well, shit

[theexhaustedmermaid]

Quick post on what’s happening in Atlanta right now

So there’s this beautiful trail in Atlanta called the South River Forest Trail. As we all know, Atlanta Georgia is renowned for their tree cover and historic forests. 

The City of Atlanta and corporations like Delta, AT&T and Amazon are funding a massive police training center that will destroy the forest.

Dubbed ‘cop city’ by many protesters, this will cost about $90 million  to build. This will be used to further militarize Atlanta’s police leading to more incidents of police brutality in the city. 

On January 18th indigenous activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran was shot and killed by the police for defending this historic forest from destruction. Their reason? “He did not comply”. Many protests have been going on in Atlanta to defend this forest.

Since Tortuguita’s death, the situation has quickly deteriorated

This forest is very dear to me but I am unable to physically protest at the moment, so I am handing this off to Tumblr to spread awareness. Rebloging this may help this tragedy become part of national news instead of just an Atlanta problem.

Donation and petition links to stop cop city

https://www.gofundme.com/f/stoptheswap2020

https://act.colorofchange.org/sign/no-cop-city-atl/

https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/solidarity

[jackawful]

Some more important context: around a week before the Georgia State Patrol killed Tortuguita, a joint op between them & the Atlanta police resulted in six people being arrested and charged under a state-level domestic terrorism law for tree sitting. There are also records of police radio chatter from before Tort’s death talking about what actions from forest defenders could be justified as “lethal force encounters,” I.e, justification for cops to fire on forest defenders.

Currently, there’s a court injunction against the contractors that were set to clear-cut and tear down infrastructure in the forest. They’re going ahead anyway with tearing up sidewalks, cutting trees, and even demolishing a fucking gazebo. Because it’s for a police facility that police want to happen, the injunction is essentially unenforceable - hypothetically, cops should be upholding The Law and taking action to stop development, instead, they are trying to clear the forest of residents by force; first chemical weapons, now actual live ammunition.

Last night (1/21), a vigil for Tort turned into a revolt in which the Atlanta police foundation was targeted, cop car windows smashed, and a cop car lit on fire.

Luckily, forest defenders in Atlanta have already built up enough alternative media structure that they were able to get information about Tortuguila’s death out ahead of police press releases. On the media side of the fight here, it’s important to boost sources that are reporting from the ground and not giving credance to police press releases, because cops are especially motivated to lie here. It seems that, failing to spin this to mainstream press in a way that frames protestors as the bad guys, the strategy may be to deny the story oxygen & try to keep it from going national. Raising awareness isn’t the be-all-end-all of activism, but in this case, it’s really, really important. Please talk about this with your friends, family, and coworkers. Put it on your social media. The more people know, the less the cops & their corporate allies can control the story, and the more national pressure can work against Cop City being built.

[sigynpenniman]

A short list of things I think everyone should try or do at least once in their life that will make you feel more alive. Not all of these are applicable to every person, but it’s a summary:

Take a dance class of any style with a semi-serious instructor for at least 4 classes worth

Write a work of fiction, of *any* length and *any* quality

Learn a least a bit of a language that isn’t your native one. You don’t need to become anywhere near fluent, but try and get a bit beyond yes, no, and where’s the bathroom. If you’re from a country where most people are bilingual already, that doesn’t count! Get bits of a language with which you are truly unfamiliar.

In the same vein, make peace with subtitles and start consuming music, TV and movies from cultures that aren’t your own. If your country imports large amounts of media from a specific other culture or cultures (American movies in foreign markets, for example) that also doesn’t count! Get some feelers out to begin to take in content from a culture that you don’t already have a lot of knowledge of.

Try at least one less common/less “exercisey” and more fun type of physical exercise such as roller blading or roller or ice skating, gymnastics, trampoline, rock climbing, aerial silks, pole dancing, surfing, etc

Learn a hobby or craft that produces a physical finished product and produce a single, complete object - regardless of quality - that you can hold in your hands and say that you made.

Look up a how it’s made video or YouTube video on how an item that’s interesting or relevant to you is made

Give one type of thing - media, hobby, sport, whatever - that you’ve never been interested in or never tried because of some preconceived perception an honest shot and see if your perception was correct. Sometimes it won’t be, sometimes it will be, but it’s valuable to know.

Rearrange the furniture in a room in your home

It’s about NOVELTY, babey! Get some enrichment into your enclosure!

