meet the ridiculous fluffballs I’ve been feeding since they were born in one of the feral cat shelters I put in the back garden. They are 9 weeks old, and @lemonsharks caught them and we have been trading off petting/cuddling/washing/feeding them since I think Friday? I no longer have any sense of what day it is, thanks to constant dosing with Benedryl, and getting up every hour last night to check on them.
Possibly I may have spent $$$$ I don’t really have on fancy schmancy kitten food in the last 9 weeks. So we may pass the hat at some point, since we both lost our jobs about 2 weeks after they were born, and there are going to be vet bills to pay as well.
They are adorbs and ridic, and I’m pretty sure all 4 are getting adopted (@lemonsharks has already claimed Jones). Now that we know they are 3 boys and a girl, names are being adjusted. Stone’s twin is most likely Cillian now, but Flynn is staying Flynn because she is so very Flynn.
okay guys, we need to talk about a movie called Big Eden
It’s about this dude Henry who’s an artist living in New York,
and he has to go back to his hometown in Montana to take care of his grandfather who just recently had a stroke and is wheelchair-bound.
Things are all fine and dandy until Henry finds out that his old best friend from high school, as well as object of his unrequited affections that he’s never really been able to let go of is also back in town. His name is Dean. He’s there with his two sons to recoup from a recent divorce from his wife.
Henry is extremely frazzled by seeing his long-time crush after so many years, but they spend a lot of time together over the passing weeks and seem to fall into their old friendship very easily. Perhaps a little too easily….??? hmmm???
And with everything with Dean happening, Henry can’t be blamed that he’s entirely oblivious to Pike, the man who runs the local general goods store.
It’s obvious to us (and the whole damn town) that Pike’s been head over heels for Henry since high school, but is painfully shy. He can barely talk to Henry at all and it’s the cuTEST GODDAMN THING oh lord help me from this movie.
Throughout the movie, Pike can’t seem to help himself from wanting nothing more than to make Henry happy from afar. He’s supposed to be delivering food cooked by one of the older ladies in town to Henry and his grandfather’s house to eat every night, but Pike cooks his own, exceptionally better meals, and delivers those instead and tells no one.
Now, Henry does notice Pike, and something about him catches his attention. Even if he doesn’t understand why yet. He tries to invite him to stay for dinner almost every night in an attempt to get him to open up, but Pike only becomes more closed off when he notices what’s going on between Henry and Dean.
I’ll stop there, as I don’t want to give the whole thing away, but I can’t leave this without talking about the town’s residents in this movie. This place is 100% one of those little towns where everyone knows each other as well as their business, you have nosy little old ladies, dudes who do nothing all day but sit on the porch of the corner store and smoke a pipe, and they all go to church on Sundays.
AND YET, not only is this movie void of any homophobia from any character, basically the whole freaking town is all up in this whole love triangle. They support Pike so much that there’s even scenes where they all play matchmaker with him and Henry. They root for them in the goofiest, most loveable way.
SO BASICALLY, this is a silly romantic comedy, except gay. It’s all super lighthearted comedy with tiny bits of drama thrown in. No one dies!!!! No one is killed or commits suicide and has a 100% happy ending!!! The three main guys are just normal guys!!! There’s not a stereotype to be found here!! anD ONE OF THEM IS NATIVE AMERICAN. No seriously guys it hurts me that not everybody knows about this movie. I discovered it when I was in middle school in our video store’s tiny little LGBTQ section, and must have rented it 20 times throughout the years before I finally bought it. I know this movie almost frame by frame I’ve watched it so many times because it’s just so disgustingly cute and always makes me happy. NOW, this movie isn’t perfect. It’s got some clunky acting, weird.. I guess artsy moments that don’t make sense, and crosses into the line of cheesy quite a few times, BUT, that’s really not important. This is treated exactly as if it were a het romantic comedy. Their being gay has nothing to do with the overall story, and is never brought up save for a small plotline where Henry is guilty with himself for never coming out to his grandfather. But overall, more LGBTQ movies need to be like this, it’s just way too rare.
