I'm not upset discussions of Sally Ride these days don't leave out the fact that she was a lesbian and therefore the first known queer person in space (albeit a fact only known after her death), but I hate that the fact that what is left out is that she, while part of the Roger's Commission after Challenger exploded, was the whistleblower who made sure the information for the defects of the O-rings made its way to Richard Feynman, who then famously, publicly, and on camera demonstrated how icy coldness (such as the cold and icy weather the morning before Challenger launched) could critically deform the O-rings used and keep them from forming a seal. This was also only revealed after she died. (x)

Whenever Sally Ride comes up these days among my (overwhelmingly queer) friends, we all acknowledge that she was a lesbian and celebrate what a role model she was not just for girls but for queer kids (and adults) too, but everyone is always surprised when I bring up the whistleblowing thing, which I think is damn shame and a disservice to her legacy.

I wish there were medieval fantasy written by people who actually found the medieval period interesting

I don’t mean grittiness I mean like anthropologically. The medieval period was fucking weird and the people who lived through it had fundamentally different perspectives on how the world works than even very religious modern people, reading a medieval fantasy shouldn’t feel like I’m just reading a contemporary person running around with a sword.

You need to be aware you are asking me to write a novel about radical religious groups in the 1600s that defended cows put on trial, about frost resistant turnips, about Charles I getting stuck in a window whilst trying to escape, about people putting their heads in sewers to overcome illness they believed caused by bad smells, and about the Bigod Rising which was so unpopular they only got like 300 rebels and ended up being killed.

You are aware of this, yes?

I would not ask anyone who thinks the 17th century counts as medieval to write a book even loosely inspired by the Middle Ages, no.

Hey y'all want to see a murder

Behind the scenes of Godzilla (1998)

man why didn’t they just have this guy fight him off. dude’s huge

i wouldn't fight godzilla if i was this dude's size, for roughly the same reason i wouldn't fight a komodo dragon at the size i currently am

Not even to save New York?

what has new york ever done for me

hug a trans dude today. tell him he looks good. tell him you see him and value him. ask him about his gender. ask him about his day. ask him about how he's doing. ask him about his hopes for the future. connect with him. please.

Honestly please don't ask me about my gender. I'm very tired of talking about my gender. It is among the least interesting things about me, much like my hair color or my height.

Ask me about my sheep. Ask me what I'm learning lately. Ask me about my reptiles and how the Tropiocolotes steudneri are doing. Ask me what the desert smells like at sunset.

I have a whole ass life that does not actually revolve around being transgender no matter how much the world tries to make that the only salient fact about me. I am a whole person, not just A Controversial Gender.

I'm tired of talking about my gender and I'm tired of other people talking about my gender and if you want to actually connect with me then talk to me like I'm a human being and not a gender. Do you ask your cis friends about their genders?

Activism is not cold-calling.

Activism is not cold-calling, and this is critically important to understand.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here about 'building bridges' and 'finding community,' and then (extremely valid) response posts saying "BUT HOW??" And I'm going to explain something that can be very counter-intuitive: there is strategy involved in community.

As a longtime volunteer labour organizer, I’ve taken and taught many trainings on the strategy of talking. Something that surprises a lot of people is the very first thing you do in a union campaign. You sit down with your organizing committee, take out pen and paper, and literally map it out. You draw a physical map of the workplace: where are the entrances, exits, break rooms, supervisor offices. Essentially, ‘where is it safe to have a union conversation.’ Then you draw another physical chart of your coworkers. You sort out who is union-friendly, openly hostile to unions, or somewhere in the middle, and then you plan out very deliberately and carefully who talks to whom and in what order.

