snailchimera
My Snail Shell
I WANT EDITH WIDDER'S LIFE
OR PAULA MIKKELSEN'S
DAVID G. REID WOULD ALSO BE GOOD
(they/them pronouns please)
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#I already like to think of her as disability rep but now#i absolutely want cane nemona#and someone to fix those fucking stairs at the school
Btw, poke-fans and especially nemona fans and especially people hyped by disability representation
Recently (two months ago lol) i made stories on instagram about an interaction nemona has in area zero
(what i have rn is a picture of my story and i added the translation in, but I'll rewrite in english after)
Arven : "you all right grand'ma ? Want a cane ?"
Nemona : "hahaha... *Exhale* in fact, yeah"
Arven : "uhm... I wasn't actually serious..."
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Youtube doing this while fully fucking enabling the alt right pipeline with dozens if not hundreds of racist/anti semitic grifters on their platform for decades at this point is an insane double standard.
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You know, it's kinda funny how much of high fantasy centers around kings and nobility and courtly intrigue considering that the archetypal high fantasy, Lord of the Rings, had the rather explicit moral of "saving the world is up to this backwater hick and his gardener because no politician, least of all inherited nobility, would have the ability to see past their own ambition and throw away a weapon". Oh sure, Aragorn is a great king and all, but there's a reason he's over there running a distraction ring while the hobbits do the real work. Sauron loses because he gets distracted by kings and armies and great battles (i.e. typical high fantasy stuff) letting Frodo and Sam sneak through his back door and blow it all to hell.
Just saying, maybe old Jirt knew what he was saying when he said that the small folk doing their best and holding to each other was more powerful than a dozen alliances and superweapons and we should respect him for it.
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Here it is: Your reminder to Click for Palestine today!
Thank you!
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instagram
Hey gang, looks like Audible is pulling some shit at the moment (what else is new). Basically, they've opted everyone who uses the platform into a "hide all erotic content from the search function" agreement whether you wanted to have that type of content restricted or not.
It's not even just happening to content listed as erotica. It's anything the Amazon censors deem as "erotic," and given their propensity towards censoring LGBTQ+ content as inherently more sexual than het content, I can see this getting abused really quick.
I became aware of it when Laura posted this on her Instagram a short while ago and sure enough, when I logged in and checked my settings, I'd been opted into it.
As Laura points out in the above video, you can't opt out of it on the app; you have to log in to your account on a browser, navigate to Your Account, Settings, and then uncheck the little box:
Image ID: a screenshot from Audible showing the navigation page for an Audible account. On the bottom right of the navigation bar under Preferences, a box labeled "hide erotic content in searches" has been ticked and circled in red to highlight it.
I rarely use Audible unless I'm being sent something to review, so I never would have noticed this. But yeah. If you've been wondering why you can't find your favorite romance authors on Audible anymore, this could be why.
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how do we feel about very small snails?
many land snails are very small, even some smaller than these, but they’re easy to miss even if you’re already accustomed to looking for tiny invertebrates.
these are different Vallonia species but I’ll need a different angle of the shell for a good ID. At ~2mm, both are full-sized adults; you can tell by the peristome (lip) at the aperture of the shell!
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Published May 7, 2024
Last week, the WHO announced that it will recommend creation of a new booster for the JN.1 variant of COVID-19. One little problem: JN.1 was hyper-dominant all fall and winter but is quickly fading away. Now, its descendent KP.2 is positioned to take off in an early-summer wave. By this winter, when we’re able to get the brand-new JN.1 vaccine, the dominant variant will most likely be a descendent of KP.2. In other words, a distant relative of JN.1.
If you, like me, got the most recent booster, you got a vaccine designed to help prevent and lessen symptoms of XBB.1.5, the variant most dominant in the winter of 2022-23. During that winter, the booster was designed to combat the Omicron BA variants, which were predominant a year prior, in the winter of 2021-22.
You see the pattern?
Often when the topic of COVID is broached, people who have paid little attention since early 2021 point out that “now we have the vaccines.” Ok. Yes. But are you aware of what has changed since 2021? Specifically, the virus?
When Moderna and Pfizer announced their COVID-19 vaccines, the efficacy of the shots was thrilling. Early data showed a reduction in infection - not just severity, in actual infections- of 90%+. Here’s a link to a Pfizer release which states:
Data from 43,448 participants, half of whom received BNT162b2 and half of whom received placebo, showed that the vaccine candidate was well tolerated and demonstrated 95% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 in those without prior infection 7 days or more after the second dose….These pivotal data demonstrate that our COVID-19 vaccine candidate is highly effective in preventing COVID-19 disease and is generally well-tolerated.
