Why are people suddenly following me like where did y'all come from what prompted this there have been like 7 of you in the last couple days and you dont look like porn bots so what the heck
Also just an fyi I am really shitty at tagging shit like really bad like I almost never do it and theres no consistency. My tumblr is full of things I enjoy that I felt were tasty. There is no theme there is no consistency. Usually my original stuff is tagged. Usually. I generally avoid politics and current events. Generally.
I will neglect to tag stuff from abuse (all sorts) to fandoms to memes. This is your warning. Dead dove do not eat.
Also @utility-keeper is my side blog with useful shit. Also poorly tagged.
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Odette is a master ragebaiter, and yes, cats are born with this skill, she is just so capable of sensing the worst possible thing to do and the worst time to do it and then carrying out that action. Ascribing human-like malicious intent to a cat’s behavior is usually wrong BUT I think she loves pissing me off and ruining my day. Do not get me wrong, I love her, I love this cat, she brings me so much joy, she is just the household supervillain. She just jumped in a plastic bag full of paper scraps from crafting that I had next to me and began kneading the bottom of it, ripping the bag open and spreading tiny slivers of paper all over the couch and the floor. Without fail, every time I am overstimulated, she will knock my drink over. She has never seen a pen or marker she did not want to chew on. She somehow manages to jump onto the table and directly onto my work space every time I am mid stroke in my calligraphy. It’s like she has a psychic ability to predict my actions and hinder them.
Again, I love her. She is just mischievous and devious in a way that her sister is not and Tommy could not compare to. She is like living with a raccoon, I know she desperately wishes she had their little fingers and she would use that dexterity for evil. She just requires a great deal of enrichment and entertainment, not even attention. She loves the toys. She hogs the toys. But inevitably, she gets bored of playing with the ball track and goes back to thwarting my efforts to do just about anything.
I see Odette is closer related to Dimitri than the average. He also knocks over drinks when I am not complying sufficiently, deliberately gets in my way, roots around in the trash can when he's bored, and washes his paws in his water dish. I sometimes wonder if I'd adopted a raccoon. Mercifully he doesn't have the fingers and dexterity they do.
If you had a chance to get another cat with Tommy’s condition would you?
To this day, we never really figured out what her overall condition was.
That’s a difficult question, though. I loved her so much. I did everything in my power to keep her alive. With how chronically broke I am, I am probably not the best person to have a high expense special needs cat. I’d do it all again if a cat needed me like that. Money was the biggest issue, not giving her medication, not the effort of taking her to the vet, not feeding her a special diet, not the messes she made. Yes, I’d do it again, only if I knew I could afford it.
My dad was a public defender when I was a child and he would have to drive all over the district to visit various defendants in various jails which I thought was very interesting and I liked to hear about his experiences in various jails and how different they all were. He drove me to school every day and sometimes I’d skip in and tell my classmates “My dad is going to the jail in [TOWN/CITY] today!” mind you, I went to public school in a not very nice little town so my teacher’s first thought wasn’t lawyer, she had other students with incarcerated parents. This was also occurring in the south where everyone is nosy as fuck so she eventually called my mother, presumably to scope out why her husband was a jail bird and if the chargers were relevant to me and my education in any way. My mom had to explain that my dad wasn’t an inmate who kept getting transferred and that going to jail is his job.
The people who say they can’t utter the charge are saying it from the biggest stages on earth. The people who actually can’t speak don’t get
I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.
Nobody called me an antisemite for it.
I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.
Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.
Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.
This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.
But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.
Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.
The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.
Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.
She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.
Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.
At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.
I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.
There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.
The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.
And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.
On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.
A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.
Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.
So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.
There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.
The ones who say they cannot criticize Israel are speaking from the loudest rooms we have. The ones who truly cannot speak are the people who were set on fire for showing up. One of those groups is on a stage at Cannes. The other is in the ground.
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Don’t overlook paternity leave because it’s a hugely important feminist issue
Celebrating fatherhood with official paternity leave policies challenges traditional gender roles and empowers parents in the workplace. It’s one of those rare issues where men’s rights activists and feminists can find common ground with a mutually beneficial cause. It even has an impact on LGBTQ equality.
I’ve reblogged a lot of posts today about why paid paternity leave (or just in general all parents regardless of gender being entitled to the same amount of paid parental leave) is such an important social issue, and these posts have made a lot of great points about why gender equality in parental leave is such a massively important issue for equality, such as:
- It’s important for LGBT+ parents who don’t fit the cis-hetero mold of one mother and one father.
- It’s an important feminist issue for reducing the second shift: when only one parent gets adequate parental leave, it’s only natural for a pattern to develop that the only parent who got adequate parental leave takes on the lion’s share of childcare. However, if both parents get adequate parental leave, then it’s more likely for a pattern to develop of sharing childcare duties. This is obviously massively important for reducing how much women’s careers are affected by having children.
