher: little girls have really rich inner lives to combat the way they're puppeted by society in real life. they'll learn to censor it out in a couple years, but it doesn't go away.

me, who was also a weird little girl who phased in and out of weirdness depending on social settings: nice.

Update: the children have discovered collaborative writing, plunging their weirdness to new depths via team effort.

they are now creating a story/comic(/movie??) that seems to be a thinly veiled allegory for killing authority figures via psychic powers gained through a ring tainted with frog poison that also kills the wearer, but you can only kill one other person so its a 1:1 death ratio/murder-suicide for the greater good, so the characters start out willingly sacrificing themselves to 'rid the world of evil' but, like all things of this nature, it becomes corrupt and they start forcing people to do psychic murders

Prehistoric Planet finally gives us the True Rival to the Tyrant Lizard King and it’s NOT a Dinosaur.

For a hot minute, I thought the true rival might be quicksand.

Quetzalcoatlus is hopelessly out of its weight class, but it makes up for it with a Big Pointy Beak

I love this scene because it’s not so much “T.rex gets its ass kicked by the new predator” and more “T.rex gets annoyed by two other predators and ultimately decides it’s not worth dealing with them and walks off,” which is a far more common occurrence for predator conflicts in the natural world.

PSA Regarding Hateful Anons

Tumblr recently made it a requirement for you to be logged in to send asks anonymously. If you receive a hateful ask, don’t publish it - report it to Tumblr. It can be traced back to the user that sent it and with enough reports that person’s account will be suspended.

Share to raise awareness but also to make the clowns who think this behaviour is acceptable think twice before acting brave behind the guise of invisibility.

did not realize there was a Gollum game out so I was staring at this thumbnail like 'well damn the little dude had his problems but 22 minutes of criticism seems excessive'

i rly wanna know like americans and non-americans- were u immunised against chicken pox or did ur parents rather u just get infected as a child??

I was born just a few years before the vaccine was even available, and I contracted chickenpox before the vaccine was part of routine vaccination (and mandatory in schools).

Which doesn’t sound so bad on its own, but at sixteen my immune system collapsed, and the previous mild case of chickenpox I had at nine suddenly gave me a violent and atypical case of shingles. My whole damn body was covered in pustules, even down my throat. Wherever there was skin, it was covered in pox. I nearly died. The doctors told my mother if she had waited just two more hours to get me to the hospital in Indy (my hometown hospital refused to even give me an E.R. bed ‘because it’s just chickenpox’, despite our pleas that I was immunocompromised), I would have died.

I was out of school for three months with a PICC line going straight to my heart pumping acyclovir into me even after I was discharged from the PICU. I never recovered academically and I ended up forced out of school the next year because they hated that I was wrecking attendance records with my frequent illnesses.

It’s only in the last five years that most of the pox scars have faded. I was sixteen then. I’m thirty now.

People/parents love to think that chickenpox is a normal and harmless part of childhood, almost a right of passage. Oh it’s just a week or so if mild itching, life will go on. No need to get my child vaccinated. Hell, let’s intentionally infect our young child by hosting chickenpox party! Better to have it at a young age, they say! But I wasn’t immunocompromised yet when I got chickenpox at 9. And at sixteen that same “harmless” virus latent within me nearly killed me. And even with the basic chickenpox, things can and have gone catastrophically wrong. Your perfectly healthy kid might come into contact with another kid on chemo. Suddenly that kid can die just like I almost did. Even your perfectly healthy kid can have a freak reaction and be killed by chickenpox.

The chickenpox vaccine has been around and available for over two decades now. Chickenpox and further complications like shingles are completely avoidable. Get your kid vaccinated

Oo, I get to talk about an absolute CLASSIC marine ecology story!

This is not a story about AI being trained to pick plastic out of the ocean, but picking out something else that's harmful to the ocean: The Crown of Thorns Starfish. (Also yes, that name DOES go incredibly hard.)

