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.

This should keep me going a while :)

support our troops, especially 5 star generals like this binch right here 

This advertisement is for The Archive Undying—a debut science fantasy epic from Emma Mieko Candon, and book one in their Downworld Sequence.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT

Plugged into his AI god when its corruption renders him unfortunately immortal, sad gay disaster Sunai takes a die-again-or-die-trying approach to his tragically unending life. Despotic police states want to leash him and giant robots want to eat him, but reuniting with the small handful of people he cares about is what’s actually horrifying.

Adrift in the wilds, Sunai makes several unwise decisions such as:

This brain-melting series-starter is like a Neon Genesis Evangelion AMV set to a bass-boosted cover of George Michael’s "Careless Whisper."

#meirl #too real

Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.

And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.

this is such a beautiful post it doesn't need my dumb addition, but i can't fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I'm only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.

at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child

so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world's oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any "useful" items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios' grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we've all been the same for 30,000 years.

@wearepaladin

I honestly get so fucking mad when people act like Bruce’s no-killing rule and iron conviction that everybody can get better is something dumb. Like why does everybody hate kind characters so much?? What’s wrong with being a good person? It’s not stupid or childish or naïve, and in a cruel world, it takes one heck of a lot of courage to be kind.

I fully get people being annoying that That GuyTM is still running around. But first of all, let’s be honest the reason for that is money. He’s popular, he sells books, he’s never ever under any circumstances going to get a permadeath (unfortunately). So if bats did kill him it would just become a whack-a-mole situation, where he keeps killing the guy, wacky scifi ensues, guys back, bats kills him again, rinse and repeat. Forever. It would get boring and stale really quickly.

But secondly, even if we agreed that the joker deserves to die (which y’all only do because you know that metacontextually he cannot and will not be reformed, something which in canon they cannot be certain of). Batman has ZERO obligation to carry out that execution. The idea that not only “Death Penalty = Good”, but also “therefore not wanting to be the executioner, or trying to prevent the execution from happening right in front of you is morally bankrupt” is, to put it mildly, fucked. If Bruce doesn’t wanna kill or watch someone be killed he doesn’t have to, end of. There is nothing morally wrong with not wanting anyone to die.

also, like, i think bruce is well-primed to understand Tolkien's “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”

Truth is, it reads more like "she can do everything" and "him, it's just Ken"

And ken is a slang used in French that means "to fuck"

So "Him, it's just fucking"

Which I think is even more hilarious

I love how it’s a dead ringer for this photo of Barbra Streisand and Elliot Gould:

This movie is going to be FUCKING AMAZING.

#historyofchristianity #thatsaspicymeatball #technicalheresy

🌞 Lesser known epithets of Apollo:

Philesios - Loving - the title of the God in Miletus and Didyma

Iatros - Healer, Helper - the title of the God under which He was worshiped in the Greek colonies alongside the western coast of the Black Sea

Thargelios - of Thargelia or of Thargelion - either deriving from the name of the celebration to honor Apollo during the month Thargelion, or after the month itself

Boreas - of the North - the title of the God as He was worshiped in the Miletus’ colony of Olbia

Neomenios - Apollo of the first month

Prostrates - Protector - epithet of Apollo as the city-protector, especially of those who left their home and settled in a new place (i.e. colonies)

Aguieus - similarly to Prostrates, this title names Apollo as the protector of streets and public spaces as well as travelers

Thyraios - title of Apollo, protector of the doorways

Propylaios - Apollo as the protector of the area before the gates into the house

Milesios - Milesian - title of Apollo in the Greek city of Miletus

Didymaios - Didymaian - epithet of Apollo in Didyma, the city of Ancient Anatolia, where He had established oracular worship

Oulios - Healer - the title under which Apollo was worshiped in Miletus where the epithet Iatros was not yet known

Ptoios - of Ptoion - title of Apollo in honor of His oracle in Ancient Boeotia

Sources:

Apollo Iatros: A Greek God of Pontic Origin by Y. Ustinova The cult of Apollo in the Milesian colonies along the coast of the Black Sea : an inventory of archaeological data by Patrick Bisaillon Theophoric Names and the History of Greek Religion by Robert Parker

watching the 2018 milwaukee ballet production of dracula and y'all the dracula/jonathan pas de deux is amazing

it's beautiful and creepy and sensual and horrifying all at the same time

crap, i don't know enough dance terminology to make this coherent, but the way they've been utilizing going en pointe in act 2 is fascinating. like, aside from when they're doing turns and stuff like that, all the women are walking around on the flat part like regular people. but then dracula bursts in and everyone is down in the dark except lucy, who is now on her tippy toes and basically floating across the floor to him in a trance and the contrast is so eerie

also i just realized it was mean of me to talk about this without telling anyone where to watch it. here's a link to the official video from the milwaukee ballet account's @ Home series https://vimeo.com/469873929/5ee47dee00

continuing the trend of being both sensual and beautiful and horrifying, the drac+lucy pas de deux is also fantastic.

also, repeated theme the way dracula just kind of flings them around at times, like they're not dance partners but just toys to be played with and literally tossed aside. in the jonathan one he just like yote him 15 feet or something crazy across the stage, and in this one he's just positioning her like a ragdoll, the choreo is so good

agh no no no i hate this! D: lucy! :(((

looking forward to and dreading the drac+mina one if they're all gonna be this good but also upsetting lol

oh good, an ensemble mourning scene, that's cool that's fine i'm handling this gracefully

oh damn, though, she does feral really well too. cool thanks this is a great place for an intermission because i'm feeling totally emotionally stable (:

i saw cats (2019) and am in absolute horror

it’s 2am and i haven’t stopped thinking about this movie. minor spoilers ahead

- ‪i shit you not, the opening sequence is straight from a horror movie. look up the first song in the soundtrack (overture). now imagine that but with cat people crawling jerkily over to a thrashing body bag. it is dark out. the music keeps getting louder‬

