Apothecary

Eric Bogosian and Assad Zaman at New York Comic Con (2025)

14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."

and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.

so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.

on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.

the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.

If you know what you'd have to do to solve a problem, but you just don't want to do it, your main problem isn't the problem itself. Your problem is figuring out how to get yourself to do the solution.

If your problem is not eating enough vegetables, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make vegetables stop being yucky". If your problem is not getting enough exercise, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make exercise stop sucking ass". You're not supposed to just be doing things that are awful and suck all the time forever, you're supposed to figure out how to make it stop being so awful all the time.

I used to hate wearing sunscreen because it's sticky and slimy and disgusting and it feels bad and it smells bad, so I neglected to wear it even if I needed to. Then I found one that isn't like that, and doesn't smell and feel gross. Problem solved.

Rowling has been transparent about her desire to keep assisting people in their efforts to rob transgender people of their dignity and human rights. That seems very much to be the entire point of The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund — an organization Rowling launched in 2025 that claims to be “fighting to retain women’s and girls’ sex-based rights in all aspects of life.” The Fund offers financial support provided by Rowling to cisgender women who are looking to file lawsuits. The Fund’s website makes no mention of gender as a concept, but it explicitly points to the For Women Scotland case as the kind of “victory” that it wants to see more of in the world.

Rowling has been rich enough to pour cash into organizations like this for some time now because she continues to hold primary intellectual property rights to the entire Harry Potter franchise. Every Harry Potter book, movie, video game, stage show ticket, theme park pass, and piece of merchandise that’s sold puts money into Rowling’s pocket, which she can use to keep her crusade against trans people going. Given the property’s lasting popularity, Rowling, who is currently worth about $1.2 billion, could probably do all of this even if HBO wasn’t producing a new Harry Potter series. But because the network is and it wants to keep the show going for at least a decade, Rowling will have even more capital at her disposal to impose her retrograde views onto others.

Wendy Klemperer

Howling Naildog

Been practising my BG skills lately! process pics under the cut