i take pictures of my cats and birds in my yard

I grew up in The Woods. There was absolutely no form of public transportation aside from the literal school bus. If you wanted to go anywhere besides school (10 miles from my house), you had to drive a car or ride your bike on unpaved, bumpy dirt roads. The center of town (a 2 mile walk) held the library, some churches, town hall, the village store, and the beach for the local lake. And I must've clocked thousands of biking miles just to go to the library, the village store for a snack, and the beach as a kid. Because I could go literally nowhere else.

The closest City Where Stuff Happens was 15 miles away. It might as well have been on the moon before I got a driver's license and begged to borrow my brother's car.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

The result of a joke taken too far, my original Umamusume OC 'Wordle in Four'.

The origins:

And how she's now used those gloves for over thirty winters and each time she puts them on, she gets to pet her beloved dog's fur even though Ginger is long gone. And how even though her bones have long since been swallowed by the earth, Ginger is still protecting her owner from the cold.

If you don't already know you have issues doing so, squat down real quick. Bend your knees all the way and touch the floor. Just make sure you can do it. Okay? For me? And then stand up all the way and make sure you can balance on one foot.

If there was ever a tumblr post worth sending to your mom, it's this one.

This is the very simple "starting from zero muscles" program I followed, highly recommend it or something similar: