As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

We now have window units in most of the bedrooms and a window unit in the main space I spend my time downstairs. The next time one goes out we're going to take advantage of a zero interest loan from our utility company, in order to replace the window units with heat pumps/mini splits. They will drastically improve our heat costs in the winter.

We have to get our house painted this year. I'm going to have them use a solar reflective paint (probably super therm) which will actually help both summer and winter because it acts as an insulative layer, reflecting infrared in both directions.

Next year we will be making our kitchen accessible, and I'll take the opportunity to take advantage of another zero interest loan from the utility to replace a single pane French door with something weatherproof with r value.

Black man named Daniel Cressy!! (23) in Louisiana has been the first person cured!! (Happy Black News!!!)

This Doonesbury abortion cartoon was originally written by Gary Trudeau in 2012, in response to a Texas law requiring women to have an ultrasound before an abortion. It was banned from many major newspapers, and they ran syndicated cartoons in its place.

Now seems like an appropriate time to bring these cartoons back, with the passing of Texas’ new law requiring the burial or cremation of miscarried or aborted fetal remains. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Trudeau decides to write the sequel.

'Transfem DIY HRT' and 'Transmasc DIY HRT' are a pair of zines aimed at teaching transgender people how to safely self-administer DIY Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).

Both zines are 100% free to download here from Little Mouse (who also made the zine). Print, share and distribute to those who need it!

Specifically regarding the bloodwork, you do NOT want to test your T levels right before your next injection, you want to take it approximately halfway between your injections. Trough levels (T levels immediately before your next injection, when your T is at the lowest point) are useless. It doesn't tell you what your T levels actually are, and does not provide a frame of reference for adjusting dosage if you need to. Taking your blood levels approximately halfway between dosages allows you to see what your T levels actually look like for the majority of the time, before it starts to work out of your system.

I think the confusion is caused because the zine is based on weekly T dosage, but T is generally taken every 2 weeks* and you should take your blood levels one week after your shot if you're on a 2 week schedule.

*every 2 weeks is standard for a couple of reasons:

1) injections suck and doing it every week sucks.

2) T in the US until recently could not be handed over by a pharmacy and therefore injections could not be done at home and instead had to be done at at doctor's office. The 2-week schedule allowed for less doctors visits and less expense.

3) perisex cis men also have a hormone cycle (albeit one not as visible as those of perisex cis women) and having your T high and T low be about 2 weeks apart is thought to mimic that natural cycle. This may or may not actually be true, but it was part of the prescribing basis for a long time.

4) because the half-life of cyprionate is 8 days, HALF OF IT is still in your system after 8 days. Taking a second dose at that point messes with the dosages and results in you stacking your dose on top of half of your previous dose, resulting in you taking 150% of the amount you're trying to take.

My latest books cartoon for The Guardian's books pages.