welcome to the jungle

If you live in the USA and you're pleading for donations to pay your rent, bills, or get food then dial 211! Please dial 211 before the last minute!

It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.

It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.

You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.

Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!

https://www.211.org/

Hi I work for my state's 211 service. It really breaks my heart how many people only know to call us at the last minute. 211's can provide a whole wealth of resources to use before things ever get to a cut off utility, eviction, or homelessness!

I can't speak for all 211's but most should also have a website detailing all the agencies in their database. if you don't like phone calls, this can be something to reference instead.

If you don't have health insurance but you need to see a doctor, reference 211! We list clinics that provide free or discounted general care, vision, and dental services to low income households and people without insurance! Many hospitals also have financial aid policies that can severely reduce your bill if you had an expensive procedure!

If you're stuck in a dead end job or need educational resources reference 211! There are a lot of programs focused on providing basic adult education as well as trade skills or other high demand fields! State governments are generally more interested in funneling people into work than providing benefits, but you can still use this to your advantage especially if you have some form of disability but are still able to work. That includes if you're neurodiverse or have mental health issues! Most of these programs are extremely underutilized.

If you believe you qualify for public benefits but the bureaucracy of the process is in your way, reference 211! There are agencies specifically geared towards helping people obtain the benefits they qualify for- for free!

If you need help with your taxes-

If you need help finding a pro bono lawyer-

If you need help finding affordable housing/section 8 housing-

If you need help finding food pantries-

If you need help paying for your prescriptions-

If you need help obtaining disability aids or assistive technology-

If you need help finding transportation options-

If you need help following a natural or personal disaster (like a home fire)-

If you need help repairing a home you or your family owns or it needs modifications to be accessible-

If you need Queer resources-

Reference your 211!!!!!

I had no idea what 211 was before working for it but I wish I had. I've learned so much about what resources are actually available to the community even in a ho hum area of the country like my state. I've saved my partner literally thousands of dollars just from the medical resources I've gathered.

Not enough young people know about or utilize these services but they are there for you!

P. S.

This isn't an intended use of 211, but I like to reference the agency listings when I look for jobs. Many of the agencies listed are non-profits which, while they certainly are not perfect, generally have lower barriers of entry to decent paying jobs with benefits. The work environments tend to be much kinder and at least pretend to be forward thinking. You're more likely to find jobs without as many people applying as well, especially if they're only advertising their positions through their own website.

I just found the earliest email I ever sent from my email address, and it’s the funniest goddamn thing I can possibly imagine a fourth grader sending her teacher:

(Context - my fourth grade teacher was on maternity leave, and the state of the classroom fish tank was dire under the substitute teacher’s tyrannical rule. The class convened at recess, and decided to inform our (24yo, new mother) former teacher of the situation. I was selected as the duly appointed representative for this solemn communication.)

Further context: I am now a practicing attorney.

Today I learnt of Goodhart's Law, which holds that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

This is why targeting "good test scores" is a really bad means of improving education, why journal impact factor or citations are lousy means of evaluating academic performance, why it can feel like the economy is shitty even when performance indicators are high, why AI people seem to think that they can make an artificial general intelligence by training a large language model to pass tests of cognitive ability, and so on. It's a specific case of the fallacy of reification--treating a model or proxy for a thing like the thing itself.

And it's a problem because I think that neoliberal managerialism is all about treating proxies like they're the real thing.

More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing (2014)

[click here to read online]

just knoooow yanks are going to start with the “foreigners can’t comment on american politics, it doesn’t affect you” cunt your country runs a secret spy base (plus at least 127 other spy&military bases globally) out of my country and the last prime minister who talked about closing it got removed from office by the cia

no america isn’t bombing me. but the american government that i don’t get to vote for says jump and my government says “how much military support can we continue to provide you in the middle east?”

unfortunately 127 is a very lowball number, it's at least around 750 based on pentagon data

“the habsburgs weren’t even that inbred” uh yes they were, why is this discourse it’s just a scientific fact

I listened to a podcast episode about the Habsburgs, and the guest expert said that Charles II’s DNA reads as being a product of two parents who are closer than brother and sister.