In the vaccine world, this is a home run. No vaccines are 100% effective against infection. But if you can get enough shots 90+% effective in arms fast enough, you can achieve what is called herd immunity. Herd immunity is achieved when the “disease gradually disappears from a population and may result in eradication or permanent reduction of infections to zero”. The virus runs out of hosts and dies out.
This was the explicit goal of the Biden administration, stating in early 2021 that we could be “heading to herd immunity by summer”. His exact words were, “I feel confident that by summer, we're going to be well on our way to heading toward herd immunity”. This meant- at the time- getting to a place where the majority of the population has immunity to COVID, and therefore vulnerable people aren’t exposed. It’s critical that people understand that Biden’s COVID response never achieved its own stated goals, rather, the public was gaslit into accepting a new goal: forever reinfections.
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Ok gotta talk about it.
As a Jewish historian, I fucking hate Israel in ways most probably will never be able to comprehend. I'm going to try and explain it anyways. The central creation myth of Israel is that it is Jewish, and then consequently, that Israel is a part of Jewishness. Its easy to simply state this is false, but fully comprehending this and putting it into practice in thought and deed seems rare to me.
The evil at the heart of this violence predates the recent acceleration of genocide. Israel is a colony, and more than that, an antisemitic fraud itself. After WW2, when Israel was being founded, the Jews of Europe generally did not wave goodbye to their neighbors and head to the promised land. Many were expelled from their homes. Zionism itself, as an action, was a false choice at the time. A mere excuse to place an ally in the middle east, and an excuse to complete the expulsion and destruction of the European Jew. The Zionist Jew is more than complicit in this, they actively seek the destruction and assimilation of all other Jews.
Many fail to realize, and largely because of Israel, that Jews are not inherently white, Ashkenazi, European-descended people. Our faith and culture has an immense variety that is spread all across the globe. Jewishness, in population and volume of culture, exists more so outside of Israel than within it. Israel is for a very specific kind of Jew. The kind that lets Yiddish die, that attaches themselves to European things, that makes themselves and their practices as white as possible.
And they have the nerve, the fucking belligerent GALL, to frame themselves as the necessary saviors of our people. To the Zionist, questioning Israel is to question Jewishness itself. They bake adoration for the colonial machine into their very prayers, and push them on us even as children. To *not* oppress, to *not* kill, to *not* genocide, is to invite death. This is the core of fascistic thought, of course. "Kill them before they kill us." And they KNOW this too, they really do. The truth of that irony does not matter, because as is true for all fascists, the truth itself does not matter to them. They wanted this, they wanted this even before the British saw it in their best interest to give them the land. Any excuse to RETVRN, as the neo-nazis say of Rome, or the German Empire, or whatever the fuck stupid country they want to poorly animate the corpse of. Some select Zionists even *sided with the fucking Nazis* in agreement they should abandon Europe to colonize Palestine. (Haavara Agreement)
My people have proved time and time and time again you don't need a nation state to have an enduring culture. We have protected ourselves for thousands of years without the help of these spiteful, doom-saying maniacs. I was going to post something like this on Passover, but that would be hypocritical. The state of Israel doesn't actually have shit to do with Jewishness.
שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְה
Vi tsu derleb ikh im shoyn tsu bagrobn.
[my best translation]
Hear Israel (beginning of a prayer in Hebrew)
I should outlive him long enough to bury him. (an old Yiddish curse)
Free Palestine. Donate what you can, they need it right now.
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another reminder to stop buying/watching/reading anything JK Rowling associated
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Here's a website where Palestine GoFundMes are vetted and shared that you can send out to people. The url is gazafunds.com
Easy to use and simple. Just share the site whenever someone asks for GFMs for Palestine.
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Told all my life that raw chicken = salmonella poisoning like that's just natural but no, it's just because it's not something food companies are legally required to control at their end and America is only NOW considering classifying it as a "contaminant?!" Meaning it would become a violation of federal law to sell meat with any detectable presence of it?? We could have fucking done that all along???
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As someone raised in a leftist home, I notice a lot of things common to people who “convert” to leftism (ie, reared in a centrist to right wing household and become leftist <and stay that way> later in life) that drive me absolutely bonkers. I’m trying to come up with a term for this group that makes sense for my kvetching needs.
