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Everything is just sunshine and butterflies for this baby
sharing for everyone seeing this post!!!
I can’t risk
I need those 5 years of luck real bad
People on twitter have been saying this website is extremely white and tbh its making me very curious what the demographics of this site are (of my own reach anyway) so
What is your race (predominantly)
White
Latino
Middle Eastern
Asian
Black
Indigenous American
Aboriginal Australian
Pacific Islander
Mixed
Other
DISCLAIMER: Race is a non scientific concept with no exact definitions. It is a social construct primarily characterized by how society treats you and thus this is an imperfect poll. If you feel none of the options here reflect you and your experience I implore you to reblog this with your experience as I am curious about that and want to hear about it.
Uh.... Please reblog this and cast as wide a net as possible
Transfems read this thread
Biological anthropologist here: TERFs are dead wrong about estrogen/testosterone not changing the skeleton. They do so much to the skeleton we had to completely reassess one of the ways we estimate the biological sex of skeletons.
So, before the advent of cross-sex hormone therapy, one of the surefire ways to ID a biologically female skeleton of a person who had borne children (this is important) was by looking for pits of parturition. These form when the estrogen surge during late pregnancy tells your pelvic ligaments to loosen up in order to fit the baby’s massive head through the birth canal. Your pelvis starts to s There’s hypothetically only one normally occurring biological reason for a body to give that signal, and since you have to be nominally XX (or some variant of that where you can still carry a pregnancy to term), it was a pretty solid shorthand for sex!
Until we started looking for these things outside of female skeletons, and surprise! “Male” skeletons can have them too! Sometimes these are chromosomal variants, sometimes they’re men with a high estrogen or estrogen-esque hormonal component, and in the modern era? Sometimes these are trans women whose skeletons have undergone hormonal changes due to taking estrogen.
And then there’s testosterone. You know what that does, right. It makes it easier to build muscle. But what THAT does is put new and interesting stresses and pressures on the bones, making them more rugged and in line with the skeletal structure we see in people who have had high testosterone their entire lives. We don’t just see this in trans men- we see this in older cis women too. Once your estrogen production tanks after menopause, we see what we call masculinization of the face, where the features get more rugged and robust as tissue production changes. These changes don’t happen overnight, and we don’t have good data (yet) but my guess is that when we start looking at the skeletal remains of trans men who took T throughout their adult lives, their skulls are gonna look pretty damn masculine.
Now, hormone therapy isn’t going to change every aspect of your skeleton. Estrogen in particular doesn’t do too much to the cranial bones. Your skeletal height and limb length are unlikely to change. Things like the size and shape of the pelvic inlet, the sciatic notch, and other features that are used in sex estimation, are also unlikely to change. Professional anthropological sex estimation is a complex calculus where you look at many, many features of the skeleton to make the best possible estimation of what sex the person was. It has nothing to do with gender or gender presentation. It simply tells us the end result of your hormonal composition during life. So long as you’re taking hormones regularly for a while and giving your body a chance to change and grow, your skeleton WILL undergo changes based on your hormone levels.
Hey, one anth to another: I'd love to read some of this literature, do you have any reccs? Cause I always figured that hormones would change things like bone density and possibly some of the shape, but after fusing and ossification they cant change things like the sciatic notch and the bowl shape of the pelvis and whatnot. Because I know that in grad school we did learn about the pits of partirition but as like an outdated thing that isn't very useful for sex ID anymore (if anyone's wondering, these are the source of that "pregnancy leaves notches on your pelvis" post that was going around tumblr a few years back. It isn't true.). Tho I'd love to see a study on the hands thing the op mentioned. Like I know a lot about the skeleton at this point and I'd love to know how that happened. Was it remodeling? Did the hormones somehow "reactivate" the ephyphesys? Change the bone ossification? Or was it all soft tissue? Because we do know that males and females have different proportions to their fingers vs palms (that's how the handprint paintings in caves were IDd as done by women.), but is it bone or soft tissue? Idk man it's just really interesting.
Yeah! Fair warning, a lot of these papers use terms that the trans community no longer sees as appropriate. The language standards that the medical community uses are not the same as the trans community at large (I’m sure any trans person can tell you that!) so you’ll see terms like “transsexual” a lot.