The COTS is a species of venomous starfish found on the barrier reef, and they feed on corals. They aren't invasive, but they don't have many natural predators either, so large outbreaks in their population can descercate huge portions of the reef at a time. That's where this guy comes in:

This is Rangerbot. It's a "cots bot" equipped with trained AI to recognize inditidual COTS. It then injects the COTS with bile, which is toxic to the COTS but harmless for the environment. This was effectively used to keep the COTS population in check, so the coral of the barrier reef had time to grow.

There's an episode of Bizarre Beasts about the COTS (hosted by Hank Green himself) which I think is pretty cool and explains the whole situation in a fun way.

So, yeah! If an AI can be trained to recognize a species of starfish with %99 accuracy and effectively get rid of them, I think it is PERFECTLY reasonable to train AI to recognize trash in the oceans, at least in areas close to the shore, and have them clean it up.

I want to add that there are 2 categories of AI here, the one that’s trained to detect starfish is non-generative AI. Object detection, classification and segmentation are examples of non-generative AI. Non-generative AI are actually quite prevalent and accessible at this point where you can run certain AI models on a raspberry pi. Surveillance (e.g., face detection) is a major unethical application of non-generative AI.

The type of AI that gained massive public interest and adoption recently are generative AI (text, imagine, sounds generation). Generative AI are a whole different beast, its sociological impacts are still a hot topic.

I like where tumblr is headed, but I think it'd be nice if staff implemented a feature where if a post ever reaches over 10k notes, you should be able to make one replier of your choice instantly hit that one elbow nerve through some magical means

THE WORST REPLY HAS BEEN CHOSEN, MAY THEIR NERVES SING IN AGONY

there should be a special place in hell for those who renovate victorian houses to have modern interior like what the hell is wrong with you. i hope the ghosts kill you fr.

Then…don’t buy a Victorian house?

This is where the issue comes into play – people who should just buy a modern house, for some weird reason, decide to buy one that’s not what they like at all and change it so people who would enjoy it will not be able to. I will never understand it. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you buy a Victorian; I can’t think of many areas in which that’s the only housing option.

just get something more modern if that’s what you want. and stop intruding on houses – and Tumblr posts – that are clearly not for you

there’s a famous house in my city that looks like this on the outside

and has been reno’d to look like… this on the inside

People do this with yards all the time as well. I live in the "old" district in my city, which means they are all older unique homes usually with lots of very old trees and bushes and things and very sort of lived in look. My neighbor and many others will move into my neighborhood specifically because they like the overall aesthetic of a lush green neighborhood, and then immediately chop down the 200 yr old tree in their yard and all the bushes and flowers until it looks like it would fit right into a suburb, then even sometimes start complaining about little details in neighbors yards they don't like and start whining that there isn't an HOA. Like.... Go live in a fucking suburb you freaks. You all are actively destroying the things about places you like because you're too stupid to even understand WHY they look and feel better to live in.

discords new username update is literally just “what if we got rid of privacy & safety & the fun of name changes! cuz numbers are so hard :(” and it is making me physically violent

good advice.

I’ve read the notes and I still genuinely don’t understand the issue here.

We’ll still have perfectly customizable display names so we can put our pronouns and stuff. We’ll still be able to personalize a nickname for each server. We’ll still be able to change our usernames up to 2 times per hour, so it shouldn’t affect our ability to escape malicious stalkers. And there is no obligation to use the same username as on our social media.

None of these features will be locked behind a Nitro subscription.

