Brand New Zodiac

“Scared of the Dark”

(You might need to turn up your brightness or turn off light mode for this one! I did my best to fix it but I got a little carried away with the theme of darkness, sorry!)

Have you ever been at the Harpyworld glacieral superlake in the springtime and said to yourself, what are these beasts that amble so carefully down sheer faces of cliffs, and what are the flightless people that burden them with such a journey?

Humans are homonid people who have adapted a novel migration pattern within the latest 1500 years. Their wintering lowland permafrost home becomes a floodplain in the summer, due to the extreme ice melt in recent centuries, so they adapted a mutualistic relationship with the wooly tapir, which has adapted goatlike toes to keep balance in extremely steep environments. Tapir are also trufflers, and assist in mushroom hunting. In return, humans protect the tapir from predators, especially large cat species. Much like boars, this tapir has a defensive habit of charging, which humans use as a jousting method of subduing oversized prey.

The human ethnicity in this region are the White Eyed People, characterized by genetically passed lines around their eyes, and white streaks in hair of all ages. This is the only human ethnicity that visits harpy territory. They are a type of cave people, in that they will use natural formations as shelter, and have designated caves along their migration route that have been used as family homes for several generations. The ones they tend to use along the lakeshore are also whale dens in the winter.

Humans are usually wearing hide clothing with thread made from tendons or tapir hair. They tend to like warm colored dyes, and are usually wearing a combination of parka+leggings+boots with a knee length tunic beneath. Summertime at the glacier maxes out at 50°f. They sustain themselves most often on wild sweet potatoes, onions, other tubers, mushrooms, rice, gourds, and fruit. Humans will also eat fish and game meat, but they compete with harpies for that resource.

Once again. I can understand the kneejerk impulse here, I do. It sucks to imagine, say, a creator scrolling online coming across some needlessly vitriolic post about something they worked on. But anyone is allowed to go "That's dickish" and move on, or people can engage with "I think this is oversimplified blah blah" if they want to but at the end of the day it isn't some kind of crime against the hobby or a fandom or even a singular person if someone just shoots off "This sucked I wasted my night" in their own accounts.

Like. A lot of people are trending towards thinking I'm talking about the importance of constructive criticism and like, sure, I think that is probably a more interesting avenue of analyzing something's flaws, but once again if you're not like, addressing an artist or interested in doing a deep dive that doesn't mean you're Not Allowed to be flippant or quick to judge. It's kind of startling how many times I've seen someone be like, "I can't stand this album" on their blogs, untagged, had that shit shared, only for it to come across someone's feed and for them to respond with "Why? What's wrong with it? People are allowed to like it, why are you being so negative, why are you tearing people down for no reason, this isn't even real critique," as though the intention in the first place ever was or ought to have been substantive critique in the first place.

long story short: i need help paying my car insurance this month. i was SO close to being able to pay for it myself but i missed a few days of working (i do doordash/food deliveries in general right now) bc of the heat or the storms or just not making enough that day to put more gas in my car.

i'm hoping to get at least $40 but literally anything will do. i'm going to try to go out this evening when its not so hot, but im low on gas and its apparently going to rain again, so, everything is up in the air and i might not even make anything. (i literally made nothing on sunday and i was out for almost 5 hours😭)

p.aypal: airikah v.enmo: itserij c.ashapp: $itserij

my dms are always open if you have any questions

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.