a story bursting in my heart

wrambler | moonlighting writer | 20s | she/it/wtv

[wramblering]

First ever attempt at a contrapuntal poem! Very much inspired by alex peery clark (@two-bees-poetry) and probably subconsciously by Fred Chappell's Narcissus and Echo.

[395nm]

I know nothing about wiring a house or hooking up plumbing, so Gemini seems really helpful to me. It knows so much good stuff! Together, we get the project done.

I know a ton about Noita. I have 1800 hours in game. I got stuck and asked Gemini. Its inability to grasp advanced concepts horrifies me! I think If I had been a professional plumber, I would have felt the same when Gemini was telling me how to hook up a drain line. Probably very dangerous to rely on AI directions in a field where I know nothing.

[staticbluue]

“People should pass a test before being allowed to have kids.” “Isn’t it scary how white people have this inborn capacity for evil?” “I’ll never pass because males and females have different skull shapes.” “Autistic people have a stronger sense of justice than anyone else.” “I don’t want AMABs in my space because they’re dangerous.” “You shouldn’t have access to hormones if you dress like THAT.” “Anyone who does something that awful isn’t human.” “Some people really shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

This is eugenics. This is phrenology. THIS IS NAZI SHIT, YOU ARE A LEFTIST BUYING INTO NAZI SHIT. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO NAZI SHIT.

[chalkrub]

my telephone thingle by itself - did you know orange can be any colour but better

[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.

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[sweetfirebird]

It's Leave a Comment Time again

Hello people already tired of US American Project 2025 bullshit. Today's is Russell Vought/the OMB Office putting forth a proposal that all federal science grants have to be reviewed for "woke."

I'm not kidding. The proposal includes the word "woke" in quotes. It also includes some Trumpian ranting about DEI and gender ideology.

The basic idea being, following vague and basically undefined guidelines (whatever they decide woke means that day), the OMB office of Federal Financial Management will review applications for research grants and the like and reject or approve them based on "woke."

Being Russell Vought-run, this would likely mean anything they decide has to do with climate change, women, gay stuff, trans stuff, and possibly anything that might even remotely be about sex positivity or reproductive rights.

Comment period is open until July 14th.

Here is the proposed regulation. It's a doozy.

On this page, you will see a link to regulations.gov which is where you actually leave a comment. In the search bar right at the start of this page, you enter OMB-2026-0034 and it will take you to the place to comment on this bullshit.

I am hoping someone smart will start posting sample comments for us all. I did a ranty comment already but I wouldn't recommend that. I will do a proper one later. (Yeah, you can comment again. You can also comment anonymously.)

Some things to bring up: the guidelines are (probably deliberately) vague and undefined. This is going to drastically inhibit and hamstring valuable research. This is going to damage the US' reputation (even more). This is going to damage our status as an international power. (I mean, if you are looking for an argument to use against these people. We deserve to lose that but this is to save the science and the research, so.... Project 2025 wants Americans uneducated, isolated, and dumb but paradoxically also still wants to be the number one superpower. I know. P2025 people are real stupid.) This will cost the US money in possible future innovations, as the best and the brightest will go elsewhere and take their cutting edge tech and knowledge with them. (As they should honestly, but again, we are trying to defend the scientists here now who need their grant money.) Talking about money usually helps when arguing with these losers.

Anyway, hopefully someone posts this better, or creates some sample posts. Here this is for now.

[beatrice-otter]

The specific place to leave a comment is here: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001

[wramblering]

I like Elizabeth Ginexi's Substack post for this (1), which both discusses the consequences of the proposal (TL;DR U.S. science would be utterly fucked) and how to write a strong comment against it: https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-need-to-do-next-ombs-proposed

(1) except the "who should comment" section, which only lists a few groups — EVERYONE should comment, regardless of your relation to science! Science funding affects everyone!

Also, summarizing some guidance from my university:

Number of comments does matter! ("overwhelming" comments is different than just "substantial" comments). However, comments need to be in your own words. Agencies treat "non-unique" (copy-paste/templated) comments as just one comment.

Granular examples and anecdotes are powerful. Don't try to be comprehensive. One comment can home in on one horrifying rule (there are many to choose from) and focus on the implications of that. Talk about how these things will personally affect you (2).

In your comment, push to extend the commenting period. The current period (45 days) violates legal precedent: Executive Order 12866 Sec. 6 requires 60 days MINIMUM for public comments. For a giant dumpster fire of this complexity (over 400 pages), it should have even more time. (This one's more important than it sounds. An appropriately extended deadline means that these rules won't be able to affect the upcoming grant year, at the very least, and gives us more time to mobilize opposition in other ways. Otherwise, their refusal to extend the deadline gives more legal footing to fight this thing in the courts.)

I'll try to circle back and call out some particularly awful sections from the proposal — right now my horror is too big for words — but suffice to say: you really, really do not want political appointees controlling what science is done, or how science is done. These proposed rules are the equivalent of "let's put the politicians in charge of open-heart surgery, they know how to serve the interests of the people better than the surgeons!"

(2) Even if you're not A Scientist, science funding sure does affect you. One of my favorite examples is insulin: we wouldn't be able to mass-manufacture it if we didn't know how to put insulin-making genes into E. coli. If you gave a random person $500,000 and asked them whether it should go towards researching a treatment for diabetes or researching how E. coli acquire genes, they'd probably pick the diabetes treatment! Even a well-meaning political appointee would pick diabetes! But the E. coli work was crucial for getting us there.