[annabelle--cane]

I'm telling ya if you want people to get better then you have to be nice to them. you have to make an effort to understand why they currently act the way they do and give them compassionate encouragement, it's both way nicer and a million times more effective than trying to slap a bad behaviour out of someone's hands and scream at them about why they were holding it in the first place. maybe you're not up to making that effort, fine, but in that case just do nothing instead of being a dick.

[animentality]

[headspace-hotel]

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

[sliversoakley2-deactivated20210]

[phantom-rin]

THE FUCKING ENDING

[cherrycreamfairy]

Turn on the sound please it's so much better lmao

[dwarfmun]

[video id: a snapchat with the caption "y'all want a horse? he's trying to eat my dog food and my chicks feed i can't deal with him no mo". the person filming waits behind the barn door, and for about 10 seconds, rattling can be heard as the door handle slowly turns and a brown horse pulls the door open with its nose. it rears back as the person filming shouts "I CAUGHT YOUR ASS. GET BACK. YEAH, SUCKA." the horse looks extremely guilty. end id]

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[curlicuecal]

Tiktoker: "like the designer was like 'men are craving business casual and tits- how can we merge the two?'"

[evilbeast-moved]

ilove people who work at front desks of things. i can walk into a building and go to the desk and i ask how do i do this thing. and then they just fucking tell me !!!!

[evilbeast-moved]

i walked into my college found the first desk and asked hey where do i pay my student fees. did that. ok where i do find the academic advisor? got the general direction, went up to the first desk i saw, asked where to go to drop a class .awesome. went to the bookstore, walked up to the desk, asked how to find out what textbooks i need. and AGAIN they had answers for me. this is so cool thank you desk people

[evilbeast-moved]

no this is so real actually !! it always feels like you'll be expected to know everything when you do Adult Things but you don't, actually, you just need to know who to ask

[ceekari]

And usually "who to ask" is the first person you encounter, because that's what that person is there for. They might not have the specific answer to your question, but they'll know who to send you to.

[skunkbear]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.

[thepuppeteer-andthetrashmob]

Isn’t Lady Gaga bisexual?

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

yes that is indeed why she's on the list of famous women who like women

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

why have multiple people reblogged this with some horse-assed "um actually most of these people are bi or pan" did I fucking stutter I said they like girls. what is your point. I'm going to kill you.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

#op probably has this post muted but the icon is too real.

the icon is because of this post

[what-even-is-thiss]

Your sense of self isn’t a static image, bro. It’s more like a climate or a biome. Both of which can shift in gradual ways over time or suddenly due to internal or external factors. Just check the weather report, man. Don’t try to force the sky to stay blue without clouds 24/7.

[opalescent-potato]

[memewhore]

[fousheezy]

License plate “jizz lord”

[lordofdragonss]

https://www.sciencealert.com

[redscharlach]

My name is cow And when I see A scientist Paint stripes on me I look so hip And sleek and fit And best of all I don’t get bit

[amygdalae]

Keying/graffiti-ing someones car is old news now if someone cheats we go at their wardrobe with a seam ripper

yknow what? Fuck you *unstitches all your shirts and jeans*

[melyzard]

My mother did this to my father once. They got into an argument, my very pregnant and hormonal mother stormed off…except they lived in a tiny apartment so the only place to go was to shut herself into the closet for a good long sulk. And while she was sitting in there, fuming, she looked up and saw her sewing kit on the shelf, and all my father’s uniforms hanging right there.

So she picked one shirt and one pair of trousers, carefully, methodically ripped every third stitch out of every seam, and then hung them back up together so that he would be likely to pick them at the same time. This took her a couple hours, so by the time she was done, the anger had worn down. She came out, she and my father had a talk that ended in apologies, after which they were tired and went to bed. My mother swears up and down that she meant to warn my father about the sabotaged clothes in the morning, but he wore a different uniform set and they were both still feeling a little raw, so she didn’t want to bring up the fight again. She decided to tell him that night instead.

And then she forgot.

Anyway, about four days later, my father apparently came home roughly an hour after he left for work, his clothes slowly, gently shredding off his body, the most bewildered expression on his face. “Paula,” he said, his voice mildly shell-shocked. “Paula, my clothes are broken.”

My mother promptly burst out laughing so hard that she went into labor. And that’s the story of my birth, heralded by petty vengeance and utter confusion.