First Generation Leftists maybe? Idk
Anyways generational leftist knowledge is necessary because its the stuff that has kept leftism alive in the face of overwhelming adversity and a lot of 1st gen-ers are going to burn out and implode if they don’t learn them like, now
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So You're A USian Who Can't Bring Yourself To Vote Biden, Even Though Trump-Led Republicans Really Want To Kill You And Everyone You Love
You know what, fair.
I do understand where you're coming from, and I'm not going to argue with you about it. Sometimes there are lines we cannot cross even when there are no better choices, and "not supporting genocide" is a respectable hill to die on.
I personally am still taking the harm mitigation stance on the presidential election; Biden is starting to respond to pressure from protestors, slowly but surely, and I think we can work with that a lot more easily than we can work with Trump and the apocalyptic death cult supporting him.
That said, it was a genuinely difficult decision to make, and I'm still not sure it's the right one. I'm not going to judge you for going the other way.
What I am going to ask of you- what I am going to beg of you- is that you vote the rest of the ballot. Why?
1. It sends a stronger message.
If you don't vote at all, the easy assumption for pundits and politicians to make is that you didn't give a fuck, just like the many, many people who don't bother every year. The unfortunate reality of a two party system is lack of support for one side translates to support of the other side. A big Republican turnout and a small Democrat turnout sends the message that people as a whole like Republicans and want them to keep doing what they're doing. It pushes Dems right and emboldens the worst human beings on Earth to keep killing us.
But if a lot of people show up to vote, but don't vote for a president? In a presidential election? That's damn near unheard of. That sends a different, much more specific message: "Fuck these two bastards in particular". It tells the Democratic Party that there are people who are engaged in electoral politics (they don't give a fuck about people who aren't engaged in electoral politics), who will vote for Dems, but only if those Dems meet a minimum standard of human decency.
2. It keeps us alive long enough to fix things.
A president is not a king, and they only get away with acting like kings if the rest of the government lets them. Has way too much power been concentrated in the executive branch over time? Yeah. Does your average Democrat have a spine made of soggy cardboard? Yeah. But limits on executive power are still limits. The fact of the matter is that either Biden or Trump is going to be president, and if enough people refuse to vote for Biden, it's going to be Trump. We all remember how bad Trump was, and we know he and his followers want to make him dictator for life and murder all his detractors (read: us). We know Trump himself doesn't care about the conservative culture war, but he loves power and he's desperate for popularity, so he will give the evil Christofascist fuckers whatever they want in exchange for those two things. We know Trump enjoys hurting people for the sake of hurting them, because it makes him feel powerful and secure. Last time, a lot of damage was mitigated by the Supreme Court, but this time the Republicans have the court.
If we want to live through the next four years (and still hopefully have the right to vote at the end of them), we need to have Not-Republicans in control of the legislative branch. More importantly, because states generally have more power over their own governance than the federal government does, we need to keep Republicans out of the state and local governments as much as possible.
(There's also the issue that if progressives and radical leftists don't vote, but more centrists/people who actually like the Democratic Party and Biden as opposed to voting for damage control reasons do, the people who get voted in will be more conservative and less likely to actually hamper Republicans in any meaningful way. This is more of a primary issue, and the primaries are over, but it's still worth mentioning.)
And if Biden wins anyway? You still want Democrats in the legislative branch and in your state governments, because if Republicans are locked out of those places, it gives us the breathing room we need to demand better of our elected officials and removes the excuse that nothing will get done unless we're sufficiently "bipartisan". Democrats are easier to apply pressure to. Democrats of the wet cardboard spine variety are much easier to apply pressure to when they can't blame the scary Republicans for their own cowardice, apathy, or greed.
3. There are Democrats who will actually help us, but they need your votes to do so.
If you live in Michigan, you're especially lucky, because you get to vote for Representative Rashida Tlaib. Rep. Tlaib is a Palestinian-American woman who has been extremely vocal about her opposition to blind military support for Israel. She's also been vocal about issues such as immigrant rights, environmental justice, community supports for elderly and other vulnerable people, and healthcare, to name just a few. And she's not alone.
Again, pay special attention to state and local elections in your area. It's a lot easier to get genuine allies into smaller positions, and conversely it's a lot easier for The Worst People On Earth to get their own allies into these positions. This is partly because there's a smaller audience to appeal to, and partly because fewer people pay attention to the small elections. Do you want to protect trans kids? Vote for school board members. Do you want your city to be a sanctuary city? You need to pay attention to your mayor and your district representative. Find out who is, or is likely to be, on specific committees, such as agriculture or LGBTQ rights. These elections generally affect you and your community more than the presidential election does anyway.
