Hey! I’m the age of some of your moms and aunts and the OG version of this post helped me catch my cancer in 2023. I had a hysterectomy at the beginning of 2024 and I’ve been cancer-free since then. If I hadn’t read this information, I wouldn’t have reported bleeding to the next doctor I saw. I might have died, and I probably would have had to undergo chemo and/or radiation, both of which I avoided.
you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this
lots of people are reblogging this and tagging it #piracy—i should clarify, this is not piracy! ripping DVDs and CDs to have your own copy is fully legal, because it’s your legal right to do what you will with your property individually. it only becomes illegal if you then distribute that file on the internet.
Now this is an effective boycott. It is targeting (ha) a specific company with a clearly stated goal. The amount of time is long enough to be noticed, and could be extended if needed. Anything that can be purchased at Target can also be obtained elsewhere, so it is actually possible to boycott this specific company for a very long time. Target is caving to fascism and rolling back their diversity and inclusion policies. The goal is for them to reverse that decision. This is an achievable goal.
Boycotting everything all at once, for one day or for as long as you can, because everything is terrible and we’re mad about it…does nothing. It’s vague, disorganized, and frankly impossible. We have to buy things sometimes. You can’t just target the economy as a whole. You have to be specific.
If you want to start a boycott, use this one as an example. Choose one target. Provide one (simple, clear, easy to explain) reason why that company deserves to be boycotted. Explain what you want them to do differently. Make sure that it is something that can actually be done. Then tell people about it.
I have no patience for negativity toward "boomers" anymore.
Almost everybody doing the work to restore ecosystems, grow native plants, and preserve rare species is 50 or older
The people I work with IRL have told me that my presence is encouraging because it means "the younger generation is getting involved with this stuff too." There's really not very many people my age
Who do you think was fighting this fight in the 1970's
I'm saying this as a Gen Z who is woefully lacking in these skills
Social media and the internet have really decimated my generation's ability to network and organize with people IRL
Not in the sense that That Damn Phone causes your skills to atrophy, but rather, Gen Z has no idea how people organized before social media, and no idea what anyone over 40 is doing for good in the world
The vast majority of local native plant, wildlife, and gardening organizations have NO social media presence
I could never have understood this until I started working IRL with people who are absolute powerhouses of knowledge, resources, and action about plants, animals, ecosystems, and conservation...who simply, barely know how to email
It can link you to a few resources, but it is ultimately a complicated device to make you Buy Product
Google will not even show you the best websites out there for learning about the ecosystem. At all. Google recognizes few possible interpretations of your query other than "Google, show me a bunch of advertisements for [thing] so I can Buy Product." If your research doesn't end in Buy Product, Google has no interest in helping you.
Many people think that the way of finding things out before Google was books
But that's more wrong than right.
The way of finding things out before Google was community.
Because there's some old lady in your community who has been gardening and observing wildlife for 40 years who is somehow running a sprawling native plant gardening organization and providing everyone else in your town with seeds and random produce, and she has a library's worth of knowledge absorbed from reading every book and talking to every guy who has any experience about plants, and this old lady has 87 close friends who are somehow involved in every local governmental department and private organization and business, and if she can't answer your question herself, she will be able to hand you a little scrap of note paper with the name of the exact person you need to talk to. She doesn't have an email address
Gen Z seems to regard "having connections" as a bad thing and a way of cheating your way into opportunities that you don't deserve
In reality, it's "opportunities" and "deserve" that indicates something deeply wrong and dysfunctional with our society. Outside of the numerous artificial competitive scenarios we are placed in where we strive against others to perform the ideal persona of worthiness as a human being, "having connections" is just how things get done.
