#toolkit

"Of the many things you’ll need to manage for yourself in life at some point — and if you’re a person in your teens or 20s, probably need to already do to some degree or will need to start doing soon — managing your own healthcare may be one that feels particularly complex, all the more so if you’re disabled or chronically ill. In an era where healthcare systems around the world, be they private or public, keep becoming increasingly more difficult to access and navigate, and where what care we can access and how we access it may be threatened, limited or in a state of flux, it can all feel especially overwhelming. That’s why we created this toolkit to help you organize, chronicle, sort through, and communicate your healthcare needs for yourself and anyone else involved in the care and keeping of you and your body. It’s only going to be full of the information about you, your health, and everything involved that you provide. You can change up any headings or sections that don’t work for you, and you can use this in digital spreadsheet, digital or word document, printed or DIY-journaling form, whichever works best for you. You can also think about this toolkit as a way of organizing some parts of your care web, a personal community and living system of care and support. The idea of care webs generally positions them as being about mutual or reciprocal support, and you may have roles in your own care web that are about the help you give others. This is for the care, and supports for that care, that you need, and a tool for you to organize your own care. The three of us who’ve co-created this are all people who have long had varied, ongoing and complex healthcare needs. One of us gets their care through a national healthcare system, and two of us have used public health and private insurance. The form itself is even based on the form one of us — s.e. — created for himself and still uses to manage his own care."

Or toolkit gets trapped in a quirky version of hell

This is gonna be for sure the first part of many cause I have plans hehehe rubs hands

for absolutely no reason, especially one that involves multiple storylines being pushed down your throat at once, here’s a short post about tabloid media literacy.

as a tabloid journalist (hypothetically, fictionally), my company makes money when you click on links and read stories. that’s it. that’s the job. my paycheck and career depend on traffic.

so i see a celebrity say something in an interview with another outlet. if i think it might be click-worthy, i’m going to run with it. whether or not that’s what the person actually meant in context.

i’ll take that quote, pair it with vaguely related things that have been said in the past, and stretch it into a few paragraphs so it qualifies as an article.

then my editor steps in. sometimes they say no (for legal reasons, or because they don’t want to risk losing access to information that person’s team occasionally provides.) sometimes they say yes. access absolutely matters.

in another scenario, i notice a celebrity moving kind of weird. i start asking around. eventually someone surfaces (maybe a friend of a "partner’s" family member, maybe someone who went to primary school with the celebrity. maybe the celebrities' grocery delivery driver. maybe someone adjacent enough that it technically counts.)

as long as i can label them a “source,” i have plausible deniability. i didn’t state it as fact. i reported what a source claimed. there are legal limits, but within those limits, a lot can be printed.

in another scenario, someone from someone’s team reaches out anonymously. it genuinely doesn’t matter whose team. maybe X says something that sounds like shade at Y. then Y’s "girlfriend's" camp confirms to me that it was shade. i run with it.

i don’t actually care what their motive is. but since they gave me information, i’ll probably throw in a favorable line about them so they keep talking to me.

and then there’s aggregation.

i work at a smaller outlet. there are five of us covering hundreds of celebrities. we don’t have time to generate original reporting for everything, so we wait for a bigger tabloid to publish, rewrite their story, cite them, and hit post.

now take one out-of-context quote or one bad source, and run it through this system.

it gets repeated. and repeated. and repeated.

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