I'm not cishet please don't call me that.

the way fandoms are desperate to make all aroace characters romance and sex favorable but then dont do anything remotely similar to any other identity is astounding. hmm i wonder why

my thirteen-year-old cousin came to visit a few months back. he saw my copy of american psycho and asked if he could borrow it, because his friend had seen the movie and said it was really good. i said okay, sure, but just so you know, it's a lot more graphic than the movie and there's some stuff in there that you might find really upsetting. he asked what kind of stuff. i gave him a bare-bones outline of the contents (gore, sexual violence, cannibalism, etc). he said he would think about it.

a few days later, he came back to me and said, "it doesn't sound like my kind of thing. i think i might wait until i'm a bit older to read it." alright, i said, good call, and that was the end of it. i am 99% sure that if i'd just said "no, you can't have it, you're not old enough," he would have felt patronised and found a way to read it anyway, just to prove a point.

⚠️SCAM ALERT⚠️

soo scams have been on the rise lately. i was recently approached by a woman saying she wanted a portrait of her daughter for $200. she “accidentally” wrote a check for $2000 instead, wanting me to send back $1800.

i almost did it, because i assumed a faulty check wouldn’t deposit. luckily i looked up mobile banking check scams. YOU CAN STILL BE SCAMMED WITH A BAD CHECK. it won’t flag it till later, leaving you owing money.

This one’s a popular variation on what’s called an ‘overpayment’ scam. Any time anybody sends (general) you money and then asks you to send some of that money back, you should be looking out for this. 

Also, because apparently a lot of younger people don’t know this: cheques aren’t immediate payments. It can take five to ten days for a cheque to clear - that is, for the other bank or credit union to get notified about the cheque trying to be withdrawn from the account they hold, determine whether or not the cheque is legit and the funds are available, and either let the cheque go through or ask for the money back if the cheque is bad. Yes, you can see your account balance go up immediately, but that money gets taken right back out of your account if the cheque is bad.

On an episode of Bar Rescue I saw once, the bar owners hadn’t paid their staff for several months, and Jon Taffer insisted that they pay their staff before he’d help them. However, he had the bar owners write the manager a cheque for the back wages, and then go and deposit the cheque to her account that same day, and then when she came back the same day and said she’d been able to deposit the cheque, he went ahead. That cheque could easily have bounced three days later and the staff still wouldn’t have been paid their back wages. 

It’s a good rule of thumb, if you’re accepting a cheque, to assume the money isn’t actually there until at least a week has passed. (Some banks or credit unions will have what’s called a ‘standard hold’ on certain types of cheque deposits, so that you actually can’t access those funds until after the cheque clears. If you’ve ever deposited a cheque at an ATM, you’ve probably run into this.)

Check the GALAP Directory! The Gender Affirming Letter Access Project is a directory of US based therapists organized by state that are willing to write surgery support letters without gatekeeping! Short appointments, generally free letters.

The site lists out therapist names and locations as well as open trans/non-binary status & whether or not a therapist is a PoC.

https://thegalap.org/directory