GO WATCH IT YOU’LL BE GLAD YOU DID. Sadly, the only way I know to get ahold of it is to just buy the DVD. But it’s fairly cheap on Amazon! And even cheaper if you buy it used on there, but either way I promise it’s worth it to own. Like I said, I think I kept our video store in business from my renting it so many times.
Oh, and I hope you enjoy country music to some extent because this has the countriest soundtrack of all time.
The defenders of CripTax prices will say that those prices cover the cost of production. This is, without a doubt, true. I work at a university where we often have to take written materials and convert them into braille – it takes a LOT of people hours, special software, and a braille embosser.
But those defenders of higher prices are reversing the argument to justify fleecing disabled readers.
What do I mean by that?
Braille is not magic. It is done by taking plain text and feeding it through fairly affordable translation software, creating a document that can easily be printed in braille.
All that time and effort and special software? IS NOT FOR THE BRAILLE.
It is to take the document provided by the publisher (usually in PDF format, the same file they send to the printers) and turn it into plain, unadorned text, by hand. Text has to be “stripped” (OCR/text recognition); images have to be described; footnotes have to be embedded; special pullouts and other formatting shifted or removed.
Printing in braille is cheap; reverse engineering a finished text to print it in braille IS NOT.
Same with those audio books. After a book is completed and, often, after it has already been published, the publisher arranges to have the book recorded by a professional voice actor/reader, which usually also involves a recording producer, if not a recording studio, which all stacks up to $$, no two ways about it.
However: that cost? IS RARELY FACTORED INTO THE BUDGET OF PRINTING A BOOK.
Oh, it might be, if the author is JK Rowling and it is well known that readers will want audio versions right away. But most of the time, nope, the audio book is produced only after the hard copy book has become a decent seller, and so it’s an extra cost which is claimed must be covered by making the audio version extra expensive to buy. (Even then it’s somewhat ridiculous, since honestly, creating an audio book is, in the end, cheaper than printing, factoring in the cost of paper.)
If publishers factored audio book production into the assumed costs of publishing a book, they would have very little reason to price it higher.
If publishers factored in creating a “plain text” file – including having editors/authors describe images – that could be used to print braille copies or to be used with refreshable braille readers (electronic pinboards, basically), then there would be zero reason to price those books higher.
tl;dr:
Yes, it’s a #criptax, and the excuse that “those formats are more expensive to produce so they have to be priced higher” is only true if you completely throw out the premise that publishers have an obligation to account for disabled readers when they are actually budgeting for and publishing the book.
I’m really glad you brought this up, because this is exactly the sort of argument thatpeople try to use to justify inaccessibility in all kinds of areas. When we tell a company that their website or appliance or piece of technology isn’t accessible, they frequently tell us that they are sorry to hear that but that the accessibility is too expensive and time-consuming to add in now. There is also a provision in the law that allows companies to not bother including accessibility in their products if the cost of building in the accessibility is more than 5% of the total cost to build the whole product in the US.
That seems reasonable on the surface, doesn’t it? Except here’s the thing—the accessibility should have been a part of the original plans to begin with and designed in from the very beginning and should have been considered a necessary element and just another ordinary part of the cost of producing the product, not some extra feature that can be opted out of if it’s too expensive. The problem is that these companies do not understand the fact that if you cannot afford to build the product with the accessibility included, then you cannot afford to build the product and that is that. It’s exactly the same as not being able to afford to make the product with all elements up to safety and health codes and standards. If you can’t afford to meet the legal standards, then you can’t afford to make the product, and it’s that simple. Accessibility is not an exception to this and it should not be considered as such. It should be just as much an ordinary required part of the design process as any other element, not an extra, shiny, fancy feature that you can just choose not to bother with if it costs a little bit of money.
