This is a good time to make sure that everyone in your broader community is using Signal and knows how to anonymize their identity on it. This flier offers QR codes to make it easy. You can print out this design here:

https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/09/signal.pdf

You could use the blank space on the flier to add a third QR code directing people to a local announcements-only Signal thread to stay abreast of developments.

You can learn how to set one up here:

"By learning how to craft from the materials of nature" I think to myself, "there would be no need for buying plastic objects and knickknacks which doubtless were shipped from overseas and are responsible for much pollution...and the ecosystem rejoices when its gifts are accepted."

I made a little basket. I'm getting much better at it! It's made of Eastern Redcedar bark, collected from standing deadwood.

Not everyone can be into crafts, but everyone can use the crafts! So they can be a gift!

At our allotments (like a community garden only the plots of British allotments tend to be a bit bigger than your average American community garden plot) there's a lot of swapping of skills, supplies, seeds, and actual food.

One of our neighbours is too old to get up a ladder and prune his plum tree, so we do it for him and have permission to pick some of the plums in return.

If one person ends up with too many seedlings of one type of plant then they'll give some of them to others and often get something else in return. If one person ends up with more beans or courgettes or kale or whatever than they can use then they offer the excess to friends.

I make a lot of jam and have several 'jam deals' with people where I have permission to pick their berries etc and return some in the form of jams or jellies. A different neighbour has a crab apple tree that he can't be bothered to do anything with but also won't cut down because it shelters his bee hives. I pick the entire crop of crab apples and give him crab apple jelly and butter in return. We also keep an eye on his bees when he's away and then we get some of the honey.

The same applies to skills and communities. You don't need to have everyone knowing how to make baskets from barks and grasses. You only need a few that can do that, while others are good at canning or sewing or growing pretty flowers or raising chickens or identifying tasty and non-lethal mushrooms. Then you swap skills and end products and so everyone has supplies and everyone gets fed.

@meganemaryam Luckily, there are a ton of wild plants that work great for spinning thread and yarn. I don't know where you live, but some of the best ones are Apocyonum cannabinum (dogbane; it has a lovely copper-to-peach color and is incredibly strong and tough, doesn't require retting you just beat it and scrape it a bunch) any of the types of nettle, Kudzu (Pueraria spp, haven't personally tried it yet but it was literally one of the fundamental textile fibers of ancient China and farmed for use as textile), Milkweed (Asclepias spp, you can use the bast fibers or the seed fluffs, the latter are very delicate and best to blend with something stronger, but I made a fantastic yarn out of 50/50 Dogbane bast fiber and Milkweed floss) and the new/green less-than-a-year-old sprouts off of grapevine (Vitis spp).

With the exception of the milkweed floss, all of these fibers are bast fibers, meaning they come from the inner bark, you have to peel the bark off the woody inner part and then beat, soak, crush, and/or ferment the bark in some combination to extract the fine threads. It is surprisingly easy to get cool results this way

One thing you could do is promote antipatriotic education?

Contribute to an anarchist library, whether by uploading something you have access to or translating into a different language

Support or offer your voice to Audible Anarchist to provide audiobooks of anarchist texts

If your area has an infoshop, anarchist bookstore, or anarchist bookfair, volunteer and donate! There’s no comprehensive list of these things so you’ll have to do your own duckduckgoing

Support anarchist news media like CrimethInc, It’s Going Down, Unicorn Riot, and Indigenous Action

Put up stickers or posters around your area

Print off or order some zines, books, or other reading material and stick them in local little free libraries

Slave Narratives (x) (x) Linked to one I own, and the search results since there’s seriously a LOT

Preaching with Sacred Fire:  An Anthology of African-American Sermons, 1750 to the Present

Autobiography of Malcolm X

Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr

Our Non-Christian Nation (because these chuds have a hard-on for theocracies)

The Four Voyages: Being His Own Log-Book, Letters and Dispatches with Connecting Narratives.  (Because you can’t deny what he says in his own words)

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About…American History

She thinks I'm joking

this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

1. Look up your rx on Wikipedia and figure out whatever the chemical in it actually is. Navigate to that page.

2. Find the CAS #. This is a universal identifier that will help you overcome language barriers.

3. Go on madeinchina.com and search for ur drug by cas #. If you are very sketched by giving $$ to a company that can be hard to vet, you can also go on like reddit i guess and look for "hrt raw suppliers" with good reputations and see if they also carry what youre looking for but that can be less likely unless its a hormone med. Tbh i usually just trust companies that make a lot of pharmacueticals and that have a digital footprint going back at least five years. Very very common medications and especially things like cialis id be slightly more discerning about sources because theres more profit motive in scamming people over them; running a scam for random pharmacueticals is just...a strange thing to do with a low hit rate.

