if you ever find yourself thinking “wow I scraped the bottom of the barrel with my energy with that and came out okay!” that’s the devil talking. you did not come out okay. you borrowed energy from the future. you will repay it if you don’t rest and replenish the borrowed energy first.
WIZARD PSA: Chronomancy might be weird and confusing, but one of the few solid rules of the discipline is keep your promises. Time is a library, and you don't want to meet the librarian.
it’s literally sooo much more expensive to incarcerate people than it is to house and feed them. In my state it costs $90,000 to incarcerate a single person for one year. $90,000. Other states are even more expensive. for comparison, my rent is $1,050 a month. The annual cost of my housing is $12,600.
A word of advice for people advocating for criminal Justice reform to republicans and people who literally do not care about human rights: use these numbers. Republicans and conservatives and even moderate Dems don’t actually care about moral appeals of why it’s wrong to criminalize homelessness. They do however care about how much tax money this would cost to enforce. It makes financial sense to NOT incarcerate people. (Obviously it makes moral sense too, but most people don’t actually care about that)
It's so much more expensive to put people in jail. If they are in the custody of the state (jail or prison), they have to be given food, clothes, heating, and healthcare. Most of the people who are homeless have health problems--either problems that caused them to lose their homes, trauma from being on the street, substance abuse disorder, anything. The average person experiencing homelessness is much sicker than the average American.
At this point, the largest healthcare provider in the U.S. is the Department of Justice. And legally speaking, they have to provide care. (Granted, a lot of places will avoid that as much as possible, but ideally, they get what treatment they need.) There is a giant prison in Rochester, MN, because it's next to the Mayo Clinic. It's where people with rare and serious illnesses go. My old psych prof worked there part time, providing counseling. He saw people who committed horrendous crimes getting surgeries and chemo. To be clear, prisoners should be getting surgeries and chemo. They deserve healthcare. But it's jarring to hear that a murderer got a tumor taken off his lung while his victims' families have to pay out of pocket for therapy.
I also need to point out that if you're giving people housing, you're just giving them housing. Maybe you include heating, water, and electricity. You aren't giving them clothes (uniforms). You aren't paying guards. You aren't installing metal detectors and cameras. You are just giving them a place to live. That's obviously much, much cheaper than prison.
I am horrified that I have to resort to spelling this out, but yes, this is the only argument Republicans will listen to. Give them the cost-benefit analysis
But I like to believe that most people not directly benefitting from the prison industrial complex actually WOULD care about the "it's cheaper to house than to jail and those are YOUR TAX DOLLARS" argument, even if they care 0% about ethics or morality
WONDER WHY THOSE ALL DON’T LOOK LIKE THE SAME COLOR? BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT
OTHER THAN BEING PART OF THE SAME FAMILY OF BLUES, THEY ARE NOT ALL THE SAME FUCKING COLOR! WHY WOULD THEY ALL BE THE SAME FUCKING COLOR! DO YOU THINK WE JUST NAME NEW COLORS FOR KICKS!?!?!?
WHEN DESCRIBING A CHARACTER’S GOD FORSAKEN EYE COLOR, PICK ONE YA GODDAMN HIPPIE
Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child has known this better than he.
In autumn, puddles would freeze overnight, and give the sharpest, sweetest snap when you stepped on them. All gone by late morning, but reappearing the next day with sharp crinkles and chimes.
All I remember are the live bugs. I remember driving down the highway and openethe window, hundreds brought in by the draft. Saved from being splattered on the hood and windshield. Flying awkwardly as they mated midair.
im just so happy i live in a time period where actual meaningful biological transition is possible. even if we lose rights or the ability to exist in public, nothing can turn back the clock on that, and just by having any sort of access to that our lives are made immensely better. millions of our sisters throughout history would never have dreamed of a day where they could have what HRT does for us.
please don't lose the plot of this. if you're a trans person on HRT you're a living miracle, the dream of hundreds of millions of your ancestors. your lives are all deeply meaningful no matter what anyone says.
Cursed be the one who announced to my father:
“It’s a boy!"...
...How could he twist the course of the stars so much?
How could he have erred so in his astrology?
A lying tongue, a fool’s mouth it had given him
For he foolishly transformed justice to poison
He altered the law and transposed the lines
Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman...
...I would say "how lucky am I"
Father in heaven
who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water...
...Who would then transform me from a man to woman?
Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...
What shall I say?
why cry or be bitter?
