Public service announcement.
Blue/purple lips and fingernails is a symptom of low oxygen in lighter skin tones.
In darker skin tones you're looking for grey or white lips and fingernails. Other places where this may be not evidence is the tongue and gums.
Figured since everyone gets taught what low oxygen looks like on lighter skin. Everyone should know what it looks like on dark skin too.
-fae
ok!
Another one of my favorite programs I did when I worked at the park wasn't even a planned program, I literally was scheduled to do a completely different program but nobody showed up for it so I was packing up, and I hear this grandma at one of the nearby campsites go "No I'm not taking you down to the lake! Look, there's a park ranger, go ask him and maybe he'll take you". So these siblings who are like 10 and 12 years old come up to me and ask if I could take them to the lake. And since I had a free hour since nobody came to the scheduled program I was like. Fuck it. Let's go to the lake.
So I spent like 30 minutes just chatting and hiking with these two kids down to the lake, stopping to show them cool plants and bugs and stuff along the trail, giving them spicebush leaves to smell, showing them what pawpaw trees look like, etc. When we got to the water they splashed around for a few minutes and I showed them the little animal footprints in the mud and we tried to figure out what kind of creatures they might be from.
But the BEST part was on the way back when we passed by this cluster of milkweed with all kinds of insects all over it, and I told them about how important pollinators are, and how a lot of bees and wasps are actually very docile and don't wanna hurt you, and to demonstrate I patted a bumblebee right on its back. And we spent a few minutes just watching all the insects buzzing around the flowers (wasps and hornets and bumblebees and honeybees and beetles and butterflies) and the brother finally goes "wow.... maybe bees aren't scary after all"
And I was like YEAH!! Bees aren't scary after all! You get it little dude!! One of my favorite moments from that whole summer. I hope he still appreciates bees.
It’s called “environmental amnesia” and it’s an actual issue environmentalists discuss how to combat. The climate crisis makes it more widespread but it’s been something that’s happening for generations. The story of The Lorax describes it beautifully. The idea that what you remember is what you consider normal, but if the changes happen slowly over generations, you don’t see how large they are because you don’t personally remember them being very different, even if you were told stories about it.
“So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in 5th grade or 4th grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?” asked state Rep. Ashley Gantt, a Democrat who taught in public schools and noted that girls as young as 10 can begin having periods.
“It would,” McClain responded.
Unbelievable. Link to article.
The first ever suicide prevention hotline was created in 1935 bevause a man conducted a funeral for a 14 year old girl who ended her life because she got her period. She didn't know what it was and assumed it was a STD. Learning about periods and sexual health is life saving. Republicans are unapologetically just evil.
You know, here's a thing: I went to Catholic school from age 5 to age 16. (My family's not Christian, but the local public schools weren't great, so -- )
In 4th grade, girls were given a clear, scientific, extremely bland pamphlet about menstruation. It was Boring and Educational. There wasn't any class about it or anything -- just the pamphlet, provided in a plain manila envelope for you to take home.
Starting in 5th grade, the school provided a small pack of pads to girls. This was probably so that anyone who unexpectedly started her period at school would have an emergency supply, but the thing was: this boring pamphlet, this pack of pads handed to you by a nun, made menstruation...so normal. It's so normal that a nun hands you a pack of pads. It's so normal that there's a boring pamphlet. It's just a thing your body does. (It's so normal that you realize, oh, nuns have periods, huh.)
It kills me, KILLS ME, that this totally boring and bland form of education about human bodies is somehow Too Much, Too Scary, Too Sexy, for some people.
“We can’t make transit free because then people might use transit”
This is actually hilarious, because the train, bus metro etc is going anyways.....so what difference does it make?
Unnecessary trips? Like... People enjoying life???
Pip Boy but it's shit.
Talk shit about windows98 again and I'll fuck
Thats a rather unique threat
it's so wild when people complain about religious inclusion like "oh so you think THEY should get special privileges/accommodations to do x, y, or z??"
and the things they're talking about are like. exceptions to rules or norms that in themselves shouldn't exist. yes Richard, we actually should have diverse meal options at work events to accommodate people with different diets. yes, people should be allowed to take time off to be with their family during whatever holidays or life events they so choose. yes, people should be able to wear clothing that makes them comfortable. nobody should be happy about these restrictions existing. stop bitching about the singular jewish or muslim person in your workplace and realize that everyone deserves better.
