just me

she/they | queer in all the ways that matter and all the ways that don't

[memewhore]

[bananahomo]

I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.

dude.

$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.

[finnglas]

when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.

[finnglas]

I love how every June this one gets dug up and passed around again, lmao.

[finnglas]

oh no is this what we’re doing now

[finnglas]

…relic…

*crumbles and blows away on the wind*

[romans-art]

the killing game still has me in a chokehold

[creekfiend]

sorry for the dog bölls but he is dead buggin it on the couch with me rn and he's ZONKED totally asleep in this position

[twogundogonesighthound]

Can confirm. Here are my two completely unrelated pharaoh hounds.

[creekfiend]

WE LOVE TO SEE A SIGHTHOUND DEADBUGGIN IT!!!

[autisticplants]

not sighthound but nonetheless i have more dog balls to add to the collection

[creekfiend]

dead 👏 buggin 👏 it 👏 p

[wizardarchetypes]

little bird does this also and sometimes i tuck her in and she doesnt move for hours.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

no more historic events this decade that is ENOUGH, i’m putting my foot down

[alettertofutureme]

History is not done with us yet my friend

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I have received all manner of threat, up to and beyond “I will play a flute carved from your femur,” and yet this is the first time I’ve felt truly threatened

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i knew posting this in 2022 was risky but holy fucking shit

[mevil]

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[vasyan-pupkinyan]

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

[directactionforhope]

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

[directactionforhope]

Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Why Fire Makes Us Human

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Fire and the Brain: How Cooking Shaped Humans | AMNH

It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.

[reasonsforhope]

Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live

[giveherswords]

I love a lesbian built like an instrument of war who loves with the exact same intensity they’ve been hurt.

[theabigailthorn]

batman voice THENYOU'REGONNALOVEME

[ashstfu]

reading a good interesting book after a horrible reading slump and suddenly you can feel the sun shining again and the sky is more beautiful than ever and birds are all singing songs to you

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[cacophonila]

[runs hands down face]

Okay this is the problem with sharing pop science stuff online and content aggregation accounts

The study is real, it's very easy to find by searching up the author's name + study. Give it a read yourself. It's written in a pretty accessible way imo.

Note that it does not put forward any explanations for why this effect happens, only that it does. In the conclusion it posits many possible reasons for why, and that it's most likely nothing to do with the specific action of walking, merely any semi automatic repetitive activity. They also acknowledge the study did not account for the social company the walkers were in, which is a pretty massive factor imo. Considering the conclusion brings up MANY alternative explanations and future experiment possibilities, it's decidedly not "killed every alternative explanation" like the tweet says. The actual paper ends like most scientific papers, listing alternative possible explanations, these are preliminary results, more research is needed, wider demographics of people need to be included, etc.

Another thing is the phrasing of these tweets are like red flags flapping in the wind to me. Any short form social media content that's 1. Pop science 2. Conveys absolute certainty 3. Ends with self improvement biohacking adjacent advice, should set off alarm bells.

Look at the implications that if the tweets were true, it would mean wheelchair users and people with mobility issues would be inherently worse at creative tasks.

So who is this person that's tweeting this, rephrasing this paper in a "helpful" way that is sure to get shares from people who really value being creative and are looking for any way to become more creative in their -

OFC ITS AN AI BRO

You wanna see what his recent articles look like?

CAN WE STOP GETTING BAITED INTO PLATFORMING GRIFTERS

[keepingitreluctant]

Thank you! There were so many red flags in the first post's language. The original paper straight up says that the mechanisms weren't isolated! Also there is no single part of the brain responsible for creative idea generation, it involves communication between multiple brain networks.

[lastoneout]

Glad I wasn't the only person who looked at this and thought that it was weird to say this study is SO perfect when the way it's framed here directly implies that people who can't walk are inherently less capable of being creative than people who can.

[lastoneout]

I can't leave a reply but to the disabled people in the notes who now genuinely seem to believe their mobility issues have robbed them of their ability to be creative pls don't think that! That's not what this study said! You're dealing with ableist misinformation from an AI bro, the study did not make these claims. I encourage everyone who's shared the version without the corrections to take them down, this misinfo is hurting already clearly hurting disabled people and should not be spread.

[the-eldritch-it-gay]

I am tired of those who use my niqab to dry their guilty tears They tear open my chest and build a church from my bones They build a confessional out of my flesh Pulling on my skirt and begging for forgiveness Hoping my blood will baptize them of their bias, of their racism That my flesh will exorcise them of their bigotry Wanting to hang my skin on their wall as a trophy to their tolerance To parade around my tongue as proof that they are a good person They refuse to turn the mirror on themselves They can find no glory in putting in the work They see no reward in quietly unlearning the hatred they were taught So they vivisect me in hopes of finding absolution there

– Confession/Vivisection, Salamatullah Eldritch

[phantomrose96]

I think it's funny world-building how like, so at the center of Life we've got Water. Arguably The most important resource. Colorless transparent substance that molds to any container and we die without it and quickly. And all organic functions of society hinge on its availability. Could fight a ton of wars over this thing.

