fuck it I will make this my Disability Pride Month Request: if you are able-bodied, or just unfamiliar, look up the prices of things. Look up what life-sustaining medication costs, look up what good manualÂč and any power wheelchairs cost, look up what corrective surgery and accessible vehicles and home meal delivery services and service dog training and special dietary restriction food costs. and look up how much money is available for people who can't work.
how many months of government support does it take to afford something like a power wheelchair if you're someone who needs one to get out of bed? how much expense is incurred while saving up for that, making sure you still get food, cleaning, other appointments while you're saving up? is it enough to pay rent? is it enough to still have nice meals, streaming subscriptions, a new video game? is it enough to help family or friends cover emergencies? are there resources available to help with dating, girl's nights, family events if you can't do it all yourself? how in demand are those services, how far in advance do they have to be reserved, how much do they cost?
I've had a few posts about disability get relatively well-shared at this point, and there's always an element of surprise in it - like, what do you mean there's subscriptions, what do you mean it's that expensive, isn't there something else? - and while I understand why, it would really mean a lot if people who don't know about this stuff took the initiative to find out just how bad some of this shit is on their own time
Âč and not just the folding ones on Amazon, which are still expensive, but which I can say from experience are also really uncomfortable and not suited for full time use
29th June 2026.
This year's Strawberry Moon was extremely low in the sky, which made it look very large and bright. (A perfect photographic opportunity!)
the poster that this incredible illustration is based on is extremely striking. but while searching for it, I also found earlier posters for conveying this message along with a corresponding one for summer, and I fucking love them. absolutely lovely graphic design work. (both are from 1924, artist is Austin Cooper)
the one I was looking for originally also has a summer variant. (artist is Frederick Charles Herrick: 'it is warmer below' is from 1927, 'it is cooler below' is 1926)
i had a dream last night that the entire world used a currency (?) called angrypennies which as the name implies are obtained by experiencing anger. the stronger and more intense your anger was, the more angrypennies you'd gain. an all-consuming rage would earn you more than a slight irritation, etc. so people were always searching for ways to fuel their anger and purposefully keeping themselves angry all the time because they wanted to earn angrypennies. unclear if angrypennies could be exchanged for goods and services, or if they were just a collectible.
anyway, as if this wasn't heavy-handed enough, at one point british comedian greg davies appeared and explained that angrypennies couldn't be worth feeling angry all the time. this was a real revelation to dream-me and i was finally able to break free of the angrypenny grind and allow myself to experience emotions other than anger.
it goes without saying that i will be using the word angrypenny as if it was part of the common vernacular instead of a term that my dreaming brain conjured up i.e. "he's all about the angrypennies" (derogatory way to refer to a guy who searches for reasons to be angry and possibly lacks introspection)
The human body's response to HRT is actually admirable in the sheer indifference. Just pure I Don't Give A Shit, I Just Fucking Work Here compliance to the new instructions. You can get testosterone injected straight into your body and it doesn't even question where that shit came from, coming back from a coffee break and just going
"Okay, everything seems to be in ord- oh fuck now what? Oh huh. Alright fine. New orders came in, cancel the menstrual cycle. Dig up the genetic balding patterns from somewhere, I don't fucking know they're buried somewhere in the dna. I'm greenlighting the growing-hair-on-your-toes thing. Yeah just cancel the ongoing maintenance processes, new orders came in so this is apparently what we're doing now."
genuinely i think a big problem with science education is we spend too much time in high school telling students DNA is like, the Magical Essence of an Organism.
dna is mostly just instructions for building proteins, and not very persuasive ones at that. it sits in the nucleus of the cell, and what happens after RNA transcription isn't any of its business. this is a good thing! it means we can override it sometimes when we need to (and when we know how). but a lot of rhetoric around DNA (and therefore gender and sex and morphological freedom in general) treats it like this Platonic sorcery that must be obeyed, lest we incur the wrath of the gods. and it's nothing so special!