The TL:DR from all of this: there is good evidence for skeletal changes during adult-initiated HRT. We know that these changes occur, but there isn’t a whole lot of literature about exactly what occurs. Many of these changes are minute and you may not see them in a living trans human, but are more discernible in a skeleton. We need to study this more.
Introductory Stuff
A nice Sapiens article proposing how to improve trans visibility within bioarchaeology/forensics: https://www.sapiens.org/biology/transgender-intersex-forensic-anthropology/
Why it’s important to be able to talk about the bodily changes trans people go through as an anthropologist: https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/1409
Studies of skeletal development in trans people taking hormones
Bone health as a part of trans healthcare: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S8756328208007722?casa_token=Q0yyPHewOLIAAAAA:f6VKhwq1uVylVHkVZtAX6c-t3WADx8aaymmIWtiUeci1dqVuYAMH9OXn2ofmm4T1thKw5dkutuw
Hormones and bone density: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2265.1998.00396.x?casa_token=o2l0Y9Nt4qoAAAAA:tO3_aIeM4RqBE0xyNpC8Ns8d7vipYNFzsdMdaX5ZcodO9JShKdEkh-Vw-66FKJAW13bDG2pCCKKUYeyc
Interesting paper on pelvic morphology changes: https://asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbmr.4262
(this one’s about people who started HRT before 18, but it’s still a really interesting read even if it isn’t directly applicable to OP’s situation since they transitioned as an adult)
10 year bone health study in transgender individuals: https://asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbmr.3612
Not hormones, but stuff on how FFS affects skeletal remains: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32200173/
Ok, so we’ve identified that there ARE bone changes. How does muscle affect bone structure?
Explains the bone/muscle relationship in typical cis men and typical cis women: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3189615/ (Note: by typical, we mean that their hormones are generally within the range that’s expected for their chromosomal composition.)
Comparing trans men on long-term HRT to cis women of the same age and looking at bone mass, body composition, etc: https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/97/7/2503/2834495
Facial masculinization of the female cranium with age: https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/5250/NAPARSTEK-THESIS-2014.pdf?sequence=1
Cranial remodeling with age: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.12247
(The aging stuff is important because hormonal composition changes drastically with age and it’s a useful analogue, if not direct analogy.)
Some interesting reads on the relationship between sex hormones and cartilage
Estrogen and osteoarthritis (aka cartilage loss): https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/5/2767/htm
More sex hormones and osteoarthritis: https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.27.1_supplement.1053.15
Generally speaking, HRT isn’t going to do too much to the cartilage. If you think your nose looks different, it’s probably because you’re seeing it in a new context since the fat deposits on your face rearrange themselves. They’re very close to the surface, after all.
Pelvic Scarring and how it’s not strictly based in pregnancy
Oops we found it in men: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.2887
It’s also found in women who have never given birth: https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/8481/GALEA-THESIS-2018.pdf?sequence=1
Identifying transgender people within archaeology
https://miami.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/the-fallacy-of-the-transgender-skeleton (good read on how human sexual dimorphism... isn’t. The spectrum of traits overlaps too much.)
surgery piece: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073820300827?casa_token=jy_vbV7_fXkAAAAA:nz2d-xCUT-JoYACam3CDliKmto1UFkB8-ft837QzSpjLZJ0uiH5DHNSH7M_fG_b5XWsln3yZZKk
As for the mechanism, it’s a combination of remodeling and changes in bone density. The bones don’t unfuse, so you’re basically stuck with the same structure, just with different sizes and densities. This is more notable in trans men- they can lose some height from bone density loss if they’re not careful. It’s usually not a lot and isn’t as noticeable in living people as it is in skeletons, because there’s a lot more tissue to you than just bone! It’s the same mechanism that happens in cis women with osteoporosis. Fortunately, most endocrinologists take that into consideration these days.