Consider: If Vocally Leftist Jane walks up to Conservative David and says "hey what do you think about unions," David is going to shut down immediately. He's not inclined to listen to Jane. But if Jane talks to Moderate Jason and brings him into the fold, then Jason is a far more effective strategic choice to talk to David, and David may actually hear him out without an instant reaction.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If Conservative David turns out to be Alt-Right David, and could be dangerous to follow organizers, we write him off. We are not trying to reach Alt-Right David. We are trying to reach Conservative David, who may actually be persuaded to find solidarity with other employees as fellow workers. Jason is a safe scout to find out which one he is. It does no one any good if Leftist Jane (or even Moderate Jane who is a visible minority) talks to Alt-Right David and puts herself on his radar. Not only has she done nothing to convince Alt-Right David to join a union - she's probably actively turned him against the idea - but now she's also in danger and the entire campaign is at risk. NOBODY WANTS THIS. Jane was NOT a hero for doing this. The organizing committee was foolish and enacted a terrible strategy to everyone's detriment.

Where you can make a difference is with people who will listen to you. You having a conversation with your well-meaning but clueless Centrist Democrat Auntie, and maybe gently helping her understand some things the media has been glossing over, is way more strategically useful than you marching up to MAGA Neighbour You've Met Once and trying to "build community" or "understand" them. They don't care. They're impervious, dangerous, and cruel. But maybe your beloved auntie will think about what you said, and then talk to her friend Anna who IDs as "fiscally conservative" but didn't vote because she can't bring herself to get on board with Trump. Then perhaps Anna talks to her brother Nic who has MAGA leanings but isn't all the way there yet. Proto-MAGA Nic would not have listened to you, nor would he have listened to Centrist Democrat Auntie, but he might absorb some of what his sister is saying.

This is not a cop-out or an echo chamber. This is you spending your time and energy strategically and safely. You are not a useful activist to anyone if you’re dead. Anyone who is telling you to hurl yourself directly at MAGA assholes like cannon fodder has no understanding of the strategy behind community building, and you should feel comfortable writing them off.

Last point: If you are tired, emotionally devastated, and/or in danger: take a break. This post is for people who would feel better jumping into action, not for people who are too overwhelmed to even think about it right now. You are worth so much even if you’re not actively Doing Activism, and your rest is worth more than “a break period so you can recharge and Do More Activism.” We all deserve the individual dignity of being worthy of comfort, rest & safety just on the basis of being human, outside of whatever we're doing for others' benefit. To deny ourselves that dignity is to devalue ourselves, and that’s the absolute last thing any of us should be doing right now.

I think the biggest "he would not fucking say that" I've ever experienced was when I read a terror modern au fic where the characters were doing land acknowledgements

IM sksjjakskjakkdjdjjashjdndjsk

i'm a writer irl (can't say who because my agent would put me into a blender and press go) and honestly the funniest and most humiliating incident of my life was the time my finished manuscript triggered a plagiarism flag with the publisher for two lines of prose in my literary fiction novel...

.... which was word for word similar to a paragraph in a certain explicit work on FFN starring elrond and his batsman from the hobbit films, aka that one elf that looked like he ate panic attacks for breakfast (i forget his name but it's Figwit II) where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment.

and if you think i had to sit in front of one if the biggest publishing companies in the world and admit that it was, in fact, me who wrote the fic where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment in order to avoid being wrongly flagged for plagiarism, you would be absolutely correct.

(yes they published the book)

This takes a lot of courage in a lot of important ways good job OP

Cozy farming sim but with realistic crop growth times. Just. Just fucking ruin everyone's day with the endless patience required.

And none of this "one crop per year but a year is only 50 days" shit. Full 365 day year. Your guy's gotta eat every day. Actually this would be good in survival sims too. Survival sim where plants and animals (cultivated and noncultivated) replenish at a realistic rate. Work for your food, you stranded fuck.

Really make the player question why they’re doing it on a screen at all and not just having a mildly productive outdoor hobby by doing it in real life

playing science telephone

Hi folks. Let's play a fun game today called "unravelling bad science communication back to its source."

Journey with me.

Saw a comment going around on a tumblr thread that "sometimes the life expectancy of autism is cited in the 30s"

That number seemed..... strange. The commenter DID go on to say that that was "situational on people being awful and not… anything autism actually does", but you know what? Still a strange number. I feel compelled to fact check.

Quick Google "autism life expectancy" pulls up quite a few websites bandying around the number 39. Which is ~technically~ within the 30s, but already higher than the tumblr factoid would suggest. But, guess what. This number still sounds strange to me.

