WeirdWatterPhone

A lot of people have asked me to compile a list of my go-to depressing/dooming media, but I feel it would be irresponsible to give you that without an antidote.

Maybe this will be of help to you on an anxious night and instead of smoking a cigarette you'll turn to this or maybe its a nice cozy afternoon and you need something to maintain that feeling.. either way here's stuff that I consume on those days:

Film/TV

Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep

This is something I have recommended to most of my friends at this point and if you ever give me the opportunity I'll probably talk your ear off about this man. I have a very special affinity towards this video, as it randomly found me on a particularly stressful quarantine night and boy am I glad it did.

I'm not gonna talk about it too much further, but if you're feeling a little bit lost or anxious, even after my 250 watches of this, I end up feeling a little bit better. If you like it make sure to check out his show, Joe Pera Talks With You on hbomax as it's one of my favourite shows ever!! The episodes are short and easy to digest :)

How to With John Wilson

It's hard for me to exactly describe this show, it's just one of those things you have to see for yourself to fully understand the appeal of it. For the most part, this show uses street footage of New York City and interviews with average everyday New Yorkers to convey some kind of narrative, usually disguised as a tutorial(hence the "how to"). There's a lot of absurdity, laughter and sometimes it plays with your emotions a bit, but sometimes it's nice to just unwind and learn about the insane industry of scaffolding in NYC.

Come and Visit Us Again

Okay, so this is probably one of the most niche things here.. Considering that it has 205 views as of me writing this and it's in estonian with no captions available.(Maybe someday I'll translate it)

As far as I can tell, it is a documentary short made by Liis Nimik, who at the time was a film school student. It follows the day-to-day of a village grocery store cashier and her interactions with the people who visit her store everyday.

Moms, dads, scary little kids and village bums.. It has it all and serves as this kind of a sweet time capsule of one particular week in this one Estonian village. I will admit this is probably extra comforting for me as I grew up near a village similar to this that also had a store just like this one. In a small village, the people who work at the local grocery store really become apart of your everyday life and I loved to see it captured like this.

I feel like even if you don't understand Estonian, it's nice background noise.

Malcom in the Middle

Need I say more?

Youtube

If you know me, you know I'm a fiend for comforting youtube personalities. Here are some of my favorites:

Steve Wallis

Even if you aren't particularly interested in camping, you'll still probably enjoy these videos. Steve is probably one of the sweetest dudes I've found on YouTube and he really knows how to keep a conversation. All in all, just nice to throw on if you just wanna disconnect for 30 minutes

Shirley Curry

I've loved Shirley's stuff for years now. She calls her viewers her grandkids and posts vlogs & let's plays. I think that covers the gist of it.

Featureman a.k.a. Tom Willett

This is an older gentleman, who for the most part shows you different meals that he makes & tells you stories about his time as an actor in the 1980s. Every video feels like you're visiting your grandpa.

GIFGAS

I found them quite recently, but they're quickly turning into my favourite Youtube channel. Videos of trainhopping, which are so well shot and the music choices are soooooo gooooood. Every travel vlog should have a mandatory requirement of at least (1) shoegaze song.

Roger Hance

Found this guy randomly on my recommended and him only having 4k subs feels like a crime. He's a bird photographer, who vlogs his outings and talks about all the little birds he sees. super cute.

Music

Below are a couple of playlists and tracks I recommend for this occasion:

Mixture of ambient tracks and just relaxing instrumentals. There's no vocals. During the summer, I would always listen to this if I was sitting in a park or doodling.

This is just some of my favourite ambient tracks. If you've never really listened to ambient music before, check this out I guarantee you'll like it.

I have fallen asleep to this so many times that sometimes i just constantly hear it in the back of my head. Maybe thats not a comforting thought but it helps me sleep so that's a price I am willing to pay.

First, the pervasiveness of this litter box thing is ridiculous. I think it has been debunked like a thousand times.

And the *actual* reason schools have cat litter has nothing to do with students identifying as cats.

"Columbine High School has been stocking classrooms with small amounts of cat litter since 2017, but as part of ‘go buckets’ that contain emergency supplies in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting."

But I actually want to talk about the Tootsie Roll Pop gender thing.

They are trying to criticize a child psychologist, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, who works at a gender clinic.

I'm sure a lot of their audience who see "gender minotaur" or "gender Tootsie Roll Pops" will completely write off this woman and claim she is a nutcase.

But conservatives and Fox News love to omit context and nuance.

Here is the document all of this stemmed from...

The implied Fox narrative is that Dr. Ehrensaft is creating silly genders and then labeling kids as minotaurs or smoothies.

In reality, she is describing all of the creative ways young kids and teens use to explain how they feel about their gender.

These kids probably don't have a lot of information or the vocabulary to express themselves in more traditional terms, so they've come up with analogies to help adults understand what they are feeling.

That doesn't seem ridiculous at all.

And I actually think these kids are quite clever.

So these conservatives are basically making fun of kids who are confused and seeking help to understand themselves.

Real classy.