Too many people are forgetting these things too quickly:
-SESTA/FOSTA passed. Despite the many, many warnings of sex workers.
-A bunch of apps started their censorship policies because Apple directly threatened their revenue if they didn't promise to cut down on the amount of porn on their sites
-MasterCard and VISA tried to outright stop processing OnlyFans work SPECIFICALLY because of the association with sex work, and no other feasible financial reason.
There is not a sudden regressive movement among individual people. Free The Nipple didn't fade into obscurity because people didn't care. It was stopped. By policies. By laws. By arrests. By censorship. These things have been purposefully put in place by companies and politicians. They saw the work we were trying to do wrt bodily autonomy, sexual liberation, and sexual freedom, and they forcibly put a stop to it.
seduces u with evil tricks like caring about u and wanting to hear about ur day
me a few years ago: its so weird how right wingers always wanna blame the "elite" given that alot of them are in the global 1% of wealth and therefore almost by definition the same "elite" they claim to hate. weird right? lol right wing logic makes no sense
me now: oh my god they mean Jewish people. its always been Jewish people. and the insistence of online leftists to use words like "elite" and "cabal" (to refer to a handful of ultra rich people who dictate a lot of how our lives are run) kinda makes them sound like antisemites too. maybe this whole idea that the world is run by a select few is a gross oversimplification which only serves to reinforce antisemitic stereotypes... oh no. maybe i have a lot of shit to unlearn. maybe i need to start vocally defending Jewish ppl. also local community building is the only way out of this
This post has been making the rounds on jumblr and I've had a few different reactions so I just wanna weigh into some things here.
First up:
Jews I love you and I'm so glad that this little thoughtramble I wrote a month ago resonated with so many of you. I hope it helps with educating some people on just how widespread and insidious antisemitism is.
Secondly: I'm a gentile so I'm by no means an authority on these things. But a couple fellow gentiles in the notes are saying stuff along the lines of, "but can't we criticise billionnaires?"
To which I say, watch where you step, cus you're on thin ice. I've learned a litte the past few years and here's my conclusions:
Also, please consider your motives:
And especially,
Lastly I want to highlight these as well:
Absolutely correct. The amount of times I've come across online bigots who are like "George Soros is funding BLM!" or "LGBTs are elites trying to plunge this country into immorality!" This is all antisemitism. In general just be wary of anyone wanting to blame "elites" or "rich people" (yeah even that one cus historically Jews are stereotyped to have money!!! and also not all rich ppl are inherently evil!!!!) or "shadow government" or "globalists" or "lizard people" or really, literally anything that seems to imply that a small, select group of people is secretly running the world: That's antisemitism baby. It's all antisemitism. It's disgustingly common.
By all means, criticise billionnaires. But be specific. It's one of the best ways to make sure it's not veering into antisemitism. We know who these billionnaires are, for the most part; we know their names and we know their crimes. Talk about them specifically.
It doesn't help if you just swap out "elites" with "billionnaires" or "the 1%" if the rest of your rhetoric remains the same. It sounds exactly the same to antisemites, and they will feel empowered. In truth, it is much more complicated than "billionnaires are running the world and fucking us all over"; some billionnaires are using their fortune for good, and they don't directly cause our problems - they may exploit a system that was set up long before they were born, sure, but your problems are also caused by Sue from accounting and your neighbour ratting you out to the authorities and that kid across the road yelling slurs at you. Your problems exist because society lets them exist, and that includes everyone. The system makes it hard to fight this, and sure, most billionnaires don't help the issue. But again if you're just looking for someone to hate on, it's very likely you're actually reinforcing oppression rather than "punching up".
Sweeping statements are dangerous and a lot of your talking points have been used to justify genocide in the past. Just cus the world's been a lil less overt about its antisemitism post-Holocaust, does not mean antisemitism has disappeared, far from it. And it's being revived at an alarming rate just now so please, Gentiles, pay attention to what the dogwhistles look like and don't reinforce harmful stereotypes.
Thank you.