Iâm not trying to play devilâs advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what youâre saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesnât, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think itâs important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because heâs a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesnât make the text less racist but itâs an important thing to consider. Thatâs all, I agree with your other points.Â
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so Iâm snowed under atm â ïž
So thereâs a lot of talk about Tolkien being âof his time and classâ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. âOf his timeâ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isnât applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ânorms of his timeâ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to âwhat Tolkien saidâ rather than âwhat was actually happening thenâ.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the âthe fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his timeâ line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moodyâs League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think whatâs more likely than âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didnât know any such antiracist thought existedâ is that âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existedâ.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharkyâs minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking peopleâs cats
Anyway, Iâm so tired of how âof his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.Â
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really donât think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as âunconscious biasâ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job đ
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ânormal people not kings of menâ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of NĂșmenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramirâs entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the âchildless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gatesâ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a âbirthright citizenshipâ as a consequence of a personâs actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day âmigrant criminalityâ discourse, how can you say he didnât anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration đ
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the FĂ«anorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls donât jump up my ass đ)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Menâąïž being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. Itâs not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!Â
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean âhe did not anticipate a world where migration is the normâ??? đThe legendarium isnât a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that âhis timeâ kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didnât.Â
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didnât have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does â ïž
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on âunconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when heâs hit. Which is to say, the insistence on âTolkien was of his time and his time was badâ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about âthe timeâ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.Â
On a vaguely related note, I also think âthis fandom gives grace to the authorâ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket youâre in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and itâs doubly baffling considering that he isnât exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.Â
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of âgrateful to the author for this wonderful worldâ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going âwhy the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?âÂ
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
Another design is using 2 20x25x1 filters, taping them to the sides of the box fan and then to each other so they sort of make a triangle, then cutting cardboard to make a top and bottom to the triangle.
This was discovered as a more effective design during the 2020 US west coast fires.
Iâve personally used both the flat single-filter version AND the triangular two-filter version, and based on subjective personal experience I would argue that the benefits from the second filter, both in terms of airflow and filtration, are absolutely worth it. If you need a makeshift air filter and you have two filters to work with, build the triangle (if not the box, i have no idea how good that one works but based on the info here i presume itâs a fair bit better.)
Alright I have been enabled so Iâm gonna say somethings.
Fatalistic sarcasm is a thing, however, it usually hides deep feelings of insecurity, and whether you consciously recognize this or not, it validates them. Seriously, I used to constantly make jokes about how other peopleâs work was better than mine, and it did nothing for my self-esteem, it was a tool to deflect from my own feelings of inferiority and it actively worked against me thinking critically about my own and other peopleâs work. If it was a joke I could put myself down instead of analyzing why someoneâs work was better and trying to incorporate that into my own
As someone who took creative writing courses I was constantly surrounded by other brilliant people, if I hung my head in shame every time I read something as good or better than mine I never would have lifted it.Â
As someone who has watched a lot of writers with very good ideaâs crash and burn I mean it when I say you either develop a healthy sense of respect for your own work or you stop writing.Â
Thereâs three things I really wish more people consider
1. Do you think their work is better because itâs a different style, one that you like? Thereâs an element to âthe grass is greener on the other sideâ, I have seen people work in some amazing styles that I wished to god I could replicate, some I managed, some I never did, but thereâs nothing wrong with either. having a different style Is Not the same as having a bad style, each has their own strengths and you can admire one without putting yours down
2. Knowing someone who is a better writer is a blessing and if they knew you were using their work to bring yourself down they would not be happy, mooch off that friend, analyze their work, ask them to edit your shit, as long as youâre not annoying them be shameless about it. the best thing creative writing did for me was give me the confidence to ask people to critic my work and shamelessly better each other for that sharingÂ
3. People need to normalize being confident in their work, the quality of your work has literally nothing to do with your worth as a person, the quality of your work has nothing to do with your worth as a writer. You can write something really shitty and the only thing Iâd say to you is that your trying and I respect you for that
I also donât like comparing my work to othersâ bc it starts to feel almost competitive in a way. It turns to asking âwhich of these is better?â instead of âwhat do I like about each of these?â
Weâre not competing against each other to see who can bake the best cake, weâre all bringing dishes to a potluck. Itâs the community and love for the craft that matter
Hi, these bees are babies! Theyâre not clumsy at all, this is what is called orientation flights. After birth and before beginning their careers as foragers (as all Honey bees cycle through all the jobs in the Hive throughout their lifespan), Honey bees take short flights back and forth, to and from the Hive, to orient themselves with their wings and their home so they can learn its location and how to get back home after foraging! Everyone has to learn, these are just smol little baby turkeys. Bees use the angle of the sun for location so adults have a better and more direct sense of location than any human
"It doesn't help your credibility to exaggerate, most employers wouldn't literally work you to death" like, I used to work in distribution. If booking a truck driver for back to back shifts until they fall asleep at the wheel, crash, and die counts as being worked to death, I have personally met employers who've worked employees to death and gotten away with a slap on the wrist. It may not be universal, but it's a hell of a lot more common than a lot of us would prefer to think.
The FAA had to explicitly make rules about how long pilots have to have off between shifts, and how far away from their home you can pin their home airport, because it doesn't mean shit that someone has 10 hours between shifts if they have a 2 hour commute each way. They had to make these rules because multiple passenger airplanes crashed because the pilots were exhausted from tight scheduling. Employers won't just work you to death, they'll take a hundred random customers with you.
