Star

[sacred-portal]

[starrystar]

I thought graduation was going to be like this, but actually, The Horrors.

[bitcoitus]

Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

[bitcoitus]

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being." — Robert Anton Wilson

[doeberman-moveddd-deactivated20]

moment of silence for everyone who's just like their dad but a girl

[quasi-normalcy]

Mel Brooks on taking studio notes:

[starrystar]

This is a really good description of the only successful way to work with some dissertation advisors, also.

[alivingtypo]

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

[today-till-tomorrow]

op how does it feel to be the most correct person on earth

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[cherrispryte]

Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.

[mikkeneko]

Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.

[grison-in-space]

As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.

[aesungaia]

[accessible-art]

[IDs from alt: Comic panel showing the inside of a room. There's a cat tree by the front door, under a window. There's a dog door on the front door. The narration reads: 'So, there's this cat tree in our house. We got it back when we had cats, but we don't have any anymore.'

Panel 2. The cat tree now has cats in it, and the front door no longer has a dog door. The narration continues: 'Lately, it's been filling up with cats I don't recognize. I don't know how they keep getting in. We don't have a dog door or anything.'

Panel 3. The cat tree looks slightly different, the cats are gone, and other small details around the room have changed. The narration continues: 'So, we have this cat tree at our house. I don't know how it keeps getting in. We've never had a cat or anything.'

Panel 4. Instead of the room, we see an illustration of several cats walking single-file in a void, weaving around the text of the page and several heaps of pills. The narration continues: 'When I was a kid, I used to be on this medication. Long after I'd stopped taking it, it was revealed to me that one of the potential side-effects was memory issues. For the longest time, I couldn't recall a single thing that had happened to me during the years I was on it.'

Panel 5. We're back in the room from before, only the design of the front door has changed, a table has become a cupboard, the window now has blinds, and the cat tree is gone. Three cats levitate in the air, occupying the positions they were previously in while the cat tree was present. The narration continues: 'So, we've got these cats in our apartment. I don't know why they're arranged like that.'

Panel 6. Several cats gather around a giant human brain in a void. The narration continues: 'Some things came back to me eventually, and I wasn't sure whether I was still missing pieces, whether I'd totally recovered, or whether there was never anything wrong with me in the first place.'

Panel 7. Illustration showing the inside of the cat tree, looking outward, as if we're seeing from a cat's perspective. The narration continues: 'So, there's this room in my house. I don't know how I keep getting in.'

Panel 8. We're back in the room, but the window has moved to a different wall, the cat tree has grown, and a portrait that used to hang on the wall is now gone, among other changes. The narration continues: 'So, I have these trust issues. If I forgot something important, would I even notice?'

Panel 9. The room continues to change, and the cat tree continues to grow. The narration continues: 'I think a lot about how little the human brain is actually understood. So, there's this cat tree in my house.'

Panel 10. The cat tree grows. The narration continues: 'Did you know that the diagnoses for a lot of mental health conditions are practically baseless? There's this cat tree in my house.'

Panel 11. Illustration of a pencil next to several mental health assessment worksheets. The narration continues: 'The doctor essentially gives you a 'What Simpsons Character Are You?' facebook personality quiz, full of statements like 'I often feel bad', and you're expected to rate how relatable these statements are on a scale of one to ten, with no frame of reference for what these numbers actually mean.'

Panel 12 is mostly text, but we see the carpeted insides of a cat tree slowly encroaching in on the words. The narration continues: 'There's no real metric for any of this. What's the 'normal' amount of anxious? What's the 'normal' amount of autistic? What amount of feeling bad is the 'normal' amount of feeling bad? How much of that is my body, and how much of it is my circumstances? Which number do I circle to get them to take me seriously? Which number communicates that something is wrong, but that others probably have it a lot worse? Six? Eight? If I answer nine or ten, will they assume I'm exaggerating? Will I be immediately hospitalized against my will?'

Panel 13. The carpet encroaches further, and the page grows darker. In the light at the end of the tunnel, the narration continues: 'What percentage of my life is a normal percentage to forget? If my mind can't be trusted, how can my answers be trusted?'

Panel 14 shows several posters on the walls of the doctors office, demanding patience to turn off the phone, asking patients to use their phone to scan a qr code to leave a review, advertising services to patience, and demanding that patients 'only have one problem per appointment'. The narration continues: 'When the quiz is over, the doctor decides which Simpsons character you are based on vibes and their own personal biases, and if they think you're a Marge they won't help you. 'Thanks for taking my quiz! You seem totally normal. That'll be one thousand dollars. You can leave it in the trash next to the four hundred forms that I made you fill out and then didn't read. Yeah, the ones that already asked you all the same questions I did.'

