What’s the point of grinding to the bone your whole life for money if you aren’t even gonna be there to spend it…

"The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being." -Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

“The thing about money is, we can always make more, so let’s go out to eat tonight!” —My dad, after being laid-off, working odd and probably demeaning jobs so we could have dinner.

“Ah, baby, I want to buy this for you, it’s not like I can take the money with me when I go.” —My mom, when she bought me new clothes while I was between jobs.

“There’ll always be a job out there you can work, but we’d prefer you happy instead.” —Both my parents on jobs (“I can always get ya a job ditch diggin! They’ll always need ditch diggers. Hard work, but no college necessary. I can talk to the Hall.”—My proud, union dad, enthused, three seconds later.)

“It doesn’t matter what they do with the money after you give it to them. Drugs, beer, it doesn’t matter, maybe that’s what they need? How do you know?” —My dad on giving money to the homeless.

“Nah, we’ll never make any money, my husband has morals.” —My mom’s friend, fondly reflecting on the fact her lawyer husband isn’t working for a big money firm.

“Don’t worry! I’ve got this!” My equally poor friend buying me dinner when my debt card declined.

“I know we didn’t have furniture in the living room when you were growing up, but—ha!—remember Balloon Ball?” —My dad reflecting on the made up, mock-volleyball game we’d play in the open living room, using balloons. He had used electrical tape to make the court.

“I’m sorry we could never take you anywhere greater growing up,” —My mom, reflecting on our “stay-cations.” (“Why?” I asked, reflecting on all our trips to the park, zoo, public swimming pools, libraries, free theater, two dollar movie days, and her and my dad right there with me and my brothers.)

Bring poor is hard and it’s not right that it happens, but I prefer it to the hustle because at the very least, poor taught me what love is and I won’t let a shitty job deny me that.

ok!!!

“Is it possible to turn things around by 2050? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

Many scientists have been telling us how the world will look like, if we don’t act now. However, others, like Chan, are tracking what success might look like.

They are not simply day-dreamers either. They aren’t being too optimistic. They are putting together road maps for how to safely get to the planet envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where temperatures hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before we started burning fossil fuels, this article from July states.

“Three decades is enough to do a lot of important things. In the next few years—if we get started on them—they will pay dividends in the coming decades,” says Chan, the lead author of the chapter on achieving a sustainable future in a recent UN report that predicted the possible extinction of a million species.

Making these changes won’t mean years of being poor, cold and hungry before things get comfortable again, the scientists insist. They say that if we start acting seriously NOW, we stand a decent chance of transforming society without huge disruption. 

No doubt, it will take a massive switch in society’s energy use. But without us noticing, that’s already happening. Not fast enough, maybe, but it is. Solar panels and offshore wind power plummet in price.  Iceland and Paraguay have stripped the carbon from their grids, according to a new energy outlook report from Bloomberg. Europe is on track to be 90 per cent carbon-free by 2040. And Ottawa says that Canada is already at 81 per cent, thanks to hydro, nuclear, wind and solar. 

Decarbonizing the whole economy is within grasp. We can do this.

“If we have five years of really sustained efforts, making sure we reorient our businesses and our governments toward sustainability, then from that point on, this transition will seem quite seamless. Because it will just be this gradual reshaping of options,” Chan says, adding: “All these things seem very natural when the system is changing around you.”

Hoping people with more relevant knowledge and science parsing skills than I do might comment on this …

I think it is absolutely vital that people be able to picture The Healed World. Honestly I think it’s one of the most important things we can do.

Look at how many different apocalypses people can visualise. Our brains can freely feast on unlimited scenes of scarcity, competition and fear. Everywhere we turn we can consume endless content about killing our neighbors for scraps, about hurting children, about bleak planets and extinction, and lots and lots of guns. It is easy, accessible and cheap. Our minds gobble up as much of this content as the market generates and the market gleefully generates more. We feed and feed upon a future of suffering and loss. We feast on images of brown children being hurt, unnecessarily, and say smugly that “that’s just what humanity is like.” Our brains are programmed away from the natural human responses to crises (fix it, help each other, rebuild and hope) and TOWARDS the mindsets of fictional apocalypse (cause it, turn on each other [it’s just what humans do! We’ve all seen the same stories!], collapse, fight each other for crumbs, the world is doomed anyway.)