Accessibility should be part of the standard design process just as much as safety codes and health standards and other legal regulations. The ADA has existed for 20 years so companies have had ample time to catch up and learn to plan for accessibility from the beginning as a part of the standard required design process. If you can’t afford to create the product fully up to code, standards, and accessibility laws, then you simply can’t afford to make the product. No excuses, no exceptions.
I have often said that, very often, the high cost of disability accessibility is not actually for the accessibility itself. The actual high cost is often due to the lack of foresight and planning for accessibility from the design stage onwards.
Let me explain what I mean with an example. Take accessibility in a building. Usually making a building accessible means you need things like braille signage, ramps to entrances, wide doorways that leave plenty of room for a wheelchair to pass through, and so forth. If you design a new building from scratch to incorporate all of these design elements from the beginning, literally before the building is a hole in the ground, then the total cost of integrating accessible features into the building is less than one percent of the total cost of constructing that building.
On the other hand, if you don’t bother to account for the need for disability access and just build the building first, and then go, “oops, we didn’t design for accessibility”, then you will need to literally tear down parts of the building and reconstruct it from scratch. If this is your primary approach to accessibility, then of course the cost of accessibility may seem expensive. But it’s not actually the ramp or the wide door ways that are expensive. What is expensive is all the extra cost and effort of completely undoing parts of what you had already created wrongly so that you can recreate it correctly. In other words, the actual expense is the lack of planning ahead for accessibility.
This is the first I learned how books could be more cheaply accessible if this was planned for ahead of time. But it’s the same principle at work. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand all this and blame disabled people for wanting accessibility instead of blaming designers, architects, inventors and book publishers, and so forth, as well as the people responsible for contracting them, for having failed to consider the needs of disabled people when there was still time to integrate accessibility during the design and initial construction phase, when it could have been done cheaply.
What we need is for more designers, architects, inventors, book publishers, policy makers, program managers, and so forth to learn about the principles of universal design.
I have a friend who’s having a house built for this very reason - it would be prohibitively expensive to retrofit an existing house with the accommodations she needs, but getting in during the building stage has made it possible to add ramps, wider doorways, and so on, for very little additional cost.
Please, Mrs. Conservative, don’t yell at our daddy for using food stamps. Also, can we have a cookie?
I met this woman named Mae. She’s a van driver for a production company. She works 14-hour days but says she doesn’t mind, says she keeps one eye on the road and the other on the prize — a paycheck that has to last through the dead months.
We’re driving through a poor stretch of Atlanta. Dirty streets. Old houses. Plastic toys upturned in front yards, no kids though. The neighborhood is quiet. I live in L.A., land of nannies and gardeners where the hills are alive with the sound of toddlers and leaf blowers. I prefer Atlanta. You can find parking at the grocery store in the middle of the day. In L.A. it doesn’t matter what time it is, the Trader Joe’s is packed with SAHs and WAHs (stay-at-homes and work-at-homes.)
We pass a decades-old Buick Skylark. I point it out.
“You into cars?” Mae asks.
I’m not into cars, but my dad and I once abandoned one of those Buicks on the side of a Florida highway when I was a teenager. That’s how my family did cars — we bought them on their last leg and left them where they died. I tell her how I’d come home from high school and there’d be nothing in the fridge but a bottle of red wine vinegar and a head of lettuce. On the counter, there’d be a bag of potatoes and a bottle of olive oil from the Dollar Store. That was dinner, potatoes and lettuce.
“I hear you,” she says. “We had ketchup sandwiches all the time growing up. We didn’t complain. We ate them.”
Mae’s voice is rich, melodic, it’s Maya Angelou meets Gladys Knight. I tell her about the time I borrowed red stirrup pants. (Remember stirrup pants from the 80s?) I borrowed them from my friend Marla. Her two older brothers drove Corvettes, one each. Marla drove a more sensible car for a 16-year-old, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. But it was new. And it was hers. She let me borrow the pants for a party in her neighborhood. (God knows I couldn’t go in my own shit clothes.) Long and short of it, the pants ripped in the calf. My mother wept like death had come, struggling with red thread, looking at me like I’d done the worst thing ever. Marla wanted $17 to replace them.
