Chaos in Paradise

If you need to track the cost of things like hotel stays, pet kenneling, medical care, etc. after a disaster you can use this worksheet.

If you need to create an inventory of your home for an insurance claim (and if you'd like to do this to keep someplace safe before a disaster) you can use this worksheet (two pages, instructions on the first page, worksheet on the second).

These are free documents you can download to keep track of disaster recovery expenses or make a list for insurance claims.

I know people are exhausted and frightened and not thinking about stuff but start a folder in your email for receipts for things you're paying for right now so that you can fill out these forms later.

Don't enter your info on a random website or you're going to start getting calls from scammy companies.

her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.

remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

2026 - 2025 - 2024 - 2023

in spite of it all, happy 2026 pride.

you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads

you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride

these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.

Hi! I am Jo, a disabled latina lesbian. If you see this and can help in any way, even by sharing, we (me and my 77yo mother) live on benefits and could always use a little help to end the month with everything paid, food on the table, and all the medicine we need bought. Benefits are only $600, and half of it alone goes to rent, meaning some days are harder to go by. I know many of us are struggling, but anything truly helps. Thank you so much! 💕

$0/100

I deserve rewards for not killing myself yet. I want to but I haven't.

Venmo- Kate-Havekost

(Yes I know it's crass but everything from hotels to security deposits to replacing stuff is fucking expensive. If I can't afford to like I'm completely fine with dying.)

I've been looking at housing within my area. Saw something I liked. It's less than the last place.

Literary analysis isn’t about the book

It’s not even about being right

It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury

It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won

My regular teacher was out for the day, so the “this guy works here but nobody quite knows what he’s supposed to do” substitute was in for her. His name was Mr. Moony. I suspect, knowing more now, that Mr. Moony was the special education coordinator for gifted and talented students. But that’s all besides the point.

The only thing that mattered about Mr. Moony for this story is that every student knew you never learned anything when he was in, because he was always batshit insane. He would completely disregard plans, throw them away, and tell us to do something different.

When he came in, we had just finished reading Waiting for Godot. We were well on our way to an AP Lit exam, tired and worried, and we had a practice essay coming up based on this play. And he said, “you’re all burnt the hell out, so I’m going to write an essay for you.” We all cheered because, hell yes, a lecture day. We didn’t have to do shit. We could all tune out and stop caring.

And then he started going.

We were enraptured. This man deconstructed the two act play into a masterpiece, quoting ancient literature on theology and God, as well as personal details about the author, to reveal to us all that, actually, Waiting for Godot was the author’s roundabout way to show the anguish behind the politics of the pro-life/anti-choice movements, and the author’s criticisms of abortion.

He went on for a half hour, writing faster than we could really keep up with. By the end of his rant, we were all nodding along. At the end, he slammed his hand on the board and shouted “ABORTION” to really make his point.

“So, do you all think that’s what this story is about?”

The majority of us nodded, myself included. And this man looked at us, scrunched his face like Kermit the Fucking Frog, and went, “no the fuck it’s not. I made all that up.”

There was a beat of everyone feeling like their time was wasted. Some students very frustrated because they were trying to take notes and just realized it all was fabricated. One or two who were angry about being woken up to him shouting abortion.

And then he looked at us. “How many of you only believe it’s about abortion because that’s what I just told you to think?”

Quite a few raised their hands.

“Then I did English good.”

The rest of the time of class was spent with him teaching us various styles of analysis, though sadly my amnesia has claimed most of this part from me. I remember my belief in English being entirely shaken at this point. But at the same time, I also got what he was saying, and it opened my eyes to new things.

There is no right answer in literary analysis. There’s just answers people want to hear, or answers that are compelling, or answers that aren’t those things. The answer that Waiting for Godot was about abortion was not something all of us wanted to hear, but he made the answer sound compelling — and so we were riveted.

My next essay I wrote for that class was about the setting of the play, and how the entirety of Waiting for Godot centers on the anxieties of losing the modern family — and even modern life as we know it — to technology, and via that idea, the climate crisis.

I got a 100%. My teacher highlighted my (thankfully anonymous to the class) essay, particularly because the first sentence was “compelling,” due to my absence of proper grammar rules; I’d started it off by just saying, “trees.”