It’s pretty unnecessary. And frankly pretty cringe. Imagine being part of some of the most prosperous, empowered, educated, connected group of humans to ever exist, and having a brain that can only picture the future as apocalypse-movie.

And where is the food of abundance, equality, beauty, hope, diversity? Where is the actual food of the future? Oh. It’s in, like, three solarpunk anthologies, huh?

Huh.

Anyway not to get all Amitav Ghosh on main but we have GOT to address this unnecessary and EMBARRASSING failure of imagination. Because we are the generation currently failing in our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth, because of this deranged inability to picture the world as being a real place, and the future being a place where people will live.

So, basically, yes, let’s just say it and start saying it regularly. The work is now and we have to do it. It isn’t impossible. Yes there is hope. Yes it can all be done. Yes there is a future for fucksake. It’s within our grasp. that is what futures are.

👆 Not sure if I’ve already reblogged this, but @elodieunderglass is 100% right here. We find it so easy to picture doom, but we find it so hard to picture healing.

Also, giving up on a future that is still possible means not only giving up on your own life, but the lives of your loved ones, on the poor and disadvantaged people who will face the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and giving up on nature itself.

For some people, climate disaster is already here. There are millions of people already fighting for survival. They don’t have the privilege of sitting back, giving up, and waiting for the apocalypse to come.

They don’t have the privilege of saying “Oh well, the world’s doomed anyway so why should we bother?” And neither should anyone else.

Saw this tweet and had to collect Ryan Gosling’s best PR quotes for Barbie

Hey uh brand new addition

somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

I'm not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me

been thinking a lot about anticipatory grief lately. i love you so much that i know losing you will devastate me. i haven't lost you yet but i already miss you. we still have time, but it won't be enough. i think about what i would say at your funeral, and say some of it to you now cause i need you to know how loved you are before you go. you will go where i cannot follow, but you will never really leave me. it won't make it hurt less but it is a part of healing somehow.

this is actually abt me preparing to lose my grandma, but it can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. grief exists everywhere u look, because love exists everywhere.

i'll tell you what converted me to being all-in on keeping cats indoors only:

living for a year and a half in a rural area with a sudden feral cat colony explosion on the property.

i moved in with my folks for a bit and at that time, one (1) stray cat mama had taken up residence on the property, but was too feral to let my mother anywhere near her. but especially after she brought three kittens around, mom fed her and the kittens in hopes they'd grow trusting enough she could catch for spay and neuter at the minimum. momcat stayed mean and hella wary, but the kittens would hang around a little nearer and play with my mom via long stick, but still wouldn't come close enough to touch or catch.

unfortunately, two of the three kittens were girls and started having kittens of their own before further progress was made, shortly after i moved in. and that was pretty much instant doom.

there were so many kittens. SO MANY. multiple litters. every time we turned around, more kittens.

we fed them. we hunted for and located the kittens every time anywhere on the property and would move them to a repurposed doghouse anytime a mama cat had them somewhere else, so that they could grow up human-socialized and we could spay/neuter them when they were old enough. (also it was a handy tactic to push the issue of the mamas getting more used to/trusting of us themselves. only really worked with one of them, though.)

and we watched them die.

we watched litter after litter of kittens never make it to the age they could be spayed or neutered. the moms stayed, for the longest time, too skittish to more than briefly touch, much less catch and crate for a vet visit.

it sounds like a silly joke to say i have kitten-related ptsd, but i absolutely do.

too many goddamn times i'd walk out of the garage and find the carport and gravel drive strewn with tiny bodies. others simply went missing, never to be found.

one in particular, i wish i hadn't found, and the visual literally haunts me still, almost a decade later.