Mae invites me to sit up front with her. The traffic to my hotel is bad, we’re in for a haul. I switch out at the next red light.
“So her brothers drive corvettes?” Yup.
“One each?” Yup.
“Lord Almighty,” she says, “folks of privilege don’t understand how $17 can ruin you.”
Mae tells me how she’d come home from school and her mother would hustle her and her sisters upstairs to pick out clothes for the next day before the utilities cut off. Too many red notices.
I was poor in Florida. Mae’s from Detroit. I ask what she did to keep warm. “Poor kids just do what they gotta do. Privileged kids panic if they can’t have new this and new that, or if they can’t be on a sport team. Sports and heat, those are luxuries.”
I ask if she’s heard of John Prine, the folk singer. I sing his line: It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown. She howls, “Rich folks standing in a puddle screaming!”
I tell her about my parents shaking me awake in the middle of the night whispering, we have to go now. There’s a difference between going and getting out. What we were doing was getting out before morning, before the neighbors would see us evicted.
“I hear you,” she says. “Lord Almighty, I hear you.”
America loves helping the shoeless, iphoneless, voteless, bug-infested Street Jesuses. These are the lost-cause poor; all they want is your pocket change. (Bless their hearts.) But the working poor? Those who claim to not have enough money for food because they also need clothes for work, water for bathing and laundry, rent for housing, heat in the winter, money for daycare, a smartphone for their job, car insurance and gas — those are some shifty motherfuckers.
If you’re on food stamps America has every right to hate you, as evidenced by this angry conservative yelling at a father and child for using food stamps. This lady proves conservatives love a good hate like they love a good steak. I assume she thinks of herself as a nice person, a good person, a church-goer. We all think everyone else is the asshole, right? There isn’t a lot of self-directed road rage out there. How often do we key our own cars? It’s always okay to hate the other guy when the hate is justified — like child predators, rapists, and food stamp users.
Huddled round the Fox News campfire are those who love tall tales of poor people using tax dollars to buy drugs and alcohol and Gucci shoes. That’s not how it works. I’ve been on food stamps. The government doesn’t hand out wads of cash. When you qualify for food stamps you receive a plastic grocery card that only works for food transactions. Key word: qualify. You don’t just sign up. It’s not a tennis lesson at the club. What’s scary about the woman in the video is that she sees what’s in the dad’s cart (food for his kid) and she hates him for it.
Stupid fucking poor people. If only we’d been engineer majors in college. If only we’d gone to college. If only our parents hadn’t been poor. If only they spoke English. If only we worked harder. If only we were more like conservatives who believe everything they have today is a direct result from the sweat of their own brow.
When looking at a spider’s web can you point to the 8th spun web, or the 108th? There are those who claim this astounding ability — those who take full credit for crafting, spin by spin, a better life than ours, a life without aid. If you had help paying for college, if someone bought you your first car, if you had health insurance growing up, if your mom never cried over $17, you were lucky. The Hail Mary toss of birth landed you in a family that could put you on a soccer team and buy cleats as your foot grew. And someone was home to help you with your math and give you a gummy vitamin each morning. That’s called aid, by the way. And not all kids get it, but all kids should.
Don’t confuse aid with charity. Charity is old coats. Donating a coat doesn’t make you a good person but I bet it makes you feel like one. You didn’t even want that coat anymore, what you wanted was the closet space. Sure, you could have sold it at a garage sale and made, like, twenty bucks. It was an expensive coat, damn it. But you, with your heart of gold, gave it away. There’s a twinkle in God’s eye just for you.
What makes you a good person to others (and not just to yourself) is the same thing that makes me, or anyone who can afford the occasional $12 cocktail, a good person: Your vote. Not your coat.
