How To Scream Underwater

good news is you don't necessarily have to go to school in a big city to find lgbtq+ community, as long as you know what to ask and look for.

these are our top 10:

1) Antioch College (Yellow Springs, OH)

Antioch stands out because the school publicly reports an extraordinarily queer student community: 82% of students identify as LGBTQ+ and 16% identify as transgender (from its student survey). They have a culture built around belonging, social justice, and real-world learning, in a town that has its own long-standing reputation for LGBTQ+ inclusion.

2) College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME)

COA is ranked #1 LGBTQ-Friendly by The Princeton Review (based on student survey responses about peer treatment across sexual orientation and gender identity/expression). It's a tiny campus in a tiny town off the coast of Maine and has a “human ecology” approach to education that emphasizes values, systems, and impact.

3) Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA)

Wellesley consistently shows up as a campus where LGBTQ+ students report feeling supported (#4 LGBTQ-Friendly ranking in The Princeton Review) and haw q visible, student-led queer community life and queer culture that has its own traditions and continuity, not just offices and policies.

4) Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)

Wesleyan is ranked #6 LGBTQ-Friendly by The Princeton Review and has visible academic and campus-life infrastructure that signals queer community is integrated into the school, not siloed. Strong arts + activism + intellectual culture tends to create a campus where queer students can find community across multiple scenes — not just in one designated "queer" space.

5) Smith College (Northampton, MA)

Smith lands high because it has a well-known queer student culture with concrete, practical inclusion signals, like a stated admissions policy that explicitly includes self-identified trans women and visible, day-to-day supports like a published map of gender-neutral bathroom locations. It's in a small city (hello "Lesbianville, USA!") where off-campus queer community is also deeply woven into the place so the sense of belonging doesn’t end at the campus gates.

6) Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA)

Mount Holyoke is explicit about who it’s for: it states it welcomes female, trans, and nonbinary students, which is a major clarity point for students considering women’s colleges and wondering whether they’ll truly be included. Strong “queer legacy” energy with LGBTQ+ communityhistory, continuity, and tradition rather than feeling new or fragile.

7) Bennington College (Bennington, VT)

Bennington’s placement is supported by student-reported climate (ranked #5 LGBTQ-Friendly by The Princeton Review) and a campus culture known for self-expression and student-driven community-building which is extra important in a small-town setting.

8) Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH)

Oberlin has a long-running reputation for progressive culture and offers practical inclusion infrastructure, including clear housing policies that support gender diversity. Activism, arts, and identity aren’t side quests, they’re part of the college’s public identity.

9) Kenyon College (Gambier, OH)

Kenyon makes the list because it backs inclusion with structure. It reports a five-star Campus Pride Index rating and supports community through Unity House plus widely available gender-inclusive housing options on a small-town campus that still manages to build real, durable LGBTQ+ spaces.

10) Grinnell College (Grinnell, IA)

Grinnell earns its spot because it has a visible, named hub for LGBTQIA+ community — the Stonewall Resource Center — and a campus culture that consistently emphasizes belonging and student support.

any others you think we should include?

User cotton-seed-oil posted to the FanFiction sub-reddit:

I studied for my exam with fanfiction, and I think it worked. This is so fucking funny. It is the best thing I have every done. I am a physics and astronomy student in college. I am taking cosmology this semester, and it is much harder than expected (we glossed over all of special and general relativity in two lectures, and our previous classes were not expected to teach us this). I spent days trying to study for this exam, and nothing worked-everything was going in one ear and out the other. Finally, two days before my exam, I decided to get creative. I wrote a fanfiction about four characters discussing the concepts, explaining them to one another. One issue I had faced when studying was getting very anxious while reviewing the material, making it hard to even think clearly. Writing this fanfic eliminated that-after all, it's fanfic. Therefore, no danger. It removed all the pressure. 48 hours later, I wrote over nine thousand words in Overleaf, at 30 pages long. It was fun, and it was complete. This afternoon, I took the exam-and while was difficult, I felt like I knew what I was doing. More than that, I actually think I understand the material now. When I reviewed my old homework questions, they were understandable, whereas I had been completely lost the first time around. I have a Quantum exam next week, and I am using the exact same technique, because holy shit, it works like magic (and is so much fun).

End description.

Honestly this Masslive article about the stuff covers the Hadley Asparagus Thing way better than the other article.

number one rule is get stainless steel shit. stainless steel water bottle stainless steel straw, you dont want that rubber plastic etc shit it grows mold like a mf. turns out that was the main culprit of what happened to me, my reusable water bottle was plastic and it didn't matter how much i let it soak or cleaned it out.

get this either if you can or can't afford the stainless steel stuff and just be really on cleaning it; staw cleaner looks like this:

and get one its mammas the bottle cleaner for your cup:

You put that tablet in the bottle, add hot water, let it fizz and soak for a bit and hey presto, any stains or discolouration or weird little crevices are suddenly removed of their hidden nasty bits.

My niece kept saying her water bottle tasted weird, and she washed it and washed it, and then me and my mum were like GIVE IT HERE and we put a denture tablet in it and added the straw to it and it started fizzing up the straw and all this black gunk started coming out the weird curvy bits of the fitted straw like a Coke-mentos experiment.

It’ll taste slightly minty unless you rinse rinse rinse rinse rinse rinse but that’s not a terrible thing, and let’s face it, denture tablets are for cleaning dentures so, you know, designed to clean things that go in mouths.

If you don't read books: Read a book. Read any book. Read a book you loved when you were a kid. Read a book that interests you now. Read an entire collection of poetry or essays and think about why the author or editor arranged those works in that order. Read an erotic novel. Read nonfiction. Read graphic novels or manga. Read a kids' chapter book or a YA novel. Read a book digitally. Read a book on paper. Read an audiobook and really focus on it - if you notice yourself spacing out, scroll back to the last words you remember and try listening again. Read any book. And then when you finish it, celebrate for a minute (get those endorphins going!) and then read another one.