- If the mother has post-partum health issues (anything from recovering from a C-section or other physical traumas, to post-partum depression and/or anxiety) it’s incredibly unfair to expect her partner to just go back to work immediately instead of allowing her partner to stay home and help with childcare duties. When someone is recovering from having a baby, it can be really important for their partner to stay home to help care for them and the baby.
However, one important point I haven’t seen brought up in why equal paid parental is so important for social equality is how important it is for reducing hiring discrimination.
By that I mean, when a country has *only* guaranteed maternity leave, but either no paternity leave (or really short paternity leave of a few weeks like the U.K. has), this is only going to raise the risk of hiring discrimination against women.
So if a company is choosing between two candidates for a position: one is a young woman and the other is a young man, if the country this company is in has a maternity leave policy of several months or more, but paternity leave is either just a few weeks (or completely non-existent), the company will look at the woman as riskier and less reliable to hire than the man.
So equal paid parental leave leads to more equality in the job market, because it means companies are less likely to see women as riskier and less reliable to hire. If everyone, not just women, has the same length of parental leave, everyone runs the same risk of needing to go on leave for the same amount of time.
There’s no reason not to demand that all parents regardless of gender receive equal paid parental leave. All parents and all children benefit from it.
Weirdly, the more bored and resigned I sound about getting a medical thing checked out the more efficiently they check it out. Like, "Hi, I have had 4 pulmonary emboli and I'm having leg pain which is probably not a clot but I'd feel very stupid if it was and I didn't get it checked out."
ER doctor: you mean if I just send you for a leg ultrasound right now and it's clear you'll leave?
Me, picking up my book: yeah, I'm just gonna read until we get it done
Fastest ER visit ever (it was not in fact a clot but I sure would have felt dumb if it had been)
Or, "hey so this test result came back weird and so I think we have to rule out a benign pituitary tumor."
The more specific I get with what I need the faster they order tests. For the RA diagnosis it was, "hey this is probably some weird post viral arthralgia but could we do an arthritis panel since I've got 27 affected joints?"
If the doctor says something dismissive or they don't know, I ask for them to refer me to someone with more expertise in this area.
I had to go through three different practices to find a spinal surgeon who did not tell me that operating on me would be too dangerous because I'm fat. But the third one was like, "Oh, I'm not worried about you coding, there's just a risk that it won't work. But it has a hundred percent failure rate if we don't try."
I did not code. The surgery worked. Was it perfect? No. Did it drastically improve my quality of life? It gave me my fucking life back. I can sit. I can be out in the world and not in blinding pain.
It is so important to not take dismissals and such as the final answer. I got so much bullshit for so many years. It nearly killed me twice, people blowing off clots as muscle pain or "depression".
Track your symptoms. Make a list. Talk about how it affects your quality of life. Ask for physical therapy, ask for second opinions. If you have an idea of what might be wrong, ask them to help you rule it out. Also ask for patient assistance, nonprofit hospitals have it. You might have to go through their labs and their doctors but it can cover an awful lot.
Take a friend with you, or a family member. My pcp asks if I want a chaperone (I don't) but literally having an extra person with you can help.
Being me feels like a full time job sometimes, medically, but no one else is stepping up to it, you know?
As the year goes on, take into consideration the temperature highs and lows if your dumpster diving for food. If the weather gets too hot during the day, it may be dangerous to pick food from a previous day, as the conditions can encourage bacterial growth. On the flip side, consider that consistently freezing weather practically turns your dumpster into a fridge, if you enjoy the forbidden perishables of dumpster diving like meats.
Always take rain into account and plan around it when making plans with your dumpster buddies. Rain can ruin loot, especially if dumpsters are left open.
The change of college semesters, or as some call it “hippie Christmas” are golden opportunities for all sorts of goodies that privileged college students leave behind. If there are dorms or fraternities/sororities in your neighborhood, they may be worth checking out around December and May
Time of day:
Can you dumpster dive during the day? Yes, But! you run a high chance of getting caught, since that’s when employees are most likely to be coming and going
I suggest looking up the places you want to dumpster dive at beforehand, taking note of and avoiding going within 2 hours of opening and closing, that way you give employees some time to get out there (and nobody flips their shit and calls the cops)
Here’s what to do if you run into cops anyways
Special occasions:
depending on the company, restaurants and grocery stores are sometimes required to throw out all their refrigerated foods when the power goes out, even if it was only for a moment. So next time there’s a storm or you hear about a power outage, go take a peak at your local hot spots, you may just hit a jackpot.
General dumpster diving safety guide
WHERE to dumpster dive
Feel free to add on anything I missed. Be safe and go dumpster diving! ♻️
Forget flashlights. Get a good headlamp so both hands are free.
A long stick of some sort can be helpful. Often these are in the dumpsters themselves.
