https://gofund.me/4f96f136
So I need some urgent help but I don't have any people I know that can help so if anyone could help me out in whatever way they can while I try to get back on my feet, I would seriously cry tears of joy.
who is telling men that having gray in their hair is ugly. why are they fucking lying
who is telling women that having gray in their hair is ugly!!!!!!! why are they fucking lying!!!!!!!
as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
It really boils down to three simple things:
This is really useful to me personally because I’ve definitely caught myself losing sight of what cultural appropriation actually is, and why it matters, so thank you, and everybody else pay attention too
Just a reminder to anyone who will listen! There’s a huge cold front coming up in America right now and I want to remind everyone to NEVER use or rely on a gas stove to heat up your home. You will die. If your power goes out, the best thing you can do is cover your windows, or get to an area in your house with no windows, and bundle up to the best of your ability to conserve heat. I know generating heat with whatever you have sounds good in theory, but we lost a LOT of people to carbon monoxide poisoning in last years Texas Freeze because many relied on gas stoves and other propane heat sources. A lot of people went to bed and never woke up. Please be aware of the things you can’t see, like fumes from your generator, built up gas when starting a car in an enclosed space, and of course, the excess carbon monoxide that can be generated by leaving a gas stove on for too long.
If you think there's a possibility you might lose heat in your residence, take some tips from this formerly homeless social worker:
Try to get ahold of a tent, a pile of thrift store crochet blankets, and a thrifted flannel sheet (fitted or flat is fine).
Set up the tent somewhere in your home, preferrably in a room with as few windows as possible (basements are ideal because they stay warmer in a freeze). Make sure you zip up any screen covers and add the fly. Then drape the flannel sheet over top (nice air pockets around your tent to warm up the air).
Try to pile up everyone into the tent with the crochet blankets so you can make the most of the body heat and blankets.
Make sure you keep all your taps trickling so your pipes don't burst.
Snag yourself a bulk pack of pocket hand warmers. If you have to be out of the tent, bundle up (the key here is layers and puffy coats to trap as much warmed air near your body as you can) and snap one of these open so you can keep your extremities warm.
Try to keep 1-2 battery packs charged up in case you get ice on the power lines and lose electricity.
You can tape up layers of sheet plastic, cling wrap, newspaper, and other materials in your windows to reduce chill/heat loss.
Follow these steps to sew yourself a rice heat pack: https://homesteadandchill.com/how-to-make-rice-heating-pad/
Keep a potable water supply for emergencies (I usually keep 2-3 five gallon jugs around during freeze season)
Stay fed and hydrated, even if that means stocking up on easy to prepare/premade junk foods. Do not skip meals.
This is far from a comprehensive list of things to keep you and your family safe and healthy this winter, but they're tricks I learned professionally and personally, so now you don't have to completely reinvent the wheel!
YEAHHHHHHHH
ok seeing some people not sure what this means so to summarize it:
hypothetically speaking, if we could produce nuclear fusion on a commercial scale it would provide us with totally clean and practically unlimited energy. no radiation, no pollution, just energy. fusion is actually the process that powers the sun itself, so scientists have been attempting to recreate fusion for decades because it's essentially the 'holy grail' of clean energy sources.
up until now, while we've technically been able to recreate fusion, it has always taken more energy to actually make fusion occur compared to the energy the reaction puts out. but now we've finally had a reaction happen where it produced more energy than it cost. meaning that nuclear fusion is going to be seen as a fully viable and possible energy resource, so more funding will be put into it to try and improve the process. we're still decades away from potentially using it as an energy source, but this is a HUGE step towards unlimited energy with no environmental repercussions
here's an article on it!
The joke about smooth sharks has never been funny to me, partially because "insisting on something wrong and making fun of the other person for trying to correct you" was constantly used against me when I was an (autistic) kid and as a teenager I often assumed people were arbitrarily lying to me when they made innocuous statements. I was afraid to respond sincerely to anything and often ignored advice and information people gave me because of the chance it could be a joke at my expense.
It's even more grating in this case because people explicitly say they think the joke detects and entraps people who are already "annoying" and "need to be the smartest person in the room."
(Never mind that the "outcome" is entirely contingent on subtle differences in context and how social rules in the exchange were followed; the person that said honey is made by putting bees in a bee grinder got ridiculed even though they were doing the same thing—confidently asserting something stupid on the internet.)
The other reason I hate the "sharks are smooth" joke is that it obscures the reality that sharks are literally covered in teeth. They evolved from teeth, they are morphologically teeth. TEETH
literally just imagine how insufferable Goncharov would have been if everyone was just stubbornly insisting it was real.
I'm convinced that is exactly what would have happened even a couple years earlier, and I hope we have learned that "yes, it is a joke, here is all the information you need. Now that you know, it can be your turn to play. Enter into this reality with us." is much better and more fun in every way
good tags
Going through the pile of books to go to charity shops and there’s this amazing kids history one that’s literally like
Give your friend a neolithic burial
Exactly
I’m so glad this post is finally reaching the people it was meant for; weird little kids who liked playing history and death
The book also had instructions for making a paper replica of a mammoth bone/hide hut 🦣 🛖 and I was never allowed to take over the living room and do it
Reblog to give your mutuals a neolithic burial 🦴🌼⚱️🗡️
Never talk to me or my 42 trees again
it amuses me to see people being surprised/impressed/amused by this setup, because it’s extremely common on the plains. if you don’t plant a windbreak, your heating and cooling bills are huge, and storms do things like throw the lawnmower through the living room window, take the roof off, or cake the entire north side of the house with six inches of solid ice.
evergreens remain bendy even in the coldest weather, so – wait, no, not the coldest. i remember when i was a kid it got down to like -45 and the norway pines around my house were cracking like gunshots as the sap froze.
maples, incidentally, make that noise around -20f, and i hear it at least once every winter here in southern minnesota. but i only ever heard norway pines make it that one time.
so anyway that’s why we plant pine trees around our houses. because otherwise the wind would freaking kill us.
This is informative and perfectly sensible under the circumstances but I also cannot resist the temptation to compare it to planting stuff all around the boundary of your lot in The Sims