If my father in heaven has decreed upon me
and has maimed me with an immutable deformity
then I do not wish to remove it.
the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure
and for which no comfort can be found.
So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground.
Since I have learned from our tradition
that we bless both, the good and the bitter
I will bless in a voice hushed and weak:
blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.
All the clothing, accessories, helmets, weapons, what site can I find them all on?
Anon, please stop watching Fox for information about anti-fascism. 99% of anti-fascist work is entirely non-violent. The 1% that isn't = when anti-fascists are forced to defend themselves and their communities from fascist/far right violence.
For what we hope are obvious reasons, we're not going to be giving out advice publicly about purchasing weapons, etc. to an anon ask on tumblr.
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 3: Ballistic Protection
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 4: Primary Firearms
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 6: Secondary Firearms
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 7: Tertiary Firearms
Be smart and be safe. Don't just scroll down to the recommended equipment and DIY guides - read the articles, top to bottom, and take the advice they give seriously
And yes, anon is probably a weirdo fash who thinks that all antifas go to antifa.gov/merch for our officially licensed molotov cocktails, but just in case anyone out there is actually scared of the current climate and wants to arm and defend themself, I want them to be safe while doing it. All these articles are publicly available and easy to find and almost all of the recommendations they give are sold by companies with no political affiliation that fash would gain nothing by targeting, so don't give me any shit about "missing the point" or "playing into their hands" or whatever
It looks like the IAF articles have moved to wordpress. They're a fantastic resources for all sorts of info, and I suggest exploring their collection of knowledge. here's updated links
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 2: Basic PPE
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 3: Ballistic Protection
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 4: Primary Firearms
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 6: Secondary Firearms
Skills for Revolutionary Survival 7: Tertiary Firearms
"Trans women are actually women for real, not in a metaphorical sense, not in a "anyone can be anything" sense, but genuinely actually make more taxonomic sense to classify in the category of women than any other group you could classify them in" is a position you'll find is pretty radical even in queer spaces
I recently posed a question to my cis followers on Bsky about whether they could defend the idea that trans women are in fact women.
The overwhelming response was, while well-meaning, sorely disappointing and along the lines of "of course trans women are women, 'woman' is ultimately a meaningless category, you can be whatever you like".
It was such a profoundly sobering experience because I realized that most people have framed their conception of trans rights around owning bigots and dunking on them in arguments instead of an affirmative understanding of trans marginalization, a comprehension of the struggles we face in a cissexist, patriarchal society, or even a basic familiarity with how we are seen and regarded and treated institutionally.
'Woman' is not a meaningless category in a patriarchy. It is a positionality, one that trans women undoubtedly occupy, and most cis people--even allies, even the ones who believe they want to do right by us--do not fundamentally accept the premise that we actually inhabit this position and navigate society as women.
It's an epistemic chasm I don't quite know how to cross, which is unfortunate as I've inadvertently dedicated my life to doing so. Ascertaining just how wide that gap in understanding is was alarming, if necessary.
To cis readers, all I can say is that if you only think trans women can be women in a world where the word 'woman' holds no meaning, you're more aligned with the Gender-Conservative position on us than you think. You might want to unpack that.
Hey, wanna make music? Yeah? Got a buncha money? No? Well that's perfectly fine, check this free stuff out:
Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)
Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.
Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.
Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.
The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).
BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.
Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.
Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.
This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!
sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.
Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.
Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.
Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.
Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.
Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.
Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.
Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.
MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.
Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).
Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.
ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.
UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.
Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.
TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.
Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.
Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.
Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.
fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!
WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!
aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made a while back :P
As for DAWs, it's been a long while since I've used anything other than FL Studio (not counting Audacity, which I still occasionally use for specific purposes), which, while being the only one I can directly recommend, is paid. However, I've heard good things about Reaper which has a "free trial" that you can technically use forever, akin to WinRAR. Additionally, I've also heard some good things about Waveform Free.
The way adult fandom people hold indie online creators and cartoons to a much higher standard than their actual local politicians. You could be putting that energy into terrorizing and protesting conservatives at your town hall and actually make a good material impact on the world but instead you're background checking everything the trans woman who made the amazing digital circus has ever said
The point isn't "stop criticizing indie artists" or "defend your favorite show under this post". I don't even watch Digital Circus and no one is above criticism. Literally every indie show is getting torn to shreds on twitter right now and I'm not saying this to defend anyone I don't know. The point is "someone who actually has the power to kill us all and get away with it deserves way more ire and accountability than a cartoonist and I expect grown adults to understand this"
I normally tag these posts “specific ass machines” after a minor meme that blew through Tumblr, but I was tempted to tag this one “specific boob machines”.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I've got good news and bad news for Trump. The good news: you can get elected by promising to do something about the cost of living crisis, and the president actually has a lot of ways to improve people's daily costs. The bad news: everything you could do to fix working people's cost of living will make an oligarch worse off.