Same with "being a Karen." Taking out your petty frustrations on a powerless retail worker is one thing, summoning every ounce of Upstanding Member Of Society in your middle aged white woman body to rend asunder the guy who approved of bulldozing a wetland is another
@false-binaries I mean honestly that's not far off
1. go to physical place that seems closest to the thing you want to learn about (community garden is great, nature center or farmer's market is also great)
2. observe a person that seems open to chatting with others
3. ask something along the lines of "Hi, I've been trying to learn about [thing], but I'm pretty new to it, do you happen to know anything about it?" Express curiosity about the work done by the place you are in
4. If you manage to hit it off with someone, just kinda hang out. Other people will show up to chat with the person you are talking to. You are now talking to those people as well.
to be fair this works very well for me partly because it's the south and people will talk for 30 minutes after meeting in the middle of the grocery store. but we need to normalize community
Libraries are great for this! Also, just hang around places you know there's people interested in what you're interested in.
I used to participate in a knitting circle at my library. Met all sorts of people there without a email or any social media. At the aquarium I volunteer at, there's an old dude who is very passionate about whales and he sits in front of the beluga exhibit every Thursday. He knows everything about local ocean conservation and collaborates with the local river keepers. Again, no social media and only has a joint email with his wife.
Thing to keep in mind is these people love to talk about their interests so you'll get lots of info. You can also check local news papers as many people put community events in there!
^ can recommend libraries, professionally. also check out cooperative extension programs - they can be a great way to connect with people who are into this kind of thing
and yeah. local newspapers! the actual print copy, which you can also probably find at your local library. plenty of places still do the bulk of their advertising there
I can not overemphasize that gardeners WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT PLANTS.
I sit my ass on my front porch and people walk by and ask me about my plants. It’s FANTASTIC. It’s also normal culture for gardeners because a lot of us get free plants/seeds this way.
I’m in my 40s, bridging that gap between seniors with no email and zoomers with no land. I can direct either towards resources and yes I DO know where you can get involved and yes I DO have milkweed seeds but you do need to refrigerate them before you plant them.
Seriously if you see someone tending a native plant garden they are dying to tell you about it and shove cuttings at you I promise.
Me and my friend had some fun trying to rewrite the sequel trilogy a while ago and I think the best idea we had was Luke dies and Han and Rey get stranded on some nowhere planet where he has to haphazardly attempt to teach her years of jedi training in like a week entirely by reading out of Luke’s notes (somehow even worse than Luke’s extremely DIY training in the OT).
This isn’t at all based on the ‘Han has the force’ theory it’s literally just crabby atheist old man Han Solo and his dead best friend’s religious texts that are totally useless to him vs the world.
i LOVE that, disney needs to get you two rewriting the sequels STAT
EVERYONE GREAT NEWS REWRITE ANON RETURNED AND BLESSED US W MORE! i'll copy & paste the rest of the asks under the cut ⬇️ it's pretty long but worth the read (ive left my own notes in pink)
[continued from screenshot] We didn’t come up with a new name for Kylo Ren/Ben Solo but we did come up with a new arc and I put him in a traditional Alderaanian cape in the concept art sketches because he deserves to be an Organa (potes notes: YES!!!). I also gave him a lightning scar instead of a lightsaber scar because it made a bit more sense.
Our general plan was that yes, he’s still evil, at least a bit. His parents and uncle are awe-inspiring war heroes as well as being incredibly busy making sure the entire Galaxy doesn’t collapse in on itself in the power vacuum left behind by the Empire. Luke is part of a humanitarian aid/Geneva Convention type wing of the New Republic and Kylo finds himself both feeling like he lacks the means to prove himself and like they’re not doing enough to squash the threat of insurgence - which is still a clear threat and there have been multiple attempts on his mother’s life that have left the family scared. He absorbs certain parts of his mother and father’s political conduct; Leia’s willingness to fight for what’s right and Han’s general impulsiveness.
