This will be its own website eventually but right now I have 600+ small businesses/artist from tiktok and instagram listed here and it's still growing. The original masterlist posts will stay up for anyone that has them saved in their likes. This post will be updated with the website link as and when I get that going.
practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance
“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!
nobody needs to know your real name or your hometown or where you work or your home country or your race or ethnicity or skin color or phone number or the name of your first pet or the model of your first car or your mother’s maiden name or how many siblings you have or what school you go to or your credit card number
A gender for when someone isn't a person but a presence. A collection of masks that just rotate and shift to whatever the situation requires
Flag: black for lack of sense of self, grey for blurry identity, white for presence, dull turquoise for the illusion of person good that dissipates when left alone, dull magenta for the illusion of existing (since the colour itself scientifically doesn't exist)
Conduitmasc: a presence that prefers to be perceived as masculine
Conduitfem: a presence that prefers to be perceived as feminine
Condneu: a presence that prefers to be perceived as androgynous or genderless
Conduitflux: a presence that prefers to be perceived as gender fluid, a shapeshifter, pangender, etc.
Congratulations to Sierra Madre’s Public Library on the grand reopening of its revitalized library last month! What a wonderful way to kick off the busy summer season when libraries are buzzing with activity.
Sierra Madre Public Library received a State Library Building Forward Library Infrastructure grant to help make this project possible. Building Forward is supporting libraries throughout California, building and revitalizing welcoming spaces, strengthening communities, and creating opportunities for all.
Building Forward is a program of the California State Library, funded by the State of California.
Hey, you, cis girl that's very (correctly) vocal about women being allowed to talk about their periods, do you include trans women in that?
I ask because every single time I've tried to talk about it to anyone that isn't a trans woman they get fucking angry. Which has caused me to have to just suffer in silence every single month. So I really relate to cis women when they talk about literally the exact same thing; being shamed by everyone around them their whole lives for talking about their periods, so they just suffer in silence every month as it negatively impacts their work and social lives. But I don't even feel like I can voice that I am literally dealing with the same exact thing because most of y'all react like you want to throw me in front of a bus for saying it, even those of you who act like your such big great transfem allies.
I guess I'll take this opportunity to talk about trans women periods.
The first thing any tme person thinks when they hear this is always "how can trans women have periods? They don't have uteruses!"
The answer is: the uterus isn't what causes your period, it is effected by your period. What causes your period and what causes trans women's periods is the same thing: the endocrine system.
HRT changes the sex of your endocrine system. Feminizing HRT makes it a female endocrine system, giving us a 28-day hormone cycle just like cis women. At the end of that cycle, the hypothalamus floods the body with prostaglandins. Those are what cause all but one of the period symptoms, because they make muscles inflame and contract. They are what make the uterus shed its lining, they are what cause intestinal cramps, they are what cause body aches, they are what cause headaches and migraines. The only period symptom not causes by the release of prostaglandins throughout the body is depression, and that is caused by your endocrine system simply not processing as much estrogen and from simply feeling like shit.
So, the only symptoms trans women don't get every 28 days is menstrual cramps, because yes we do not menstruate since we don't have uteruses. But migraines, depression, body aches, intestinal cramps, and the infamous "period shits" don't exactly add up to us having any better of a time. Except we have to pretend that we're fine and nothing is different because no one believes that we get periods, not even cis women.
"But you can't call it a period then because that refers to MENSTRUATION!" is another one I hear all the time. This is incorrect. You use the word "period" instead of just "menstruation" because it doesn't just refer to menstruation. It refers to a period at the end of the hormone cycle where we experience a host of symptoms. And not all cis women experience all of the symptoms that encompass the period. Not all cis women get migraines, or body aches, or have severe depression. If a cis woman gets a hysterectomy she doesn't menstruate either! In that instance she experiences an identical period to what trans women experience. Yet, I doubt you'd insist that cis women who've had hysterectomies don't have periods.
Oh, another thing that I personally discovered after bottom surgery: vaginal odor changes for trans women during our periods too. I was not expecting that because I always thought it was just from menstruation. But nope, the ph levels of a trans woman's vagina are the same of as a cis woman's vagina, and it changes during our periods just the same.
Apparently yes and I cannot wrap my head around this. You're telling me most of these teens and early 20 something's dominating social media do not even have a laptop full of organized directories of favorite images? They aren't downloading and playing with creative SOFTWARE rather than stupid little "apps??" They already can't navigate what was supposed to be the new standard level of technological familiarity!?
Pc is more customizable and has a bigger screen. It’s easier to block ads. I can actually read recipes on my pc and never think about ads while I’m using it. Typing is faster, print is bigger, an actually good version of mahjong comes free with it. Clicking things feels good.