I don't know how anyone can think your bosses won't work you to death when we literally had premature back to work orders during a massive viral pandemic not that long ago. I'm sorry but have y'all memory holed Covid so stubbornly that you can't even draw on recent experience? We went back to work so airlines could make money and our government could pretend everything was fine and white collar bosses wouldn't have to acknowledge how absolutely unimportant and inflated their roles were revealed to be by remote work. Does nobody remember the refrigerated trucks full of bodies in the first couple years of Covid? Does nobody remember how many truly essential workers died? So many of you stopped masking as soon as people up top said it was time to party again, even though rates were still high, people were still dying, and long covid remained a serious risk even with mild infections. If you're willing to kill or disable people just to go to brunch or the bar you better believe they're willing to kill or disable you for profit.
I work in healthcare. We were told covid didn't get spread through respiratory methods for two months (while the CDC 100% knew it did just like ALL coronaviruses do) while we wore garbage bags and reused N95 masks while hospital CEOs and administrators who lied to us and made security walk down a new N95 mask every time someone needed a new one worked from home.
I work in OBGYN, where being on call for 48 to 72 hours at a time where you have no back up and are cutting people open during emergency surgeries is considered the industry standard. I'm a hospitalist and work 12-13 hour shifts at a time, even doing that, it didn't prevent my employer from scheduling me so I have to shift from night shift to day shift four times in one week. Do you think they put even a single iota of thought into how being unable to achieve quality REM sleep might affect my ability to safely perform surgery? Nah.
Corporations are willing to give you diarrhea parasites, listeria, and e.coli because they don't wanna provide the people who harvest their food with fucking bathrooms out in the fields. Your boss would push you into a fucking meat grinder if it saved the company 50 cents and the only reason they don't is because of OSHA regulations that are getting torn down every single day.
A person collapsed and died in an Amazon warehouse and the managers literally told people not to provide CPR and keep working lest the average time for packing things go up by one second.
A UPS driver was literally killed during a shoot out of a robbery. He was killed by the cops who were just wildly shooting into traffic. UPS didn't even offer to pay for his fucking funeral.
Your boss would kill you (and their consumers/customers) without a single thought or incentive if they knew they didn't have to be held financially or criminally accountable. We have so many examples of this at this point that you are either hella dumb or hella naive to believe otherwise.
This is also true in the US, except instead of it being connected to soccer, it's the Super Bowl.
When I worked at the crisis hotline, I worked the superbowl and night after for two years in a row. It was just repeated fucking calls and hospital visits.
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming đ”âđ«
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
I mean I find them exciting also, but theyâre very exciting if you do not live in a place where birds have little anime girl cowlicks on top of their heads.
Iâm on the East Coast of the US and we have fireflies!
I was something like 50 years old when I learned that not only are they not a worldwide phenomenon, they arenât even universal within the US. I hear the West Coast doesnât have them.
Everyone should come here and experience a night with fireflies at least once. Theyâre bugs that glow, and they land on you and then fly off harmlessly, and theyâre pretty to look at. You can catch them just by putting a hand near them so they land on it. Then you let them go because the point to catching fireflies is just to catch them, not to keep them.
Havenât been seeing as many this year and damn, that makes me sad. I know global warming is harming them. I hope they survive. I hope some conservationists are keeping populations of fireflies in air conditioned places set to 80 degrees-ish (they like summer temps, but not extreme ones) so that, if we do kill them all off with warming the planet, we can release the ones that were protected and repopulate the fireflies once we get the planet cooled off again.
My uncle was one of the top surgeons in the country. He was upper middle class definitely. When he got cancer, his insurance didnât cover all the treatments he would need and after 5 years he drained his savings on cancer treatments (while still working most of that time) and eventually died because he couldnât afford the expensive treatments that might have saved him.
If you are upper middle class and you get sick, it will likely bankrupt your family. Itâs fucked.
Honest to god - even if you make 6 figures a year? you're closer to poverty than true wealth. Check your shit and remember who your real allies and enemies are guys.
A 6 figure income is a lot right?
Thatâs say: 223,000 dollars a year
Which is 112 dollars an hour.
Most people would consider that upper middle class. Thatâs enough money to have a nice house, go on fun vacations. Thatâs slight more than the average doctor makes.
223,000 dollars is what Jeff Bezo makes in a minute
There was a wonderful study done about 15 years ago I think, that shows that people cannot accurately identify their income bracket. Most people who own a home think they are upper middle class when in fact they are closer to the poverty line. Even people living well below poverty often identify as middle class. The wealth gap is even worse now. I wonder if anyone actually knows their financial standing.
Anyway shoutout to John Williams, amazing composer and probably the one who made the other 50% of "holy shit amazing" soundtracks (Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Superman, and incidentally the original Harry Potter theme and score) who famously worked closely with the first openly transgender woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, Angela Morley. He respected her, and so far as I can see, has never made transphobic remarks.
