Conversations with Empty Rooms

she/her

[readingsometimes]

If you haven’t ditched the Amazon-owned Goodreads in favor of the independent, Black-owned StoryGraph, what are you waiting for?

You can import your Goodreads data (so you won’t lose years of book tracking)!

You can get personal recommendations based on your current preferences!

It’s sleek af!

IT’S NOT OWNED BY AMAZON

Users can apply content warnings so you can avoid triggers before ever opening a specific book

The same applies for ‘mood’! Wanna read something sad? Find books tagged as ‘sad’, that’s literally it

IT’S NOT OWNED BY JEFF BEZOS

[dronesofthedesert2023-deactivat]

[i.d.: screenshot of the website StoryGraph. it has a pale blue color scheme with links for “find a book”, “reading challenges”, “community”, and “your story graph” at the top, next to a searchbar. there are three boxes with information on different books shown: Retribution Falls by Chris Woodling, Rejse med let bagage by tove jansson, and the fellowship of the ring by j.r.r. tolkein. each book has the status, ‘currently reading’ and a progress bar showing how much is complete. under the title and author is blue text listing the genres, then pink text listing the mood and tone, then grey text listing the page count and year of publication. each box also has a tag section at the bottom.]

[werewolfmack]

Ooooh they’ve updated since I lasted logged in a few months ago

[frontier001]

I’m not seeing anything about this on social media. Certainly I don’t expect to see it covered by the mass media. This is truly something we need to fight back against. Even if you don’t have Comcast\Xfinity, please let your voice be heard.

Amidst a pandemic when we’re all trapped at home, when we’re working from home, schooling from home, and our only entertainment outlets are online, this is cruel and unacceptable. 1.2 terabytes might not be bad for an individual, but if you’re a household of 3 or more, this will be terrible for you.

Make some noise about this please!

Comcast to impose home internet data cap of 1.2TB in more than a dozen US states next year

The limits will take effect in March 2021.

[cosmomoore]

This is why we need net neutrality and also why internet needs to be considered a utility, like water and power.

[emilytwistautisticwitch]

Sharing some info from my husband, who's a network engineer. What Comcast is doing is actually pretty standard across the industry, and it's not a new policy for Comcast specifically. Comcast waived their data caps for most of this year due to Covid-19, and are now bringing them back. And raising them apparently. He's pretty sure the cap was 1TB pre-covid.

He says it's shitty timing, and a shitty practice generally, but it's not out of the norm. Most likely your ISP is doing it too. Hence we're both in the camp of making the internet a public utility.

[justsomeantifas]

i genuinely want to know what else do you think macron should do when muslims are LITERALLY beheading people out in the open bc of a cartoon. This is s serious question. yes we all know the west is responsible for the rise of islam extremism during and after the cold war but the question is right now: what else could macron possibly do? imo its a losing game of western muslims moving into the west and then refusing to adapt to secularism. don't move somewhere you don't agree with???

“A cartoon” as if Muslims have not been repeatedly saying that a core part of their faith is respect to the prophet Muhammad via not drawing him. As if the magazine didn’t completely disrespect and attack the faith of nearly 2 billion people under the guise of “free speech” and “satire”, as if the French are not inherently islamophobic. Obviously I am not endorsing the fact that a teacher was killed and anyone insinuating that in my inbox is getting deleted instantly. One person doing that suddenly means it’s the responsibility of all Muslims? Use your brains. Is it so hard to respect a religion? For France, apparently so.

What is Macron going to do? You said it right there. The west is responsible for the rise of extremism. Maybe he should apologize for the rampant and deadly islamophobia? Maybe make amends to heal France’s past of horrible colonialism into Muslim countries? Maybe not incite terror against the Muslim population knowing France’s history? Maybe not help bomb Muslim countries so that Muslims feel there is no other option but to migrate to a country that isn’t being bombed? Muslims NEVER asked to move into different countries. The west forced them to. And this “secularism vs. religion” debate is stupid as all hell because it ignores the horrible history of forced migration that France has forced upon the world. Take your blatant islamophobia and disrespect and go. 

[justsomeantifas]

French secularism is not secularism, it is a laughable excuse they use to get away with treating people, particularly Muslim people, like shit.

