Following someone you supposedly hate to their alts is so bizarre. This James Somerton stuff feels like Chris-chan but for leftists. Doing lolcow but wokely

I don’t think we’ve put it enough into perspective.

Rafah is 48 times smaller than Rhode Island. Israel is forcing millions of Gazans into Rafah and trapping them all to bomb them. Keep speaking, keep telling others, keep protesting, do not turn your back on them! It is imperative we keep it up!

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

Hi. I'm Nesha: Black, queer, female, mentally ill, physically unwell, financially vulnerable, socially disengaged, and geographically on my own.

I'm cat mom to an elderly blind long hair domestic and live in an area with a high cost of living and constantly increasing unhoused population.

Creating this because the last one has fizzled out.

As of May 2024:

What comes every month and hasn't been paid is rent, electricity, gas, rental insurance, and medicine.

What I'm begging for: Anything you have. I currently can not meet a single bill. Thank you.

I have PayPal

I have CashApp

I have Venmo

it’s disheartening to see an overwhelming majority of white queer people fail to recognize that the communities they build so closely imitate the structures of oppression they have claimed to leave behind, while loudly proclaiming allyship for people of color.

i’ve been on a ton of different platforms now and even though i interact with a lot of trans people, i’ve noticed that i often find myself othered by trans fem communities. the exclusion is subtle because i am east asian, pretty, and passing. and because i am pretty and passing, i often receive recognition and admiration from other trans fems. and because i am east asian as opposed to someone with black or brown skin, i am often accepted into white circles.

but i am not white. and the subtle exclusion comes from my distaste of jokes that fail to account for privilege, from speaking up when white creators speak over other people of color, from simply having a different perspective

because i am not white. and i have never been.

i’ve lived my entire life being nearly accepted by the white people around me. and the subtle exclusion that has been a staple of my life hasn’t gone away because racism still exists within queer communities.

it’s not enough to be loud about fighting oppression.

you also have to fucking do it.

Different POVs In Writing

POV - Short for Point Of View, meaning that the audience is experiencing a story from the perspective of a specific person or outside entity; they are part of the story in one way or another

• 1st Person POV - Experiencing a story from the perspective of the main character. Pronouns will be I, me, my, mine, etc

• 2nd Person POV - Experiencing a story from your own perspective as if you were a character within the story. Pronouns will be you, your, yours, etc. Stories are rarely written from this perspective outside of Choose Your Own Adventure style stories

• 3rd Person POV - Experiencing a story from an outside perspective. No personal pronouns will be used for you, but other characters will be referred to as he, she, they, it, etc

• 4th Person POV - Experiencing a story through a collective perspective. Pronouns include we, us, someone, anyone, etc. I’ve never seen a story written from this perspective. Fourth person perspective is mostly used in livestreams, in which the chat forms a non-specific collective presence that are all addressed as one

Reblogging would be a great help, but don’t feel pressured to

like black people are present in every single fucking genre and scene and popularized and straight up created several but people are so fucking hell bent on finding every possible excuse to not engage with their music because its easier than trying to confront their own racism. like okay well if its truly just a disinterest in most rap music then surely you listen to black artists in other genres right? who am i fucking kidding. of course you dont.

There are an estimated 50 000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day. Without hospitals the chances of survival for mother and child drop drastically

Actually that makes for a really funny poll idea

It's interesting to me how much people struggle to intuit differences of scale. Like, years of geology training thinking about very large subjects, and I'm only barely managing it around the edges.

The classic one is, of course, the mantle- everybody has this image of the mantle as a sort of molten magma lake that the Earth's crust is floating on. Which is a pedagogically useful thing! Because the intuitions about how liquids work- forming internal currents, hot sections rising, cool sections sinking, all that- are all dynamics native to the Earth's mantle. We mostly talk about the mantle in the context of those currents, and how they drive things like continental drift, and so we tend to have this metaphor in mind of the mantle as a big magma lake.

The catch, of course, is that the mantle is a solid, not magma. It's just that at very large scales, the distinction between solids and liquids is... squirrely.

When cornered on this, a geologist will tell you that the mantle is 'ductile'. But that's a lie of omission. Because it's not that the mantle is a metal like gold or iron, what we usually think of when we talk about ductility. You couldn't hammer mantle-matter in to horseshoes or nails on an anvil. It's just a rock, really. Peridotite. Chemically it's got a lot of metal atoms in it, which helps, but if you whack a chunk of it with a hammer you can expect about the same thing to happen as if you whacked a chunk of concrete. Really, it's just that any and every rock is made of tons and tons of microcrystal structures all bound together, and the boundaries between these microcrystals can shift under enormous pressure on very slow timescales; when the scope of your question gets big enough, those bonds become weak in a relative sense, and it becomes more useful to think of a rock as more like a pile of gravel where the pebbles can shift and flow around one another.

The blunt fact is, on very large scales of space and of time, almost everything other than perfect crystals start to act kind of like a liquid- and a lot of those do as well. When I made a study of very old Martian craters, I got used to 'eyeballing' the age based on how much the crater had subsided, almost exactly like the ways that ripples in the surface of water gradually subside over time when you throw a rock in to a lake. Just, you know. Slower.

But at the same time, these things are more fragile than you'd believe, and can shatter like glass. The surface of the Earth is like this, too. Absent the kind of overpressures that make the mantle flow like it does, Earth's crust is still tremendously weak relative to many of the planet-scale forces to which it is subject- I was surprised, once, when a professor offhandedly described the crust as having a tensile strength of 'basically zero;' they really thought of the surface as a delicate filigreed bubble of glass that formed like a thin shell, almost too thin to mention, on the outside of a water droplet. On human scales, liquid is the thing that flows, and solid is the thing that breaks. But once stuff gets big or slow or both, the distinction between a solid and a liquid is more that a liquid is the thing that doesn't shatter when it flows. And it all gets really, really vague, which I suppose you'd expect when you get this far outside the contexts in which our languages were crafted.

i will never get over “SWEET JESUS”

thinking about all of the palestinian mothers who have been suffering miscarriages due to malnourishment and lack of access to prenatal care, all of the palestinian mothers that have had to watch their sons be taken to modern day concentration camps, all of the palestinian mothers who’ve seen their kids die as they run for water or an empty promise of a care package, all of the palestinian mothers who have had to throw birthday parties in the middle of rubble to give their kids one normal day in a war, all of the palestinian mothers ALWAYS. but especially today. 🤍

isn't it insane though how schizophrenic people are viewed as violent and dangerous by the majority of society when in reality schizophrenic people are nearly 14 times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than to be the perpetrators...

sometimes i wonder if every part of my personality these days is a glowing beacon that shrieks to the world "this woman has a tumblr account!" and i start to get legitimately concerned about it except then i remember that all the people best equipped to recognize the signs in the wild are also on this website so. devil's sacrament, etc. the fact that the phrase "devil's sacrament" came so readily to my mind just then is probably a point in favor of an affirmative answer to that first question isn't it

was a mistake