Right now, most of the research on skeletal changes is focusing on FFS because it’s much more visible and dramatic. There’s a lot of reasons we don’t really understand everything that HRT does to the skeleton- we know a lot of it, but not everything- and how any of it shows up in the archaeological record. One of them is that HRT is relatively new and we don’t have the representation in skeletal collections. Another is that most of our standards are written based on studying white people, and while you can’t truly identify race from a skeleton, you can associate a skeleton with certain genetic groups based on suites of traits. By only including white skeletons in a study, you miss out on a TON of variation.
I know this is a little disjointed, but I think it’ll help as a starting place for people interested in doing more research on the relationship between HRT and the human skeleton and how we can see some of these changes in the archaeological or forensic context!
Amazing list of resources, and as a biologist in training imma take a dive into these.
But a friendly reminder: the key ingredient of HRT is PATIENCE. I've already read a lot of studies, and most seem inconclusive, but all agree on one thing: time on HRT (with appropriate levels) supercedes the majority of other factors involved with feminization/masculinization. Don't let someone tell you you're "done" at one year, two years, five years.... this is lifelong. Your body will adapt to the hormones it currently has at the age it is. Let it do that, and give it the time to do so.
Oh wow it was me seeing this thread all along
But uh yeah bump for visibility
pelvis... rotated?....
We lost 3" of height that way! And yeah, they do that. Changed how we walk. :3
We lost 3" of height
that way! And yeah, they do that.
Changed how we walk. :3
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
I was planning on having Sam say something about building community with kindness, but apparently he had other ideas.
So I guess this is instead, a cockroach moment. A "I'll be as queer and asian as I want, fuck you" moment. A "it's your turn to recognize my humanity" moment. A "I will keep asking uncomfortable questions and making you acknowledge what you're doing" moment.
TBH I almost didn't draw a comic this year, since I haven't consumed any Marvel content in over 4 years, and, well... ::gestures at everything::. But it turns out that my brain still wants to trot out these 3 dudes and make them talk about America, so I banged this out in 5 hours.
Yes, I've been doing this for 12 years. Here's the AO3 link if you want to see all 12: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1968099 (wow, look at baby me's opinions from the first Trump term!)
And here's the tumblr tag: https://potofsoup.tumblr.com/tagged/happy%20birthday%20steve/chrono
I promise the other years are a lot more hopeful.
do you have tips for working on a car when you have adhd?
YES. YES VERY VERY MUCH.
Part One: Prep
Purchase a tear-down manual for your car. For older cars these are books you can buy at auto parts stores. For newer cars these are subscriptions that you have to get and the primary producers are Chilton's and Haynes. If you end up getting a subscription, you are going to download and print out the manual. The entire manual. And you are going to put it in a three ring binder and then put that binder in a waterproof bag. And then you are going to cancel your subscription. Digital access to your car manual is not enough; someday you will be away from cell signal or with a dead phone battery and will need to fix your car. Someday you will need to fix your car and your hands will be either greasy or in gloves and you won't be able to scroll on a screen. You need a physical manual for your car. No matter where you keep your tools, the tear-down manual lives in the car.
Have an organization system for your tools. It needs to be a system that works for you. My system is a very organized toolbox where I put everything back as soon as the project is done. Wrenches are kept on carabiners, sockets are kept in dedicated boxes, the car tools stay in the car or in the car maintenance cupboard. Large Bastard's system is three five-gallon buckets full of wrenches and breaker bars and an ammo can full of sockets. Our systems are mutually exclusive. He is not allowed to use my tools. If he uses my wrenches they end up in the bucket and then the 14mm is missing from my set and the 14mm is the one I need for everything on this car and I have to go buy another fucking wrench no, absolutely not, stop taking my wrenches. So the deal is that you need to know what system works for you and how to navigate it; Large Bastard has many duplicates of things because he uses tools for a ton of things and has a really huge volume of tools. It's more effective for him to have ten places to search for a tool and will be likely to find one, and it's more effective for me to know exactly where the tool lives. Which brings me to my second tip:
Keep an eye out for tools at yard sales and secondhand stores. Tools are expensive. If you are a frequent tool-loser, don't invest in expensive tools. It's okay if Large Bastard steals and loses my SAE wrench set in a bucket because that was seven dollars at Harbor Freight.