[suiheisen]

who is this diva

[megacarapa]

ok so this is another long shot but a few years ago there was a twitter post (in japanese i think?) that had measurememts for how to make this book stand thing out of cardboard that you could use to double up books and use up more space on shelves

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

if it comes down to it i can just take one apart and get the measurements from there but i would be very grateful if anyone happens to have the original post or something similar??

[megacarapa]

don't mind how long it's been since i made this post, anyway i realized that i don't even need to take one apart to get the measurements when i can literally just unfold it and refold it /FACEPALM

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

EVERYONE START GETTING MORE USE OUT OF YOUR SPACE NOW!!!!

[me----irl]

Reblog if you think the person you reblogged this from deserves to be happy.

[northstareclipse]

As someone who has overcome substance abuse, I find this decade’s framing of addiction incredibly insulting.

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

We deserve better language. We deserve distinctions. We deserve a culture that can tell the difference between compulsion and preference, between harm and habit, between numbing out and nourishing ourselves. Not everything that holds our attention is a disorder. Not everything pleasurable is a vice. And not everything repetitive is an addiction.

[aster-is-confused]

my favorite genre of bird picture

[trytogethappy]

would you all like to see. my bird quilt

[trytogethappy]

my bird quilt

[trytogethappy]

bird quilt part 2

[problemnyatic]

"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys

[problemnyatic]

I know this might be a bold take but maybe teaching everyone from a young age that ever making a mistake will be met with unimaginable pain and misery doesn't actually encourage learning or correct behavior. If anything it creates a sense of terror so powerful it completely suffocates curiosity and exploration, thus leading to people knowing absolutely nothing but whatever is brought directly to them, which is a big problem in a world where information is so tightly controlled that a very small number of very powerful people basically have complete power over what people see and hear on a day-to-day basis when not actively seeking new and rigorously verified information from diverse and trustworthy sources.

[problemnyatic]

if any of this sounds like you, start by looking up the definition of words you've heard and are pretty sure you know what they mean, but haven't actually double-checked for yourself. Just like, whenever it occurs to you. Great first step

[problemnyatic]

This post goes out to the "we need to bring back bullying" crowd. Just because you aren't hitting someone physically doesn't mean you aren't being punitive. Maybe it isn't actually healthy to believe it's necessary to harass and humiliate anyone who makes you upset or uncomfortable. That sounds like a you problem actually.

[problemnyatic]

Anyways, breaking the cycle of abuse starts with you and how you treat yourself. You have to give yourself grace and room for error or you'll never be able to cultivate a healthier mindset than your trauma left you with. It's not easy, but you have to trust yourself that whatever seems kinder than however you usually treat yourself is probably a good enough start. Doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be The Correct Answer, just needs to be a step in the right direction, y'know? We'll figure out the details along the way.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[lyraeon]

who taught you that suffering in silence was noble, and how would you shutting up have benefited them?

[inkskinned]

one thing that's really monumentally hard about this moment is accepting that there will never be perfect allies. i'm hispanic; i have been against ICE and state-sanctioned violence the whole time. it's so hard for me to hold both my activism and my personal rage in both hands. the rage in me keeps asking why the fuck wasn't it enough at the first kidnapping. why haven't the other deaths mattered at all?

but at the same time - if Good and Pretti's murders are radicalizing people, it's radicalizing them. someone online (with 5k likes) said: i don't know why, but this one feels more personal than usual. i don't blame them for their ignorance (they're just people) but that one comment hurt me. none of the other crying mothers or little kids calling out for their parents or men slaughtered by police felt personal?

and ... i get it. maybe for once other people are finally saying that could have been me in the car. they are finally saying he just tried to help someone up, he wasn't even at a protest. maybe they finally realized: these people did nothing wrong, but the government defamed them before any investigation was even begun. the killer was pardoned before he even drew the fucking gun.

and i know what that's like, i have seen this happen too-many times.

but maybe this was the first time they've ever actually seen ICE violence. maybe they don't read the news, maybe they genuinely believed every kidnapped person "deserved it". maybe... i don't know. maybe it didn't feel real until now, you know? to be fair: social media has a way of making everything film together, a massive wave of tragedy that you cannot parse. and maybe there's just such a sense of pointlessness to it that it filtered out for them. the government usually provides such a clean narrative (he was resisting, she was a criminal); maybe it had given them some peace to just-believe. maybe this is the first time that the lie is obvious even to their eyes.

it's frustrating, and dehumanizing. a white lady and a white man shouldn't be the face of a movement that largely affects everyone else.

and... they died for our movement. and if this is what it takes. if now there are people who are going to take up a banner and walk with me... I want them to be there. i want them to feel the same fire i do. i want them to have that fury that has been burning in me for so long. hell, maybe because they're new to it - they'll burn hotter. there's probably places i am jaded and overwrought. a friend in need is a friend indeed, right?

i have always hated the parable of the prodigal son. i cannot help but feel i have been standing in this space, screaming. that we have been begging for help. that we have warned you. why wasn't it enough when it was one of us?

still. still. i close my eyes. they're here now, and that is something. a handprint. at least, at last: they're by my side. as the saying goes: better late. okay. okay.

whatever it takes.