I’m begging people to explain here. Is there a big issue that I’m completely blind to, or did nobody bother reading the FAQ?

the usernames now must be completely unique and are separate to display names; aka the same as most socmed systems right now. that’s annoying on its own because discord is not a socmed. it’s a messaging app. anyway this means even if you can change them whenever you want, you shouldn’t, because it opens up your name to being stolen. this also means url hoarding can be a thing on discord now. this also means that people who don’t like to change their name because they want it consistent across platforms can be forced to if they don’t want to be stalked for any reason— and then, should their new name be found; they will have to do that again, potentially eventually running out of any names they even like having. sure, we’ve all had to make names we didn’t like that much on social media before— but discord is not a social media, not to mention they literally had a perfectly good system before and are just deciding to change it.

this also means that anyone besides the FIRST person to have a common name now must change their name, regardless of how attached to it they were before. because it’s going off of seniority.

there’s also the fact that there was practically no good reason for this change. the statistics discord mentions in their announcement of the update are misleading at best and at worst completely untrue. i also struggle to understand the purpose of forcing 9999 people to chose an entirely new name just because that 10000th person wasn’t able to get it too. “only 9999 people can have this name, which seems unfair! so instead of adding a number to make it 99999 or something, we’re going to take away numbers, so now only 1 person can have it!” does not seem like a well thought out decision to me.

as i understand, it also means that only people with latin characters for names can make their usernames, and people without will have to change their names. i’m not going to even go into why that’s dumb.

in short, it’s going to be a huge hassle and inconvenience for many many people, and actually dangerous for other people. and even if it wasn’t, there really is zero good reason for this change besides the homogenization of the internet, which personally i am avidly against.

at least, this is my opinion. i hope it doesn’t come across as harsh.

in short, to use a mangled metaphorical: you know how we're getting bots with really good urls these days? and how those urls are gone forever, locked away from us because some botnet took it? discord is introducing a similar scarcity problem.

From Costa Rica to West Africa, the practice of bokashi — the use of fermented waste as fertilizer — has taken root, especially as the cost of chemical fertilizer has surged due to the war in Ukraine.

Standing behind the popularization of bokashi is Teruo Higa, professor emeritus of horticulture at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa Prefecture. His research, and related Effective Microorganisms product, has spread the approach as an environmentally friendly alternative to chemical fertilizer.

Unlike composting, bokashi ferments organic waste to help break it down into available nutrients and energy for plants. The process of fermentation creates a potent mix of microorganisms that can play a vital role in maintaining the fertility, structure and overall health of soil.

Bokashi’s uptake is multifaceted: It’s cheap at just a tenth of the price of synthetic fertilizer; it’s much quicker to prepare than traditional composting methods, taking 12 days compared with 30; and uses local ingredients such as rice bran and straw, manure, yeast, clay and sugar cane molasses — with these being interchangeable depending on what’s available.

But above all, the results are what sets bokashi apart.

“Last year I grew 625 sacks of potatoes (with synthetic fertilizer),” says Faye. “This year I have 1,200 already, although I did increase the field size slightly.

“The land does not lie,” Faye says.

Okay post number 2 I’ll actually explain myself.

Every time I think about Impa I go bonkers but ESPECIALLY when I think about Impa and Ganondorf/Demise. These two are having a full on SAGA off screen and Nintendo is just too afraid of the raw energy their dynamic would bring. They would steal the show if let loose. Zelda and Link’s soulmate bond would pale in comparison to their absolutely fucked up 8D chess eternal rivalry. They’ve been playing the “too different to ever be friends, too similar to hate each other” game for centuries and it’s high time we addressed it lmao

Despite having about one scene of on-screen interaction and no dialogue together, Impa and Ganondorf are pretty clearly set up to be narrative foils. Impa is the servant of the goddess, the protector of Zelda, and guide to Link. Ganondorf is the rebel, the Demon King, and the opponent of the Princess and the Hero. Impa is defined by her selflessness, time and again devoting her life to serving Hylia and the Royal Family, even at a price for herself. Ganondorf, in contrast, is characteristically selfish; seeking to fulfill his own goals at the expense of others.

The Sheikah and the Gerudo are foils too. Both suffer the subjugation of the Royal Family, and both are the only other two human races besides Hylians. However, the Sheikah for the most part conform to their roles, serving the Royal Family, (therefore labeled as “good” by the Hylian narrative), while the Gerudo actively resist that regime (and are hence labeled as “bad”).