1. A tweet by Lis Power @LisPower1 on 24 August 2023 containing text and an image.

Text: Fox "straight news" anchor Shannon Bream spreads litter boxes in school hoax

Bream: "I have a lot of Northern Virginia moms who have kids in school who have told me that there are schools who are now having to put litter boxes in for kids who identify as cats"

Image: a Fox News screenshot with a picture of a Tootsie Roll Pop and a woman. Fox News. Professor: Kids can identify as Tootsie Roll Pops.

Image 2: a Health headline. Medical Group Publishes Guidance For Kids Who Are 'Gender Tootsie Roll Pops' with what might be a photo from a Pride march.

Image 3: another Health headline. Psychologist At Children's Hospital Gender Center Claims Kids Can Identify As Mythological 'Minotaurs'

Image 4: a tweet by Christopher F. Rufo X✰ @realchrisrufo

The American Psychological Association published this guidebook for diagnosing children as "gender smoothies," "gender hybrids," "gender prius[es]," and "gender minotaur[s]." These psychologists are psychopaths.

apa.org/pubs/books/The...

Image 5:

■ Gender fluid children. Children who defy the norms of binary gender and either slide along a gender spectrum or weave their own intricate individual patterns along the gender web. The word fluid here refers to the potential for movement through further development of one's understanding of their gender.

■ Gender smoothies. Gender smoothies are a variation on the theme of gender fluid. As one teenager vividly described it, "You see, you take everything about gender, throw it in the blender, press the button, and you've got me—a gender smoothie."

■ Gender hybrids. Children who combine or alternate between genders, often in a binary way. Among gender hybrids are the following:

■ Gender Prius. Half girl/half boy: This gender label was invented by a school-age child who, from the front, looked like any boy in basketball shorts, tank top, and basketball sneakers, and, from the back, had a long blond braid tied at the end with a bright pink bow: "You see-I'm a Prius, a boy in the front, a girl in the back. A hybrid."

■ Gender minotaur. A descriptor for the children who explain that they are one gender on the top and another on the bottom, this usually to account for genitals at odds with the gender they know themselves to be.

■ Gender-by-season children. Children who freely express their authentic gender (identity, expressions, or both) during summer and school vacations but never at school, or alternatively use school as the safe place to be their true gender self but keep it under wraps during home-based summers or vacations.

■ Gender-by-location children. A close cousin to gender-by-season, a child who knows the locations or is told the locations where free gender expression will be accepted and other locations where it is not, and chooses or is told to keep

Actually, I don't always have the energy. I have about 800 things in my drafts folder because I was unable to finish them.

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Little girl was part of a county fair agro-educational program where they raise an animal for a few months and at the end it’s slaughtered. Supposed to teach them about the economics of farming and stuff.

But the little girl loved her goat so much she was crying on the day her goat was supposed to be taken away, so her mom sent the county fair people an email saying “I’ll pay for the goat and any expenses. We’ve had several deaths in the family in the past year, I don’t wanna take away one more thing my little girl loves.” Technically the goat had already been sold at auction, so the mom was on the hook for about $1000, only about $70 of which would have been profit for the county fair.

The county fair people were irate and got law enforcement involved, over this “breach of contract”. They literally got a fucking judge to sign a search warrant, authorizing them to go to this little girl’s house and search every room and every cabinet or box “large enough to contain a small goat”. The sheriff’s deputies seized the goat, and whoever they gave it to immediately slaughtered it, though they were supposed to wait until some kind of agreement had been worked out.

They broke multiple laws in order to “teach” a little girl the “lesson” that “everybody has to follow the rules”.

My dudes, I cannot emphasize enough that the little girl's emotional attachment to the goat is in fact the least of the issues with this story. The main issue in this story is the fact that a bunch of cops broke multiple laws, including the unlawful entry to the property the goat was being held, the unlawful seizure and destruction of said goat, and the unlawful use of a criminal search warrant in a civil dispute case, just to start with.

The little girl owned the goat. At no point in the proceedings - and indeed at no point in the proceedings in the course of the normal auction-purchase-slaughter of a livestock animal in this program - did the fair own the goat. At no point in the proceedings did the person who successfully bid on the goat actually own it - he had made the winning bid to purchase rights to the meat. He hadn't even done that yet! The goat legally and incontrovertibly belonged to the little girl. The very worst that should have happened in this story is a brief property ownership dispute in a civil court.

The fair CEO decided to unlawfully force the auction of the goat, and, when the girl's mother began to dispute her actions, to make a false claim of theft, with precisely ZERO legal basis, calling the cops on an already emotionally fragile child, and then had the temerity to be angry with the child's mother because the story was making them look bad on social media.

It's a great place. It functions mostly like a regular cafe but it has this free/pay what you want drip coffee for anyone who wants it, free bathroom use, and it stocks indie merch and books on antifascist, queer, leftist, socialist, indigenous topics. I've met a lot of awesome people there.

Its very existence enrages conservatives, and anarchocapitalists who tried to claim it only to be shown the middle finger by its anticapitalist owner, who is an all around nice dude (and a fellow Elden Ring fan)

If you can toss a coin to its continued operation, please do! Upon request from their followers on insta they opened a Gofundme. Even just a few dollars will be a huge help.