i saw so many kittens die of snake bite, spider bite, wild dogs, birds of prey, hit by cars, respiratory illness, covered in fleas and eyes crusted with infection.

and we loved them all. scrimped for antibiotics if the vet could be convinced to give it to us despite our being unable to bring them in. bought flea collars and ointments. we cared for them and fed them and petted them and played with them, brushed their fur and cleaned up their little faces, put ice in their water in hot summer, rigged a heating lamp in their house in the winter.

and they died. horribly. that property is pocked with unmarked graves of kittens and cats.

all the best intentions, not enough resources, and it didn't matter anyways because the population went from three to almost twenty (at times, over thirty) in the blink of an eye.

they died and died and died. our hearts broke over and over again. the stress and anxiety wore us down like sandpaper. i think, by the end of it all, we managed to find less than 10 of them all homes, including batman the disabled kitten i found a home across the country through tumblr.

it was carnage and tragedy, frankly. and we were helpless.

it only ended because they started dying faster than they could be born, and because we finally caught the two remaining mom cats in traps and got them spayed.

the points about outdoor cats being invasive predators devastating to local wildlife populations is true and valid and important.

but i know cat people, and cat people who don't know better than to let cats outdoors. what matters to you is the cat itself, generally. the cat being happy and taken care of.

keeping cats outdoors, letting them outdoors, is not taking care of the cats. it's not protecting them. it's not giving them any happiness or invigoration that couldn't be provided to them as indoor-only pets with just a little research and effort.

they die. they get ill. they get hurt. they're at risk of predators, and cars, and disease, and carelessly cruel children and deliberately cruel adults. they're at risk of disappearing on you because someone else saw a cat outdoors and intervened to give it a better, safer life not in conflict with the local environment.

and if that offends and angers you that someone would just take a cat they saw roaming outdoors, even collared, and that it sounds like i'm endorsing that, i am, but not if you intervene and be that person yourself for your own cat.

if what matters to you is doing right by your cat because it's family and a living creature whose happiness and health and safety is important to you,

keep them indoors. not part time. always. exclusively.

I had a similar experience as a kid. We had a huge colony of continuously breeding feral cats in our yard. A lot of the kittens grew up to be friendly, and my family sort of regarded them as “ours”. We fed them, pet them, and played with them. We even found homes for some of the more cuddly ones. One time, we tried to re-home one of the kittens by bringing it to a local fair. My sister and I were just little kids, but we carried this kitten (who was, in retrospect, oddly listless and docile) around to all of the crafters’ tables in a basket, asking if somebody would like to take it home. Probably hundreds of people played with, stroked, and kissed this kitten. Finally, somebody took it home.

The kitten had rabies. There was a huge news campaign to “find the man in the tan van” and his daughters who had been handing around a rabid kitten. In fact, by this point all of the cats and kittens were considered rabid. They all had to be put down, and tons of fair goers, my family, and other people in the town who had also been feeding the cats had to get rabies shots. It was this immense disaster that resulted in over thirty dead cats and a whole ton of endangered humans all in one fell swoop.

"YA books are brain rotting at any age" okay I know booktok is annoying but please get offline

For real though I may make jokes but YA is great and an absolutely valuable resource for tweens/teens and isn't completely represented by the love triangle romances it's become associated with (which tbh who cares if it does have that). YA includes Holes by Louis Sachar, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. And y'know I grew up reading a bunch of Sarah Dessen books, the Flowers in the Attic series, Thirteen Reasons Why, Twilight, Maximum Ride, etc etc and even though I probably wouldn't recommend those books now, they nurtured a love of reading that followed me afterwards!!! I'm grateful that people eventually realized that there is a tumultuous period between childhood and adulthood and gave that period of life a space in literature

Ppl who had time for romance in high school we are so different. i was busy fighting for my life in my head

this is the sound of the summer every summer forever

[ID:

*screencap of a tiktok by @sarahinyellow featuring a lightskinned person sitting at their laptop with a bag of potato chips and a bottle of diet coke*

“diet culture will demonize any food that isn’t “clean” but EVERY food can have a benefit for you

Diet Coke is somehow the only thing that stops my migraines, and it reminds me of my best friend. Cape Cod potato chips are my go to salty snack and I live 10 minutes from the factory, so they make me feel cool.

