cute
Y’all in the American SW and west Mexico better check the national hurricane center and your weather for this weekend and next week.
Hurricane Hilary is about to make landfall and that whole desert area is supposed to get a years worth of rain or more. Death Valley is supposed to get twice the annual rainfall. Severe winds, massive flooding, and landslides are all strong possibilities.
This is gonna get ugly. Please spread the word. This is a majorly anomalous event and people may be unaware of the threat headed their way.
Flash floods are definitely gonna kill people, so here’s your regularly scheduled PSA:
Desert soil does not absorb a significant amount of water. It reaches maximum saturation very very quickly, and all the rest of the water rushes downhill. Even if you can’t tell that the ground is not perfectly flat, the water can. And it will move. Quickly. No, faster than that. Nope, still faster. If you try to cross moving floodwater, you will get swept downstream and probably die.
Do not try to wade in/cross flood water that is any deeper than the thickness of the sole of an average athletic shoe, no I am not kidding, the water will get deeper literally while you’re standing in it.
This goes for cars, too. I’ve seen entire vehicles getting swept downstream in flash floods because the driver thought they could cross the “puddle” and Found Out.
Stay safe, y’all.
Beyond not wading or driving through it - don't go anywhere near flowing floodwater if you can help it. Flooding will destabilize the ground under your feet, and if you don't want to walk through water you really don't want to fall in. This kills. I know people who were observing floodwaters from a raised embankment, when the embankment collapsed due to saturation and erosion. They fell into the rushing water and both died.
I imagine the soil over on the west coast has some different properties than over here, but it bears mention nonetheless: if you are close enough to clearly see rushing floodwater, and you are standing on dirt/turf/sediment, you are likely in some degree of active danger.
Take care of yourselves.
You know. Some people could really stand to get more comfortable with the idea of “you shouldn’t say that because it’s mean”. Especially with really common body shaming and straight up bullying lines.
“You shouldn’t make ugly bald jokes because what if a transman on T sees it!”
“You shouldn’t make virgin jokes because what if someone who’s asexual sees it!”
How about you just don’t make them because they’re mean. How about people can be balding or a virgin for a number of reasons and also don’t deserve to be routinely made fun of. How about saying that the reason you shouldn’t make x joke because it spares x specific identity’s feelings also let’s them know that you actually have no problem saying or thinking bald people are ugly or virgins are stupid or etc but you’re just not saying it in front of them. How about you understand this kind of body shaming and bullying especially in a very public setting online are always going to have way more unintended damage to people who did nothing wrong than damage to the person you’re upset with.
Sometimes the best reason to not make a bad joke like that is because it’s fucking mean.
Facebook and google are helping cops prosecute people seeking abortion. Be very careful in this new era people.
Online pharmacies also sharing data. Be very careful where you get your pills from
A reminder to be careful with your doctors and hospital choices no matter the state, too, lest we forget the Tenessee university hospital with a gender-affirming care clinic that handed over unredacted information on its patients to the Tenessee Attorney General. This is not a drill and could also happen to reproductive healthcare clinics.
The hospital says its hands were tied because the Tennessee AG is investigating for medical billing fraud at the clinic for codes being used to obfuscate care that patients were receiving that went outside what State Medicaid allows for gender-affirming care for minors and that they had to comply with the AG's requests because, "Under HIPAA, a healthcare provider may disclose protected health information without a patient’s consent for legitimate administrative requests, civil or authorized investigative demands or similar processes authorized under law."
However, I do want to also point out that the hospital was not obligated to inform patients that their medical records had been released to the AG's office, and the AG's office was "surprised" that it happened. Now there's a shit storm.
Be safe, friends, every single one of you.
i cannot for the life of me find that essay about how sterilized, approachable, “nice” literature was used in victorian england to create a cultural imaginary that wholeheartedly ignored the atrocities being committed by the state, but every time i see someone sincerely make the argument that escapist stories are the only moral form of storytelling it rings in my head like a bell. it haunts me. some of y’all actually think that wide-scale erasure is better that attempting to grapple with messy reality in fiction and it’s honestly so exhausting
ALSO can we stop evaluating stories solely based on their utility? Please? there is more to a narrative than whether it’s “harmful” or not, and it’ll be way better in the long run to be able to understand what the ideas being communicated are and how they’re communicated than sticking to just whether or not they’re objectively and universally Good.
I’m sure people have already linked you this, but is it Gary Brecher’s “Amateurs Talk Cancel, Pros Talk Silence”?
The real problem, the kind of thing that would make De Niro in Casino groan, “Amateur night!”, starts when people imagine that they can stop immoral behavior by policing immoral characters, phrases, or scenes in literature.
They’re looking for the wrong thing. They’re sniffing for depictions of immorality, when they should be scanning the silences, the evasions.
There’s a very naïve theory of language at work here, roughly: “if people speak nicely, they’ll act nicely” — with the fatuous corollary, “If people mention bad things, they must like bad things.”
The simplest refutation of that is two words: Victorian Britain.
Victorian Britain carried out several of the biggest genocides in human history. It was also a high point of virtuous literature. […]
my toxic trait is that i call everything a saw trap regardless of whether it’s actually like a saw trap or not
Turns out the British public has more positive views of lgbt people than the British media would suggest. Cis lesbians are tied with cis bisexual for expressing the most supportive views on trans people
Article date: August 11, 2023
Some encouraging news.
Really glad they did this research - especially because YouGov is a credible, well-regarded, and fairly accurate pollster. They're one of the most prominent polling organizations in the UK. So it's not like just anyone is giving these numbers - you can have a fair amount of confidence in them.
Given British media and assholes online, I definitely would not have called that cis lesbians and cis bisexuals are tied for most supportive of trans people. Very, very nice to hear.
NASA took a pic of the dark side of the moon fyi
temporarily back on my vampire bullshit
Fuck it I'm writing lesbian vampires now
Please do
