Totally been Bea this whole time

GIRLS THAT'S FUCKING TERRIFYING,, PLEASE FACTORY RESET YOUR PHONES GET NEW ONES IF YOU HAVE TO GET AN INDEPENDENT SIM card WHAT IS HAPPENING

I'M BEGGING YOU

What's the worst that can happen if you do it anyway? Genuinely. The literal worst. Catastrophise about it with me for a sec.

Will your mum yell at you? You're an adult. Yelling at fellow adults is Not Okay Actually. (Yelling at kids is also not okay but let's take this one step at a time.) If your mum is yelling at you, a fellow adult, she's the one being weird and out of line. You asked your friend and they said so too (me. I'm the friend.)

Will she cut off your phone plan? That would be a problem. Can you look into whether you can afford to switch to a new plan she doesn't have access to? Most phone companies will let you port your number over pretty easily.

Will she cut you off financially? Run the numbers again. Can you afford for that to happen? If the answer is no, that's okay, I believe you and I know you're making the best decision for your own well-being that you can in the moment. If there's anything you can do to make it more affordable, I do suggest doing that, though.

Will she be physically violent, inclusive of breaking stuff that belongs to you? That’s assault. That's a crime. It's not okay for her to do that and she almost certainly knows it.

Will she stop talking to you? Honestly I gotta say at this point that's not sounding like a bad outcome. It sucks. It really really sucks and I'm sorry if that's a choice you're having to make, but take it from someone who's been there and done that: when someone who is being abusive to you (stalking is abuse! Yelling at you is abuse! Threatening to cut off your funds if you don't do what they want forever is abuse! Breaking your stuff or physically hurting you is abuse!) decides of their own volition to cut you off, it hurts for a hot minute, and then you suddenly realise that you can breathe, and it feels so. Goddamn. Amazing.

Delete the tracking application. Live where you want to live. Change your name. Join or leave the religion. Get the piercing or the tattoo or the surgery. Live your life, because it's yours and not your parents'.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

At the time, the NYPD was coming under quite a bit of criticism about rising crime rates and the seeming ineffectiveness of the police’s response to the problem. In the Kitty Genovese case, even though people did in fact call the police, it took about an hour for them to show up and the first detectives didn’t arrive until three hours later (at which point they mostly spent their time interrogating Kitty’s girlfriend about their relationship, because for “some reason” they considered her to be the most likely suspect for the murder. In fact, the police wouldn’t catch the actual killer until six days later when he was picked up for having a stolen TV in the trunk of his car, at which point he admitted to having committed a total of three murders). It’s not an accident that one of the things to come out of the Genovese case was the establishment of the 9-1-1 system, because at the time that the attack happened, you had to call the specific number of a particular police precinct and it was up to the duty sergeant on the desk to take action - which was usually to send someone out from the precinct to the address reported, because cops on foot patrol wouldn’t be outfitted with two-way radios for several years. It’s more than a little convenient that at a time when the NYPD is coming in for public scrutiny about its ability to do the basic job of responding to reports of crimes in a timely fashion, the Police Commissioner happens to hand the City Editor of the city’s most prominent newspaper a story which puts the blame for the slow response on the apathy and inaction of New Yorkers, neatly absolving the NYPD for its ridiculously poor performance in this case in particular and its response to the rise in crime in general. 

"Ohh it's a different sugar than refined sugar" it's the same molecule.

"Ohhh my water filtering apparatus making beauty water and cleaning water and alkaline water" Water is H20. What you're doing is reverse osmosis, and if it's alkaline then there is a substance that's not water in there to make it alkaline. You can't purify water to a pH of 12, because pure water molecules have, by definition of how the pH system works and several phyics rules, a pH of exactly 7.

"Ooohh it has ~different~ sodium atoms." That's called an isotope and sodium isotopes aren't created by magic woowoo, and the magical ability of most isotopes is radioactivity.

"Low toxin" what toxin. Tell me their names. What are they doing. "They are endocrine disruptors" what part of the endocrine system? How? Do you have a source that doesn't try to sell you something?

"Just mix vinegar and baking soda to cleanse all the toxins of your fruits" you just created water molecules and CO2, and some calcium and acetate which don't have much chemical property. That's a science fair vulcano. And doesn't have acidic or alkaline properties to chemically influence anything. Just use tap water at this point. "My wood cutting board soaked in an alkaline solution from baking soda to clear out the toxins leaves a nasty looking soup" yeah because you were dissolving the wood with an alkaline solution. Congratulations.

"There is effective microorganisms in this ceramic bead and it can cleanse your laundry and dishes and prevent mold in your fridge and it works for years" what microorganisms exactly? How did you discover them? What are they eating? Are they resistant to 60 degrees and steam? Do they procreate in the fridge? Are they spreading out on all surfaces to prevent the mold or is it an air filtration system that works without airflow or is it just magic? "Put them in your flowers, they can reverse cavities, put them in your walls" what are they eating in my walls? What kind of microorganisms are they? Did you test the safety of those things in human bodies? Are they native to my biotope? How do they survive in those fucking ceramic beads?

I always assumed they were a scam because ions (an atom with an electron imbalance) really really hate existing and are hard to make.

Lots of ions are ok in water because water is super polar (oxygen hogs all the electrons so every molecule is like a tiny magnet) and therefore they'll soak up all the imbalanced charges.

Go pour salt in water right now. If it dissolves you've created negative chlorine ions! (And an equal number of positive sodium ions)! Good job on being a scientist.

But in air? Nothing polar to stabilise them.

Go pour salt on your table. It stays a solid? Good job. You've proven the atoms in salt prefer being bonded to each other than being free flying ions. You're half way to a chemistry degree.

The only way to force the creation of ions in air is a fuckton of energy. This can be electricity or radiation.

Go attach leads to a 9V battery. Put both into a cup of water. If you see bubbles you've successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen will be on the positive lead because oxygen ions are negative. The hydrogen will be on the negative clip because hydrogen ions are positive. There will also be more bubbles because water has twice as many hydrogen atoms as oxygen atoms. These bubbles won't be ions though, because again, ions hate existing so they recombine into oxygen and hydrogen gas almost instantly. Still. You did technically make negative ions for a split second. Good job.

But most of those negative ion bracelets don't have batteries (which again, only make ions for a split second and require a renewable resource like water to do that with). So they must be a scam right? They're just rocks!

Nope. Remember the other way to make ions? It was radiation! Those bracelets and necklaces you're supposed to wear 24/7 to keep yourself healthy? They're made of mildly radioactive stone.

So they are splitting the air into ions (for a split second. You now know that ions hate existing so they recombine. Although sometimes they'll recombine into ozone (O3) rather than breathable oxygen (O2). Ozone isn't great to breathe in but you also presumably have been near a car so like... It's not a big deal in the scheme of things).

But more importantly!! They're also splitting your body into ions! Which are stabilised by the water in your body (remember the magnet analogy?) and therefore last a lot longer and can get up to more fuckery.

#where people simply do not understand what the creative process entails so they devalue and dismiss it

#striving to be a well rounded person educated on as many things as possible is good actually

So while I was taking this chemistry class I walked into a health food store one day and saw a bottle of "alkaline water"

Well I bought it and brought it into class the next day and asked the teacher if we could PH test it, since we were learning about acids and bases, and she loved the idea of IRL applied science so we took ten minutes to do a quick PH test on the alkaline water