PS: A few blogs that have helped me unlearn and unpack antisemitism are @spacelazarwolf, @hadeantaiga and @gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda with a special shout out to @softness-and-shattering for being very patient with me rambling about jewish/antisemitism related stuff in dms. Youre all soooo great n I appreciate you soooo much <3
There's also lots of Jewish ppl in the notes of this post, I'm sure a lot of them have lovely blogs to follow.
There's some reading recs in the notes as well:
I haven't read these books myself, I've read a preview of Jews Don't Count and it's on my list of books to order when I have more money, but basically, go look at what actual Jewish folks have written on the subject, I'm just a random Gentile who doesn't like bigotry so don't take it just from me.
So myself and two best friends got matching tattoos that say Κύριε ἐλέησον. It’s pronounced Kyrie Eleison and in ancient Greek means “Lord have mercy.” It’s one of the oldest Christian liturgical prayers and features in the Bible, and when Christianity became Latinised, it as one of the only surviving Greek prayers.
Just for fun I plugged it into Google Translate to see what modern Greek thinks of it and
10/10 A+ tat so glad its marked on my skin forever, would tattoo again
Thanks OP you ruined the liturgy for me.
never gonna hear The Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack the same way again
Frollo: Ima kill this baby
Choir in the background: Dude fuckin chill
Frollo: I’m gonna set her on fire
Choir: Dude… chill
My entire church singing in unison: ♫ Sir, please calm down! ♫ Calm down, sir! ♫ Sir, please calm down! ♫ Take it easy, sir! ♫
LORD, you’re making a scene
🎶 Sir, this is an Arby’s 🎶
following weird horny furries who are into shit like pooltoys and transformation and stuff is enrichment. the vitamins and minerals of posting
[Image ID: a screenshot of Tumblr tags reading "exposure to fetishes you aren't into is inoculation against the disgust response that right wingers prey upon." End image ID.]
When I was 10, my mom made me wear a bra and it felt like a punishment for being different.
When I was 10, I took the bra off when changing for gymnastics and accidentally dropped it in the school hallway. A teacher picked it up and said, “Oh, this must belong to you” and handed it back to me in front of everyone. I quit gymnastics.
When I was 11, I thought maybe the boobs would be okay so long as they didn’t get any bigger than would fit in my hand, so I kept measuring it, but they did.
When I was 12, I started wearing two or three sports bras to smush them down, until one day a classmate said, “Are you wearing two bras?!” while laughing.
When I was 13, a boy told me he wanted to squeeze my boobs “until they popped.”
When I was 14, I got cast in a play as an older character and a classmate told me I got the role because I had boobs.
When I was 17, my mom told me to return a swimsuit because it would be too distracting for my boyfriend’s father.
When I was 21, I got properly fitted for a bra and everyone felt the need to tell me how much better my boobs looked.
When I was 26, I got pregnant and my immediate fear was that my boobs would get bigger.
When I was 28, I got shamed for trying to feed my screaming baby in public without a cover.
When I was 28, people asked me “why are you bothering to use a breastfeeding cover?”
When I was 30, people gave me weird looks that I wasn’t yelling at my kid for putting their hand on my boob.
When I was 31, I avoided going to the beach or pool because I didn’t want to have to deal with boobs in a swimsuit.
When I was 32, I got asked, again, “why don’t you get a breast reduction?”
When I was 33, I watched a 5yo girl get shamed for running around in sweltering heat without a shirt on and had to reprimand a bunch of tween boys who thought it was okay to shame her for doing something they do all the time.
When I was 34, my kid kept patting my breast and saying “Mommy’s squishy breast!!” They will never see me express any shame about tits, because I want them to have a different mindset than I had. Yes, boobs are nice! They’re squishy! They’re fun! That’s the end of that.
I’m 35 and no longer give a fuck. I don’t care anymore. As a teenager my tits were covered in stretch marks. They’ve been engorged with milk. My nipple changed shape with pregnancy. Give it another couple decades and my breasts will probably be all wrinkly. It’s sexual when I’m using it sexually. I don’t fucking care, and I won’t be ashamed anymore.
Every time a policy or cultural hangup treats people with breasts differently, it fucks us over.
Tumblr’s new policy makes an active choice to participate in this culture of shame. By classifying “female-presenting nipples” as explicit material, Tumblr has taken a stance that any chest or breast that differs from a male default is worthy of shame and unavoidably sexual. The idea that breasts are shameful and unavoidably sexual is exactly what fucked me up for so much of my life.