‪- i need everyone to know that at least four people walked out during the movie. usually during the musical numbers. like “nah fuck this”‬

- ‪the entirety of introducing rebel wilson was her just falling off of various surfaces and bumping into things while some other cat sang somberly about how great she was. she also scratched her inner thighs at one point ‬

- ‪they gave both the mice and cockroaches human faces, implying that the out of sight dog also has a human face, and i want to cry‬

‪- there was a part where they poured cgi milk into the cat’s mouths and bodies while they squirmed around on tables. jason derulo took off his clothes and was thrusting his hips while standing on said tables. this movie is rated pg

- ‪they breathed so loudly?? they kept moaning??? like rubbing up against each other and crawling around on the floor and sighing like calm down please there are children present ‬

- ‪rebel wilson unzipping her fursuit to reveal a cgi dress that floated above her body will forever haunt me ‬

- ‪there was one shot where victoria stretched her leg out towards jason derulo and i deadass thought he was gonna take her whole foot in his mouth. that’s the energy this movie had ‬

- ‪they have hands yet drink like cats. i had to watch ian mckellen lap water from a bowl in a dark closet. ‬

- ‪taylor swift’s part was good up until the cats started jerking their heads back and forth, to which i said “no no no” too loudly. also the cat nip made them hornier and fall into each other while breathing heavily. i hated it

- ‪i liked the tap dancing part bc they actually moved like people. if you’re gonna do a movie about cats looking like people either look like people or find a way not to look horny by trying to act like a cat ‬

- ‪jennifer hudson’s singing was phenomenal but she was crying every time we saw her and there was snot everywhere ‬

- i saw the unpatched version (they’re apparently gonna clean it up later) and i urge you to do the same before they change it. you’ll be subjected to wonderful sights such as seeing hands have fur in one scene and none in the next, watch the cats float above the ground randomly, and have clothes animated like an old veggie tales episode

- the plot was nonexistent and honestly i prefer that bc i could barely keep up with it as it was due to getting distracted by the tails moving sensually for no reason

- at the end they had a part where judi dench stares at the camera while singing and i literally closed my eyes out of fear

- and, finally: i can’t stop thinking about idris elba having the shortest hair of all the cats and because of that looking entirely naked. he took off his clothes and i said “what the fuck” out loud cause i genuinely thought they were gonna wip out cat dick, that’s how horny the cgi is

usually if a movie is bad i might see it again just to hate watch it. not this one; cats 2019 instilled a primal fear in me and i never want to see it again or i may cry.

anyway please go watch this movie, i’m making it the last one i see before the decade ends bc i think it deserves that title. i will never be able to look at a cat in the eye again. goodnight

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

RATING: RELIABLE

you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here

thriftbooks better world books half-price books wonder book pangobooks libgen archive.org ubuweb kanopy (library card required; free) tubi pluto tv

storygraph

abebooks, book depository, and goodreads are all owned my amazon.

adding another one for used books!

biblio

been going insane over Bruce in his eating dome for 24 hrs now

There is so much story telling here. A person got this pacific parrotlet named it Bruce which in and of itself is amazing but then this person went here my little bird friend a raspbebe for you to enjoy and Bruce said hell yeah and went cataclysmicly and irreversible ape shit ham on that berry. And that probably happened more than once. So instead of never again allowing this little dinosaur the joy of the succulent flesh of the delectable raspberry they went what can we do for our little baby boy. and then boom they got some kind of cake cover type deal and cut a door into it so that Bruce would Not Be Trapped in a fruit prison (altho truely it is the berries who are trapped in there with Bruce but none the less) and so he may go to his pent house and freak it as crazily as his little bird heart desires.

Anyway i love pets they are each distinct little guys who are carred for by the funniest ape to ever exist bc we love animal so much

And speaking of scurvy, I am eternally amused by the thing where some ancient form of healing that was born in a time where people didn't know exactly how the human body works, or what causes it to stop working sometimes, that still somehow worked. Like how so many old folk medicinal plants were listed as a cure for various ailments that - from a modern view - are clearly just symptoms of scurvy, and the plant itself is rich in vitamin C.

I recall reading some story, no recollection of the exact time or place, where the king of a large empire suffered from constant horrible headaches and was incapable of falling asleep unless drugged or blackout drunk. Sick of taking temporary fixes to dull the pain and having to be sedated every night, he called up some old sage healer who was said to know how to fix things nobody else could explain, and the healer heard his symptoms and went

"Hmm. You spend too much time being a king. Your skull is packed so full of kingly thoughts that they don't all fit in there and that's why your head is in pain. You need to spend time not being a king." And prescribed him to schedule three days every month where he must go to a peasant village where nobody knows he's the king, live with a family there under a fake name and identity, work in the rice fields with them, eating the same food and sleeping on the same mats. Absolutely nobody is allowed to address him as the king, speak to him of any royal or political matters, and he himself is not allowed to think any kingly thoughts or think of himself as the king.

And naturally, this worked. Taking a regular scheduled break from a highly stressful office desk job to completely decompress, paired with physical exercise in the form of hard but simple physical labour, plain and simple food and Just Not Thinking About Your Fucking Job All The Time does help chronic stress, which here was worded as "spending too much time being a king clogs your brain."

Sometimes you do have ghosts in your blood, though I'm not entirely sure whether you should do cocaine about it.