A place for my rants, my causes, and my original writing/fanfic, brought to you by a feminist, disabled, genderfluid (she/her, they/them) aro-ace millenial with not enough time on my hands.
BBC Merlin is insane as a show. Its an adaptation of Arthurian mythos. It's inspired by CW's Smallville (this is 100% real look it up). it stars 4 unknown 20 somethings and British acting legends. It's aimed at kids and families. its a tragedy. Its campy as hell. It will make you cry. It asks you, like Merlin, to believe in the Golden age of Camelot. It never shows you that Golden age. Everyone in the show is the most beautiful person you'll ever see. people will clown on the CGI. Its one of the most homerotic shows of the 2000's. Its an on purpose allegory for queerphobia, but those allegorious queer characters are largely villains. If you watched it when you were 12 you will never quite be able to let it go. This is a curse. This is an experience you wouldn't give up for the world.
The crux of the anti trans movement is a war on bodily autonomy. They don't want you to have any agency over what you look like, how you dress, who you date, whether to have kids, etc.
They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.
Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone's self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.
Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Our rights are your rights. Our destruction is your destruction.
Something Tumblr has failed to understand in its quest to become solvent.
Is that user surveys would probably help in providing things people would actually pay for!
--I would pay up to $5 a month to be able to list my crochet for sale in-app. I post the photos and information and indicate it's a sales post, Tumblr provides the "buy here" link.
--I would pay $30 a year for ad-free, but not $70.
--I would pay $1/mo to have a second user icon, and while $1/mo isn't much, it adds up. Indeed, back in the LJ days it was really common to pay for extra icons for your RP accounts so your character could "make facial expressions."
--that $70/yr? I'd pay that if it included one free Blaze per month, no ads, and three user icons.
I would pay to help keep the lights on if they gave me something I felt was worth paying for. But they don't seem to understand that payment needs to have value added, and "we're doing weird coding stuff nobody wants" is not value added.
I legitimately think separating this place from other socmed by making it more user-driven would not only make Tumblr thrive, it might also push other sites back toward not being THE ALGORITHM THE ALGORITHM THE ALGORITHM all the time.
its so funny watching people veer so far to the left that they start reinventing things like race science, segregation, purity politics, censorship, misogyny, bioessentialism, anti-theism, nationalism, lynch mobs, capital punishment and group punishment, etc.
and by funny I mean fucking terrifying but I have to laugh otherwise I'll spiral.
You might have opinions that you feel have veered off into unacceptable territory. You might have come to feminism with a "fuck all men, we should start treating them like shit, see how they like it" mentality. You might have come to anti-christian nationalism with a "christianity is so patriarchal and imperialistic, anyone who practices it hates me and i hate them" mentality. You might have come to environmentalism with a "there are too many people on this planet, we need a new plague" mentality.
You might have noticed your opinions slipping further and further into radicalization but you might also feel like you started on that path from a genuinely good place and you've had only the best of intentions.
But (and this is the part you need to internalize), it is not too late to course correct.
Whenever I worry that my desire to make a better world has led me to accept opinions, beliefs, rhetoric etc. that I don't actually agree with, I take a step back and ask myself three questions:
First, am I assuming that other people are not people in the exact same way that I'm a person?
The root of all evil is the incredibly tempting tendency to treat other people like they're not exactly as much of a person as you are. So take a beat and ask yourself if you're treating them like they are.
(This can go in both directions by the way! Treating someone like they're less than a person is obviously harmful and dehumanizing but treating them like they're more than a person can lead to objectification, tokenization, and more. Not good stuff.)
Second, am I thinking from a place of love or hate?
The saying "you have to love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor" will untangle you from so many impossible ethical dilemmas, I promise you.
And third, am I putting my anger somewhere useful?
This is actually a two part question because the first step is asking yourself, "Am I directing my anger towards the person or institution I am actually mad at?" If the answer is no, then you are effectively yelling at a Walmart employee about how evil the Walmart corporation is and expecting them to be able to do something about that.
Then you move onto the actual question, "Am I putting my anger somewhere useful?" If the extent of your civic engagement is getting into fights on social media, I can assure you the answer is no.
So for example...
Let's say you are a girl in your early-mid 20s. You learned about feminism from your friends and maybe a teacher or professor or two and you've accepted the fact that patriarchy is real and harmful to women but you find yourself repeatedly thinking "Ugh, I wish all men could just fuck off and die. I should be able to treat them exactly as terribly as women have been treated since the beginning of time."
This is an understandable thought. I see how you got there. Misogyny is incredibly exhausting to deal with, many men have done exactly zero work to become less misogynistic, and living your life with the crushing weight of "a significant portion of the world's population do not think of me as a full and autonomous person" is very very difficult.
