The green pendulum

Brought to you by the “fuck masks” state.

Glass Microbiology, by Luke Jerram

1st row: COVID-19 (both photos)

2nd row: T4 bacteriophage and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

3rd row: HIV (both photos)

4th row:  Giardia lamblia and Ebolavirus

Blind cave gummi man

Jar of space virus

Don’t bully him :(

a family of honkulating dwimpuses

“Uhh this is how a duck swims right? Hoo boy. At least I remembered that they’re about two and a half inches long.”

JEREMY SCIENCE FACT: he has more friends.

“Stupid idiot little fish like to pretend they’re one big fish but I’m too high-IQ to fall for that” - a fish once

This wants to be somebody’s OC so bad.

This demon eyed tadpole isn’t even silly it’s just radical

Moomin larvae

Sometimes a fish is just like “hell yeah I have no idea what I’m looking at so it is D E F I N I T E L Y going in my mouth”

This is significantly more important than a change.org petition bc it HAS to be acknowledged if it gets enough signatures

One of the things that impress me most about Wang Yibo and Xiao Zhan are what they’ve done that quietly challenge gender stereotypes: wyb for dancing the heck out of girl idol group dances, and xz for unapologetically performing his favorite tracks by female singers.

It may seem effortless, but you don’t see a lot of male celebs following suit. Of course, just like in the West, there are lots of nasty anonymous comments from misogynists online calling them names for not conforming, but it’s honestly a breath of fresh air to people who’re sick of the toxic masculinity on TV.

Hey guess what?

We have a homeschool-to-prison pipeline now.

https://www.propublica.org/article/a-teenager-didnt-do-her-online-schoolwork-so-a-judge-sent-her-to-juvenile-detention

Grace is a 15-year-old with ADHD and a long history of behavioral difficulties who ended up on probation after a fight with her mom led to the confiscation of her phone and her briefly stealing a classmate’s phone.

Grace is now in a juvenile facility where her life is at risk from covid because one of her probation conditions was to do her homework, and when her school in Oakland County Michigan went online only, she struggled to complete her distance education homework.

As a result, Judge Mary Ellen Brennan ignored the Michigan governor’s orders to minimize the incarceration of children and ordered Grace imprisoned…for not doing her homework.

The Propublica story on Grace and her single mother Charisse - written by Jodi S Cohen - is a heartbreaker and a half. It paints a picture of a kid whose need for extra educational attention was met by a stern and uncaring system, from caseworker to judge.

Judge Brennan does not come off well in this story. She ordered Grace to appear in person in court - the only case of the day with that requirement - and then refused a continuance when Grace’s lawyer said he would NOT come to court and risk his life to argue her case.

Brennan’s sentence was handed down after Grace’s caseworker Michelle Giroux admitted that she did not know the details of Grace’s learning disabilities and had not familiarized herself with the legally mandated supports for them that Grace had not recieved.

Brennan called Grace a “threat to the community” for missing her homework, denied Grace’s pleas for more time to adjust to homeschooling, and had her taken out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

It goes without saying that, like the majority of Michigan teens sentenced to youth detention in defiance of the governor’s orders, Grace is Black. Black children in Michigan are four times likelier to be imprisoned than their white peers.

Grace has not been permitted to see her mother, except by videoconference. Her mother’s attempts to bring her clothes and toys have been rebuffed by the facility, because of petty rules like those stipulating that underwear must be briefs, or that jeans can’t be “too tight.”

When Grace is brought out for videoconference status meetings with the court, the child is handcuffed and put in ankle shackles. She makes heartbreaking pleas to be returned to her mother. The judge has ordered her held until at least Sept 8.

let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.

picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.

every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.

i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.

i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.

i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.

i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.

or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.

ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.

remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?

i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.

and now look at it.

i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?

if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.

When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:

“Your regulations are written in blood.”

These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to. 

They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. 

Can I say it again, for those not paying attention? 

You can’t see it from the other side, either. It also cost about $20, and I can’t recommend it enough. Easy to travel with, too! Great for Air BnBs!

“Savion Morgan (They/Them) is a Black Trans Nonbinary student and activist. Them and their mother have been struggling with proper housing for the past 2-3 years. Their current goal is $7,500 which will cover moving costs, security depost and a month’s rent! Please share and donate!”

https://venmo.com/savionmorgan

cashapp: @savionmorgan

https://www.paypal.me/savionmorgan

Kids are exhausted! I don't remember being able to focus the last two hours of whatever class I had those hours because I just couldn't my brain couldn't function to it.

Also those 2h for eating and 30 min of break are the worst. Because the 30 min of break where you eat a sandwich and breath fresh air is cool. You go back to class is mid morning you are fine, but the 2h of eating, school meals use to suck, extra activities for kids who had to stay an eat where mentally exhausting too. If you did eat home that was nuts, go run home, make you food if your parents aren't there, choke on your food and while you are digesting hold it Tru 2h more of class. Beg to God isn't gym or you will throw up.

And I was lucky! I lived 10 min from my school, sometimes they would let me eat premade food and I didn't have after school activities, but if you did, HAHAHAH you end at 8pm you have HOMEWORK! for like 2h at least, and then eat, go to sleep, wake at 6-7am and go back have the same cycle.

The only thing I got from this system was, anxiety, constant stress, burnout, the bad habit of skipping breakfast to sleep 30 min more and sometimes skipping lunch to do my homework.