Anyway keep that in mind. He makes a stupid bid to try and prove himself by trying to fight off a whole imperial remnant cell alone “Just like the Jedi used to do.” and ends up going completely missing. Tl/dr: he’s super close to death and the big bad of the movie steps in to save him, teaching him what he always wanted to learn - how to fight and defend the people you love rather than focusing on connection to the force. Kylo doesn’t see the significance of that side of things, both because his parents don’t have an interest in it and because he’s grown up with tales of the daring exploits of Master Luke taking on ten people at once and chopping robots to bits. He just wants to make people proud of him. (OHHH THIS IS SO GOOD SO SO MUCH BETTER)
He’s pretty young when this happens too, and eventually his mind is twisted to believe that the only way to keep everyone safe is dictatorship. He’s grown up in a long, slow, difficult democracy with constant political unrest and everyone’s described how powerful and stable the Empire was his whole life - doesn’t matter that they were talking about how cool it was that they beat it. He still absorbed all that. (THIS IS SUCH A GOOD CHARACTER MOTIVATION and also great setup for themes/discussions on radicalisation and its like poetry it rhymes w anakin's fall omg)
Anyway, flash forward to the time of the films. He’s not a Sith, he can’t manage to push himself that far into the dark side. But he wants to be. He’s got a complex about it, he’s obsessed with getting stronger because then maybe they’ll be proud of me. He loses his first fight with Rey, not because she’s strong in the force at this point, but because he’s trained himself to the point of exhaustion after being reprimanded for a minor failure in interrogating Poe. He can barely move and he’s on the verge of fainting when they corner him in fact. He’s practically addicted to the pain of overtraining himself because that pain is what connects him to the dark side. (GOOD FIX!! 10/10 writing omg)
When Rey actually becomes a more formidable opponent in the force, he asks her “Who trained you?” and she tells him it was Han, not knowing the blow this is going to strike. This gets in his head. Badly. Han never understood the force when he was a kid, and was still not the best at being emotionally vulnerable (he was a great dad! But he was still the man who said “I know.” to “I love you.” (oop yep ok see ur point LOL)). Kylo isn’t to know that Han was FORCED to overcome this stuff through a brief stay in absolute hell. He asks what she can possibly have that he doesn’t, how is she better than him? And when he lashes out at Rey, telling her about the Han he knew, she doesn’t believe him and calls him a liar and a terrible son. This fight (which takes place on water) ends up with Rey almost drowning as Kylo throws a massive force tantrum, and Kylo having a breakdown under the sea in a force air bubble after the fight is over.
I think I’ll do a couple more asks because this one has been super long! I’m sorry if this was a chore to read I just thought I’d share if you liked the last one hah.
Rewrite anon again! I’m sorry if this is getting tedious!
We had a general plan for Kylo Ren’s redemption where Rey would be in danger of falling to the dark side by the end of the second film (IM LISTENING), and Kylo would already be on the path to questioning things after some hard hitting blows
Death of Luke (his master) (;-;)
Rey was trained by and kind of adopted by Han and has become the galaxy’s beacon of hope. Maybe it is all on him. And she loves Han so much that it’s hard for his new master to twist the facts on him anymore.
The third film would be a fucked up family reunion type bit where Kylo begs for forgiveness and him and Han set off to try and save Rey together. (YESSSSSSS!!! omg this is everything to me holy shit)
Thanks for the listen! I hope these aren’t too annoying. (IM LOVING IT)
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Rewrite anon again (sorry). Wanted to mention Leia, Poe and Finn.
Leia is dealing with a massive insurgence threat which is why she sends Rey (galaxy’s last hope) away with Han (good at hiding. Also the only person she could both trust and spare).
Finn and Poe both comment a lot on how Rey’s galactic significance makes her blind to people’s lives. The New Order might keep her alive because she’s valuable, and Kylo might listen to her, but Finn and Poe are both canon fodder to both Kylo and the New Order. Hierarchy of lives and all that. (oooo yes that'd be such a fun like... counterpoint to the whole Skywalker Saga & fate-destiny-soap-opera)
Poe used to be a fighter pilot but is now more of a political leader and provides a necessary voice in the senate to backwater outer rim planets. He’s Leia’s political mentor (i assume you meant mentee/student?) with none of her royal manners and all of her intensity.