So what do we do about it? What is our response.
Here is where we pause and ask the questions.
First, am I assuming that other people are not people in the exact same way that I am a person?
Am I treating "men" like a monolith in the same way that misogynists treat "women" like a monolith? Yes? Okay then what's the reality? (Hint: it is always more complex than you first think).
For me, the reality is that "men" includes my best friend from college who loves me and the world so much he's spent 12 years learning about feminism and gender theory just so he could be a better person, a better friend. It includes Brennan Lee Mulligan (and Lou Wilson and Zac Oyama and more) who prove to me that it is possible to be a public figure without promoting toxic masculinity. It includes my favorite professor who still checks in on me and my career, even years after I stopped being his student. It includes trans men I want to celebrate and love, both for their trans-ness and their maleness. It includes so many men whom I love and who love me.
Which brings us to....
Second, am I thinking from a place of love or hate?
When I have the knee-jerk thought "I wish all men would just fuck off and die" what am I actually saying? I'm saying I wish the world were safer and kinder and better for women. I'm saying I want women to live the lives they want to live, regardless of whatever a hateful man might think about it. I'm saying I want a higher quality of life for women.
And so....
Third, am I putting my anger somewhere useful?
Do I actually think all men should die? Do I think men should be violently eradicated from the planet?
No, that's ridiculous and not useful at all and certainly not coming from a place of love.
So instead I'll ask myself "How can I make my anger work for me?"
Well, what do women need to have a higher quality of life? They need to be paid a fair wage, they need access to high-quality health care, they need subsidized childcare and birth control and abortions and education. So those are the things I will fight for. Those are the things I will talk about.
Boom, I have turned hatred for misogyny into love for women, love for the world. And I have given myself useful and productive motivation to make the world a better place. Dope. We're doing great.
Pick a topic you like, and that's what you're going to read about. Set a minimum word count, and read until you get to it. Start small. Smart easy. First try, it might actually be agonizing.
That's it for the day. Just hit the word count.
Next day, read to the word count again. Read something new! It will be easier today.
And easier the next.
And you will naturally find yourself extending how much you read per day.
yes! the brain must be exercised like any other part of the body to get stronger! no matter what place you’re at you can do stimulating activities to exercise your brain!
The answer to 'how are they going to function' is, and I say this as someone whose mom was a social worker in Appalachia for 20 years: they're going to get scammed. They're going to be victims of fraud, scams, and exploitation, due to their low literacy making them easier targets for others. And then they're going to be unable to read and write well enough to advocate for themselves in a court of law or fight back in any meaningful way.
"I ain't reading that" becomes "I can't read that" which becomes "I didn't read before I signed it because the guy telling me to was convincing and now I don't have anything".
^^ There is so much profit in exploiting illiteracy and ignorance.
On top of being scammed, receiving accurate medical treatment relies on you knowing how to do your own research, and too many doctors take illiterate patients less seriously.
If you become a victim of a crime or are accused of a crime, you need to be able to read the papers a cop or lawyer puts in front of you. They can happily take advantage of your ignorance if you give them a chance.
This list goes on! Landlords, real estate agents, accountants, car mechanics, bankers, phone companies, customer service, contractors, childcare workers, e.g. any other human you rely on just to live your life will expect you to be literate and capable of making smart decisions. It is not their job to supplement your ignorance. It is not any well-meaning individual's job to make sure you paid attention in the same classes they did. And most of them know this and will not wait for you to figure things out.
cleaning with ADHD is a nightmare. it’s an endless cycle of finding a half-finished chore and stopping the one you were already working on, then remembering that something else needs to be done and getting started on that, then finding half-finished chore and
have you ever seen a junebug get to grips with a window screen? it’s remarkably persistent, but not very focused. all that matters is location.
how to junebug: choose the location you feel you can probably get some shit done on today. be specific. not ‘the bathroom’ but ‘the bathroom sink’. you are not choosing a range, you are choosing a center; you will move around, but your location is where you’ll keep coming back to. mentally stick a pin in it. consider yourself tethered to that spot by a long mental bungee cord.
go to your location. look at stuff. move stuff around. do a thing. get distracted. remember you’re junebugging the bathroom sink and go back there. look at it some more. do a different thing. get distracted. get a sandwich. remember you’re junebugging and go back to the bathroom sink.
