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spreadsheet of families in Gaza you can help today

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‪Just donated. Match if you can and give any amount if you are able ‬to financially.

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

two tweets reading:

if you ever need to cry on cue, what works for me is thinking about the fact a queer person once would call every gay bar they had a number to just to hear the sound of other queers laughing somewhere, just listen, say nothing. as to not be alone. every week. for fourteen years.

i remember reading that interview like, six years ago, and FEELING this knowledge integrate itself into my cellular makeup. i can never unknow this window to someone’s loneliness and need. and now you have it too. godspeed

text reading:

INFORMANT: Well, I had insomnia. I used to phone up all the gay bars, just to hear them answer the phone … Just to hear the noise, oh yes.

INTERVIEWER: So you would call and just be on the phone?

INFORMANT: No, I would just hear the noise and the laughter in the background. I just wanted to be there.

INTERVIEWER: … it helped you just to know it was out there?

(Pause)

INTERVIEWER: .. that’s a really special story.

INFORMANT: Yeah, oh God.

text from an article, reading:

PREFACE: MYRNA’S STORY

I would stay on the phone … that was my lifeline.

“I came out as gay in 1945-the year that the war ended” Myrna Kurland told me from her home high in the Hollywood Hills of California. “I was dating a softball player that I met at the gay bar. I met her at Mona’s or else it was the Paper Pony. My first night in a gay bar was—freedom. I had a gay male friend and he took me there.”

Myrna was in the gay bars for eight years. She showed me her “treasure from the 40s"—a gold softball on a necklace chain from her first lover—inscribed with the initials from the professional softball league to which women belonged while the men were in the war. “We went to the bar all the time. My entire social life was there—there was no other place.” However, that night she first went to the bar-something else happened. Her father died that night. And she blamed herself, even though she knew that was irrational. She couldn’t get over it. Also she told me that, “I’m Jewish and we lost so many people in the Holocaust. I felt it was my duty to have children.

There was no other way to have children in the 1950s without getting married to a man. I married someone I disliked that’s what I felt I deserved because I was gay and I felt so guilty” She married a psychiatrist—someone to whom she would never be able to tell her secret. Her husband’s practice was very involved in actively trying to change the sexuality/sexual deviancy of his clients as would be almost any psychiatrist’s practice at the time. If her sexual past and preference had been known to him in all likelihood she would have lost her children.

This brief story came as I was packing up my things, and although we had been speaking for about three hours, this was in response to my final question, “Is there any last thing you want to say about what the bars meant to you?” I meant when she actually went to the bars in the 1940s—not knowing there was another story. She told me a story about when she did not actually go to the bars, but when she made sure the bars were still there—when she was married.

INFORMANT: Well, I had insomnia. I used to phone up all the gay bars, just to hear them answer the phone … Just to hear the noise, oh yes.

INTERVIEWER: So you would call and just be on the phone?

INFORMANT: No, I would just hear the noise and the laughter in the background. I just wanted to be there.

INTERVIEWER: … it helped you just to know it was out there?

(Pause)

INTERVIEWER: … that’s a really special story.

INFORMANT: Yeah, oh God.

MYRNA’S STORY … CONTINUED

Myrna was married from 1953 to 1968 when she separated, and then divorced her husband in 1970 when no-fault divorce law passed in California. She had terrible insomnia throughout her marriage. “I would get up at one or two a.m. and I would call every gay bar I had the number to from the 1940s. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just stay on the phone and listen to the sounds in the background. I would stay on until they hung up, and then I would call another one of my numbers, until I had called all the numbers I had. ‘That was my lifeline.”

What did it mean to call those bars and to hear the sounds in the background? “That phone. Those numbers. That was my lifeline.” she whispered, and put both hands by her heart. “It meant there was a place somewhere—even if I couldn’t go there—that place was out there. I could hear it. Freedom.” She called the bars two to three times a week like this—for fourteen years.

Naturally everybody will think it's fake because of the date only to lose their minds (both positively and negatively based on their opinion of trump) when realizing it's real

There will be massive celebrations in the streets and on social media and lots of predictable "don't speak ill of the dead" discourse about those celebrations

Weird evangelicals will pull some weird number trick talking about how Jesus was conceived on April 1st and that makes Trump a sort of messiah and people will make fun of that

The Republicans (after they're done with the faux-sadness and faux-outrage) will stomp over each other to be his successor but none of them will succeed. They'll tear each other apart and have no single nominee for the November elections.

There will be discourse about if Biden and the living former presidents should go to his funeral (they won't, he was a traitor insurrectionist)

The Ukraine-Russia War immediately goes in favor of Ukraine as morale in the Kremlin is reduced. China similarly backs off from its threats on Taiwan.

Ten thousand new memes are made, some sticking around for years to come.

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

Also

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.

But my parents were birders, so hiking we did go.

And about a mile up the trail, a woman came rushing up to us, clutching her binoculars to her chest. "Come quickly," she said, with a British accent. "You have to see this!"

This is what birders are like. They are as excited about a life bird as any fan would be spotting their favorite celebrity. You have to see, you have to.

So my parents rushed off with her, and I plodded along behind them.

To find a cluster of Brits huddled in a bird blind, staring at..

A blue jay.

A goddamn blue jay.

And I was a teenager, but I knew better then to mouth off in front of my mom. So I nodded, and smiled, and bit my tongue, until an elderly man looked at me with tears in his eyes, and said, "Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?"

And I stopped. And looked at it. The way they were. As if it were new. And damned if they weren't right.

Anyway reminder that we also have one of the most uniquely outlandish plants there ever was: in all of the entire known history of our planet, the one and only species of Venus Fly Trap to ever exist is only known to be native to North and South Carolina.

It was initially assumed that the flytrap and waterwheel plant evolved their traps independently, but molecular evidence suggests that the two plants actually share a snap-trap common ancestor, that then radiated into the two plants we see today. While straying from the North American charm, waterwheel plants have a curious, very fragmented distribution over much of the old world. Last I remember, speculation was that waterwheel plants were once very wide spread, but their population has shrunk over millennia to the pockets we now know of today. (Distribution map from wikipedia)

Also to get wackier on the taxonomy: evidence suggest that the snap-traps evolved from carnivorous sundews. Carnivorous sundews seem to have evolved from some sorta, vine-like ancestor, like the modern very strange temporarily carnivorous Triphyophyllum vine. Molecular/DNA taxonomy suggests that these ancestral carnivorous vines or proto-carnivorous vines appear to be the common ancestor to Sundews, Drosophyllum (not a shock there, theyre kinda just big weird sundews), and startlingly, the pitcher genus Nepenthes. Evolutionary tree here taken from the ICPS website. (Drosera are sundews, Dionaea are flytraps)

"arguments suggesting climate solutions won't work...have grown 21.4 percentage points"

Where is this information coming from?

What does the writer or creator want me to feel?

How is this prompting me to act?

Who benefits from my reaction?...

So, if your reaction is, "It's hopeless, there's nothing we can do, it's over..." or "I guess we just have to learn to live on a destroyed planet..."

You should think very carefully about those questions

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

Archive.org deliver a windfall of lost music.

leg so hot

hot hot leg

leg so hot u fry an eg

*touches ground*