Personally, I’m the type that will willingly jump into dumpsters (I even do this when scavenging or dealing with my work’s dumpsters) BUT this is dangerous, dirty, and yes dumpsters can tip over. Know your agility and comfort level.
Be up to date on your tetanus shots.
Idiots are loud and slow and attract unwanted attention. Get in, get out. There’s different philosophies about ‘I belong here’ vs ‘stealth mode’ but whatever you do, lingering is NOT helpful.
If it’s locked, there’s a good possibility that there are cameras. Breaking that lock costs time, and it means that if you are caught, management is more likely to be hostile than usual and more likely to press charges. Know your local laws.
Leave the place better than you found it, or you’re likely to end up with locked and monitored dumpsters.
You can learn when dumpsters are picked up, so you can check them right beforehand. The best divers have a regular “route” they check. Some nights you don’t get much of anything, some can be total bonanzas.
I like to double check the wishlists of local nonprofits, and keep an eye out for those items when diving/scavenging
Beware of bedbugs!!!!!! They can ruin your living situation. Beware of clothing, upholstery, furniture, etc. You can bag the items up in black garbage bags and leave them in the sun for a few weeks but honestly that shit is not worth it in my book.
Don’t forget curb picking. This can be much safer and faster than actually dealing with dumpsters.
Plastic bags and a change of clothes can be very helpful.
It’s more fun with a friend. But make sure they have a good head on their shoulders. Do they have your back?
Some places have diving communities, in which case, it is poor form to take all the good stuff for your “team”. We’ve met other people while diving, and often you find out what the other folks are looking for while you go through stuff together. Working cooperatively means that everyone gets in, and gets out, as quickly as possible.
In case you’re wondering why the heck one would dumpster dive in the first place, it’s truly astounding the perfectly good things people will just toss into landfills, or things that just need a little repair. If you are creative or know someone who is, you can find all manner of things. It’s an interesting hobby for punk environmentalists, freegans, etc. and more than a few people have made some money from selling the stuff that they’ve found dumpster diving.
Many stores will destroy or damage things on purpose before throwing them in the dumpster. Many will not. Learn how different places operate, map out your route, and check often! Good luck and stay safe!
If the cops in your area are bored af, dive someplace else, or just check out the curbside options... trust your intuition if something doesn’t feel right.
Insisting James Talarico is transgender in hopes of invoking the feverish transphobic hysteria they have been cultivating for years (he is cisgender), tweeting about how he will sacrifice you to Moloch (he is a Presbyterian who went to seminary school), repeatedly stating he is a vegan (he is not) and doing the old classic of calling him a Communist (wish that was true), republicans are fucking terrified of James Talarico and it is so fucking funny. Ken Paxton is a worse candidate and a worse person by every conceivable metric, he’s repeatedly committed fraud, he’s been a terrible attorney general. They cannot find anything to level the playing field in terms of terrible career track record or personal moral failing so they’re just lying. Not even good lies. They’re just going for what they assume will make the Texas public hate him. Transgender, demon worshipper, barbecue hater, commie. It is scary that the truth means nothing, it is scary that transgender identity is continuously weaponized for political gain, it is scary that we are still in the Red Scare and 1980s Satanic Panic bullshit but oh my God is it hilarious to see them spinning their wheels this hard.
With the note I know nothing about this dude running in some cali election other than what this attack ad said (mistakes in digital marketing+ my mom's weird Internet connection means sometimes she gets really random ads from places a fair ways away) they stated:
He's a Democrat
He said trump took bribes
Trump has condemned him twice
That's it. All of it was presented as a bad thing and it was definitely an attack ad
It is interesting to see this as an apparent trend in Republican attack ads of just sort of playing on the shit they've been launching instead of actually building like an even semi related more personalized one
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Every Pride Month I’m once again struck by the ridiculousness of the “marriage is between a man and a woman, as (the Christian) God intended” and similar ‘marriage is a (somehow a solely) Christian institution’ rhetoric. Your God did not invent marriage. Your God was late to the scene on the whole marriage thing. It existed long before the Old Testament, even. Which is not to say that marriage as a Christian rite (which was a later historical construct) is not valid, I believe everyone has a right to practice their religious beliefs surrounding marriage but, again, most religions and societies have some concept of marriage and your idea of Christian marriage entered the game way later than some of these.
The concept of marriage in American society is a legal construct, not a religious one.
(Also, side note, Christian marriage being between “one man and one woman” is controversial even in Christian theological debate because polygyny is never definitively condemned in the text. They only decided on the one man and one woman thing in 673 and not everyone agreed.)
Boo hoo i'll be able to add more physical storage to my phone and be able to change out batteries if they degrade as well as all these other optional features I won't have to touch
I love how they add totally absurd things no one is asking for to make the idea look crazy. And still, I must emphasize, failing to make this look like a bad idea.