This is the essential conundrum of Trumpismo: to keep his base happy, he needs to make their lives better; but to make their lives better, he'll have to make oligarchs angry. The oligarchs' wealth bonanza caused the cost of living crisis. Oligarchs' pleasure causes our suffering, so alleviating our suffering will reduce their pleasure.
This means that while Trump can promise help with prices, all he can deliver is union-busting, ICE lynchings, and pointless wars, none of which have any hope of materially improving the lives of working people. Indeed, all of this stuff makes working people materially worse off, as wages fall, crops rot in the fields, and gas prices shoot through the roof.
Trump would dearly love to find an ox he can safely gore, but all the good oxen are owned by his oligarch chums. Trump can't punish Ticketmaster, because the billions Ticketmaster steals from the WWE, F1 and football fans in his base all land in the pocket of oligarchs who own stock in Ticketmaster, and Trump can't afford to upset those oligarchs:
Indeed, I can't think of a single corrupt racket that Trump can afford to do something about. Not even the only cost of living metric that can approach gas prices in the hierarchy of American electoral salience: grocery prices.
Your grocery bill went up because oligarchs price-gouge you. Eggflation was caused by Cal-Maine, the monopolist that owns every brand of eggs in your grocer's fridge, who jacked up prices because they knew they could:
Pepsi and Walmart conspired to force every retailer to jack up the prices of all Pepsi products (including Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Aquafina, etc) at every retailer's store, so that Walmart could also jack up their prices and still undersell their competition (naturally, Trump let them get away with it):
This stuff isn't exactly a secret. Grocery store owners hold earnings calls with their investors where they boast about the fact that they can raise their prices far in excess of their increased costs, and blame it on inflation:
They boast about their "personalized pricing" swindles, whereby they use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and jack up the prices you see in their apps:
Trump has the power to put a stop to all of this, but still, he can't, because his oligarch pals would squeal, and when they squeal, Trump jumps. In theory, Trump has lots of power, but in practice, Trump can't do anything.
Which brings me to the cost of meat. Meat inflation has raced ahead of other forms of food inflation, even as the payments to ranchers and other producers fell sharply, leading to waves of bankruptcies:
Partly, that's because meat processing is controlled by cartels, with 85% of all the beef being processed by four packers, and nearly every chicken going through one of four poultry processors. These middlemen jack up prices to grocers while colluding to push down the payments to their suppliers.
How do they rig those prices? After all, it's very illegal for these four companies to get together around a table to rig prices. Instead, they use a "price consultancy" called Agri Stats that does the price-rigging for them. Every week, the packers send a detailed list of all their costs and prices into Agri Stats, and Agri Stats "advises" them all to raise all their prices at once, and anyone who doesn't play along is pushed out of the Agri Stats cartel. Everyone wins – except families paying for groceries:
Agri Stats has been doing this since the Reagan years, but they grew steadily more brazen, until, back in 2023, Biden's DOJ brought history's most obvious, easily won antitrust case against them:
And wouldn't you know it, Trump just settled that case, in a way that will make Agri Stats much, much richer and give them far more opportunities to rig prices:
Under the terms of the settlement, Agri Stats must "allow" restaurants, farmers, and other parts of the supply chain to pay it for the data it consolidates. This will allow more parties to collude to rig prices, and provide more income to Agri Stats. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, they've been "sentenced to make money."
Agri Stats isn't the only "price consultancy" that is used to launder a price-fixing cartel that's driving up the cost of living for all Americans, including Trump's base, in order to make oligarchs better off. Companies like Realpage do the same thing for residential rents:
Trump can't do anything about any of these scams, not without goring some oligarch's precious ox. But, as Dayen points out, there are dozens of Democratic state Attorneys General who can kill Trump's sweetheart deal for Agri Stats using the Tunney Act, which gives them standing to sue to force a federal judge to review the settlement and determine whether it is fair.
Whether any AG will seize the moment remains to be seen, of course, but it would be very good politics to do so – after all, the path to political power in America runs through credible promises to do something about the cost of living crisis.