4. The Glorious Revolution is not happening within the next seven months.
Electoral politics fix nothing by themselves. Voting is always going to be a method of shoring up defenses and disempowering the worst elements of our society. Ultimately, the US is not a good and noble country with some currently bad leaders; it's a colonialist, capitalist world power designed from the start and refined over time to give a few people a lot of power and wealth at the expense of everyone else, not just here, but everywhere in the world. It's important to recognize this. It's important to act in other ways to dismantle that power before it kills us all.
It is also important to recognize that you will not accomplish this before the next presidential election. You will not accomplish this very shortly after the next presidential election either.
Ideals are never as important as real human beings. Ideals are in fact useless if they do not serve real human beings. Your first priority, always, needs to be people. Do what you can to keep people alive. Do what you can to support them. When Republicans are in power, more people die. More people here die. More people in the rest of the world, including Palestine, Sudan, etc. die. That doesn't mean Democrats' hands are clean. It doesn't mean we shrug, flip the trolley switch, and move on with our lives as though nothing else could be done. It means we use every tool at our disposal to keep people alive, and we recognize that voting is one of those tools.
Smarter and better read people than me have said what I'm about to say much more eloquently, but sometimes it feels like The Revolution is like a leftist version of the Rapture; a single grand moment, long foretold, that will come all at once without warning and wash away all oppression and terror, leaving only peace and brotherhood when the smoke clears. People talk about it like it's something you only need to wait for and have faith in, and never forsake by engaging in ideologically impure action. I don't think that's how this works. I don't think that's how anything works, or ever has worked. Things change; change comes in one form or another, for better or for worse, as inevitably as the passage of time, and human history will not stop after some great, satisfying climax. Big dramatic changes always prove in the end to have been underpinned by many small ones, over long, long stretches of time. Tearing down a wall one brick at a time is still tearing down a wall.
Actions like the student protests are more important and more effective at building the kind of world we want to live in than voting, if you look at each by itself, but you don't have to. You don't have to choose between chip damage and a more meaningful confrontation. You can make the path just a little bit easier. That's what voting is.
In Conclusion
Back in the 2020 primaries, I joked that I would vote for a moldy ham sandwich if it ran against Trump. Then Biden got the nomination, and I said I didn't actually mean we should nominate a moldy ham sandwich.
Biden has done some very useful, important, and meaningful things, which I'm sure other people will be happy to tell you about in detail. He has also failed in some significant ways, and done some incredibly morally reprehensible things (as, to be clear, every single US president in history has); again, other people will be happy to tell you about that in detail. I know the breaking point for many of us has been seeing the horrors Israel is inflicting on Palestine, knowing our tax dollars are paying for that mass murder, and hearing Biden say that he does not care. I'm not going to defend that, because it's indefensible. I'm not going to make excuses for that, because there are none.
I'm just asking you to remember that the presidency is not the only thing at stake this year.
Please, help keep us a little bit safer. Keep Republicans out of your local and state government positions. Get people into the House and Senate who will, at worst, not make things significantly worse; if you can, get people who will stand up to Trumps and Bidens alike.
Don't throw our lives away.
#Snail babble#US stuff#politics#voting#Biden#free Palestine#god I hate that this is an argument I have to make#why can't Trump and Biden both get eaten by tigers or something#I'm gonna regret making this post I can feel it
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that post going up for my birthday is bc i got it all set up last night and am impatient but also HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MEEEEE my actual real birthday wish is that you check out my webcomic 💚
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For those following the Chinook Indian Nation's work toward regaining federal recognition, this is an important endorsement. I posted a while back about a petition for the state of Washington to give the now-closed Naselle Youth Camp to the Chinook. The NYC is on unceded Chinook land, and specifically the portion of land the Chinook asked to retain almost two centuries ago as part of an unfulfilled treaty with the U.S. government.
A state task force formed to determine the fate of the NYC has officially recommended the NYC be given to the Chinook Indian Nation. Not only would this put the facility into the hands of people who will make excellent use of it, but the Chinook have also stated their intention to restore the on-site wastewater treatment facility and salmon hatchery. The former would additionally be a boon to the entirety of Pacific County, which currently ships its wastewater all the way to Centralia, WA, over 100 miles away from southern portions of the county.
If the NYC is indeed given to the Chinook, this will be an important statement that can be used to pressure the U.S. government to restore their federal recognition. To find out ways you can help the Chinook in this effort, please visit ChinookJustice.org.
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