*goblinizes*

one of my favorite things about neopets is how two of my Special Color pets have hardly any clothes available while this egg has a bigger wardrobe than i do in real life

Our houses are not built for temperatures below 30°F. They’re also designed to shed heat. Good design for when it regularly gets to 100°F in the summer and winters are mild.

Homes here generally do not have furnaces. We rely on heat pumps and resistance coils, the former of which is not effective below 25°F, and the latter of which use lots of electricity

The electrical infrastructure is designed to meet demand in the afternoons in the heat of the summer, not frigid winter nights. Also, while we have a shit ton of wind and solar capacity, it’s currently crippled by frozen turbines and snowfall.

Combine all of the above and the electrical grid usage is astronomical, even when people are barely reaching 50°F indoors. The stress on the system and reduced generating capacity has caused ERCOT to start rolling blackouts as a way of preventing a mass uncontrolled blackout ala the Northeast in 2003. So that means no heat in houses that naturally shed heat, when it’s 7°F out.

Since we live in a warm place, many people don’t have clothing for this level of cold. Means a lot of people are really, really cold, and their houses are already losing heat fast.

Speaking of homes shedding heat, this also means pipes are not heavily insulated, and without proper measures taken (which many people are unaware of) that means no water.

We don’t generally keep equipment like ice scrapers and snow shovels handy. Most hardware stores don’t stock rock salt for ice. Meaning we can’t leave our homes and go anywhere if the car and roads are covered with ice. The cities don’t have snow plows. Nobody here has chains or snow tires to be able to drive safely either.

As if all of this is not already bad enough, the local plants are not evolved for this kind of freeze, including snow. So many trees are breaking under the weight and causing damage.

[ Link to survey ]

The eighth annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 10th March 2021.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet, boost this Mastodon post, check out this post on Reddit, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 24,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/gendercensus2021/

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

It’s day 3 and there have been over 14,000 participants so far, which is way ahead of last year’s day 3, and well over halfway to beating last year’s record!

And it’s only lunchtime!

Several times yesterday there was a new survey response coming in every four seconds. Right now it’s more like two responses per minute.