And well beyond organic life, modern society's great human invention is the Electronic Magic. Our greatest minds invented the Electronic Magic and it sends information around the world instantly. Our infrastructure our economy our modern life, minute by minute by minute, hinges on utilizing the great Lighting Technology.

BUT ☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️ DO NOT. DO NOT EVER. get the magical Elixir Substance of Life and Living and Healing, Water, IN the Electronic Device. The water keeps you alive critically but it KILLS the Electronic Device instantly and catastrophically. This Says something.

[phantomrose96]

and this Says something...

[pangur-and-grim]

saw someone saying that my new book sounds too convoluted, and can I just say, what the fuck is so convoluted about a brain slug alien taking over the Canadian parliament and then getting run over by a truck and isekaid into a fantasy world where a goddess tasks him to kill the demon lord and reincarnates him into a pale twink but he falls in love/lust with a spider centaur instead? hello????

[rorschachisgay]

genuine sincere question but why does he need to be in canada at all at the start. why set it up with him being an alien in a foreign world he is unfamiliar with and is strange to him, meaning he has no real attachment to it or knowledge of it, and then immediately send him to a different world that he is unfamiliar with. why not just have an alien crash on a fantasy world would that not have the same effect entirely? lands a spaceship on top of the supposed chosen one of the dark goddess and then has to awkwardly take their place until the spider romance gets in the way? i see the appeal of the sci-fi and fantasy blend but i don't get why the canada bit has to be there like, thematically or structurally, so I'm wondering what the appeal of it is for you to have it set up in this way

[pangur-and-grim]

no worries, I have an extremely easy answer! I am Canadian

[ao3commentoftheday]

Hi, hello. I do hope you're doing well.

I have a tiny little question. Well, it might be a bit bigger but y'know. I'm currently helping a friend of mine with some coding for ao3 and while most of the things have been going smoothly, I did find one thing I cannot figure out for the life of me.

I've been trying to look into a workskin that would make a "flip page" effect? A part of my friend's fic is written through journals, so we've been looking into something that could make it possible.

I found this workskin through a reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1m9kt9b/htmlcss_coding_for_a_flip_book_effect/

However, trying to change the pages + the cover to look a bit more realistic is breaking my code and the amounts of tabs I currently have open in order to find any sort of answer is just about to break my poor laptop.

So, my question is if there's any possibility to perhaps make it a little bit more, ah, nicer? Maybe?

In case it's not possible, that's also totally fine, but I've decided to at least ask. Thank you in advance! I really do love your work and siteskins a lot!

Hi anon! I've spent the few weeks since you sent this in attempting a work skin myself. Unfortunately, I think I have to admit that this is beyond my current capacity with coding.

Perhaps someone who follows this blog would be interested in helping out? Raise your hand (by saying something in the notes) if you're open to anon reaching out. Or just do the think and at me when you post so I can reblog it?

[ravensilversea]

You can change the look of the pages by adding a background image. This section of code:

#workskin .book .pages > div summary { position: absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; cursor: pointer; text-align: center; color: black !important; background: linear-gradient(to left, #e1ddd8 0%, #fffbf6 100%); box-shadow: inset 0px -1px 2px rgba(50, 50, 50, 0.1), inset -1px 0px 1px rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.2); }

Swap out "background: " (the bolded line) for:

background-image: url(URL of your preferred image);

Essentially what you're doing is giving the summary section of your code a background image to display behind the content. I cannot for the life of me get it to target just one so you could also set a dedicated cover page. But maybe someone else can!

[amphibianauthor]

Hello! Sorry anon asker if you were also the one who asked me directly a similar question, but I've previously answered something similar

HOWEVER since then, more book emulating things have come out!

-HTML Experiments + F2U workskins by tonightshannon has an animated book

-A Prayer to the Mother of Yoba (Sarah’s Prayer) by jeeksy has an open layout of pages

-Old Book + Letter workskin by red_mallow has more of a book layout

-And while not technically a tutorial, I made a Minecraft book CYOA with hovering text arrows that I could give you the code for if you wish (dm me)

Also if you want to scroll through my ao3 coding references Mega tutorials doc, here is the link to that. I recently redid some sections to make it easier to read.

[thebibliosphere]

I need to send a "per your last email" email because the person I'm dealing with gave me conflicting information and is now trying to make me the problem.

They even had the audacity to screenshot their own email, so I've screenshot their most recent email in the same email thread that counters that other email, and now I'm trying to find a professional way to say, "this you?"

Fun times.

[ms-demeanor]

"My apologies, I was under the impression that we were moving forward on the information here [include most recent screenshot] - is that incorrect? Please clarify which is most accurate."

[thebibliosphere]

God, thank you. I've been staring at an empty text box for 20 minutes. You're a gem.

[mihai-florescu]

This is a message for Paul, 25 yo, who has his mom come do his laundry weekly: your mom's friend is roasting the fuck out of you at this sushi restaurant bro

[liquidroots]

happy pride from the trans flag on the floor in deep space nine

[foone]

I always say: Star Trek: Deep Space 9 started in 1993 and ran until 1999, and the trans pride flag was designed (by Monica Helms) in 1999.

The carpets on Deep Space Nine aren't Trans Pride flag colored: the trans pride flag is Deep Space Nine carpet colored.