4. You'll need to actually email a human being to make an order :( confirm the CAS # to make sure ur talking about the right thing. Doing a buying pool with friends can give some insurance in case it ends up being weird

5. Optional IMHO but probably a good move: locate a drug checking service in ur general region. If its hard to find, find your nearest harm reduction group or street medic collective and ask them to shake the phone tree for you. If they're annoying about it find the second nearest. Etc. Ur looking for someplace that has a Mass Spectrometer and will check out a sample for you. Idk why some diy hrt guides tell you to pay for this out of pocket 💁

6. Dosingggg (for oral pills other stuff can get more complicated see note at end): you can get gel caps for cheap on like Amazon or whatever and use a tiny spoon (made with tinfoil) to measure each dose with a milligram scale. It's easier to put a whole pile of powder on the scale and take a little bit off into the scoop and measure by how much the weught goes Down, than it is to try to weigh and then cap each dose. +/-0.5MG is usually an ok tolerance. If ur stuff is dosed by MICROGRAMS look up thr 4theives miso card procedure

6a. I hate doing this so the other thing you can do is look up ur med on pubchem by CAS# and see what its soluble in. Graduated cylinders are cheap and accurate so if its water- or oil- soluble OR ethanol soluble in a reasonable amount (like your normal dose could be dissolved in <5mL of ethanol), you can do oral liquids! Oil solubility you might need to just test at home. Work out an appropriate mg/ML solution (you might need to do some hands-on testing with a small amount of ur powder to see what amount dissolves happily in what amount of solvent), figure out how many doses you want to make at once, mix that much powder and that much liquid together, and dose with an oral syringe. Water solutions you want to keep for no more than 1wk at a time or alternately, the max amount of time you wouldn't be sketched by drinking water left in an unsealed container, bc even tho drug raws & plain water arent the MOST microbe friendly itll grow Stuff eventually. Oral liquids WILL change metabolism, alcohol solutions will change it most, water will change it least. Metabolism is already super duper weird and variable by individual so for a lot of oral rx meds, adding a small variable is not going to drastically change the general variability of the population that that drug has been tested in. However: don't trust internet strangers to know everything about ur situation and do some reading on the pharmacology of ur specific meds and make decisions you think will be good.

7. Keep ur head up and stay thoughtfully engaged with this process. If the reason you take this med has some kind of metric you can test at home, like getting a BP cuff or something, you should be doing that and writing things down. Generally its a good idea to track ur own daily health situation in writing. Apps are bad for privacy, we know this. There are also really interesting consumer health metric items available like little patches that test ur blood sugar over the course of about 2wks.

If ur already financially ok and pay some amount out of pocket for ur rx I think you should strongly consider doing something like this because it is a gamble and if you can better afford to work out the kinks up front AND stop paying that bill every month in the future, congrats, chances are even a fraction of those savings put away for like, a year or less are enough to pay for someone else you know to do it again and snowball into a better situation for everyone.

Another thing to do is look up how the meds you use expire. A lot of dry pills maintain >90% efficacy for a very long time past their expiration dates (the us military did a huge long ass study about this). Syntheroid specifically can be notably worse in 6mos past exp. A few drugs decompose into actually harmful compounds but the only ones I know about are antibiotics, you should check tho

From CrimethInc:

A Demonstrator's Guide to Helmets

A Demonstrator's Guide to Gas Masks and Goggles

A Demonstrator's Guide to Body Armor

From the Indigenous Anarchist Federation:

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 2: Basic PPE

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 3: Ballistic Protection

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 4: Primary Firearms

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 6: Secondary Firearms

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 7: Tertiary Firearms

Be smart and be safe. Don't just scroll down to the recommended equipment and DIY guides - read the articles, top to bottom, and take the advice they give seriously

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 2: Basic PPE

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 3: Ballistic Protection

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 4: Primary Firearms

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 6: Secondary Firearms

I've been struggling a lot to find proper terminology for intersex issues in my research because Google is all gunked up and Tumblr is just as hard to parse through.