No matter what your system is, have a designated general area where "car maintenance stuff" goes. This may be a box in a truck bed or a cabinet in a garage or a bag in your trunk, but you're going to end up buying brake pads that you mean to install but then it's raining for three days so you set them down somewhere and now you can't find the pads. You're not going to use the whole bottle of coolant every time you top off your coolant, so you need a space (that is INACCESSIBLE TO CHILDREN AND PETS) to store the half-bottle of coolant.
Okay. So now you've got your tool system and your car-based junk-drawer. Before you start any car project, make sure you've got all the tools that the project calls for. That means BEFORE you start working on the project, you look through your tear-down manual and watch a youtube video or two and make sure you know what tools are required, because if you get halfway through a repair and realize that you need some vacuum hose you are going to stop doing the repair to go buy hose and it's a total crapshoot whether you're going to get back to the task. I'll repeat again: IF YOU ARE DOING CAR MAINTENANCE WITH ADHD, DO NOT START A PROJECT OR REPAIR UNTIL YOU ARE CERTAIN YOU HAVE ALL THE TOOLS, PARTS, AND CONSUMABLES THAT YOU WILL NEED TO COMPLETE THE JOB. You are going to mis-en-place this thing. Get a tool caddy or a plastic bin or something, read or watch the instructions for the repair all the way through and put each required tool or part in the bin. If you need to order parts or if a tool is lost, write that down as you're adding things to the bin. Then set the bin aside and acquire those things before you pop the hood. Once you have acquired those things, put them in the bin too, and then check the instructions again to verify that you have all the necessary equipment to do your repair.
As a corollary, before you make any car maintenance purchase, check and make sure you didn't already buy it and forget. Do you need oil for this oil change? Or did you buy five quarts three months ago when there was a sale and forget it? This is why you have your car-related storage area. Go through the instructions for the repair when you are able to look in the car-stuff-pit and see if you already have the car stuff.
Okay. You have your repair in mind. You have all the tools you need. You have all the parts purchased. You have your tear-down manual. Now you need to: Make sure that you have an open space to work and that you are following good car maintenance safety procedures - Never work on a car that is up on a jack, use jack stands - If you have a wheel off, put the wheel under the frame - Disconnect the battery if necessary (the manual will tell you what repairs to do this for) Check the weather and make sure you will be able to accomplish the repairs safely - If you need to get under a car, don't repair that car in the rain - If it is hot, make sure that you have some shade for your workspace; an easy-up is an oft-neglected car maintenance tool - If it is very, very cold, make sure you are protecting your hands from frostbite (you are going to be getting your hands wet and messy and then touching cold metal; you may not realize it if your fingers turn blue or lose feeling) Make sure that this is the correct time to start a repair project - Will you have enough light to get the project done in the daylight or do you need artificial lighting? - Do you have obligations that will cause problems if this repair runs long? - Are you hungry or exhausted? Wait to start until you have eaten or rested. You don't want to be too tired to think when you're working on a car.
Part two: Project (these are the answers you were probably looking for)
Every repair is going to be different, but all repairs are going to have some things in common. They're going to require some kind of equipment or tools, they're going to take some amount of time, they're going to require some amount of focus. Here are the things you can do to guard against your ADHD sabotaging you in regard to those things.
Equipment:
Use your phone to take a photo of what the repair area looked like before you started - make sure the photo(s) demonstrates where pins, screws, nuts, bolts, hoses and clamps were when you started.
Use a tool caddy or a plastic bin to keep your tools, parts, and consumables together as you are preparing for the repair.
Get a work blanket or a tarp to set your tools on top of as you're working if you're working under the car, or a bin to set tools in if you're working in the engine compartment; this prevents you from having to chase down that wrench that you set on top of the airbox and that promptly became invisible.
Have a container handy for screws, nuts, bolts, etc. Paper bowls are good for this purpose, as are old prescription bottles and peanut butter jars. Don't use a glass jar or a ceramic mug or anything that can shatter. Sometimes something that's relatively flat that you can lay parts out in is best for this purpose (for example a paper plate or a shoebox lid) and sometimes the best thing is something with a lid so you won't lose nuts if you knock it down (plastic jars or pill bottles). When you are finished taking apart whatever it is that you're taking apart, count the number of nuts and screws and pins you've removed and make sure that's how many you put back.
