I just work here, Ma'am

Vern or Borger / 28/ Nonbinary Asexual

[nourasbasha]

I sat down to light a fire to warm my children, but the rain was pouring heavily. The wood got soaked and would no longer catch fire.

My little ones were shivering in front of me, helpless and weak. All I had were a few matchsticks... and the clothes I wore.

I won’t deny that for a moment I thought about taking off my jacket and burning it to warm them, but that jacket was all I had.

I looked at my wife; she was shaking violently, her lips turning blue from the biting cold. I tried to cover her and the children with a thin, worn-out blanket, but the winter’s chill was stronger.

In that moment, I felt completely powerless, the reality here in Gaza is more than I can bear alone.

Suddenly, an idea came to me: in a dilapidated shack behind our camp, covered with tin and zinc, we started running and racing because the heat generated by movement could give us some temporary warmth.

We played, laughed, and warmed their small bodies, if only for a little while.

My wife whispered to me, “Will we soon be able to rent a warm home where our children feel true warmth?”

[nourasbasha]

Today, we are doing everything we can to rent a small, warm home for our children, but we are still short of the amount needed. Financially, this is the biggest obstacle standing between us and leaving the tent.

[nourasbasha]

To everyone who read our story, we invite you to be part of this hope. Please help us so that soon we can tell you a different story, the story of our children in a home, after losing our house to the war and living in a tent on the streets with our four kids.

[nourasbasha]

Please help us give warmth to these four children. The cold is harsh on them, and they are often sick, coughing and running fevers because of the weather. Your support can truly change this reality. Please don’t hesitate.

[autisticmudkip]

Please donate, help Mohammed and Enas afford somewhere warmer for their young kids to stay!

[nourasbasha]

I'm trying to make it a nice thing, not a tragedy... but we really need your support... you've always been kind to us.

[michealredpath20]

GO DONATE TO HER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mammalianmammals]

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / USDA Wildlife Services

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[fleshengine]

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

We gotta fix that.

[dancinbutterfly]

Progress.

Onwards!

[onthedriftinthetardis]

I can't access the full paper, but their conclusion is right there in the abstract:

While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.

[lauralot89]

[cuunos]

hey can everyone do me a favor and put in the tags why they chose their name? even if you don't go by a chosen name irl, you can put why you chose your online name.

[wolf-aid]

We're in the middle of the school. Guys, we're done building the classrooms. School thanks to your donations, this is a very wonderful thing Thank you to everyone who donated and participated But we still have a lot of lacking

[wolf-aid]

Hey guys, let's be snug. Why don't we complete donations quickly? Why don't you help us spread this out for fundraising? This is considered an institution. Why doesn't anyone care about her? I'm overloading my energy. Please create posts everywhere. Everything is available in Gaza, but education is still not available please help with posting We're doing a good job, please share and donate now.

Donate to Help the children of Gaza get a safe and free education., organized by Asma Yunis

The Coastal Initiative in Gaza urgently needs your support to laun… Asma Yunis needs your support for Help the children of Gaza get a safe a

[faacethefacts]

Please donate anything you can, you could make a real difference in these children's education here!

[trawl]

Ibrahim is doing really really important work! Let's help him!

[wolfer-aid]

Hey guys, come on, come on, we can do it all together. Please donate and share this post now, and if you can post about it, you guys are our only hope. Come on, come on, please.

[wolf-aid]

Guys, I'm so excited about this school. We should raise as much donation to complete the remaining stuff. Please share this post and donate now your donation is very important Please read Don't ignore and help with one euro it will help. Please,put a like and donate.

[mavigation]

Things are coming together!!

[wolf-aid]

Guys, we just need 300 euros to reach 6,000 euros, that's very close, please donate now before it's too late. We can help the children in Gaza by learning. I swear to you guys that I am not a fraud or that. I swear everything I'm saying is true. And that all donations will go towards completing the construction of this little initiative. I hope you understand me.

[wolfer-aid]

Guys there is someone who donated 5 euros This is absolutely wonderful This donation in my opinion is very big Please if you can donate similarly please please donate now let us hurry before the start of the new semester just five

[fuckyeahsapphics]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH HONEYS!👩🏾‍❤️‍💋‍👩🏾🏳️‍🌈✨

[suncaptor]

linked tree (includes options to donate to Ghanaian projects)

petition to show support

[deadgenerations]

Rich mates, secret mansions: Australia’s millionaire Nazi-backers revealed

Neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell is living in a secret multimillion-dollar compound in Melbourne’s far north-east “gifted” to him by one of the wealth

this is a real shocker of a story, and you can tell that it's just the tip of an iceberg. I strongly encourage any Australian to read this article in full, because these people are far more connected to wealth and power than I think anyone believed. This is becoming a serious danger. you can bypass the paywall on removepaywall if you need to. There is a lot of money flowing into the pockets of avowed Nazis seeking to start a race war in Australia.