[arcticarthropod]

[socialistexan]

Word of advice: if possible find therapists who are trans themselves.

My therapist is a trans man and not only was he willing to give me the referral I needed after just one visit, he'll do it for people who just ask.

[kamuysaurus]

Also, if available in your state: Plume is a trans run healthcare service that arranges HRT and keeps track of when you need bloodwork etc. All it took was a few intake forms, a video call with a doctor, and then I was prescribed hormones. Very simple. There is a 99 membership fee, but it takes care of all of your stuff in one place that was usually be multiple doctors. I recommend it.

[arcticarthropod]

This is big news!

[ice--ocean]

was really curious about this and no info was included in this post so, i went looking and it was a lil hard to find. the website is getplume and these are the available states (currently?) not my state but hopefully this reaches someone who needs it

[non-binary-memes]

info for my babies 💕

[socialistexan]

Oh my commentary! I'd like to add, look for an informed consent clinic. You do not need a referral from any kind of therapist, psych, anyone!

For my folk in the Austin area: Kind Clinic. I am a patient there, not only are they informed consent, but the visits are free so is the blood work, and they have resources to help with hrt costs, support groups, name change, referrals for SRS, and other transition related stuff. I had a telehealth visit with them and had an hrt prescription and blood work appointment within an hour.

Kind Clinic also does sti screening, PrEP, hiv help, and more.

The Kind Clinic | Access to PrEP and PEP, HIV Testing & General Wellness

The Kind Clinic is a sexual health clinic dedicated to the treatment and prevention of STIs including access to the HIV prevention drugs PrE

[the-venereal-bede-deactivated20]

Priest Lake/Connectus in Nashville--pretty reliable informed consent clinic, can help with doc stuff like passport marker referrals, sliding scale fees+takes tenncare/medcare/etc. Midwifery and similar services there, too.

https://www.connectus.org/priest-lake

DFW area: Prism health. They’re informed consent, pretty full service, and have an affiliated clinic that can get you scrips for free. I hear good things about their mental and sexual health programs, too.

https://phntx.org/

[sunshineandhope]

A clever new solar solution to one of the trickiest climate problems

Making high-temperature industrial heat from sunlight.

Gross’s key insight was that he could replace a lot of the material and labor involved in CSP with computing power. (Or, he could replace stuff with intelligence.) Rather than make bigger, more complicated mirrors, he made small, simple ones and controlled them with software, so they stayed aligned more precisely and produced more power. As Gross realized, material and labor generally get more expensive over time, while computing power is always getting cheaper. Anything that substitutes the latter for the former saves money.

[momtheebayer]

Dumpster Diving : The Juice was DEFINITELY WORTH THE SQUEEZE this ADVEN…

[anarchopuppy]

How to Grow a Community Food Forest - a super extensive guide by the Food Forest Network on twitter

[socialistsephardi]

[1dietcokeinacan]

Oh wow…………….say that

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

ID: a tweet reading “just a quick reminder that a society exists to serve the people within it. there’s no such thing as a person being ‘useless’ to a society, only a society that is useless to a person”

[freezingbeach]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqm5x/us-military-location-data-xmode-locate-x 🙃

[sunfortune]

delete muslim pro

[yekokataa]

sorry for seriousposting on this account, but i highly recommend following the reporting that vice has been doing about government surveillance and cybersecurity. they’ve been breaking a lot of big stories like this recently.

[enoughtohold]

it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.

which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.

it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.

[bogleech]

Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison.

That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.

…and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like that’s the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight.

[disease-danger-darkness-silence]

do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then

I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed - thank GOD - and it’s been erased - not so cool.

pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was awful.

my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and twice he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her. 

I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).

I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.

recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote

“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”

And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was THERE for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is our history and we need to learn it.

we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.

if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am absolutely willing to do a living memory.

they’re the only history books we have.

[inspirationawe]

THEY ARE THE ONLY HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last.

Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about. 

[enoughtohold]

okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right!

but you guys gotta know… they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books. just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!

i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are mostly history, and it is, at this moment, 239 books long. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.

obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!

so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, read a book.

p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense.