Time
How long a repair will take is difficult to predict; maybe it's super easy to get at a part you thought would be harder, maybe some dipshit decided to JB Weld a nut in place. Have some idea (from your manual or instructional video) of how long the task *should* take and assess whether you have the focus for a task of that length on that day. If you take meds, consider timing them to best facilitate the repair.
You know you better than I do; know if you will need a break. If you know you will need a break, prep your break ahead of time so that you won't have to stop for an hour to make lunch. Have a sandwich ready, have water nearby, have a comfortable place to sit set up close to your workspace so that you don't go inside, wash your hands, and suddenly remember that you needed to clean the grout in the kitchen and get distracted into a different task.
Focus
Obviously the last point is related to focus as well, but minimize potential distractions. Tell people you aren't available, set your phone to do not disturb, don't turn on the game on a TV in the garage. I find that I do well listening to stuff when I'm working on cars, but I don't do well with anything that I could watch or with having people around to talk to. I like music and podcasts when I'm working on cars.
Limit your scope. Maybe you're replacing rotted-out hoses and you remember that you were feeling some squishiness in the brakes. The brakes are a problem for later you. You are not working on the brakes now. You do not have your tools gathered for brake repair. You are working on the hoses now. (Aside from preventing you from losing tools, this is another reason to collect the tools you will need for each project instead of bringing your entire tool set out to work on the job - you can't work on the brakes, you only have the tools out for working on hoses right now)
Limit reasons to walk away from the repair. Go to the bathroom before you start. Have extra sets of gloves and shop towels handy. Climate control the area and yourself as much as possible (do you need a sweater? do you need a hat? do you need sunscreen? get that squared away before you start so you don't have to walk away in the middle and risk getting distracted)
Part 3: Post
When you're getting the thing buttoned up, make sure you use all of the parts that you took out. Compare against the photo you took at the start and count the screws.
Read back through the instructions step by step and make sure you did each step. Do this twice.
Manually check tightness of every part you worked on and visually check fluid levels (shoutout to the sketchy mechanic offering $15 oil changes who was surprised as fuck when I came back ten minutes after my oil change because I'd checked and the oil pan plug was only finger tight; turns out he was running a scam)
Clean up your workspace, both to get things tidy and to make sure you didn't overlook any parts.
Take the vehicle for a test drive. Make sure things are running well. If they are not running well, go back to your workspace and go through the troubleshooting steps in the manual to see if you can identify the problem (shoutout to the saturn dealership for the time they got water in my plug wires on my station wagon, shoutout to me for the time i got the order wrong on my saturn coupe plug wires)
If your car is working fine and you don't find yourself with seven extra hoses and a mystery solenoid, good job, you're done, put your tools away and pat yourself on the back.
TL;DR -
Get a teardown manual for your car
Keep your tools organized in a system that makes sense for you
Don't invest in expensive tools if you lose tools frequently
Before you start a project, make sure you've got all the necessary tools, parts, and fluids; before you buy tools, parts, or fluids check and see if you already have it.
Use a tool caddy or bin to keep the parts, tools, and fluids in one place while you're getting ready to start
Make sure that you have the space, time, and physical safety to start a project
Take a photo of the repair before you start to mark the position of bolts, pins, etc.
Have a designated space like a bin or a tarp to set down tools while you're working so that you don't set them down and lose them
Have a container to old fasteners and small parts so you don't lose them; count the parts you take out and make sure you put that many back in
Figure out how long the repair might take and realistically assess whether or not you have time to start
Plan breaks that will minimize your need to walk away from the project
Minimize distractions
Work on one thing at a time, making sure each thing is complete and tested before you start another repair.
Limit reasons to walk away (see my write-up of Success Traps for more details)
Make sure you put back all the fasteners you took out
Mentally walk through the instructions at the end of the project to make sure you did each step
Verify that everything you worked on is properly tightened and filled
Clean up your workspace and make sure you didn't overlook any parts
Test drive the car to make sure it's working well and troubleshoot any problems that come up
Put your tools away so you can find them next time
Good luck!
