"Community Is Punk"

For all my European darlings who are suffering through this horrible heat wave, my American friends who don't always have access to air conditioning, and anyone else who needs it....

Here are some tips on how to survive the heat of summer at home when you have next to no money and only household basics to work with.

(I'd love it if readers would reblog this and add their own ideas - people need all the help they can get right now!)

Stay hydrated. This is the most important thing. You're going to sweat a LOT and your body needs that replenished as often as possible. Drink WATER as much as possible and cold is best. Soda won't cut the mustard and sports drinks may replenish your electrolytes, but they are not meant for subsistence. If you need to flavor your water to make it more palatable, do it. And I know cold tea is anathema to some, but a glass of sweet or citrusy iced tea might be just the thing to get you through.

Wear loose, breezy clothing. I know the instinct is to wear your smallest, briefest summer garments, but sometimes wearing something larger, looser, and flowy helps to cool you down. The movement of the fabric creates a little bit of a breeze to draw heat away from your skin and helps all that sweating actually cool you down.

Draw the shades. If you have curtains or blinds or window shades, cover the windows, especially on the sunny side of your home. Shading the place will help keep the heat out, at least a little.

Use fans and appliances judiciously. Keep the air moving. I know sometimes it's just blowing hot air around, but it's better than stagnating. Also if you have an exhaust fan above your stove, USE IT. Draw off some of that heat from your cooking and for the love of all things holy, try not to use the oven. (Also, if you're not using your desktop computer or gaming system, unplug it for a while - those things generate a lot of heat!)

Eat cool and light. Try to avoid making meals that are going to heat up the house. If you can, make cold meals or use the microwave instead of the stovetop or oven. If you have an outdoor grill, use that for the evening meal instead of the stove. Also, if you have a blender handy, smoothies are a great way to cool down and also get in a few servings of fruit or vegetables.

Swamp coolers are your friend. If you've got a towel, a drink cooler, a bag of ice, and a box fan, you can make a homemade swamp cooler as well. Put the towel on the floor and the drink cooler on top. Fill the cooler with ice and position the fan so that it's blowing over and around the open cooler from less than two feet away. Elevate it on a box or chair if necessary. This isn't going to cool your entire home, but it can cool a small space and provides a little relief. Just be aware that there will be some sweating from the cooler and you'll need to replace the ice after a while. (The meltwater may be good for watering the garden or doing the washing up though.)

Cold showers take the edge off of many things. At the end of the day, take a shower that's a few degrees cooler than body temperature. Even if you don't do a full scrub or wash your hair, get in and sluice down, or use a pitcher of room-temperature water to give yourself a rinse. This helps your whole body cool down, cleans off the sweat of the day so you don't get breakouts, and helps you sleep cooler and less sticky. (Also, try sleeping under the duvet cover without the duvet inside to stay cooler at bedtime. And definitely have a fan in the bedroom.)

Make some homemade cold spray. This is something I used to make for camping trips. In a spray bottle, combine tap water and aloe gel in about equal measure. Then, if you have it, add 2-3 drops of peppermint essential oil. Shake to combine. You can store the bottle in the fridge when you're at home or tuck it into your bag if you're out and about. A few spritzes on the chest or the back of the neck helps immensely. (Don't spray it on your face or near your eyes. If you have any allergy or sensitivity to peppermint, leave the essential oil out.)

Keep reusable ice packs in the freezer. These can be a lifesaver. They're a quick way to cool down during the day, by cuddling or leaning against while sitting. If you can't find ice packs, fill a freezer bag 3/4 full of ice water with half a cup of rubbing alcohol, squeeze out the air before closing, and reinforce the seams and edges with duct tape. In an emergency when nothing else is working, or if someone starts to overheat, take an ice pack and put it under the arm. There's a whole host of major circulatory vessels in that area and it's a fast way to bring down body temp if someone's in trouble or while you're waiting for emergency services.

Rechargeable tabletop fans are another gamechanger and I did not know about them when I originally made this post. There are USB-chargeable models that can clip anywhere or sit on a surface and many have something like a 12 to 24hr (or longer) battery life depending on usage. Some models also include lights and power packs you can charge devices from, and having that portability is a LIFESAVER if there's a power outage in your area.

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

"The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.

I dont know what solutions might be on a broader scale, but its absurd for one country to have this much power and for their private corporations to be handed this amount of authority from literally world governments demanding "safety for children". This power structure is absurd.

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

the next day i ended up punching someone in the face with a doughnut in my fist because she thought i was being a big fucking buzzkill who tattled to teacher about a harmless game, and, guess what, grabbed my butt. i got icing all over her hair. she complained to teacher...who let everyone know that this was why they weren’t supposed to be playing grabass in the fucking shop.

for anyone who doesn't know, wheelchairs are very expensive and insurance will usually only cover one every five years or only cover a new one if your needs have changed significantly. the expense is especially true for anyone who has complex positioning needs (i.e. requiring tilt/recline/elevation in power wheelchairs, general group 3 power wheelchair needs, one arm drive for manual wheelchairs, etc.). as with so many disability related issues, those most impacted by their disability are most at risk of harm when adequate support is out of reach.

In addition transportation is an issue especially for the offroad outdoor chair. Cause we need to live in places woth good public transit or have an extrodinary ammnt of money for a custom car woth a lift for our chair if we can even drive (i cant cause of my disabilities) and an offroad capeable chair is not small enough to fit on public transit. So you end up wasting your battery getting to where you want rather than being able to actually use it.

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

sex work is shown as “sexy” and “empowering” when youre taking pictures of yourself to sell, but god forbid you physically make somebody cum for money. often we are derided, patronized and seen as unwitting victims, or simply left out of the discussion (and trust me the silence is DEAFENING and says a lot on its own)

The continued existence of these species is the legacy of so many people whose names we will never know--some of who never lived to see the impacts of their work.

When you count up the flaws of our species, you have to count the good things too--out of the many species throughout Earth's history that have caused the demise or endangerment of other species, we are the only one that tries to fix it out of our fascination and love for other life forms.

And I'll add some other recent good conservation news.

•Green sea turtles are no longer endangered

•Giant pandas are no longer endangered

•Panamanian golden frogs were returned to the wild for the first time since they were wiped out by chytrid 17 years ago

•The Eastern humpback whale population has exceeded pre-whaling numbers and many other whale species are showing strong signs of recovery

•Salmon and bison have been returned to their former habitat in multiple parts of the US through dam removal, habitat restoration, and reintroduction

•The Western monarch migration was up 60% compared to last year

•Galapagos tortoises were reintroduced to Floreana for the first time in 180 years

•Attenborough's long beaked echidna was rediscovered after being though extinct for decades

•Five "lost" island bird species were documented by citizen scientist birders in 2025