Panel 15. We're back in the room. All windows and furniture are gone, and all that remains is the ever-expanding cat tree, and its ever-expanding population of cats. Even the door has begun to disappear, and the walls and ceiling are slowly turning into carpet. The narration continues: 'So, there's this cat tree in my house. I've spent my entire life pretending to be normal in order to survive, and now I don't know how to turn it off, so now no one believes me when I say there's something wrong with me.'

Panel 16 shows an extremely close-up illustration of a cat's eye, accompanied by a single sentence: 'Did you know that cats tend to hide their symptoms when they're sick?'

Panel 17. We're back in the room, which has completely transformed into carpeting, and the cat tree has expanded to fill the entire room. Cats climb and sit and loaf about all over the room. The narration continues: 'There's a cat tree in my house. I've taken a lot of different medications in my life, for a lot of different reasons. Most of them either did nothing, or made things worse. At least, I think they did. If I was getting better, would I even notice?'

Panel 18 is completely blank, except for a single sentence: 'What are you supposed to do when neither the doctor, nor the patient, nor the treatment can be trusted?'

Panel 19. The room is now empty. No doors, no windows, no furniture, no cat tree, no cats. The narration concludes: 'There used to be this cat tree in my house.' End IDs]

[imathers]

[vulqan]

[ID: tweet from dril that reads “"This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender,” i holler as i overturn my uncle’s barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit". end description.]

[whentherewerebicycles]

saw this on twitter and wanted to save it here

[hauntedselves]

Image transcript:

Thriving: "I got this"

Calm and steady with minor mood fluctuations

Able to take things in stride

Consistent performance

Able to take feedback and to adjust to changes or plans

Able to focus

Able to communicate effectively

Normal sleep patterns and appetite

Surviving: "Something isn't right"

Nervousness, sadness, increased mood fluctuations

Inconsistent performance

More easily overwhelmed or irritated

Increased need for control and difficulty adjusting to changes

Trouble sleeping or eating

Activities and relationships you used to enjoy seem less interesting or even stressful

Muscle tension, low energy, headaches

Struggling: "I can't keep this up"

Persistent fear, panic, anxiety, anger, pervasive sadness, hopelessness

Exhaustion

Poor performance and difficulty making decisions or concentrating

Avoiding interaction with coworkers, family and friends

Fatigue, aches and pains

Restless, disturbed sleep

Self-medicating with substances, food, or other numbing activities

In Crisis: "I can't survive this"

Disabling distress and loss of function

Panic attacks

Nightmares or flashbacks

Unable to fall or stay asleep

Intrusive thoughts

Thoughts of self-harm or suicide

Easily enraged or aggressive

Careless mistakes and inability to focus

Feeling numb, lost, or out of control

Withdrawal from relationships

Dependence on substances, food, or other numbing activities to cope

End transcript.

[strictlyquadrilateral]

the more i talk to extended family the more i learn that it was EXTREMELY obvious to all the adults around me as a child that something had gone horribly wrong and i needed professional help, but i guess there's some sort of prime directive thing where you can suggest to the kid's parents that the kid might need help but you can never ever ever let on to the kid that you can tell something is wrong. you just have to hold on to that until the kid becomes an adult who's able to say "so i think i experienced a lot of trauma when i was very little" and then you can say "yes, i know. i didn't know what happened but it was completely unmissable that something had." okay. thank you. that's very validating. but why did you leave me to suffer and keep feeling like there was no other explanation than that i was broken and going insane. would it really have been so bad to sit me down and go "i see you. i can't help much, but i can tell something happened and you're in a lot of pain. you deserve help and support. you're not going insane." or something. i don't know. my internal experience was mostly that i had suddenly become a bad child who couldn't seem to get anything right and was always being yelled at. maybe it would have helped if someone had said something.