"Is this what you want? Is this ugly stupid bullcrap what you want??" the biggest loudest idiot in the room asks, holding up a picture of the hottest looking shit I've ever seen
Reminds me of the time we dared a brick oven pizza restaurant to make a pizza with so much garlic we couldn't finish it.
Boy did they deliver. The pizza had (no exaggeration) a solid inch of chopped garlic on top. It was fucking delicious. Multiple times we spotted restaurant workers peeking at us from the kitchen, with an obvious "my god they're actually eating it!" energy.
Of course we left a massive tip. Leaving the place we felt like triumphant Olympians gold-medaling the Pizza Event.
Only one problem.
This was a lunch time experience, and we worked at a small software development firm and there was a scheduled all-hands meeting after lunch. Our supervisor (politely) asked us to leave the meeting because we reeked of garlic.
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!! personal thoughts and reflections post !! does not reflect material reality for most folks, just me !!
okay now that thats out of the way ive always wondered why i could never really relate to the sentiment of wishing you grew up as your actual gender. its one that i think i totally understand but it never like. gripped me? it was never something id ever thought about myself and felt bad about. it felt weird to have this spot where grief should be and then it just wasn't there.
i think i've realized lately that im not sure my childhood would have really been any different if i had grown up a girl. like, i was a weird little kid raised in the mountains away from most people my age aside from, like, school, and all my friends who i did hang with were weird little kids as well. i had a lot of female and male friends growing up and i wasn't very good at being a boy but by god i wouldn't have been good at being a girl either. the role of boy was one that i performed as best i think i could have while still being me, and i think that would have also been about as good as it could have been if i was a girl, too. like, growing up as a strange autistic kid isolated from a lot of the populace with parents that are chill with a lot of stuff just makes you a bit unorthodox. i didn't like a lot of the things you were expected to be as a boy, but i also wasn't attracted to a lot of the things you were expected to be as a girl, either.
i think when youre a kid is partially when you're gendered the most as, like, this person that isn't allowed to be a fully autonomous being. if you're perceived as a boy, you're raised as one, and vice versa. and society has more control over you than ever, so there's this sort of crushing expectation regardless of gender, just angled differently. you don't have the freedom to define what being a boy or a girl means, you're sort of sequestered off to these little zones with all the other boys or girls because its easier and schools and families are managing a lot, see, and its really just better if you get slotted into this neat little societal category. i got a lot of "boy" gifts as a kid from well-meaning grandparents that just didn't actually know me, and I don't think that would have changed if i'd been gendered as a girl as a kid. I got a bunch of RC cars and transformers and monster truck toys, but i had about as much interest in those as i do, say, barbies or practice makeup kits or polly pockets. i think as an autistic kid who wore sweatpants every day with a bizarre obsession with like, romhacks of mario world and newspaper comics and plankton, i wasn't easy to fit into a neat little box and i think the neat little box that a "girl" was defined as in that time and place wouldn't have been good for me either. i still would have gotten those gifts that were for the Boy instead of Mason, but its the Girl this time who receives it. really a "different packaging, same gift" sort of mindset in a funny way.
i think i like being a woman now because it's something i can choose and define for myself. if i was a girl, like, a teenage girl, i would have had to deal with teenage girl bullshit and teenage girl expectations and ideas and all of that seems pretty miserable. i was a teenage boy and despite having what i would call a pretty Nice Time Growing Up Compared To Most, i'd still never go back. My childhood was, by all accounts, really nice! my parents rock and are really supportive, i got to be in nature all the time, i thankfully had a pretty nice social life once i found my spaces, but i'd still never ever go back to being a minor. being a kid and a teenager just kinda fucking sucks sometimes, and the autonomy and self-discovery that came with adulthood really made growing up less scary. it made my transition better because i got to choose what i liked and didnt like about my previous "maleness" and bring that forward into my transition and not pick up the parts of being a woman that i didn't like.
anyway, this is all just rambling. theres a lot of common experiences that people discuss that i don't really fit into, even excluding trans-specific experiences, and that's always made me feel a bit like an outsider in some ways. as i've grown up its been nice to understand that there really is no clean template to adhere to to be a person. commonalities will be commonalities, but im not worse or less human for being an outlier. i hope some rambling in a text post can help soothe those worries for some other folks too.
also, not saying that yearning for a childhood as your correct gender is bad, btw, wanna make that clear! its an extremely understandable yearning and that grief is real as anything, this post was specifically about me feeling weird that i didn't have that grief and why.
lots of word vom but this is tumblr, its technically a blogging website. i guess that ill blog. id love to hear other thoughts on this, i like learning from other people
genuinely so happy that other people have felt this before too, reading all the notes is making me feel something ;w; thanks so much yall, im truly glad we all can share experiences like that
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