Food is more than fuel. It’s memories and satisfaction and tradition and home and culture.

There’s nothing evil about that.”

END ID]

every fucking day i think about bruce springsteen pretending to be gay to avoid the draft and the conscription officers were like. “um. yeah, well. anyway, you had a concussion from a motorcycle accident, which means you failed the physical but. uh. thank you. for that.”

bruce: well well weeeeell sarge. i do love a man in uniform 

officer: you. you don’t really have to do that

officer: you literally have a concussion 

good morning to this person’s dad only

July 10, 2023 - (18:00 UTC)

The Archive is experiencing some issues (as many of you have noticed).

It looks like the Archive is under a DDoS attack causing the servers to fall over. Our volunteer sysadmins are working on countermeasures. Please be patient with us, we'll be back!

A DDoS attack is when an attacker attempts to knock a site offline by overwhelming it with requests. Data is not compromised in a DDoS attack, so there is no need to change your password at this time or worry about your works being lost.

A group presenting themselves as a collective of religiously and politically motivated hackers has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack. This group has attacked other sites before, including those of government organizations and large corporations. However, cybersecurity experts do not believe the group is honest about their motivation, so we urge caution in believing any reasoning this group provides for targeting AO3.

As part of our efforts to help keep the site up, you might find that you get "Retry later" errors more often when searching or filtering works or bookmarks. Don't worry, just go a little slower, or try again in a few minutes! These are temporary measures. Normal use of the site is fine -- you don't have to avoid using AO3 if it's currently up for you.

Our volunteers are continuing to work hard on this issue! We appreciate your patience and support in the meantime.

Date: 22:43 UTC July 10, 2023

We've changed our approach slightly, so you might now see error messages other than "Retry later," such as 429 (too many requests), 400 (bad request), or 503 (service unavailable).

Please do continue to access the site if it's up for you, and feel free to download some works for offline reading in case of further downtime!

We'd also like to take a moment to reiterate that cybersecurity experts believe the group claiming responsibility for the ongoing DDoS attack is lying about their affiliation and reasons for attacking websites. We strongly encourage you to be skeptical of any statements from this group.

Date: 02:16 UTC July 11, 2023

I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.

They are literally cutting off library access to minors.

BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY IS STILL OFFERING E-CARDS FOR TEENS+YOUNG ADULTS IN HELL STATES

https://www.bklynlibrary.org/books-unbanned

it is with a heavy heart that I inform you all AO3 is apparently currently down worldwide and I’m starting to panic thinking about how I’ll sleep tonight without staying up till 5 in the morning reading my comfort whump with hurt/comfort fic in which my blorbo is going through the worst kind of hell

so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.

first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.

it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.

and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.

you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.

and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.

your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.

in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.

in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.

so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.

you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.

once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.

and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"

you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?

hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!

you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.

we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?

you missed it because you were looking at your phone but an angel just appeared to me with a flaming sword and told me that god decided there’s nothing wrong with day drinking

eddie & richie decide to have two weddings. the real one is just the losers and an elvis impersonator. the big one is where they invite the press and their extended family and every big name from comedy. they decide to write two sets of vows, too, bc they dont want anything too real floating out there when there are paparazzi, and it’s more of a publicity thing anyway – plus, like, the whole cast of snl’s gonna be there. people are expecting to laugh. richie gives his vows first and theres not one joke. it’s 5 full minutes of tear-jerking all-encompassing love that he and everyone else in the room cries through. everyone but eddie, who is frozen in shocked horror because his vows are a tight five of stand-up beginning with “ive known richie since he was still pissing the bed: age 11”