My cat has always had the worst timing. He'll jump up on my desk to cuddle at the very moment I'm about to get up to urgently go to the bathroom. He'll try to curl up with me in bed the very instant I need to get up and refill my glass of water and put some vaseline on my dry, sore lips. He'll ask me to play just at the second I need to end my break and get back to work.
The poor guy, right? From his perspective, he approaches me for love and I immediately get up and leave. I feel awful about it. I try to reassure him first that I love him and he just has bad timing, but I know it can't feel nice, and also he's too big of a dumbass to understand that me getting up and walking away isn't triggered by him coming to say hi.
Except today I realized something: Yes. It is.
I was sitting at my desk watching a video and up jumps the boy with a mrrp, head positioned for pets, when I realized I urgently had to get up and go to the bathroom. As I opened my mouth to say "bad timing again, buddy," it finally occurred to me that... I definitely already had to go. I for sure did not "suddenly" have an urgent need for the toilet out of fucking nowhere.
I didn't realize I needed to go because my brain is piloted by angry gremlins and they were more interested in watching the video than letting me know about an important bodily function.
My cat coming to say hi is a regular trigger that pulls me back into my body from whatever bullshit I'm hyperfocusing on. And that's when I realize all the warning lights are flashing on the dash. Need water. Need food. Need toilet. In pain: need to change position. Holy shit look at the time, need to get back to work!
I now wonder how much worse I'd function if I didn't have a furry little guy in my apartment to regularly remind me that I exist in a physical form which requires maintenance and also that time passes.
I do still feel bad for walking away from him every time, but I have started just inviting him to come with me. Hey bud, sorry, I have to stand up right now, but come follow me while I get a glass of water. You coming? Come on! And rewarding him with pats for following. It's better than just walking away, I think.
Anyway cats (or other pet of your choice that requires frequent attention)? 10/10, strongly encourage having a little guy to bother you now and then, especially if you have ADHD and live alone.
#hey are you okay human#you haven’t moved from that spot in too long#what is too long you ask#one thousand years for you#come check each room with me!#pee and I will guard you#get yourself water and give me an ice cube#I love how confusing they are to me just like you - via @marissaprime
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
the other day i saw a tiktok of a woman talking about how her hyper-militant abusive parents would sometimes punish her by “taking away her name” and referring to her as a prisoner number. genuinely terrible stuff, obviously. but i skimmed the comments and. listen. i truly DO NOT mean to dunk too hard on this person, like they could be a kid or something, but.
just. breathtaking. imagine if your primary reference for the concept of the un-personing of prisoners was (check notes) a book series about owls.
This is why it's important to Include stuff like this in fiction, especially ya fiction. It can be a lot of sheltered and/or indoctrinated children, in the case of a lot of rural "Christians", first introduction to these types of concepts in a way they can understand.
I don't think there's anything weird or shameful about it. Knowledge is knowledge, regardless of where it came from.
I was once listening to one of the ten billion animorphs podcasts out there, with two hosts, one who'd read Animorphs as a kid and one who was reading it for the first time as an adult. For those who don't know, Animorphs is a war story in which a handful of children have to secretly hold off an alien invasion until the "good" aliens arrive to save Earth. It starts off with fairly clear-cut Bad Species of aliens and Good Species of aliens but as the series goes on it becomes clear that there is no such thing as a good, clean or glorious war, that a clean Good Side and a clean Bad Side is usually propoganda, that heroism is a matter of circumstance and that war will chew up and spit out even the victorious; there are no winners in war, just the side that lost less.
It's a lot, for books aimed at eleven year olds who want to read about kids turning into fun animals.
On the podcast, the two (American) hosts happened to get onto the topic of the post-9/11 Iraq War and their reactions to it. They were both children at the time and as such could not be expected to have particularly nuanced views of US military policy. The person who hadn't read Animorphs was unsurprised by the declaration of war; that's what you did. Someone attacks America, America goes to war. That's how a country protects itself, through military revenge. The Animorphs fan, about the same age, had been devastated and against the war from the start. War was a Big Deal and, while sometimes unavoidable, should be a last resort; a lot of people were going to die, and a lot more were going to get hurt, and no matter how the war shook out it was still going to be horrible. They attributed this perspective, of course, to the series that had taught them about the horrors endemic to war in an engaging way at such a young age -- to Animorphs.
I am so, so sure that my cousin meant to type something else, but I'm going to cry. Welcome to my bathroom themed bathroom... Pictures of other people's bathrooms on the walls... Little bathtub figurines on the sink... Soap dispenser shaped like a toilet... Life could be a dream... in my bathroom themed bathroom...
just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out
if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.
if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to
PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply
figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list
so for some reason this feature was actually announced on the tumblr engineering blog. interesting choice not to reblog it to the staff or tumblr blog, esp considering they asked for user input on how to implement it, but i suppose considering the response to the last update maybe the replies would be too overwhelming...
so couple of clarifications. comments are disabled as default for primary blogs that have their likes disabled. they are seemingly enabled for all other blogs that have replied to posts
posts you comment on may show on your followers 'for you' page if you leave your replies publically available. they may, in the future, show in on your followers dashboard if your follower goes to their dash settings and enables this. apparently, if your likes are enabled, your followers can already see those on the dash if they've gone into preferences and selected to do so, which I was unaware of, and that seems to be disabled at default, but it's possible i disabled it previously and forgot about it ig
Never thought I'd have the opportunity to say this again: Reducing women and girls to their vaginas and then forcing them to show those vaginas to strangers is not a feminist ideal.
unless its egregious, i'm not embarrassed to be fooled by ai. "oh i got lied to via something made by the Lying Machine the machine we made to Lie really well" like it's gonna happen it's no egg on your face. just be chill about it
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
Edited To Add: The wiki entry should be in here vs the history.com link - so here you go.
To any young creators or folks starting out on their creative journey, or to anyone struggling; I promise you I PROMISE YOU anything you create is infinitely more better than anything AI says it can do.
Learning is part of the process, being a little frustrated is part of the process, and each thing you make is wonderful because you made it exist! It's in the world because of you! It's uniquely you and no one else can replicate it exactly the way you do it.
I think of how we all exist on this earth for a limited amount of time, but the things we make will be left behind and it will touch the lives of people we'll never meet.
My partner's parents went to Italy one year and talked about how there were preserved sketches and unfinished sculptures done by Michelangelo. And I was losing my mind because yeah there's the amazing Sistine Chapel ceiling and the statue of David but his works in progress also exist! To see his process! To imagine that he also felt frustration? joy! to know he made so many WIPS before he eventually made the works hes widely known for.
I keep thinking did he have days when he thought those were crap? Which ones made him realize what he wanted to do in the final pieces. And to me the disconnect between myself and some super famous long gone artist I've never met drops for a bit and I yell THATS A PERSON WHO LIVED! THEY DID CREATIVE THINGS WE STILL DO TODAY
I think about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave. did they feel happy creating these paintings? did their children watch? copy them? There's so many animals drawn over and over again, were they also doing their own art process that way? Was that a form of practice? Farting around and having fun? 👀
To know the need to express oneself through creative works has lasted for years and years and years is AHHHHHHHH 😭💕💕💕 It has endured! People's creativity has endured. And these days can feel so hopeless but the love to create can still persist despite it all.
Fascists will try and convince us none of it matters or that specific types of art are superior over others. "Let AI do it for you" but it can't do things like you can. It's just a stupid machine made by rich morons who have no souls. Its nature is to steal because their nature is to steal.
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
titsay