Most of the websites presenting this factoid present themselves as official autism resources and organizations (for parents, etc), and most of them vaguely wave towards "studies."

Ex: "Above And Beyond Therapy" has a whole article on "Does Autism Affect Life Expectancy" and states:

The link implies that it will take you to the "research studies" being referenced, but it in fact takes you to another random autism resource group called.... Songbird Care?

And on that website we find the factoid again:

Ooh, look. Now they've added the word "some". The average lifespan for SOME autistic people. Which the next group erased from the fact. The message shifts further.

And we have slightly more information about the study! (Which has also shifted from "studies" to a singular "study"). And we have another link!

Wonderfully, this link actually takes us to the actual peer-reviewed 2020 study being discussed. [x]

And here, just by reading the abstract, we find the most important information of all.

This study followed a cohort of adolescent and adult autistic people across a 20 year time period. Within that time period, 6.4% of the cohort died. Within that 6.4%, the average age of death was 39 years.

So this number is VERY MUCH not the average age of death for autistic people, or even the average age of death for the cohort of autistic people in that study. It is the average age of death IF you died young and within the 20 year period of the study (n=26), and also we don't even know the average starting age of participants without digging into earlier papers, except that it was 10 or older. (If you're curious, the researchers in the study suggested reduced self-sufficiency to be among the biggest risk factors for the early mortality group.)

But the number in the study has been removed from it's context, gradually modified and spread around the web, and modified some more, until it is pretty much a nonsense number that everyone is citing from everyone else.

There ARE two other numbers that pop up semi-frequently:

One cites the life expectancy at 58. I will leave finding the context for that number as an exercise for the audience, since none of the places I saw it gave a direct citation for where they were getting it.

And then, probably the best and most relevant number floating around out there (and the least frequently cited) draws from a 2023 study of over 17,000 UK people with an autism diagnosis, across 30 years. [x] This study estimated life expectancies between 70 and 77 years, varying with sex and presence/absence of a learning disability. (As compared to the UK 80-83 average for the population as a whole.)

This is a set of numbers that makes way more sense and is backed by way better data, but isn't quite as snappy a soundbite to pass around the internet. I'm gonna pass it around anyway, because I feel bad about how many scared internet people I stumbled across while doing this search.

People on quora like "I'm autistic, can I live past 38"-- honey, YES. omg.

---

tl;dr, when someone gives you a number out of context, consider that the context is probably important

also, make an amateur fact checker's life easier and CITE YOUR SOURCES

"the age at which people in this study died" is nothing like a life expectancy

I know all the posts about how to stockpile hrt come from a good place but yall. Stockpiling T on purpose is a felony and its not one i judge you for but...STOP admitting it out loud on your blogs frankly and with none of the "teehee THEORETICALLY" shoplifter blogs used to have. Im seeing people talk abt the stockpiles they already have AND their plans to share it and my guys... this website WILL give your personal info to the government if subpoenad. Idk that its LIKELY but I know itd be embarrassing as hell to go to JAIL for felony possession of controlled substance w intent to distribute bc you couldnt stop yourself from YAPPING on a fucking tumblr post and then mr hammers gave your email and login ip to the cops. I KNOW youre all not using secure enough burners and vpns and shit 4 that Cmon now

garden variety conservative transphobia is going to get worse but radical feminism is also going to get worse. if youre a cis women terfs are going to try to recruit you and make you believe that the reason your rights are at stake is because of trans people. they're going to tell you that all men are your violent oppressors and they're going to include trans women in that category. they're gonna tell you about women who are gender traitors and joined the enemy and they're going to point to trans men. don't believe them. trans people are not your enemy, we have no power over you, and we desperately need your support and your solidarity.