Vote for a Living Wage for others. Vote for health insurance for others. Don’t get in the way of food stamps for others. Understand how important $17 might be to others. That poor stretch of Atlanta is quiet because people are working and paying for day care. They’re clocking the same hours you’re clocking, but they make a shit wage.
Take a good long look at your feet. If you were born at the starting line wearing a nice pair of running shoes, that was luck. Sheer luck. The most important thing you can do now is help those who had to start the race a mile behind you, barefoot.
every time i watch clueless i’m shocked that cher horowitz wasn’t intentionally written as a closeted lesbian struggling with compulsory heterosexuality because that’s literally the only interpretation of that movie that makes any sense to me whatsoever
listen…. cher expresses explicit distaste for boys her age on more than one occasion. she compares them to dogs and wonders why her best friend dee even bothers with them.
she claims to be “highly selective” ….name one closeted lesbian who hasn’t used high standards as an excuse for why they don’t seek a boyfriend, i’ll wait.
not to mention that she’s “saving herself for luke perry” ….me when i would focus my attention on unattainable men because i didn’t like any boys in real life.
let’s not forget that cher is disgusted by her friend elton’s advances and the only boy she actively pursues before realizing she was “in love” with josh was her gay friend christian. subconsciously pursuing unattainable men much?
initially, cher’s ego is hurt by christian’s rejection, but she gets over it quickly because she only pursued christian for superficial reasons and not because of any actual feelings of attraction.
so why did cher end up with josh, you might ask? my theory: cher developed feelings for her (*cough* bisexual) friend tai over the course of the film, but failed to recognize them. when tai shows interest in dating josh, cher becomes jealous, and mistakenly assumes it’s because she’s in love with josh, but she’s actually in love with tai!
honestly, just watch this movie again and compare the way cher talks about tai to the way she talks about josh. cher showed literally NO romantic interest in josh before she realized she was “in love” with him, and only started acting like she had feelings for him after she came to that conclusion.
the first time i watched clueless, i remember little 12-year-old me literally saying “WHAT!?” out loud to my tv screen when cher said she was in love with her fucking stepbrother, of all people. i didn’t know i was a lesbian back then, but i knew a forced hetero romance that made no sense when i saw one!
so ladies, never forget what the endgame for this movie should have been.
Ok well now I have to watch Clueless again. (fwiw, I had an ambiguous “I want her/want to be her/wut” crush on Tai when this movie came out. I was 14, already “highly selective” about the boys I liked, and mere months away from my first coming out. So this will be fun.)
It’s not actually known if lemons were made by humans or if they were just natural hybrids of citrons and sour oranges. Apparently it’s super common for citrons to fertilize basically anything they’re near.
I love this picture because the body language (human and draconic) reminds me so much of when the dog decides she really, really needs to be at least half in my lap while I’m chilling with my computer.
Like, the dragon is all I adore you so much please pet behind my ears please and the lady is just sigh fine you always do this and I was going to get up for a glass of water but I guess I kind of love you too.
i’m so invested in toronto’s mystery tunnel story. after a month of fruitless investigating and a week-long public appeal from the police, two anonymous guys have admitted to building the whole thing for funsies. that’s it, no big deal. just guys being dudes. they just dug a 30-foot tunnel for personal reasons. case closed. amazing.
What are your thoughts on underground fencing, since it involves a collar that shocks when crossed/beeps when the dog gets too close?
It’s lazy management and it can be a huge problem. There are two really major problems with it - dogs often end up associating things they encounter at the border of the zone with the pain from the shock, and dogs that somehow cross the border get hurt for trying to go back into their yard. Dogs have to be taught the borders of the space because it’s a totally amorphous and very human idea that a space without physical barriers still has borders. If you don’t do it right, or anything out of the ordinary happens while your dog is out, there can be a lot of things that go wrong.