Finn isn’t exactly a clone, but he is grown in a lab. He’s more of a super-soldier than a clone, designed at the genetic level to be basically eugenics’ perfect man. (puts on my CATWS stan hat im listening) He becomes a field agent/espionage/sabotage type guy after defecting from the New Order because he doesn’t want to be involved in active combat any more, even though it’s hardwired into him and he has to fight it the whole way. Luke takes a liking to Finn before his death and teaches him about the importance of forging your own identity first before you start to think about where you’ve come from.
Hope you like the ideas lol we had a lot.
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Final (?) ask from rewrite anon maybe. It’s about Han because we did kinda just make the Han movies I realise.
Han saves Rey from pirates after she finally cheats herself offworld for the first time and finds herself overwhelmed. After losing Kylo to the New Order he has long since realised his shortcomings in parenting and while he works up the courage to reach out to his son, he uses Rey kind of like a do-over child. (...healthy!)
Han ends up stuck with Rey after Luke’s death and with Leia pinned down on all sides, and as well as trying to give her super DIY teaching, he realises she can talk to Luke. Understandably this hits him like a truck while he’s grieving his friend, and him and Luke have a kind of Haymitch and Katniss communicating-without-communicating relationship. Han can’t see or hear Luke, but he knows when Luke’s trying to use timing to tell him something. (AGH I LOVE THISSSSSSSSSSS YES using a THG comparison makes me love it even more)
Han also survives until the end of the films. Harrison Ford would hate me for this he wants that guy to die so bad but no the smuggler from the fuck end of nowhere with no cosmic significance, no nothing, just the power of love and a gun makes it to the end. The survivor’s guilt is insane. (ohh LOVE THATTT!!! ESPECIALLY W UR EARLIER THING OF FINN N POE SEEING THEMSELVES AS CANON FODDER WITHOUT A GALACTIC DESTINY)
Hope you enjoyed reading these and that they weren’t too much of a bore. Maybe I’ll write some of this stuff down if people like it. (EVERYONE TELL ANON HOW MUCH YOU LIKE THIS RIGHT NOW)
Rey does of course lose her hand (fair, as is tradition) and she replaces it with a shitload of gadgets massively egged on by Han and Chewie. I think she’d have a special glove for it kind of like the equalist gloves in LOK. (SICK!)
Would also be great to have a ‘jedi’ protagonist who is even less aware of standard practice than Luke and will try definitely illegal moves like changing the length of the blade mid fight or kicking sand in your opponent’s eyes. (LMAO amazing omg)
---------------------------------------- (that was the last ask)
the good news is you can donate to PBS directly yourself. When they say “made possible by viewers like you,” they mean it.
PBS is not one monolith out of DC or Los Angeles. It’s dozens of regional nonprofits working together as a network to produce content dedicated to telling meaningful stories about the communities you live in, made by people in your community, with the purpose of uplifting underrepresented communities in a respectful and nuanced way that isnt clickbait or rage bait-y. as intended by their national founding charter. And some of that programming, yes, just so happens to be nationally syndicated and distributed.
Watch PBS and donate. You can even stream it through your local channel on their national app that’s available on iOS, Android, Roku, and etc.
This sounds like an ad but I swear it’s not. I just fucking love PBS ok. And it doesn’t get nearly as much appreciation as it deserves.
PBS News is also one of the only news programs that portrayed Israel's genocide of Palestine and their attacks on Lebanon without overwhelming dishonest pro Israel bias
And PBS itself spent the last year and change doing features on Muslim American history.
A series of six short documentary films that reveal and explore the early history of Muslims in America. The series is hosted by three leadi
This is what happens when you're paid for by the people and not by corporate interests and billionaires. Support PBS.
“make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session.”
I was in a city council meeting last week about defunding the police and one of the council members mentioned multiple times that she’d been inundated with calls and emails all that day saying to defund the police.