(The Yiga Clan is also a very curious facet of this issue, but that’s a whole other can of worms I don’t really feel equipped to discuss right now.)

Impa and Ganondorf are also tied together through their game appearances. Impa does not appear in a game without Ganon, and while Ganondorf sometimes appears without Impa, two of those occasions are Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. The same man as OOT, who has already met her. (FSA idk what’s going on there lmao. She wanted a break and that’s valid.) Timeline wise, they also return together after SS, both appearing in OOT after not being present during Minish Cap or FS. Intentionally or not, if one of them is there, the other will be too.

Impa and Ganondorf are undoubtedly paired together in the cycle, although less explicitly than Zelda and Link. They balance out the four, with Link and Zelda being destined always to find each other and work together, whereas Ganondorf and Impa are destined always to work against each other. Ganon attacks the kingdom, and Impa facilitates the resistance.

For all their differences, Impa and Ganondorf often operate in very similar ways. Throughout many of the games, they’re both working behind the scenes; nudging the heroes or their minions in the direction they want like chess pieces on a board. Ganondorf is more explicit in this (ex: Zant, Vaati, etc) but it’s important to remember that Impa is more than a passive side character. In Skyward Sword, she is directing Zelda down the path that leads to pretty much every major event in the game, and in Ocarina of Time, she raised Sheik and almost certainly sent him out to find Link. (Honestly, as much as Zelda is Hylia-incarnate, Impa is really the one pushing the Goddess’s agenda.) From these roles as orchestrators, they share a level a power over the narrative that the other characters don’t possess. Power that exists to contradict the other.

There’s also the scene in OOT where Impa escapes with young Zelda, pursued by Ganondorf, and it’s entirely possible they duked it out before the drawbridge bit. If so, then Impa’s escape implies a level of combat/magical power that is reasonably comparable to Ganondorf’s. I think it’s reasonable to say that Ganondorf likely outweighs Impa in raw strength, but she holds her ground surprisingly well. Ex: surviving the Calamity, escaping the castle in the OG game, also probably surviving the initial fight with Demise as Hylia’s guardian.

The icing on the cake to all of this is that when developing the lore, Impa was originally supposed to be a bearer of the Triforce with Link and Zelda. I checked the Hyrule Historia after seeing a post about Impa initially wielding Power and it’s true. She was originally supposed to be a guardian alongside Link and Zelda, not Ganon. And I just… oh my gosh the implications of that.

Looking at Impa through the lens of not necessarily someone who was destined to wield Power in canon, but someone who conceivably could is so fascinating. It makes her connection to Ganondorf all the more potent, not just as foils, but as two people who could just as easily be each other as oppose each other. In Ocarina of Time, for example, it’s not hard to picture an Impa who took a similar path as Ganondorf. Her people have been brought to the brink of near extinction, mostly thanks to the Royal Family. It’s entirely conceivable that she might find herself drawn to the Triforce just as much as Ganon was, seeking not coveted wind, but the undoing of so many lost lives.

All of this just sets the ground work for an absolutely fascinating relationship, and it drives me nuts that the games never explore it. Impa and Ganondorf both share a great deal of ambiguity regarding their intentions, motives, and overall feelings, and focusing on the two of them would open the doors to aspects of their character we haven’t seen. Being non-Hylian, older, and typically more world weary than Link and Zelda, they have a perspective on the cycle that is intriguing, and almost certainly not as positive. I think that would be neat to see.

Demise and Impa also have some interesting potential, especially considering how much time they spent in proximity. Like she spent centuries guarding the Imprisoned, as well as the sword he was sealed in. Did they ever speak? Did she know him from before he was sealed? Did he respect her skill and power the way he respected Link’s? There’s so many brain worms there.