So, if anyone could point me in the direction of any good literature by intersex authors or any good online resources (especially that define terminology) that would be incredibly helpful!! I'm still doing work myself but any sort of direction would be wonderful!

Intersex terminology masterpost by @intersexfairy

Media and style guide by IHRA

Intersex variations glossary by InterACT

Other Basic Things To Know 📣 (tumblr posts)

Some common misconceptions addressed by @skelejon

"Please stop acting like being intersex is just 'cool quirky genitals'" by @identitty-dickruption

"People need to understand that some intersex people find out late" by @none-gender-left-man

The Social Model of Intersex by me

"Unfortunately, most intersex people are not told outright that they are intersex" by @genderpunks

Tumblr intersex polls without votes from non-intersex people by @queercripintersex

Intersex PSAs for trans allies 🏳️‍⚧️ (tumblr posts)

PSAs for perisex trans people by @moonshinedyke

Please remember AFAB/AMAB doesn't mean "typical anatomy" by @asocial-and-antisocial

"God I wish perisex trans people would stop tokenizing and fetishizing intersex people and our bodies" by @chaos-in-one

How to talk about transition goals without being intersexist by @identitty-dickruption

Examples of casual intersexism from trans people by @hiiragi7

Exercise: Exposing intersexism in yourself by @hiiragi7

"having issues with the term transintersex is not terf rhetoric" by @hiiragi7

"In the United States, the people that are actually getting targeted with genital mutilation and nonconsensual hormones are intersex kids, not trans kids" by @trans-axolotl

"I’m begging people at this point to realize that hate towards intersex people isn’t just. Fucking misdirected transphobia" by @theforesteldritch

Make "space for ipsogender, intergender, and/or ultergender folks" by @queercripintersex

"When there's an actual discussion happening about biological sex and how it's actually super complicated, it hurts to get excluded [by trans people]" by @queercripintersex

In polls about gender, give options for intersex-specific genders rather than "intersex" by me, replying to @asocial-and-antisocial

"Those are intersex animals, not trans or nonbinary" by @heckacentipede with a reply by me

On supporting intersex people who want to go on HRT by @thehmn

"Perisex trans people have been the front of people being intersexist to me" by @oy-gayvalt

[edited to add links in purple]

"intersex trans people who can’t go on HRT for any reason are no less trans" by @identitty-dickruption

An experience of being objectified by trans people by @genderpunks

Academic Literature 🎓️

Holmes, M. (Ed.). (2016). Critical intersex. Routledge.

Horlacher, S. (2016). Transgender and intersex: Theoretical, practical, and artistic perspectives (pp. 1-27). Palgrave Macmillan US.

Orr, C. E. (2022). Cripping Intersex. UBC Press.

Davis, G. (2015). Contesting intersex: The dubious diagnosis (Vol. 10). NYU Press.

Reis, E. (2021). Bodies in doubt: An American history of intersex. JHU Press.

Lock Swarr, A. (2023). Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (p. 245). Duke University Press.

If you don't have access to a university library, copies of those and other intersex books can be accessed via the @intersexbookclub discord!

Non-academic literature 🧙‍♀️

they show up in court and just ask the lawyer for the collection company: can you prove where this number comes from? Do you have a contract showing that you purchased our debt? probably luckily for them, a reporter researching a book on the topic showed up and asked the same questions.

10 minutes later they get in front of the judge and the collection company drops the whole case and theyre free to go. story is below, it has a transcript in the link too

https://twitter.com/BrianManookian/status/1674963884703088642

WE HAVE NOT YET LOOKED INTO THIS.

... but holy shit it's worth pursuing if you're drowning in debt and these are your circumstances. I'll definitely be adding this to the Big List of Future BGR Topics. Here's more of our advice on debt:

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt

connectedpapers

the basic rundown is: you use the search bar to enter a topic, scientific paper name or DOI. the website then offers you a list of papers on the topic, and you choose the one you're looking for/most relevant one. from here, it makes a tree diagram of related papers that are clustered based on topic relatability and colour-coded by time they were produced!

for example: here i search "human B12"

i go ahead and choose the first paper, meaning my graph will be based around it and start from the topics of "b12 levels" and "fraility syndrome"

here is the graph output! you can scroll through all the papers included on the left, and clicking on each one shows you it's position on the chart + will pull up details on the paper on the right hand column (title, authors, citations, abstract/summary and links where the paper can be found)