There are definitely cases of dogs running up to people or dogs at the edge of the yard and getting shocked for it, and then becoming aggressive or reactive towards people/animals because they associated the pain with the living being and not the amorphous and non-visible, scentless barrier.
There have also been a lot of examples of a dog that ended up outside the zone (either from being tackled over the line during play, or from being in a high enough arousal state that they bulled through the pain and crossed the line) and then continually gets hurt just for trying to go home.
There are honestly so many other options - fences, long lines, actually supervising the dog - that I really don’t think those fences ever have a point. If it takes a little more work and require your landscaping to not be perfect, too bad, you voluntarily committed to keeping this animal safe and happy.
Stop telling yourself that the grass is greener on the other side, because it’s not. It is greener where you water it. So take control of your life and start watering your own pastures and grow your own greener grasses.
Stop both envying your neighbor’s green grass AND watering your own. We’re in a fucking drought. You can’t sustain that shit. Think beyond the lawn that society told you to want. Put in some native plants that will thrive and bloom with very little water. They might be a little more spiny than what you first planned, but there is great beauty and variety in these hardy survivors. Your yard will be way more interesting and friendly to wildlife than that of the people who took the easy route and poured on water at the expense of other people and organisms. (This has been a California-themed post hijacking.)
No but like along with being literal good advice (GRASS AND LAWNS ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA WE SHOULD REVERSE THIS CULTURAL EXPECTATION NOW) this is also metaphorically good advice (as I’m sure you knew when you posted it).
There are sometimes things that you take for granted that you are just Expected To Want or Do or Be that you don’t actually have to. You’re so used to it you don’t even think about it, but the moment you do a less resource-heavy alternative appears.
On an environmentally friendly level this is a terrible example, but a couple years ago I was talking with my therapist about problems I was having being a functioning human being, and I went on a rant about the dishes and how they stress me out and I feel like I never get them done and then I hate myself and after listening to this whole rant I expected my therapist to give me the normal pep talks about being kind to yourself and taking it on a little bit at a time but instead he just had the most exasperated look on his face and he said,
“Buy some paper plates.”
He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world and I was completely speechlessly thunderstruck.
He said, “As an environmentalist, I am giving you permission for your own health to buy some paper plates. Problem solved.”
I don’t always use paper plates now. My mental health does allow me to keep up with the dishes better than I was (though these days my physical health has started interfering). But when I feel that slipping? I skip the cultural expectation that I should just be doing the dishes all the time. I conserve my (metaphorical, the opposite of literal in this case, sadly) water, and I buy some paper plates.
There a thing that’s ruining your mental health? Your life? It feels like a simple thing that other people can just DO, but you can’t? Often there’s a simpler solution. If you are tired of taking care of your hair, cut it into a pixie cut to save yourself the hassle. Hell, shave it off. You don’t need hair! Google hangout is a great alternative to going out when you want to talk to a friend but aren’t sure you can get yourself out of your house. If food stresses you out, buy shit you can just grab and eat without even having to microwave (I fucking love cottage cheese and vegetables for this exact reason).
You do not have to cook. You don’t have to date or get married. You don’t have to be monogamous if you do want to date or get married. You don’t have to be straight. You don’t have to be a boy or a girl. You don’t have to look a certain way or talk a certain way or eat certain things. You don’t have to go to college. You don’t have to be in that major. You don’t have to own a house. You don’t have to want or have kids. You don’t have to wait for the perfect partner to have kids if you do want them.
It’s such a normal thing to have a lawn that many people don’t even consider the time, money, and water it would save to just get rid of it and replace it with an alternative that takes into account the native environment of where it’s growing. How much easier their life would be without maintaining something that just went there because it was expected with no regard for whether it naturally fit, and instead put in plants that serve the same function but actually thrive and take root with no real effort.
Instead of fighting to maintain expectations, throw away your lawn and plant natively instead. Both literally and metaphorically.
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