So much of this is just mis en place. This is also how I bake, fix computers, do home repairs, clean, dye my hair, and do yard work with ADHD.
The very, very basic TL;DR that is broadly applicable to everything is:
Before you start a project, determine what you need for the project (make a list yourself, find instructions or a recipe)
Estimate the time you will need for the project and make sure you've got enough time to get started
Collect the things that you need to do the project, don't start the project if you don't have the needed things, don't buy things for the project without checking what you have on hand
Prepare a workspace (set out your tool blanket and an easy up, clear the kitchen counters and the sink, drag the yard waste bin to the correct spot in the yard, clear off a desk, put a towel down over the sink)
Reduce distractions
Follow the steps you've determined are needed
Test the results of your efforts
Re-do some steps or troubleshoot as needed
Look over list of steps to verify that the job is done
Put things away so they can be found when they're needed
Enjoy the fruits of your success (driveable car, more storage on computer, fun hair color, biscotti, tidy room, relaxing yard) and possibly also a nice reward for your effort (I have completed the yard work, I can now fuck off and play a mindless phone game and listen to a podcast and have hot chocolate with marshmallows and toast for lunch).
buds, this is the wrong article to put under an email gate.
Here's the info from that article (with a lot of heavy editorializing from me):
Don't call or text; you want to leave as minimal a traceable digital footprint as possible and cellphones are extremely traceable. The Trump admin is committed to collecting metadata from journalists who receive leaks and that includes call history and who sent text messages; even if the message gets deleted there is a record of it with the carrier that can be subpoenaed.
If you are going to email, do so from a burner account created for the purpose of leaking/whistleblowing. (my advice: use a service like protonmail that allows you to encrypt messages and doesn't collect any data beyond what is absolutely necessary for an email system to function; email is inherently insecure you have to treat it as insecure, but a burner account at a privacy-focused company like proton that facilitates sending encrypted messages is the best option for email; here's some information about how to use protonmail as privately as possible) When setting up your burner email, do not use your phone number for 2FA or include any accurate biographical information during the account setup. Set up the account while using a traffic anonymizer like Tor. Here's a PDF about what Tor is and how it works and here's the Tor project's manual explaining how to install and configure the browser for privacy. (The article advises to use Tor or a VPN but that raises the question of whether you trust your VPN provider; if you are going to use a VPN use one of the ones recommended by privacyguides; I know fuck all about VPNs but I know I wouldn't trust most VPN providers in this context).
Don't reach out to the person you're leaking to on social media. I feel like this should be obvious, but it may not be - don't reach out through meta or X or tumblr, these are not anonymous platforms and they can and will be compelled to share messages sent to journalists or data sent from your account. Don't follow the people you're leaking to (unless you already happened to be following them), don't interact with their posts. Do not make any kind of visible connection between you and the person you are leaking to.
Be careful about using encrypted messaging platforms. I personally wouldn't trust telegram or whatsapp, and I haven't heard of Session until now, but generally speaking Signal is one of your safest bets for sending messages. Signal collects the smallest amount of user data it can, and while it does require a phone number to sign up, the phone number doesn't have to stay connected to your username. If you don't already have a signal account, create one NOW because one of the things that they do track and can be compelled to disclose is when an account was created. If an account is linked to you and it was created shortly before a leak, that's suspicious. Create an account now and have it handy for when you need it. IF you are using signal, be aware that people can still screencap your messages; don't share personally identifying data via signal chats.
Have good opsec about how you collect the data that you're going to leak. For example, don't email yourself a copy of the data from your work email account, take photos of the data on a non-work phone and then strip the metadata. If you require login access to get the info you're looking to leak, figure out if there's a way that you can make the leak more ambiguous about the access by making sure there's time between your access and the leak, or that the time of your access isn't included in the information that is leaked. Take a lot of time to think about how someone might track a leak back to you and take steps to mitigate that.
Don't save copies of the data that you've leaked; once you've passed the message on to people who can get it out there, destroy any copies that you had.
GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop are tools to securely share leaks with organizations that will publicize the information you're sharing while protecting you to the best of their ability. Do not access those sites through your normal browser when you are preparing to leak data, only access them through Tor.
Be cautious about who you leak to. (Look I love the team at It Could Happen Here but you don't share a leak with a podcaster you share a leak with a group like Distributed Denial of Secrets). Focus on groups that have a history of securely sharing leaked info and on outlets that might have some legal protection from sharing information about you. The Intercept and DDoSecrets are the two that spring to mind immediately for me. (In fact I got the screenshot at the top of this thread because I went searching for this intercept article to paste on to a reply to another post but then this happened so here we are). Both of those links have their tips for leakers, btw.
It isn't stated elsewhere here so I'll add it at the end: if you are using Tor, don't log in to personal accounts that are associated with your real name or your private data. If you create burner accounts, don't use them to communicate with accounts associated with your real name or private data.
Also don't tell people - partners, parents, friends, etc. - that you're going to leak something.
And, I cannot emphasize this enough, do not tell me or any other tumblr user if you have data you are thinking about leaking or a hack you think you've pulled off. Don't talk about doing crime on the internet and definitely don't talk to me about it. Don't send an anonymous ask, don't send a private message. "The hacker or hacker-adjacent person I parasocially know from tumblr" is not a safe recipient for your leak and tumblr is not a secure or anonymous platform EVER.
Another tip, for getting info instead of giving it:
DuckDuckGo (the search engine) has a service where you can make a "fake" email with a @ duck.com domain. This strips emails of trackers and sends it on to your specified email address. You'd use it in email gates like above or giving it to people who you don't trust fully.
This doesn't really help if your issue is accessing email at all, but it can add an extra layer of privacy to existing email.
anyone who's always wanted to watch leverage but couldn't afford it and couldn't find it to pirate it, or just prefers watching things on youtube instead of futzing with unofficial sites:
the first three seasons are on youtube, in full, uploaded by the creators, in the correct order (the first season was aired out of order by the network)
(ETA: it's apparently geolocked to only the US and its territories, but THAT'S WHAT A VPN'S FOR BAYBEEEEE)
undersea 🫧
Source
Mossy rooms 🌿
Tip jar | Wallpapers | Prints | Twitter | Bluesky
I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"
Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.
Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :
They make a hateful, fascist statement
Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong
We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process
We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go
They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.
Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.
Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)
Black Trans, Intersex, and/or Genderqueer Perspectives To Consider!
As a precursor to the next lesson I have coming up soon, I asked on this post for perspectives that I myself may not or do not have. While I'll be linking this in that lesson, I am putting it here as its own post because I believe they deserve to be spotlighted!
I don't care if it's "long" and "wordy"- if you intend to write about Black characters of these identities (or hell, even just to learn), and you want to be respectful about it, take the time to read the opinions of the real people whose lives you're trying to convey! Because we're not just fictional concepts or puzzles, we're real people who can read/see what you've created!
(read it on desktop if possible, it's far easier to zoom in to the PDFs. Or download them for your use!)
just wanted to share the National Down Syndrome Society’s message for this year’s World Down Syndrome Day (21st March) 💛💙
Powerful message that lovingly includes multiple disabilities, united. I love this.
[Image and video description–
The image is a textpost that reads:
This #WorldDownSyndromeDay, we've joined forces with @coordown and other international Down syndrome organizations to spread the powerful message: No Decision Without Us. [flexed biceps emoji] People with disabilities deserve a seat at the table where decisions are made about their lives, their futures, and their rights. Let's work together toward a world where every voice is valued. #NoDecisionWithoutUs #WDSD25
The text accompanies a video posted by @ ndssorg on TikTok.
