var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-36927401-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Just my random thoughts and pictures.
Okay guys, so on the eve of getting rid of our fucking authoritarian leader, I will tell you how we did it, despite the governments overwhelming media presence and fucking undercover operations against the opposition.
It was actually said best by a Hungarian comic, I'm paraphrasing a bit: If your house is on fire, you can't be like 'well that's not the fireman I imagined'.
I know it's been said a thousand times before, I know everybody is raging against having to vote for a less than ideal candidate, but today has proven that it fucking works. It's the only thing that works. And if the new guy is just a step closer to what you want? That's a fucking win. That's a fucking step in the right direction.
Ya'll remember how online games made specifically for children were programmed in a way that made it practically impossible to share your personal info?
When age, gender, location was censured like profanity in the name of protecting kids?
But suddenly the Only Way to keep children safe online is to make sure that they have 0 privacy?
And the official Samurai Troopers account posted the opening and ending on Youtube! Check them out (and watch them in slow motion too â there's a lot going on and scenes fly by pretty quickly)!
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatâs a big deal! Iâve never thought about it before but now that I have, itâs ridiculous to me that thatâs not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donât we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itâs July 20th. Thatâs the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iâm ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iâm going to have a goddamn potluck. Youâre all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
I scheduled this in 2025 to give you all a week to make Moon Day Monday preparations! I think I will order a little rocket cake or bake some moon phase cookies!
I think I am officially Fandom Old. I am so worn out from the arguments on who's the top or the bottom (who cares), what is allowed to be written (anything you want, bejeebus), what is Problematic (I know, just tag it), what other people Should Do (they Should live their lives free of judgment). There isn't a Right Way to do things. Tag your stuff appropriately, don't read stuff you don't want to read, and leave other people (me) alone.
There is nothing quite like the freedom of having gone through all of the Discourse and come out the other side into the promised land of Not Giving A Fuck.
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 ghostsâskeletal, 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 ingredientâthe cannabisâwas 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 Maryâs 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 Clubâthe 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
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
One of those fandom things that I love is when thereâs new characters around and, with the unwavering confidence of an old farmer appraising cattle, fanfic authors take one good look at them, tilt their imaginary hat, and go âAye. Praise kink, that one. Mighty case of praise kink if I ever saw one.â And everyone else just âaye.â
âI donât think the Highschool AU is going to come in too strong this year. Fandoms a touch jaded for that. But the hurt/comfort is growinâ thick as weeds and twice as fast. Itâll be a good harvest, fer sure.â
âI think Iâm going to sow some rarepairs this season. Donât know what the market for âem will be, but I can eat âem if nobody else wants to.â
As a two time sexual assault survivor, let me say so many of you stupid motherfuckers on this website will turn gleefully fascist at the prospect of punishing sex criminals as if false accusations of sex crime are not THE most common falsehood used to justify hate crimes against minorities, particularly people of color and LGBTQ folk - who, I will remind you, are disproportionately likely to be victims of SA themselves.
Like yeah! Give the government the legal power to sterilize criminals! That will never be a problem! Alan Turing? Never heard of him! It doesn't have horrible implications for the concept of bodily autonomy! Sexual abuse and abortion are famously completely different subjects!
Death penalty for sex offenders? It's not like there are already massive structural inequalities that make the death penalty vastly more likely to be used against people who are non-white, and among the white people it DOES get used on, they are overwhelmingly either poor, mentally ill or both! It's also not like making the death penalty available for crimes that are not murder heavily incentivizes murder as a way of removing a potential witness, since it carries the same penalty!
It's not as if there is a widespread fascist campaign to portray gender-affirming care as "sexual abuse" in the exact same jurisdictions that are also trying to push the death penalty for sex crimes! It's not as if the Tulsa massacre and the lynching of Emmett Till were "justified" by false accusations of sexual misconduct!
As someone who's been assaulted twice, your rhetoric doesn't actually help survivors like me live in a safer world. In fact, it contributes to a climate of thought in which the fascists who are openly gloating about sexually assaulting people thrive. They have the power right now - do you think they're going to use it to punish themselves? Do you think the motherfuckers on the Epstein List have any intention to be held accountable to their own laws?
"Oh, but I'd only use the justice system against real sexual abusers who actually committed sex crimes!" Yeah buddy that's exactly what the fascists said. You do not live in a magical world where you can exclusively punish the people who are actually guilty and will never fall for a false allegation. You will not build that world by doing the exact same things the fascists do and saying the exact same things the fascists say.
And don't think I haven't noticed that a whole lot of the people preaching fire and brimstone upon "only the truly guilty" are also happy to accuse people of being rapists and groomers for such horrific acts as... drawing BDSM art or writing noncon fiction. You know, things a lot of survivors do to process and cope with trauma, and that a lot of perfectly upstanding people do because they're into weird shit. Put simply and impolitely, I don't trust you baying-for-blood rabid fucking animals to know what a "real sexual abuser" looks like. Let's also not forget that some of you think pointing this shit out is the same as "defending sex abusers," because you are deeply unserious clowns.
One thing I never see any of the people who act like this do is actually talk about resources for survivors. In fact, a lot of the people who talk this way are the same people who don't want to spend their tax dollars on rape crisis centers, abuse shelters or comprehensive sex education - and even where they permit them to exist, they love to exclude trans people (who suffer sexual abuse at atrocious rates compared to their cis counterparts) from these services.
A society in which basic human rights cannot be taken away from even the most loathsome, horrendous people is the only one in which any of us can be safe, because it doesn't take as much as you think for the people with the power to convince everyone else that you are the most loathsome, horrendous person.
listening to CDs in the kitchen i always brace myself for the ad between songs but then it just keeps rolling. skipping around how i like without interruption feels heavenly. we're in such a commercial angst prison that books and CDs are luxury now đ
protect, pass on, thrift, gift, and store physical media, it's worth it
I love that Leverage really goes out of itâs way to show us that just because you break the ârulesâ, it doesnât mean youâre breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think thatâs the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.
#there was a time when parker wouldnât have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)
This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc Iâd had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).
But somewhere along the line they just⊠Disappeared. My mom says theyâre not being paid and theyâre not in collections. Itâs almost as if someone out there didâŠexactly what Parker did.
Ever since I saw this the first time, Iâve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.
Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I donât remember the exact process but basically thereâs a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But itâs also entirely possible for people to just⊠buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that itâs possible to exploit it for good sometimes.
Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that heâd bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.
yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. Theyâre completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. Iâm a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt theyâve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if youâre doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. thatâs a pretty good deal, I think.
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