:o

It's winter where I'm living and we have really bad snow. And the snow plow people are really bad at their jobs probably because there aren't snow plow people who clean sidewalks. As a solution I got to thinking about how I could increase the traction on my wheels. And the most redneck thing I could think of was taking a bunch of zip ties and tying them around my wheels. They last surprisingly long, and work surprisingly well. It's basically the same premise as chains for your tires during the winter.

The inflatable animals keep multiplying this ↑ is the latest video from Portland, that I've seen

spiderman dances to the beat

and I start the consultation already miserable as fuck and I give the kid some pen and paper so I can maybe communicate and see what's on his mind

and then I go WAIT A GODDAMN SECOND I KNOW THOSE MONSTERS

the mom looked at me as if her son and I belonged at the same satanic cult and that's why I knew the names of the demons in his head

so they decided to highkey just appoint all of them to my day and it took me almost a month to realize that the fact that I kept arriving and finding that all of today’s appointments were autistic children was Not A Coincidence 

anyway this one time there was a kid who was really into christianity but it was like, specifically angels 

so I’m trying to start up a conversation with him and I ask what he’s reading and he goes “do you know what a nephilim is”

and like for one hellish second my soul is suckerpunched out of my body and thrown straight into supernatural-fanfic-on-wattpad hell, and then I reassume control of my flesh prison, ignoring the mental edits of Dean and Castiel making out, and go “Aren’t those the guys who are half human and half angel?”

and the kid was so fucking happy but the mom was staring at me like ‘why are you privy to this bit of occult jesus lore’

and my heathen lesbian of a self just looks at her and goes 

Hi Anon!

This may not be the most satisfying answer, but a lot of it is practice.

Pivoting away from negative thought spirals, knowing when the despair is welling up and it's time to put the news down for a bit, being aware of the human tendency for negativity bias that feeds the media bias towards catastrophizing, seeking out stories of progress and people helping each other even if it's not glamorous or flashy or immediate. These get easier the longer you practice.

Truly, I have never been aware of how much this hope practice has paid off until this year. I won't say that I don't have bad days, but the strategies I have to deal with them and keep the bad news from driving me to disengagement feel like muscle-memory now.

I know this may not feel terribly helpful to you, but I say this to express that it is not some unique element of my personality that allows me to stay hopeful in the face of bad news--it is a skill that you can get better at too.

One really big part of this is to combat the bombardment of negative information by looking for positive information. News of progress, resistance, and people coming together to make a difference are a great place to start--but also hopeful and inspiring art (books, movies, TV shows, visual art, theater, etc.), research into human goodness and altruism, reading not just about the dark times in human history but also the times that people worked together to make things better. I just finished reading Hope for Cynics by positive psychologist Jamil Zaki, which I highly recommend if you feel like delving into the good side of human nature.

The more you train your brain to look for hope the more you will notice--one day you'll hear bad news and your knee-jerk reaction will be to turn towards possible solutions and wonder who is already working to make those solutions a reality.

I understand living in that place of fear and hopelessness--I have spent time there too and some days I still do. But hope is something worth working towards, even slowly and imperfectly. It doesn't just feel better to live in a world where you can see the possibility for things to be better than they are right now--it is the first step in being engaged in helping to make them better.

There are so many kind, brave, talented, imperfect, regular people pushing back against the bad things. None of us are alone. None of us have to save the world by ourselves. We only have to hope enough to be one small part of the process of making the world better than it would have been otherwise, in whatever ways we can.

I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.

So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.

Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.

This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.

Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.

And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.

Like abnormally straight !