Anyway, I have so many more thoughts on these two but honestly they’re better expressed via creative writing lmao. I can’t even begin to describe the absolutely insanity that their interactions would be. They’re like mortal enemies and begrudging friends and bitter exes and strangers in the same sad situation and hot messes all at once.

if you don’t know much abt christian fundamentalism, you might not have heard about quiverfull before. quiverfull is a christian nationalist movement that gets its name from psalms 127: 3-5

the quiverfull philosophy is that pregnancies/children are a blessing from god, that contraceptives/abortion are rejections of god’s true plan, and that christian families should have as many children as possible and raise them to be good soldiers in god’s army. children are arrows in your quiver: the more you have, the stronger a soldier you are.

christian nationalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy all go hand in hand. they are not separable from each other. they all follow the same principles. and they are all being leveraged toward the same end: make as many white, able bodied, indoctrinated babies as possible. we cannot reduce this to an issue of men vs women and lose sight of how this is going to affect BIPOC, poor people, disabled people, trans/queer people, intersex people, fat people. we can’t forget what the word “marginalize” means.

this is getting more attention than i expected so i want to clarify here that while i absolutely want more people to be aware of the quiverfull cult and the way that it facilitates horrific abuse, i mainly wanted to highlight one of the more blatant examples of how christian nationalism and white supremacy are intertwined. i’m not saying here that every “pro-life” asshole or even every legislator involved in this shitshow are secretly quiverfull people, but that the quiverfull cult is an example of people who say the quiet part out loud: “the goal of the systems of power that we uphold is to eternally perpetuate said systems by indoctrination from womb to tomb.”

if you look at fundamentalist extremists, they are CONSTANTLY saying the quiet parts out loud. and once you hear it, you start to get better at picking up on it when it IS quiet. fundies will openly talk about structuring their lives around hierarchies like the “umbrella of protection” where god rules over man, who rules over his wife, who rules over the children. they will say that a woman’s ultimate purpose in the world is to submit to her husband and to god by having lots of children and raising them to be good soldiers in god’s army. they will say that this is the only way to take back the world for god from sinners and degenerates.

remember “it’s adam and eve, not adam and steve?” where do you end up if you deconstruct that? “god made men and women and sex between them for a specific purpose.” what is that purpose? “to procreate. any sex that is not for the purpose of procreation is perverse.” why does god want us to procreate? “to be fruitful and multiply.” to what end? “to reclaim the world for him.”

you don’t have to be specifically a christian fundamentalist to follow this logic: perpetuate your beliefs and the structures built on their foundation by colonization, assimilation, eugenics, and lifelong indoctrination. whatever your flavor of fascism, it’s going to follow those principles.

there’s a reason why the court overturned roe v wade but buck v bell, which ruled in 1927 that compulsory sterilization of institutionalized disabled people was entirely constitutional and does not violate the fourteenth amendment, has not been touched in nearly 100 years. if they cared so much about a theoretical child’s right to be born, they wouldn’t be okay with the idea of forced sterilization. what they actually care about is eliminating and/or punishing undesirables: BIPOC, poor people, mad people, sick/disabled people, trans/queer people, intersex people, fat people, and literally any other demographic that they feel is a threat to the system.

another aspect of fundamentalism is prosperity gospel, which says that wealth and good health and happy circumstances are all rewards from god for honoring him. the implication of this is that sickness, poverty, or really any kind of misfortune are all moral failings. so long as you’re a good person, it won’t happen to you, and you don’t have to lift a finger to help the dirty sinners who have to sort out their own problems, unless your aim is to evangelize them. we see this ALL THE TIME from right wingers, whether in a religious context or not. individualist bootstrap ideology is exactly the same thing. if you’re in trouble, that’s YOUR problem. pull yourself up by your bootstraps and quit asking for handouts. if you die in the streets, well, your bad choices aren’t my problem.

it’s important now more than ever to reject this shit and to reach out to the vulnerable people around us and protect them as best we can. DO NOT let TERFs and white feminists dominate this conversation. their ideas have more in common with the fascists and the fundies than with us. pay attention to evangelist rhetoric, the ways cults use the BITE model to abuse people, the way people rationalize and justify child abuse, or abuse of patients by medical institutions, or employees by their employers. there’s a reason why all these systems echo each other in weird ways whether or not religion seems to be involved: systems of power seek nothing but to perpetuate themselves, no matter what that system is.