[strictlyquadrilateral]

i love how you're saying 90% like it's a real statistic! it really makes this reply read like you have any idea what you're talking about.

a lot of adults seem to think that parents should control as close as possible to 100% of the information available to their children, including and sometimes especially the information pertaining to their children. i'm not sure i've ever seen this work out well. i've seen a lot of adults really fucked up by the realization that some really important information had been kept from them when they were children. no one's told me about experiencing long term consequences from having been given information about themselves when they were children.

if all information has to go through the parents, you're putting a lot of trust in the parents' willingness and ability to make good decisions about their children. but some parents are not good parents. some parents abuse their children. some parents neglect their children. some parents will hear "your child needs professional help" and they will smile and nod and then continue trying to punish their child into being fixed.

if we must always defer to the parents, there are so many children who are going to fall through those cracks. i know people who never or almost never saw a doctor as a child because their parents couldn't be bothered to take them! do you think that parents like that are any more likely to care about the health of their kids' minds than they do the health of their kids' bodies?

did you know people used to think babies couldn't feel pain? did you know that it used to be common knowledge that children couldn't be traumatized, because obviously they'd just bounce back as soon as they were out of the traumatic situation? we have decided as a society to abandon children to the whims of their parents, unless those parents are minorities or, rarely, physically endangering their children. we as a society are operating under the collective wisdom that the parents know best. and we as a society are wrong.

i don't care what parents think. we need to start considering what is actually best for children.

[the-real-seebs]

yeah, so, as a parent, i 100% agree with you on this. if people think i am fucking things up for my kid, and they don't think i'm obviously going to take suggestions well, they should probably tell the kid.

i have told many kids that their parents were fucking up and it has worked really fucking well at getting kids into better situations, and just... giving them some reason to believe something other than that it's their fault for being bad and deserving it, really.

[reasonablywittyatbest]

As a kid I was so so so desperate for someone to notice i was suffering and tell me that my situation was fucked up, that they saw me, they couldn't help but they knew. Just one adult coming up to me and telling me that would have been such an incredible blessing to little me. I was far too afraid to reach out, and the fact that so many adults just seemed not to notice what was happening made me feel like no one would care. Maybe I was blowing it out of proportion, maybe I was bad.

So, yeah, I fully support this. The situation with the eating disorder cousin is clearly a different situation, if its true the parents were trying thier best to help. But. Even in that situation touching base with the kid and seeing how THEY feel about their parents help is absolutely a good idea. The parents help could absolutely be making the situation worse and it's good to ask the kid how they feel about it.

Also, no, kids in bad situations have learned they cannot go to their parents, that's dangerous, so absolutely not 90%, most won't.

[the-real-seebs]

And if they did, maybe it would help. Because you know what? A single stranger mentioning that maybe something is wrong won't give them a complex and crippling anxiety for the last 20 years. It'll give them a brief moment of surprise, and maybe actually help them feel like what they're experiencing is real. If the parents are at all competent, they'll handle it fine, and if they aren't, the kid desperately needs to know that other people can see it too.

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[manfrommars2049]

UBI needs to happen. via antiwork

[hasufin]

I think most importantly, it would give us the leverage to say “no”. To walk away from bad jobs and abusive managers. To refuse to work in unsafe environments. To demand better pay.

To demand better, because the options are no longer “suck it up” or “die”.

[tehamelie]

The counter-argument: Not having UBI is in the interests of those in power who want to do anything to the people they are in power over in order to remain in power.

If the greed of the few should come before the need of the many.

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[byjove]

there is something so fucking insulting about someone complimenting you over your weight loss when the weight loss was not intentional and was, in fact, frightening. like, thanks asshole. I wish having a BMI over 25 was the only thing I had to worry about. I’m glad you apparently believed my body was less than ideal and it is now more pleasing to you after I have been dealing with a flareup of a serious autoimmune disorder for months. I miss being able to enjoy food but I’m so glad you think I look better, apparently.

of course, you can’t say this because in the diet culture infested world that we live in, no one thinks twice about complimenting someone on their visible weight loss. it isn’t meant as a insult, it’s a thoughtless comment. it is unfathomable that someone may have been happier or healthier when they weighed more. and you don’t want to have to recount your personal medical history in graphic detail to explain why losing weight was not good.

‘you’ve lost weight since the last time I saw you’ is a completely neutral observation, it’s an acceptable comment to make in my opinion. automatically complimenting someone on it is so presumptuous and gross.

[starrystar]

IMO "You've lost weight since the last time I saw you" won't be neutral for everyone. I think strong friendships and strong connections can weather that in most cases, but coworkers and acquaintances should probably just not. My perspective only.

[seekingstars]

HOW’S THAT HOUSE THAT RAISED YOU? - Lev St. Valentine

[anexperimentallife]

[fairycosmos]

my 5 year plan? find the energy to use my human body to participate in the world in some form or fashion