[piksiew]

bacteriography portrait of Five Pebbles I made from yeast , mold , acrylic paints and other stuff i found

[retropopcult]

Cosplayers at a Star Trek Convention, 1976

[foone]

in this house we have endless respect for cosplayers from the days before VCRs.

You couldn’t just rewatch the episode to look at all the details of the costume. You got lucky with press photos showing up in magazines or you just watched the episode/movie while sketching furiously

[silencedrowns]

thinking about that one woman who made a Star Wars flight suit in 1977 entirely from trading cards and sketching details in the theater. or stories I’ve heard about old school Trek cosplayers getting the bizarre seam placements right by photocopying magazines onto overhead transparencies and projecting them onto butcher paper.

I’m a semi old school cosplayer (started in 2001) so some of the old school techniques are still things I learned on (I’ve sketched from stuttering VHS tapes on pause and used the overhead transparency trick)… what we have access to now for costume recreation blows what they had out of the water just in terms of reference material, let alone specialty costume supplies like thermoplastics and cosplay wigs.

[meeedeee]

That Star Wars fan who made the flight suit from trading cards and movie sketches is TJ Burnside and she is still with us. In fact, I am adding to her Fanlore page with info about the flight suit (and how it went viral on Twitter and Redditt a few years back). Fanlore.org, is a fan run fandom history wiki. Stay tuned.

Her (sadly) barebones Fanlore page is here: https://fanlore.org/wiki/T.J._Burnside

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

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

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

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.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[suspiriously]

Gladio is the most insane thing you will ever learn about

[sanguinesylph]

hold on I have to look something up

[suspiriously]

TLDR: after WWII, the US took nazi war criminals and set them up in sleeper cells all over Europe, “activating” them whenever the “threat of communism” was deemed too much, like in the Years of Lead

[sanguinesylph]

oh my god?

[suspiriously]

Stay-behind - Wikipedia

Stay-behind - Wikipedia

they’re called stay-behind networks, here’s a list of a bunch. Technically, Gladio was the one that operated in Italy

[cathkaesque]

Look up the BBC timewatch documentary about this

[cathkaesque]

As I understand it, this documentary was when Gladio first became known to the world.

[mintsky420]

these miis are driving me nuts

[silurisanguine]

Linktree will be feeding your images with DALL-E, Open AI from 5th July 2026.

Warning to anyone using Linktree.

From the 5th July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

I deleted my account just now, because there was no way to turn this off or opt out.

[silurisanguine]

Update with some alternatives-

Carrd.co. Free alt with paid features.

Bento.app Currently free, integrated with bluesky

Everlink.tools Closest to Linktree, has some paid features.

Omg.lol Currently $20 a year. If paying for Linktree features this is a great upgrade.

[yourfaveisintersex]

what if I just made my profile picture a male calico cat or something. hurm

[icewingassasin]

Could I suggest a picture of Dawntreader Texas Calboy? He is a beautiful male calico cat who is a chimera. He's also somewhat controversial among some cat fancy associations since he is a male cat with female colors, and some people are strangely transphobic towards him, despite him being a cat? There was even a rule implemented to keep him from competing in a cat show. If you look up his name, he made a few news articles.

[yourfaveisintersex]

Oh my god?????

Yeah you're right about beautiful I'm squeezing him until he pops!!!!! I love this guy I think I'm going to make an edit real quickly Calboy I love you I'm so sorry people are calling you a freak??????

[yourfaveisintersex]

:)

[rockband2]

People who cannot find beauty in every biome on earth are incredibly bizarre to me. "yeah this place is really beautiful but this place isnt :/". what the fuck are you talking about. start admiring that rock and that tree and that bug and that scrubby little plant and that weird animal and that extreme weather right now. im not telling you to go live there but please you gotta start enjoying all kinds of nature im begging you.

[sartorialadventure]

From Ethnographic Materials ML:

Ainu culture, an indigenous group originating from Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands.

The intricate, geometric patterns on their robes are emblematic of Ainu heritage, often created through embroidery or appliqué.

Traditional Ritual: The individuals are captured performing a traditional gesture, possibly part of a ceremony like the iyomante, a ritual aimed at sending spirits back to the kamuy realm.

Historical Context: The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan, traditionally living in harmony with nature as hunter-gatherers, though they faced significant assimilation policies in the 19th and 20th centuries.