[ID: a screenshot from a reblog of this post with the username cropped out. the response says, “great post op but out of that whole list, you didn’t mention women even once. why is that?” and attached is a screenshot of the part of the post which reads, “idea of forced sterilization. what they actually care about is eliminating and/or punishing undesirables: BIPOC, poor people, mad people, sick/disabled people, queer (especially trans) people, intersex people, fat people, and literally any other demographic that they feel is a threat to the system.” end ID]

i’m not going to dignify this person w a direct response or expose anyone to their blog because they’re a radfem obviously. lol. but i want to show ppl this response because 1) lol 2) to highlight why i said what i said about terfs in the first place.

why didn’t i mention women in that list? first of all because women fall under all of those categories and anyone who wasn’t just trying to nitpick would understand that. secondly because i was talking very specifically about forced sterilization in that paragraph and about buck v bell. carrie buck wasn’t sterilized for being a woman. she was sterilized for being a disabled woman in a mental institution who already gave birth to one disabled daughter. they don’t want to sterilize “desirable” women. they want to sterilize specifically women who they have deemed undesirables and prevent them from giving birth to other undesirables. do they still want to police the sexualities and reproductive habits of those “desirable” women? yeah, obviously. that was the entire point of this post. they want to reduce desirable women to baby machines and servants to their husbands, and undesirable women to corpses. thirdly because not only women are subjected to forced sterilizations.

terfs and radfems are not our allies in this fight. regardless of what flavor or how deep into the ideology they are or whether or not they actually bother to think before they speak, you can plainly see that they don’t actually care about dismantling all systems of power. they will act like including trans people in your activism somehow excludes “real” women or threatens to erase women as a category, in the same way white supremacists warn about “the great replacement.” a fascist is a fascist is a fascist.

forgot to post these here. tears of the kingdom+long term nuclear waste storage warnings

Now this is what I mean (metaphorically) by "enrichment in my enclosure"

Okay, vaguely related, but a friend of mine was once taking some snowy owls to canada to be released--they’d been injured while in the states, taken to the avian rehab facility where he worked, and were healthy again. But at that time of year, most  snowy owls had migrated back north to canada. So he drove to the border with three crates of screamingly angry snowy owls in back. He got to the border, declared his cargo, and immediately found himself in Big Trouble With Canadian Border Security. 

(There was nothing wrong with what he’d been doing, it had all been cleared in advance and he had all his paperwork in order. But nobody told the border guys that.)

They demanded that he take the owls out of the crates for inspection. He refused; these were very, very angry, agitated wild birds. They asked him lots of questions. They finally asked why he was taking the owls to canada, and he explained that that’s where they’re from.

The customs agent demanded “WELL, how did Canada’s owls even get to America in the first place?!”

My friend responded, “Sir. They can fly.”

The customs agent let him go.

[ID: a tag reading, “#don’t eat citrus if you have any mental health problems #the vitamin C is so bad for you” end ID]

losing my fucking mind over how people will come on here and say just the easiest to disprove absolutely inane lies. for no reason at all

This is so funny because of how long a chain of telephone it is. The starting point is that grapefruit juice SPECIFICALLY can interact negatively with several mental health medications (notably, not amphetamines). Then this tumblr post* and MULTIPLE NEWS ARTICLES got popular, stating that consuming anything acidic (including vitamin C) within an hour of taking your ADHD meds would render them ineffective. In reality, a large dose of vitamin C taken directly with an amphetamine-based ADHD medication has the potential to cause a minor dampening effect, but has no effect on other ADHD meds. 

These presumably got filtered/combined into the idea that vitamin C is bad to take with ANY mental health meds, which then got turned into the idea that if you have mental health problems, scurvy may be right for you!