The video shows people with various disabilities forcefully requesting that they not be left out of the decision-making process when the decisions affect them directly. The persons with disabilities shown include:
Sophia, a young teen with Down's Syndrome protesting at not being consulted over what dress she should wear to someone's wedding
A smart-suited young man in a wheelchair, protesting at not being consulted regarding the design of a train station, taking his place at the meeting table and planting a figurine of a person in a wheelchair in front of the flight of steps leading up to the train platform in the architectural model
A little person in medical scrubs, protesting that the shelves of medical supplies that she needs for her work are beyond her reach, even with her arm stretched as far as she can vertically
A deaf person protesting at a student assembly that a fire alarm is of little use to the hard-of-hearing community if it is only sound-based
A person with visual disability pointing out that an airport touch screen is of little use to the visually-challenged community if all your fingertips can sense is flatness
A smart-suited young woman with a prosthetic leg and a smart-suited young man (possibly with Down's Syndrome) forcefully requesting a legislative assembly to give them seats at the lawmaking table as well, if the laws that are being made will have an impact on them too
The video draws to a close with Sophia storming into the room at the start of the video wearing an outfit of her own choice: a leather jacket, a black bustier top, a choker necklace and a purple tutu. The whole sequence ends with the cast raising their fists in the air in a show of united strength.
End description.]
also they are all singing
If you're an American with a disability who receives government assistance, you likely qualify for an ABLE account, or you may starting next
Named for the 2014 law that created them, the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act, ABLE accounts have been available since 2016 to individuals identified by a doctor as having a disability before the age of 26. Next year, they’ll become available to those identified before the age of 46, which will increase access to an additional 6 million people, including 1 million veterans, according to Indiana State Treasurer Daniel Elliott, who administers the accounts in his state. An estimated 8 million people nationwide already qualify.
“The fact that it used to be that individuals could only save up to $2,000 or they could lose benefits — that was really restricting a lot of families,” Elliot said. “People were forced into a position where they couldn’t save for their futures. Now we’re seeing average account balances of (ABLE accounts) between $11,000 and $12,000.”
Generally, ABLE accounts may reach totals of $100,000 without affecting Supplemental Security Income. Lifetime balance limits for the various state ABLE accounts can range from around $300,000 to over $500,000. They’re administered by state treasurers, and the vast majority can be set up online via their websites. Some ABLE plans accept paper applications as well.
Anyone can contribute to an ABLE account — including the account owner, friends, family, organizations, nonprofits, and employers — up to $19,000 per year in 2025. If the account owner is able to work and not already contributing to a workplace retirement plan, they can contribute an additional amount equal to their yearly gross income. For 2025, that amount is up to an additional $15,560 to $18,810, depending on the state administering the account.
There are also tax advantages. Investment earnings from ABLE accounts remain untaxed as long as money taken from the account is used for “qualified disability expenses,” such as medical treatment, education, tutoring and job training. Account holders may choose from a number of investment options for the funds in their accounts or hold and save the money without investing it further.
Elliot said raising awareness of the accounts is the biggest challenge for the National Association of State Treasurers (NAST), for which he’s also the secretary treasurer.
“Many people are used to the idea that, ‘If I have a disability or my child has one, it could endanger their benefits to save money,’” he said. “We as a state and as a country need to start reaching out to people and saying, ‘Look, you actually can save money now. You could save towards the purchase of a home.’ The hardest thing right now is getting that message out. We need more people to be aware things have changed.”
According to NAST’s data, just 186,641 ABLE accounts existed at the end of 2024, despite an estimated 8 million people qualifying. When the age limit is raised, the accounts will also become available to people whose disabilities may have been the result of an accident in adulthood or developed later in life, such as after a COVID infection.
Andrew Warren, senior associate for policy and research at the Financial Health Network, who studies the financial circumstances of Americans with disabilities, said that the vast majority of people surveyed for a 2023 report by the organization did not know these accounts existed.
“Less than 1% of eligible individuals have these accounts,” Warren said. “Our research show that one of the major barriers to becoming financially healthy for this vulnerable group is asset limits. But there’s an information disconnect between caseworkers and direct services providers on the ground and (administrators of ABLE accounts).”
Two online resources — ABLE Today and the ABLE National Resource Center — can guide you through questions to determine if you or a friend or family member qualifies.
I honestly cannot articulate how HUGE this is.
It is not enough. Not NEARLY enough. But this is still HUGE.
This could mean the difference for becoming homeless and not becoming homeless, or having to stay in an abusive situation.
YOU COULD FUNDRAISE FOR HEALTH CARE AND NOT BE BREAKING THE MOTHERFUCKING LAW.