[thecoggs]

I agree with all the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now:

Here are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project

Here’s the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts

Here’s a list of a bunch of known oral history projects

And this is the podcast Making Gay History, which is taped interviews done for the book of the same name (with a bit of context added beforehand)

[melon-official]

i hope everyone with acne, eczema, vitiligo, psoriasis, dermatitis, and skin conditions have a good day today

[melon-official]

[melon-official]

thanks guys while im here PLEASE put an acne option on your picrews

[crowslunasidhe]

I definitely needed the positivity ever since I started struggling with an autoimmune related rash.

Thanks 😊

[amvi1323-deactivated20201209]

Shoutout to everyone with intertrigo and hidradenitis suppurativa. It sucks, but you don’t.

[biandlesbianliterature]

Maggie reviews A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Maggie reviews A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

I picked up A Memory Called Empireas part of my ongoing fling with space opera as a great antidote to quarantine. There’s something about complicated plots, action, and space, that is really great for pulling me out of my apartment and into a nice brain space right now. This was a lovely book, full of meticulous, engaging world-building, fascinating plot developments, and a really interesting…

View On WordPress

[thecolorsfucked]

there's also loveonblackwomen by shavonda sisson u could be donating to that gives funds directly to black women and enbies and has personally saved my ass multiple times

[ms-demeanor]

I saw a video talking about why schools shouldn't grade or assign homework the other day (interesting video! I support a lot of what the speaker was saying!) But at one point word searches were described as obvious busywork - what's the point in teaching kids to read diagonal words, after all?

Diagnosing dyslexia. Diagnosing dyslexia. Diagnosing dyslexia.

After going through IB classes in high school, after finishing my BA while working full time, after failing algebra with the same teacher two years in a row, there is no kind of homework that has ever made me cry so hard as word searches did in the 3rd grade.

If you've got a kid who has been working on a word search for an hour and is crying and telling you "the words aren't there," if you've got a kid who never knows what the pictures are in connect-the-dots because they can't connect the dots in the correct order, if you've got a kid who can't read analog clock faces after months of being taught how to read time, if you've got a kid who retranscribes all their music class handouts as letters because they can't wrap their head around reading music, I'm begging you to get your kid tested for dyslexia/dyscalculia.

And I'm begging you to get them tested before they learn how to mask so hard that it's difficult to get an official diagnosis because if they need disability accommodations in college they're going to need a diagnosis but they're going to be so good at masking their disorder that it's going to be difficult to prove that they need accommodations. And 'well if you can get by well enough that as an adult you can pass a test designed to diagnose children you must not need help' is bullshit because those tests don't make you do algebra or learn a new character set.

[ms-demeanor]

Kid *sitting at the table with a book of sheet music for recorders open, carefully counting lines on the staff and then writing down a letter next to a line of letters in a spiral notebook, checking off the note, then carefully counting down the lines of the staff again*

Adult: Why are you making this so much harder on yourself? Just read the music.

Kid *stares into the camera like The Office the memorizes the fingering for a three minute piece of music so they can pretend to read along with the class*

LEARN TO RECOGNIZE THE SYMPTOMS OF LEARNING DISABILITIES, JERK. YOU'RE A COLLEGE PROFESSOR FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

[foodffs]

[foodffs]

VEGAN BIRTHDAY CAKE

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

[queerpontmercy]

less “if you see a man and woman together at pride be nice! they could be bi/pan/trans/ace/aro” and more “stop gendering strangers to harass them anywhere, but especially at pride holy shit”

[queerpontmercy]

you know what? i want this to reach the people who do this– especially the ones claiming to support trans folk (usually in really hollow ways lol i’m not bitter). keep reblogging– i want this sentiment to be widespread and for people to stop gendering strangers! especially in explicitly LGBTQ+ spaces!

[beausbugbiome]

“...all species should have the opportunity to reach their full life potential— that we humans have no right to play fast and loose with species diversity driven by short-sighted judgments about which species we see as cute or useful. This means we have a moral duty to take the best possible care of our planets myriad creatures— including those that do not engage in any visible value creation, insects that do not have soft fur and big brown eyes, and species we see no point in.” — ‘Extraordinary Insects’ By Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson 🐞