[omegy]

Republican

[bizarro-report-deactivated20171]

[catwithaknife]

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzqpd9/heres-an-insane-story-about-a-rogue-music-teacher-cutting-a-kids-hair

[snailbutch]

what the fuck

[guu]

i’m just gonna take this post for a moment so i can rant but like

i Hate how entitled adults can feel over a child’s hair!

it started when i was young myself, i wanted a mohawk, but my dad didn’t approve of that look on a “girl”, and insisted i’d regret such a bold cut. at 16 i was finally given full autonomy over my own head.

but then i have a son and everyone around us is trying to keep his hair short. when we finally moved out just me my partner and him, i told him he doesn’t need to get any haircuts he doesn’t want.

so he starts growing it out, it’s still short but coming on mid-length. his teacher makes a point to tell me it’s getting long as if i don’t have eyes. i hear her walking out with him one day talking to him about haircuts, as if to coax him into one. eventually i get child services called on me for ‘forcing a transgender lifestyle’ over what i can only assume is from a combination of me drawing cute ponies on his valentine box and letting him go to school in a ponytail.

he kept it short for awhile after but told me he wanted to grow it out again, so i let him of course. he comes home one day after getting a haircut at his grandpa’s and tells me he didn’t Want the haircut.

i ask why he got it then and learned he was bribed with a promise of a surprise IF he cut his hair.

tl;dr people need to back the hell up off of children and let them have owership of what’s on THEIR body! /rant

[e-v-roslyn]

Same thing about getting a child to curl or straighten their hair. Or do anything with it. Just let kids have control over their bodies.

[captainroxythefoxy]

This happened to me when I was little too!! Growing up I had naturally tight Shirley Temple curls. The only problem was that you can’t get a hair brush through it if your life depended on it until it grew out over a few years.

but This One Lady from church decided that leaving my hair messy and curly was child abuse and threatened to call social services on my family every damn time she saw me until one day she was the designated kid watcher and ho boy my momma tells me i came out with tears in my eyes and greasy slicked down hair and that’s where she ends the story because i think my mother beat her ass but yeah.

Leave kids hair alone.

[disease-danger-darkness-silence]

I’m going to be honest, parents who are super-controlling of their children’s hair creep me the fuck out and I’m not entirely certain why except that I get a vague feeling they kind of relegate them to, “annoying talking doll” status.

[pretentioussongtitle]

I loved my daughter’s long blond hair. It was thick and wavy and beautiful but when she told me she wanted it cut short ‘like a boy’(she was four)  I took her to the salon and let her whack it off. 

The stylist was skeptical, ‘are you sure?” and the thing is, she said this to me, not my daughter. So I asked my girl ‘are you sure you want it cut short?’ She was. The hair went. The stylist acted nervous most of the way through like she was waiting for one of us to burst into tears, but it looked cute! And my daughter loved it! (And it’s been short ever since.)

[kintatsujo]

Autonomy over your hair is bodily autonomy and we as a culture need to start holding bodily autonomy as sacred

[mdzhb]

there is a reason that so many of us who’ve experienced trauma will reclaim control over our bodies and our selves by cutting and dying our hair. it’s part of us. it’s part of our expression. that’s vitally important to people, especially kids, who are still early in the process of learning how they fit into the world around them.

[theconcealedweapon]

For some reason, “stop enforcing your gender identity and sexual orientation on children” never applies to cis-het people who are the only ones actually enforcing it.

[discodeerdiary]

Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don't need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it's enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn't do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it's a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.

[discodeerdiary]

This is also a habit I built up from emergency response training. If I say "I need you to bring me a first aid kit and an accident report" and you bring me just a first aid kit, it's so much more efficient to say "thanks now can you bring me an accident report" than "I asked you to bring an accident report why didn't you bring me one".

[discodeerdiary]

Once you've internalized "a person bleeding out is one of the worst times to start an argument" you start to wonder what other tasks could get accomplished without arguing

[zevveli]

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

[elsajeni]

An occupational hazard of cab driving I had not previously considered

[princessnijireiki]

I love that the nola problem here is not “ghosts in my taxi cab,” but “ghosts are FUCKING BROKE DEAD BASTARDS & I GOT BILLS”

[siderealsandman]

Horror is when ghosts get into cabs and scare drivers Magical realism is when cab companies have to develop policies to prevent ghastly fare-theft

[kc749]

In a book about the tsunami in Japan in 2011, the writer talked about how there was a huge increase in reports of ghostly activity. Apparently in Japan treating ghosts rudely is basically considered the stupidest thing you could possibly do. For months after the tsunami, taxi drivers would pick up a passenger only to have them give an address in one of the devastated areas. The cab driver often looked up halfway to the destination to find their fare had disappeared. Not wanting to be impolite to the person (even if they were dead) they’d drive to the address, open the door to let them out, then drive away.

[qwertyu858]

[officialfist]

Yeah this all checks out