Stop shaming people for having bodies.
I’ve been seething in rage thinking of this all day and @aibidil put into words what was reeling in my mind.
Our bodies are not porn.
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
This is humanity
Happy Birthday, Curiousity.
Happy birthday, Curiosity.
““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.
Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.
Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.
The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.
GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.
It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…
Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21
How much you wanna bet the State of California will “prohibit” use of this system, because “reasons.”
If it’s in international waters they can’t do anything about it. And I’m pretty sure the federal government decides what can and can’t go on off our coasts too, not local or state.
Slat has been working on this since he was literally a child. I remember the first posts, articles, and I think there was even a fundraising campaign at one point.
I am so, so proud of him holy shit.
^^^ me too!! I remember the first news yeaaars ago that some kid had thought up a brilliantly simple method of cleaning up the oceans, and even that first prototype was amazingly efficient in solving a problem that the grownup world seemed to have given up on. It was so simple I couldn’t believe no scientist or engineer had thought of it before.
And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!
Well done, sir, well done and thank you <3
My big memory of this is that every time he sent out a prototype, people would overwhelmingly go “AH HA! See? It didn’t work as advertised because a storm broke it/it didn’t filter as much as he predicted/etc.”
And every time, Boyan would analyse what went wrong, tinker with it, and send a stronger version back out.
There are still issues with it, like, but this guy isn’t some shitty billionaire - he’s a normal man walking the walk to clean up an international problem that everyone else is just wringing their hands over. I have no clue why everyone is desperately waiting for him to fail. He’s picked his hill, and he plods along, and if the latest design hasn’t met expectations, he creates a new one.
Their website is here, btw, in case anyone wants to have a look; they still accept donations
Whoever was all “LOL Watch Cali Ban it”: besides the fact that isn’t how it works, LA county has actually deployed similar systems here to help clean up our beaches. They work, and of course we’re using them.
Some of y’all are way too cynical and way too confident about it, yikes.
@kilodelta Thanks for the addition, this is so true
LA isn’t just deploying similar systems, it has literally officially teamed up with the Ocean Cleanup, using one of their river cleanup systems! To absolutely massive success
That article actually appears to be non-paywalled right now, but here’s a guaranteed no-paywall Internet Archive copy just in case!
“After a historic winter hit California with dozens of atmospheric rivers, the last line of defense protecting the Pacific from much of L.A.’s trash held strong.
In the first storm season of a two-year pilot project, Ballona Creek Trash Interceptor 007 stopped nearly 155,000 pounds of garbage from flowing out to the ocean.
“Its performance has exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Boyan Slat, founder and chief executive of the Ocean Cleanup. The Dutch nonprofit partnered with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works to introduce the interceptor in October.
The system floats a few hundred yards from the outlet of Ballona Creek into the Pacific Ocean, its twin booms extended to the shoreline to funnel trash to a solar-powered system that lifts objects from the water with a conveyor belt and drops them into six dumpsters. The trash collects in the dumpsters and awaits manual removal…
In all, the first rainy season of the interceptor’s operation saw the collection of 77 tons of material, the vast majority of which went to landfill.
This first pilot year “had all the challenges we wanted it to have: heavy pollutants, lots of flow,” said Mark Pestrella, the Department of Public Works director. In January, storm-generated waves caused one boom to tear, and it had to be replaced.
According to Lee, L.A. County Department of Beaches and Harbors maintenance crews noted “a 75% reduction” in trash along local beaches adjacent to the interceptor.”
-via Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2023
These exist in Baltimore, too! Meet Mr. Trash Wheel and the Trash Wheel Family.
I know everyone says it’s best to just stick to “said” as a dialogue tag bc it disappears and that’s true and I mostly do but I want to take a moment for my all-time favorite dialogue tag, “lied.” Absolutely nothing hits like “‘I’m here to help,’ he lied.” NOTHING.
ABSOLUTELY one of my favourites.
I like to overdo uses of 'lied', like, "'I'm not lying,' I lied, like a liar."
When this site eventually dies, you're going to see people who worked here talking about how they tried to implement things to generate money and the users rebelled against it and that's what killed it.
Not the constant trading of corporate hands to cash out, mass displacement of its users, and homogenizing it to be like other websites that are falling apart to promote "growth".