“Eight generations should contain 254 different ancestors. Charles II’s has 82. This is what we might refer to as ‘suboptimal.’”

wow i guess you could say they had ch

had ch

they had che

they

MORE PHOTS IN MUH REBLOG

Psst. Don't tell the jolkein rolkein rolkein estate, but this is amazing. DO consider buying a print from the extraordinary artist responsible:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/leiaham/

Original Twitter thread with the artist's thoughts and commentary:

Source

Source

reblog if you're a sick individual who's attracted to women over 30

source: Remy Boydell

yes this, but also consider the Cranford Collection

I'm surprised no one brought up Chiltern classics

you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that's like "was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?" the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn't even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it's harmful, beyond simply "these guys are bad news because they're who my country is at war with right now") but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it's kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because...yeah, no shit, of course he didn't. tolkien didn't have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien's ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn't want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren't a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt's fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby "solving" the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.

You’ll all sleep a lot better when you realise that actually most people, rather than being purity in human form or evil incarnate, are in fact just some guy.

Non cooking spray stick

Non spray stick cooking

Non cooking stick spray

yeah okay ill reblog that

Ok this is kinda funny but imagine being surrounded by people who sound like this. The French language was a mistake in the first place but combining it with English…. abomination

@033h we’ve been saying

“toc toc toc toc you are now a porcupicicle”

to hear the québécois pronunciation of montreal in its original “muh-ray-aul” and as if it’s one syllable. perfect

“directement above your appartement”

@sparklecryptid

there's this word in Serbian 'vukojebina' which literally means 'the place where wolves go to fuck' but they use it to mean 'in the middle of nowhere'. it sure does the job well, but the visual stayed with me longer than I would have liked it to.

for chinese we have 鸟不生蛋, which is used to describe a land so barren and remote that not even birds would lay their eggs there.

In German we have "am Arsch der Welt", which means "at the world's ass"

In Finnish it's "Jumalan selän takana" - behind god's back.

I propose that these are all the same place. The world's ass, behind god's back, where birds would not nest and where wolves go to fuck.

I think the equivalent American English expression is "the ass end of nowhere."

i've always been fond of "BFE" that is ButtFuck East. i like the idea that the middle of nowhere still has geography.

"Onde Judas perdeu as botas" (BR)

"Where Judas lost his boots"

Or, if you're talking about somewhere even more remote than the first place mentioned: where he lost his socks

Hungarian has a couple options. The one I'd use most often in general is either "a világ végén" - at the end of the world, if the place is far away, or "a semmi közepén" - in the middle of nowhere literally, if the place is remote.

My favourite tho is pretty regional to Budapest, and it means a remote or unaccessible place near Budapest only, but it's also a subtle century-old insult so. "Rákosborzasztó" - "borzasztó" means horrible; and a lot of towns around Budapest - many of them historically far away or hard to access - start with "Rákos-" (Rákospalota, Rákoskeresztúr, Rákosszentmihály, etc.). "A town near here that's absolutely horrible to get to and we hate needing to do so". And actually most of these by now are very well within the city limits and easily accessible, but that just makes it even funnier imo

I'll add 'a halál faszán' to the Hungarian above, it means 'on death's dick', that's my favorite lol

as a Hungarian my favourite is ‘zergebaszta vidék’, lit. ‘place fucked by mountain goats’

what about bivalybasznád my best friend bivalybasznád. if rákosborzasztó is a town near budapest that sucks, bivalybasznád is is a small backwater village that sucks. (i can't do justice to the name in translation, but it's close to 'buffalo-fucked')

literally my favorite type of tweet

oh my god i have some of these saved 1 sec

@mistresskabooms

Gordon Ramsay goes to Night Vale.