As an older someone who primarily uses mobile, the main factors in not using my laptop are 1) it's SIGNIFICANTLY slower than mobile 2) my current living situation is far from ideal, and mobile is easier to keep nosy people out of my business. So I can understand it. I've been this way since I was 14 myself, it's not terribly new
Going through my likes and found this, thought I'd add on now that I actually have a desktop for the first time
For reference, I was born in 2003 and graduated highschool in 2021
First off, I will say I was 100% late to the technology game. We had 2 kindles and a wii, sure but I didn't get my own phone until I was 11 or so and started riding the school bus, which was a flip phone we had on hand. My first experience with computers was a desktop in preschool, and then school desktops in elementary several years later but the only things we were allowed to use it for was Microsoft word, Google docs, looking things up, coolmathgames, and freerice or whatever the name of that website was.
I got my first smartphone at 14 or 15, and my first personal computer was a handmedown Chromebook becaus I was using my mother's so much for homework and she wanted a new one. When I first learned of piracy around like 16 years old, I was *baffled* that anyone was brave enough to download things. I thought you had to work in IT or something to know what the computer stuff meant and how to navigate things and how to know what to download and how to navigate your own system. I didn't have a computer class at any point during this. It was all just assumed that we knew how to work computers so the only things we were really taught was how to log into the school system. That's it. How to log in and how to save/print our assignments.
During lockdown, I got myself a gaming laptop and that kind of opened all the doors and windows of possibility of being able to do things. I learned about Firefox and PC gaming and ad blockers and changing your preferred search engine and Linux and even took a couple coding classes and realized just how much I was making a mountain out of a molehill. I was so lost and confused with this stuff because neither of my parents were super tech savvy, and everyone else just assumed we knew computers, so learning about viruses and malware were always some Big Scary Thing, when actually no. They're almost always fixable problems that you can do yourself with just a few internet searches or asking the right person.
As for desktops, I wanted one for the longest time, and I found out that you can just. Build your own custom computer and I wanted to do badly but had no idea what anything was. My knowledge of hardware started and ended with USB drives, power cables, and headphone ports. We weren't allowed to mess with the school desktops, which made sense, and laptops already have all the hardware locked away, so I had No idea what I was getting into. Trying to sit down and look things up was so overwhelming and nothing was sticking, then AI was driving up the prices so I impulse bought a desktop I had been looking at...and set it up completely by myself.
Now there was a huge hiccup with the wifi because I thought we didn't have an Ethernet cable and I downgraded it to windows 10 because I was mad at 11 and I didn't know why the wifi driver got deleted from my computer in the process of doing that, and I was so scared of doing something wrong once I fixed it so I was super careful for a bit, but I very quickly got used to it. I messed around with the settings and read things to figure out what was what, learned how to pirate music from a friend and learned media pirating from reddit, and I can't fathom going back.
I do admittedly prefer a laptop just because the main thing I use a computer for is writing and I like being able to sit and write wherever and don't like the layout of documents on my phone cause I can't see the full thing as well, but it was genuinely astonishing just how *easy* it all was. No viruses, no malware, I know enough about the software that people are now asking *me* for help, listening to music without ads or a subscription is SO wonderful, I know about YouTube backends now and I love them, and it just makes me sad that n o n e of this was taught. Ever. Part of me wonders if it's intentional, so we pay more to repair companies whenever something goes Slightly Wrong, but I doubt it.
As someone who didn't have one, P L E A S E bring back computer classes. I have friends who are teachers now and the vast majority of things is done on Chromebooks now and these kids have no idea how the hell computers work. Computer class needs to come back y e s t e r d a y
you are like a mewling helpless baby you are standing in the rain and i am offering you a goddamn umbrella and you throw it on the floor and yell at god to abolish rain
#folks we do have to take ownership of our own internet experiences. that's always been the case and it should continue to be #if you ask for internet corporations to take control of your experience they uh. they will. you won't like it though #do not give up your agency #that means use the agency you have #please (tags by @release-the-sheep)
me as a teenager: man it sucks to have no privacy or autonomy but i guess its for a good reason. when i turn 18 i will realise how young i was and understand why they did all that.
me as an adult: teenagers are an oppressed class, their abuse is normalised and systemic and they need to start killing people
me as a teenager: man it sucks to have no privacy or autonomy but i guess its for a good reason. when i turn 18 i will realise how young i was and understand why they did all that.
me as an adult: teenagers are an oppressed class, their abuse is normalised and systemic and they need to start killing people
The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.
Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"
The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.
Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."
This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.
This torches everything. And I do mean everything.
A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):
ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives
allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason
preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies
requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.
What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.
Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.
Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.
Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:
"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"
But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.
Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.
This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.
This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.
So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.
Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.
As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.
