It's all meaningless, anyway.

AB, O+ and O- blood donors needed ASAP!!! Due to the shooting overnight, the hospital and blood bank is critically low right now for donated blood. If you are able, please go this morning to donate at one of the locations below. This valuable gift you can give is a direct way to help those injured from this tragic incident. The Orange, Osceola, and Seminole locations open today are:

Orlando - West Michigan Donor Center 345 West Michigan St #106 Orlando, FL 32806 Phone: 407-835-5500 Fax: (407) 835-5505 Sun: 7:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Orlando - Main Donor Center 8669 Commodity Circle Orlando, FL 32819 Phone: (407) 248-5009 Fax: (407) 455-7570 Sun: 7:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Apopka Donor Center 131 North Park Ave Apopka, FL 32703 Phone: (407) 884-7471 Fax: (407) 884-7475 Sun: 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Kissimmee Donor Center 1029 North John Young Pkwy Kissimmee, FL 34741 Phone: (407) 847-5747 Fax: (407) 847-9605 Sun: 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Oviedo Donor Center 1954 West 426 #1100 Oviedo, FL 32765 Phone: (407) 588-1291 Fax: (407) 365-9982 Sun: 7:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Need to talk?

You can call The Trevor Project at (866) 488-7386. The Trans Lifeline in the US: (877) 565-8860 and Canada: (877) 330-6366. Scarleteen is open all day. You can text them at (206) 866-2279.

Want to donate?

Equality Florida has set up a GoFundMe for victims of the Pulse shooting. This is the best place to donate. You can donate to Orlando hospitals through the Orlando Health Foundation. The Orlando Youth Alliance provides services to LGBTQ+ youth. The Center is Orlando’s largest LGBTQ+ organization and is taking donations.

Tweet: Shooter’s father to NBC: Son angered by seeing two men kissing in Miami recently. #OrlandoShootings

Friends and family members embrace outside the Orlando Police Headquarters during the investigation of a shooting at the Pulse night club, where as many as 50 people have been injured after a gunman opened fire, in Orlando, Florida.

The father of suspected Orlando gunman Omar Mateen says his son was not driven by religious ideology, but did grow upset after seeing two gay men kissing in Miami a few months ago.

Authorities in Santa Monica found possible explosives as well as assault rifles and ammunition Sunday in the car of a man who told them he was in town for the L.A. Pride festival in West Hollywood, a law enforcement source said.

Early Sunday,  Santa Monica police received a call of a suspected prowler near Olympic Boulevard and 11th Street. Patrol officers responded and encountered an individual who told officers he was waiting for a friend. That led officers to inspect the car and find several weapons and a lot of ammunition as well as tannerite, an ingredient that could be used to create a pipe bomb.

The car had Indiana plates. The man made comments that he was in town for the Pride event in West Hollywood this weekend. The source said authorities did not know of any connection between the gay nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., early Sunday morning and the Santa Monica incident. The investigation has been taken over by the FBI. The source said the man appeared to be white.

another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).

And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.

Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call.  It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder.  The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.

LED arm straps. 

These things will save your clothes! If you push yourself you have to make sure your sleeves aren’t dragging across your hoops. These cute arm straps will prevent your sleeves from getting dirty and they come in a lot of cute designs. They even have LED’s in them, making you more visible at night!

They cost $1.59 a piece and you can buy them here. 

Spoke reflectors

It’s very important to have some sort of reflectors in your wheels because you need to be visible even when it’s dark. (sorry for the weird phrasing but brain fog is messing with my language skills)

They cost $2.66 for 12 and you can buy them here. 

They’re pretty accurate 

for everyone who hasn’t heard (which is most people) the shooter opened fire at around 2 am in the gay night club, pulse. reportedly over 50 rounds were fired and the man also had an explosive device on him. some people escaped, but there was a confirmed hostage situation. the police literally are not even putting an official death toll on this. they are just saying that there have been “mass casualties” and several people who escaped the scene said that “there were more dead bodies than they’ve ever been able to comprehend around them“. the police are literally calling this an “act of domestic terrorism”.

when this happened in paris, the eyes of the world were on them. everyone had a supportive french flag filter on their photos. there were tributes and memorials all over the world and almost constant news coverage. there was a safety check-in feature on facebook for those in the area.

i have SO many lgbt friends who live in orlando and i have no idea if any of them are safe. i’m seeing that one of my brother’s friends, who i’ve known since i was little and is a local DJ, has made it out unscathed. that’s all i’m hearing.

WHY are we not being treated with the same respect as any other terrorist attack????

A funny thing about introducing a new queen into a hive that has lost its queen (or one that you’ve killed because her brood was too fighty). 

You have to introduce the new queen into the hive with these special queen cages that are stopped up with candy, and are open enough to let the hive smell the new queen, but not open enough that they can get in there and kill her.

Because they will kill her. 

When you first put the new queen in she smells like an intruder, but by the time it takes the bees to eat through the candy and free the queen, the queen’s pheromones will have had time to work and the hive will have gotten used to her.

From the outside this kinda seems like: 

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.