[ID: Two screenshots of a twitter thread by alex flanigan, anti-fascist @Coff33Detective from June 12, 2020 beginning at 11:25 AM that reads: hi! i work in local government and community management, and i’m here to tell you a secret: it is like, really, really easy to overwhelm the people who work in your local government. especially right now. especially on things they can actionably do or impact.
you may not know this, but i bet your city or town or municipality has a website. i bet that website has some contact forms or email addresses on it. i bet you can use them to put together a message in about 5 minutes! i bet it’s almost as easy as signing a national petition.
which is to say: i’m noticing, like most other people, that the national level discussion on really important and long overdue issues is flagging. but the internet and news cycle is not the only battleground, and you will be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to—
—fight those battles at home, on your own turf, with much more immediate impact, and they are so, so important.
I am begging you: make my job, and the jobs of people like me, difficult right now. flood us with demands. make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session. End ID]
I’ve been a city council observer with the League of Women Voters for nearly a year, and I have witnessed the following:
A few guys voicing their anxiety about speeding on a street where their children play and suggesting a radar speed sign. Despite catching all of two meetings where this was mentioned, I walked back home one day and–yep–there was a radar speed sign up.
A persistent force of 3-5ish loud residents coming to zoning and council meetings because they did not want a drive through style restaurant moving into a particular area where there were already major issues with traffic congestion and safety. This eventually resulted in a Chik-fil-a having its planning proposal shot down by council such that the lot is now likely to house an Aldi. I am getting low cost groceries instead of bigotry chicken in my neighborhood because of a D&D party’s worth of regular speakers.
A turnout of residents shouting down an attempt to reduce the amount of funding for the community Juneteenth celebration until Council backed down. One meeting. Roughly a dozen people + their kids speaking about the significance of the holiday. The celebration ended up having its full funding restored.
In my experience, it is incredibly easy to bully local politicians and get some sort of results, especially in small municipalities. If you have something that you want to see happen at the local level, seriously try to contact your local officials and see what you can make happen.
You genuinely don’t even always have to go to a meeting btw. If you have a Facebook, those council members are in your local Facebook groups.Do you know how easy it is to tag your mayor and go “hey what are you gonna do about this?” over everything? Do you know how often that WORKS?
Government From Above looks easy. Command your followers to do shit and they do it, right?
Except when they don’t. Because all of a sudden their neighbors get in their faces.
Then the whole thing comes apart.
It’s easy for people to think Their Boy and their way of thinking has won, beating the Evil Other Side. They think they can then go back to arguing with their HOA and worrying about the price of eggs.
Teach them otherwise!
Turn up at local political meetings and have those people understand that you’re not just going to roll over and let them have their way. Yell at them. (In words bigger than they were equipped to understand, if you feel that’s the way to go.) Give them to understand that they are not right, and you will be back again to get up their ill-prepared noses about this. And again. And again. (Because they’ll never really be ready for opposition. No one’s taught them that. They’re just cannon fodder, poor things. They were never meant to go into battle.)
People hate looking stupid repeatedly in front of other people. You can tire them out. You can make them give up. You can make them feel there’s no point in it.
Don’t talk yourself out of this. The Goddess of Justice must descend from great heights to effect herself into the works of human beings. Don’t talk yourself out of “your turn in the barrel.” (As some humans have been known to call it.) It won’t last that long. Almost none of your opponents have any staying power. (Remember Punched-in-The-Face-Nazi guy? He had a huge online presence. It took one punch to make him vanish.)
Let the folks you’re opposing understand that you’re going to keep on doing this every time they show up. Let them get the sense that you’re willing to be unreasonable about this. They’ve been thinking they’re the “sane” ones in this discourse. Teach them that they may possibly be incorrect.
Be persistent. Some of them will never have seen persistence in their lives. (As opposed to repeating somebody else’s talking points over and over again, which isn’t the same thing at all.) True persistence requires creativity! Every day, make a new way to come at them. They will never be able to keep up with you.
If enough of us do this… we can take whole legislative structures back: from the bottom up.
So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.
This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”
I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”
I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”
I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.
Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community.
Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.
I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).
And here’s the key point of this story:
At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.
It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.
The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it.
I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.
When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.
snowghoul
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
titsay