nt’s will go crazy watching you, and if they demand to know When You Will Be Done you will probably have to roll them in a carpet and stuff them up the chimney. you’re done when you feel done, or you’re too bored to live, or it’s bedtime, or any number of other markers, you get to pick. but the thing is, by returning repeatedly to that one spot, you harness the ‘hyperactivity’ part instead of wasting all that energy battling with the ‘attention deficit’ part.
not only will the bathroom sink almost certainly be clean, and probably the mirror and soap dish too, you might’ve swapped in a fresh toothbrush, a new soap, you might’ve unclogged the drain – you will probably also have cleaned or fixed up several things in the near vicinity, or in the path between the sink and where you get the fresh toothbrush, or maybe you did your grocery shopping cuz you were out of soap, or maybe you couldn’t find a clean hand towel and ended up doing laundry.
this is good. you got shit done! it wasn’t necessarily Cleaned The Bathroom in the way nt’s think of it, but screw ‘em. things are better than they were.
plus you worked off enough energy to be able to sleep. which is not small potatoes when living the ADHD life. :D
whenever i see people call random edgy but not-at-all harmful artists "degens" i would like to refer them to the first sentence of wikipedia's "degenerate art" article
Reminder that this is the type of art the nazis were referring to:
(Kandinsky)
You cannot "well but I'M not referring to that kind of art, I only mean Dirty Pictures" your way out of this. You are being harmful and need to stop, not rationalise why it's okay for YOU to be doing it. You need to understand
censorship violates the universal human right of free expression and freedom of speech.
fiction is not reality. Fictional characters are not real people.
if someone SAYS a work of fiction inspired them to do bad things, that is not the work of fiction's fault. The person who did bad things is STILL at fault, because they have free will and must be assumed to understand the consequences of their actions.
discomfort is not harm. If a piece of art makes you uncomfortable, that's actually fine. That's the POINT of certain pieces of art. You need to learn to tolerate discomfort.
It is not in fact the government's job to enforce a set of morals on people. That violates people's universal human right to freedom of religion and creed.
There is no such thing as "just a little bit of" censorship.
It does not matter what kind of art it is, when you use the term degenerate to refer to art you don't like, you are using a word that is deeply rooted in bigotry. A word used to target marginalized groups.
Ok the US Attorney General says that she will remove ICE if MN drops all our sanctuary laws, complies with ICE, hands over all our SNAP, Medicaid and voter rolls. They demand control over our voter registration so they can "ensure free and fair elections".
They want to control our elections.
I am dead serious people call your representatives. Get volunteering. Get protesting. Get LOUD.
They released a letter full of straight up lies. Spread the truth. MAKE NOISE.
German here. This is, essentially, what happened in 1939. The Nazis got the majority in parlament through democratic process and then applied terror until the rights of the people to vote them out again were taken away. I should add that they did, among other things, send out their paramilitary to provoke fights and also took advantage of the Reichstagsbrand. (It should be noted that I´m currently unclear on whether or not the Nazis caused that fire and blamed someone else, or if they indeed only took advantage.) Back then, the enemy was the communists and jewish people. The SA was on the street, terrorizing people. Abducting people. Taking people around the back of a house to be shot. Until they got what they wanted: absolute power.
That´s what this is. Trump tried it the soft way in his first term, and the people voted him out of office. This time, his cabinet isn´t fucking about. (I´m saying his cabinet because I shit you not, I highly doubt Trump could find his own ass pockets at this point.) This is, essentially, a terror campain. They hope you´ll grow tired of caring. They hope that if they disappear enough people, you´ll grow too scared to fight. They hope to find the right enemy to present to you as the cause of all your problems. They hope that they can somehow prevent the midterms from going to the democrats.
Here´s the important bit: Do. Not. Stop.
It´s tiring. It´s scary. Giving in will feel easier at some point. Your brain is wired to keep you alive, and going out every day to fight the Gestapo isn´t very in line with that goal. But it must be done. You´re scaring them. The fact that people of so many different backgrounds are deciding they hate ICE more than they hate each other is killing their entire spiel.
They have, ironically, succeeded splendidly in giving the nation a common enemy to unite against. Unfortunately for them, the enemy is their off-brand Gestapo and the pumpkin in chief.
Keep fighting. Don´t let history repeat itself. Get loud. Don´t ever let them silence you.
important stats from that article about why calling local leaders matters:
One phone call = 100-1,000 angry voters.
One personal email = 10-50 voters.
One form letter = maybe 1 voter, if they even count it.
This is the economy of political pressure. Individualized contact influences 94% of congressional offices on undecided issues. Mass email campaigns? 18%. Petitions? Worthless.
But here's the secret that changes everything: State officials are sitting ducks.