be aware of radfem pipelines and dog whistles too. be skeptical of anyone that talks about the divine feminine or correlates birthing, menstruating, or female reproductive organs with womanhood. be especially skeptical of people who use those biological things as reasons to why women are more spiritual, or more in tune with nature, or just that they're better than men (read: anyone they decide is a man)

radical feminism is an expected reactionary outcome from cis women who are being oppressed by conservatives, especially when all they practice is ciscentric, liberal, white feminism. they feel the need to be radicalized but don't have the experience and information to pinpoint the true source of their suffering. trans people are not your enemy, AMAB people are not your enemy, anyone who identifies as a man is not your enemy. we're all being crushed under the same stone

look I know it’s supposed to be a joke but that “irradiated wasteland” is the unceded homeland of the Paiute and Shoshone peoples and consists of fragile Mojave and Great Basin desert ecosystems that are actively being exploited and destroyed by mining interests who utilize the perception of desert as wasteland to justify their destruction of indigenous lands and communities. the joke's not funny. fuck off with this.

also, as to the "irridiated" part of this - here's an article by High Country News on cancer clusters in indigenous communities in the Southwest resulting from nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site (itself located on the ancestral homeland of the Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute) and the US government's continuing failure to compensate affected families. it's a horrific crime that the US government committed against its own citizens and the joke's not fucking funny.

wasn’t expecting this to take off but shoutout to the Australians in the notes - getting fed up with this kind of shitty rhetoric about desert landscapes and erasure of the indigenous peoples that have lived in them for millennia is Australian-Southwestern US solidarity

I am not native but wanted to jump in and share some pictures from where I live on the western edge of the Mojave at 5200 feet, where it bleeds into the San Gabriel mountains. I moved here from the humid and emerald green southeast and fell head over heels in love with high desert chaparral and juniper-piñon-oak landscapes. There's so much life here! And if you take the time to go slow and sit with the desert, it rewards you by showing you white flowers barely bigger than a grain of sand and hatchling lizards that can sit on a penny and flocks of tiny baby quail following their parents from bush to bush.

Even the yellowjackets here are magical. Back east, in a land where resources are abundant, they are aggro monsters who will sting you as soon as look at you. Here they are as mellow as domesticated honeybees. I walk through swarms of them, I let them land on my bare skin, I fish them out of my sheeps' water trough with unprotected hands, and they never offer to sting.

The only people who think deserts are wastelands are the ones who have never gone slowly enough to see a desert.

it’s so indicative of some peoples’ views of disabled people (and disabilities in general) that they’ll think their PETS are faking a disability. i just saw a video (tiktok of course) where the creator said “every time i start to think my cat is faking his blindness, he does something like this” and the video was of a cat trying to get down from a low shelf. he was unable to reach out and feel the floor with his paws, so was extraordinarily hesitant to jump down. and i had a moment of “aw poor kitty” and immediately followed by the thought: “why the fuck would anyone think a CAT was faking BLINDNESS?”

it’s completely nonsensical, right? how could a cat fake any disability? the vets diagnosed the cat with blindness for a reason. and why? why would a cat fake blindness? for what purpose would a CAT have to fake blindness? it’s a cat. IT IS A LITERAL CAT.

and then i realised that the creator of the video was projecting their beliefs regarding disabled humans onto their cat. clearly, they must believe that at least some disabled people are “faking it” and therefore their cat must be “faking it” too. i can only imagine that the cat has adapted to his blindness and is able to navigate well enough that it can appear as though the cat can see, similarly to how blind people learn their house/workplace/etc so well that they can navigate without the aid of a cane or other assistance.

and obviously that means that the cat (and, therefore, disabled people) must be faking it.

(via @woofknight over at the ex-Bird place)

It's this week now

fuck. me and my 9 roommates were at the pound voting on which cat to get. each of us cast our ballot for a different cat, except that two of us voted for the rabid horse so I guess that's who we're bringing home today

if only we had used a different system of voting, such as ranked choice or approval voting, which would have actually reflected the will of the people instead of requiring us to vote against our own preferred cats to rally behind one cat in order to avoid getting the rabid horse

unfortunately the system is built to be exploited, and those who don't understand this will unknowingly skew the vote against their own best interests!

stares into the camera pleadingly

update: I sympathize with my roommate, who is allergic to cats and rabies and thus decided not to vote, however we both just got kicked down the stairs and broke all our bones and we also have rabies now. awaiting further clarification as to how I could have prevented this by not voting