just a bit batshit

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[bludragongal]

"I should be posting this on Patreon."

[thetetra]

If being hard on yourself worked it would have worked by now

[breelandwalker]

"But what can I DO?"

Do one thing.

Start there, do ONE thing to help. Take an active role in bettering your little corner of the world by solving One Small Problem, whatever it might be.

It may not fix Everything, but it fixes Something. One less thing is broken. One less task needs doing. One less place is uncared for. One less heart is heavy. One less stomach is empty. One less voice is silent.

And that is not nothing.

[sirfrogsworth]

The most frustrating thing about the current SNAP discourse is not that the elderly, disabled, and children are losing money for food.

It's that SNAP kinda sucks.

SNAP grossly underserves everyone in the program.

At my poorest, I was able to qualify for a whopping $20 per month.

And I can't currently qualify because I inherited a house. I guess the idea is I could sell the house and then pay for food. And then when I run out of money in a year or so, I will be homeless. Then I can qualify for slightly more SNAP. Maybe they will double it to $40.

But $20 is $20 and when you are struggling and desperate, it still helps. And if you are frugal, you can make $20 stretch.

But Republicans are acting like a 90 year old can just get a job. Or that disabled people like me can start driving an Uber.

SNAP sucks, but nothing sucks a lot more.

The GOP really seems hellbent on destroying things without any plan to address the consequences.

"Obamacare is bad."

"Agreed."

"We should end Obamacare."

"Oh, so you have something better to replace it?"

"We do not."

I know this is going to affect a lot of conservatives. And there is still this part of me that hopes they will realize they voted against their own self interest. That *maybe* there is a threshold of suffering they will not tolerate to own the libs.

But history has shown that threshold may not exist.

[depsidase]

[duckbunny]

one of the many reasons to insist upon chronological timelines is that it's much, much harder to scroll forever if you can catch up with yourself. if you can run out of tumblr because you reach yesterday, that is a good and helpful prompt to do something else.

[snommelp]

[maureen2musings]

Autumn in the Scottish Highlands

ellisreed

[walkuponacloud]

Long exposures

Prints | Instagram | Photography

[wizardarchetypes]

i think a lot of ppl assume food pantries are for if you're completely destitute and have no food in your house at all.

just so you know if you forego certain foods because you can't afford them or you can't "justify" spending the money, you might be able to get that food at a pantry.

i was living in a super wealthy area once where the only grocery store within a 40 minute drive was all fancy upcharged local organic and i literally pretty much stopped eating fresh produce because i couldn't afford it. i went months without eating a carrot or greens or anything that didn't come from a can. sometimes i got frozen veggies.

so sure, i was eating. i wasn't starving. i was getting nutrition. but it was nuts that as an animal on earth where plants grow in abundance, i didn't get to eat any of them fresh. people deserve fresh produce!

one day i was lamenting it and my friend was like, "oh yeah i get all of my produce every week at the food pantry."

i was surprised bc she made the same paycheck as me and i wouldn't have thought of either of us as someone who 'qualified' for food assistance. i went to the food pantry and found out because the median income in our town was so high, i did qualify. more than that, they asked for no proof of income, it was more of a 'if you think you need help, we don't make you prove it,' situation.

for like 8 months i got all of my produce (and eggs!) there every week. and yes if i had made sacrifices elsewhere in my life i probably could have afforded some produce at the local grocery store. i could have, i don't know, skipped seeing the one movie i saw at a move theater once every couple of months and spent the $8 on spinach one time instead of the ticket and had spinach once every couple of months.

but the point is the food pantry had more than enough to go around. if i hadn't taken some of their produce, it would have gone bad. the resource was available to me, and there was no reason for me to crawl on my hands and knees to qualify for it.

resources like food assistance are not available everywhere and they can be very limited and hard to come by. they won't be given out just for fun to anyone. if you ask for assistance and are offered assistance in reply, you need to believe that the assistance is available for you.

if a food assistance program doesn't have resources to help you, it'll say so. there is no harm in asking! you will be told 'yes' or 'no.' but you won't know until you ask.

stop convincing yourself that you don't deserve assistance, that everyone else needs it more than you, that you're taking it from someone else, that you should have nothing at all in order to deserve anything.

you deserve to not only eat but to eat well. if there's assistance for you to access better foods than what you have, understand how fortunate you are, and stop denying yourself that resource!

accessing food assistance at pantries is also a great way to help yr community, because you can spread the word and help normalize receiving food assistance in yr community. you can even become a volunteer and be part of the team providing to you and others (i did that and it rocked)!

my point is, yes, there is always someone who needs something 'more' than others. i have been completely destitute and it sucks. but when i went to the food pantry never once did i think, 'nobody better be here if they have more than me.' i was grateful that we all had support.

[charmcoin]

one fun thing about living in the midwest is that they're selling pigs on facebook marketplace. 300 dollars could buy me a new and interesting problem

[espanolbot2]

Doctor’s Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will

A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when she was forced to have it removed.

A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.

[marxistcrap]

Specifically, because she couldn't afford to buy the implant from the company. They basically took her implant back to recoup their losses. This is what happens when you privatize healthcare and health research. The group providing her with this implant should not have been able to go bankrupt in the first place, let alone repossess her implant to pay off their debts.

[femmeharlequin-deactivated20240]

This is what disabled people mean when we say that cyberpunk horror is just a reality for us. This woman was literally forced to undergo a surgery because she couldn't pay to keep the implant already inside her brain. How long till companies start repossessing pacemakers and transplants?

[princesssokphanny]

A once-in-a-lifetime shot — the moon perfectly framed by a rainbow. Caught at just the right time. 🌈 🌕

[str-ngeloop]

probably tomorrow i'm gonna somehow be more organized and disciplined than i ever have been in my whole life so i'm fine probably

[luulapants]

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

[naamahdarling]

Finally, a good fucking take.

[rederiswrites]

The trouble with mending, and all the cute visible mending trends especially, is that mending is predicated on the idea that what you have is an essentially sturdy garment that has worn out in a high-wear area or gotten damaged/torn. Whereas what most of us are actually dealing with is cheaply made shit that has simply given out at the first sign of adversity. If you mend something that's weak to begin with, it's entirely likely that it will just tear at the edge of the mend, which will suddenly be the strongest part of the garment. Or if your shirt has worn through or ripped out at the seam, it's just a crap shirt, and you can fix that seam, but another will give soon, and you have to make an honest assessment of whether the work you put in is worth it. My cheap Hanes white cotton socks blow out at the heels far faster than they ever used to, and fuck a bunch of that, but I'd never bother darning them. They'll just blow out at the toes in a month.

I don't have a solution to offer for this that doesn't involve spending either more money or more time. It is still barely possible to buy quality clothing, but it costs more than most of us can afford. And you can still make your own clothing, but as the skills and tools become less common, it's all the harder to learn. All I can say is look around, make a real assessment of your resources (like, say, Grandma still has a working machine and a stash of probably unfashionable but maybe cute fabric, or you think you can afford two pairs of good work pants a year and then keep them mended), and do your best.

[boschintegral-photo]

Ueno Toshogu Autumn Dahlia Garden Tokyo, Japan