State Comptrollers generally receive 5-10 constituent calls per month. State Treasurers? Many have never experienced a coordinated campaign. District Attorneys? Only hear from victims and lawyers, not voters. State Legislators? They average 20-30 contacts per week.
The magic happens at these thresholds:
10 calls in an hour = staff notices.
50 calls in a day = emergency meeting.
100 calls in a day = office shuts down to handle it.
500 calls in a week = policy change consideration.
1,000 calls = historical precedent shows this forces action.
Constituent contact increases legislator support probability by 12-20%. The Net Neutrality campaign's 1.3 million calls changed federal policy. The ACA defense campaign's 6,000 calls prevented repeal. At the state level, you need 100x fewer calls for the same impact.
this fantastic article has sample scripts for what to say about ICE in your state and city, as well as what to ask for to help your city and state fight federal over-reach where you live
we can win this fight, but we need to fight. I know on a personal level how hard it can be to make calls, especially to politicians, but we've reached a point that if we don't, the slippery slope into the chasm of tyranny becomes a cliff
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
Jo in Little Women: "I find it poor logic to say that because women are good, women should vote. Men do not vote because they are good; they vote because they are male, and women should vote, not because we are angels and men are animals, but because we are human beings and citizens of this country."
hello physically disabled person reading this. it is not your fault that your medical supplies are made from a lot of single use plastic and you can continue using them guilt free. your health comes first. thank you for existing.
if your insulin pump has lithium batteries and the tubing is plastic,
if your ostomy bags, incontinence supplies, and sanitary wipes are single-use,
if your joint replacement, bone plate, pins & screws, or spinal hardware is cobalt & chrome,
if your meds come in a plastic container you can’t recycle or reuse for sterility,
you are still innocent. you didn’t choose this particular life. we all must do what we can to survive and that includes using technology and consuming resources. it is only human and we all do it.
some people out there own several yachts and don’t ever consider the impact it has on the world. there’s nothing to be gained by beating yourself up for doing the bare minimum for a comfortable, livable, safe & long life.
Just want to add, don’t cut corners. Don’t risk your life when there are people who could do a lot more without risking theirs.
Don’t reuse the syringe. Don’t use cloths over alcohol swabs. Choose the battery powered device over the rechargeable if it means you can carry spares. Don’t use the reusable container if you can’t get it open. Don’t choose the reusable option if you can’t keep it clean. Don’t overfill the sharps container. Don’t improvise the tourniquet. Don’t eat the expired food if you can’t afford to be sick. Don’t choose the sustainable option if it doesn’t meet your needs.
Your life is not others’ priority so it has to be yours.
i don't think there's anything about the conclave that wouldn't make more sense if it was a gathering of the grand clerics to discuss what to do about the mage and templar rebellions rather than peace talks between the mages and templars. it would explain why every major cleric was there, why no mage or templar leaders attended, why it took place at a fairly inaccessible sacred site rather than somewhere convenient for two warring sides to reach, etc etc. even the use of the word conclave, which calls to mind the gathering of catholic cardinals, would be more logical. and it would still be just as sensible for people to treat it like it could have changed things. i mean this isn’t going to solve why qunari mercenaries were hired for a crucial chantry event, or the plot contrivance of everyone politically important happening to decide to gather on a lyrium-infused mountain perfect for corypheus’ ritual, but let’s be real we’re never going to fix those
directly asking merch makers in their preorder fundraising posts who makes their products & where & if equitable pay can be guaranteed to the ppl actually sewing their shit together .. perhaps a new trend this year
The World War II-era "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is full of steps that office workers can take to resist leadership.
A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”
Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).
Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here
A Wikisource entry can be found here.
Mirrors can be found here, here, here, here and here.
thank you ao3 for being an archive and not an algorithm. thank you for letting me like things without consequences, thank you for being free with no ads, thank you for having lawyers to defend our freedom of speech. thank you tag wranglers. thank you to all authors and thank you ao3
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
i was alive and an aids activist starting in 1984, and i first heard about brownie mary in 1985.
i was sporadically involved in distributing mmj to people with aids in baltimore from 1985-1988. this was because i was a white-passing teenager and . unlikely to get arrested and . not likely to be tried as an adult anyway. (i was never so much as asked a nosy question.) my personal involvement was with patients from my work-study lab who were not currently hospitalized but had problems with aids wasting syndrome (a symptom of the disease, not just the medications). we all knew how to hook them up, but sometimes it was easiest if someone (me) just ran over a delivery on the bus.
brownie mary was a freaking hero and an inspiration to all of us who were tiny little cogs in the tremendous work of fighting aids. whatever you do for your health or anyone else's, never give up!!
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