"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, being spent on species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
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It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
There’s an emotion only unlocked when you live in a house with multiple stories. I call it “the stair emotion” and it’s when you realize the object you need is on the other side of yet another trip up and down those goddamn stairs. It’s the closest I get to transcending the desire for material goods. Maybe I don’t need that notebook. Maybe I don’t need anything.
the thing was, she wasn’t going to be able to pass the recertification exam, and she couldn’t figure out why. annabelle studied. she practiced. she pulled out every trick and shortcut she’d learned during her two years as an EMT and none of it worked. she just – she didn’t get it. it made no sense.
“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”
“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”
it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.
but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.
hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.
“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”
“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!”
hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”
“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”
he gave her a long, quiet look and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.
-
hank switched her team.
“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”
carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”
“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”
hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.
“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”
“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.
there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse.
hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin.
she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”
she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”
“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”
-
“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”
annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”
hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly.
“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”
“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”
“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”
annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”
“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”
“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”
“no. he was dead.”
“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”
“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”
“hank, what the fuck.”
he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”
he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?
annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase.
“well shit,” annabelle said, letting the flier fall from her hands.
Tumblerians tumblrites and tumblers, all and alike make writing and art prompts out of things that weren’t meant to be and that is a beauty beyond compare. Thank you members of tumblr for the amazing stories and art and for sharing it with the small world that is this website.
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On Saturday I said to my partner, as I have said for months, "A ten thousand dollar a year raise would solve so many of my problems."
As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.
As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.
I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.
May all of you get the $10K raise your soul has yearned for. And whatever level of sex you can be satisfied with for $200.
As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".
So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:
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I’m proud to identify as morosexual. I’m attracted to dumbasses and dumbasses exclusively. A guy asked me what the Spanish word for tortilla was once and now I dream of kissing him under the moonlight
Look. I didn't want to say anything because it's kind of a touchy subject, but the dragon doesn't actually take these "brides" back to its lair full of riches and add them to a harem. Okay? It's a big fucking lizard with a brain the size of an orange, it just roasts and eats them.
Now come on, get those chains off. Where did you even get these? Oh you made them? See that's the kind of craftsmanship the village needs you for. We'll have a big orgy after the ritual and if you want a bunch of us will dress up as dragons and take turns having a go at you. It'll be nice, you'll see.
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and EVEN WHEN things were more muted/neutral, the neutrality was OFFSET by ACCENT COLORS and HIGH CONTRAST between the wood tones and everything ELSE
ALSO AMERICAN COLONIAL INTERIORS POPPED OFF, Y'ALL (IN TERMS OF COLOR/COZINESS)
PEOPLE USED WHITEWASH AND COLORFUL TRIM OR EVEN JUST COLORFUL FURNITURE IF THEY COULD AFFORD TO DO SO
AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON FRENCH AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN WALLPAPERS
"ELIZABETH" YOU CRY, "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO EXTRA THIS MORNING?! IT'S MONDAY"
Because, my friend, my war on GREIGE will NEVER end.
Historic interiors were filled with LIFE and LIGHT and COLOR. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.
Part of the reason we don't see a lot of textile art is because, frankly, textiles tend to degrade over time - especially ones that had utility! And yes, pigments and weaving and dying all boosted the expense of things, when we were finally reliably block-printing fabrics and broad reams of paper, it was no longer just the wealthy who could afford pretty patterns!
In the Americas, a far wider variety of pigments also became available because of the abundance of... well, a shitton of flora and minerals, some of which weren't as common in Europe.
WHY THE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS? you ask.
CANDLES.
Those colors reflect candlelight and natural sunlight REALLY WELL.
Humans LOVE bright colors, it's NOT just a thing for kids. We live in a brilliant, vibrant, multifaceted world. We ALWAYS have.
(STOP MAKING YOUR HISTORIC SIMS 4 BUILDS BE BLAND. STOP IT.)
