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I really like the people on my dash. There is a reason I’ve opted out of other social media platforms and it’s that I haven’t been able to engineer the same mix of informative, insightful, and loving on any other platform.

I’ve got “more informative” elsewhere but it’s not a place I can hang out for long without getting too bummed out (either because people aren’t actually being insightful or because everyone is just sharing bad news all day every day), and that’s ok. I manage my time there carefully, both because a constant drip of bad news is paralyzing and because it’s hard to like people who clearly spend such a great deal of their time on disembodied discourse & the aforementioned constant drip of bad news.

Here I’ve been able to find folks here who are both concerned about (terrified for, saddened by) the world and willing to love it at the same time, which is the only way I can see out of this mess. I see you bringing that care into your walks in your favorite places, the conversations you have with your friends and family, the causes to which you donate your time and energy and money. A lot of you have focused your energy on doing outreach about something, someone, or somewhere you particularly love. I think this is a good and reasonable way to manage your energy in an age when there are so many visible (and visible is the operative word) problems that trying to tackle even a good chunk of them would diffuse your energy into uselessness. I like that so many of you have picked something. I also like how so many of you are endlessly curious about the things other people have picked.

I’ve been pretty disciplined about filtering content here and blocking people whose engagement with other people doesn’t seem generative, and I know that’s part of it. But I also think many people still using tumblr at this point in the game have specific tendencies that I like. And I like that you can still moderate your experience here to some degree. I know all of this will change but while we’re still in this space together I want you to know I like seeing what you’re sharing with us all.

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I go on daily walks but my daily walks don’t last all day which is why I feel the way I do. What I’m doing isn’t exactly microdosing but I wish I were taking heroic doses of the daily walk.

A lot of yall don’t go on daily walks. That’s why you feel the way you do

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We need spaces like this more than ever now! Help a community out.

Our Union Hall Needs Help!

Friends, followers, and Fellow Workers, the Gainesville IWW's beloved union hall, the Civic Media Center, is in need. The Civic Media Center of Gainesville, Florida, provides countless vital community resources, such as:

The Stetson Kennedy Library, a reading room and leftist library that is home to 15,000 books, journals, newspapers, and magazines.

The Travis Fristoe Zine Library, largest independent zine collection in the southeastern United States.

A meeting space for countless local activism and social justice groups such as the IWW, Food Not Bombs, and Books to Prisoners.

The Gainesville Free Store, which was founded to help local transgender people access affirming clothing and toiletries as well as other important items. The Free Store has seen so much success that they've expanded to serve the entire Gainesville community.

The Gainesville Free Grocery Store, which offers no-questions-asked food to anyone who walks in.

A cool, dry place to rest, with an open bathroom frequently used by our unhoused neighbors.

A venue for local musicians and poets to perform, including during the renowned music festival FEST.

So, so much more. Losing this community hub would be an absolutely devastating blow to our town and our union. We cannot let it die.

Via the Civic Media Center's own social media:

Dear friends, please us survive the Summer Doldrums by renewing your membership or, if you can, making an extra donation in whatever amount you can spare to help us cover rent, bills, and some extra work on our facilities this summer. Here is the direct link to the membership & donation page on our website: https://www.civicmediacenter.org/get-involved If you have Venmo or PayPal you can also just make a contribution using the handle in the graphic below. Thank you for supporting the CMC!

Please, if you can, help us out with a signal boost or a donation -- we love our union hall, and our community needs it!

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At the show someone told me that my music made them feel welcomed into complex and sometimes difficult emotions in a way that made those emotions/experiences seem interesting and not merely heavy but like spaces threaded with light and it’s one of the nicest things someone has ever said to me. That’s what I’m trying to do! I often play and write when I’m struggling with something but I never want to leave the song struggling more than when I started it, or leave the listener feeling worse than when they hear the first note. It’s really nice, as an artist, to hear someone reflect my intentions back at me. Can’t wait to get over packing/moving life so I have space to get back to making/dreaming life.

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My hot take on Andor (a show I enjoyed watching) is that the costuming is so good it’s actually bad. No culture is as sartorially cohesive as any of the cultures depicted in the show. The color schemes are particularly suspect (too good, too complimentary, too obviously schemes). Even if I do want to live in every single one of the outfits worn on Ferrix. All the quilting! So much acid yellow and chartreuse and rust orange and maroon. Teal for a little accent here and there. I found it very immersion-breaking, though

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I had such a nice time at the show yesterday listening to other people play, chatting with people I didn’t know, seeing old friends, sharing my songs for the first time in a long time. So good! Back to moving stuff now. But this morning I still wanted to bask for a little bit, so I’ve been watching videos of Emmanuel Savary skate and tearing up a bit. Here’s some for you guys:

He’s looking for help funding his skating here:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-emmanuel-represent-team-usa-abroad-europe-2025?modal=share&source=fundraiser+sidebar

[bluebelly-sun-serpentine]

So, we’re about a week out from the move, and I’d love to have a fun list of things to do once we’re done with the packing/moving/unpacking. One thing I thought would be nice would be to fulfill requests from you guys. You can respond here or in my asks, but if there are things you’d like me to go out and photograph or something you’d like me to draw, drop me a line. Can’t promise I’ll get to everything but I know I’ll have fun fulfilling requests.

I owe some people here the owlets and otters I photographed a few months ago (they’re just sitting on a different hard drive from the one I currently used, which shouldn’t be an obstacle but somehow is) so consider that part of my list. If you want to add to my list please do!

[bluebelly-sun-serpentine]

As a follow up to the stupid “cheap gas is a human right” post. What about all the humans who have to share the planet with your entitlement?

XKCD’s excellent presentation on historical global temperature and anthropogenic global warming. 

[After setting your car on fire] “Listen, your car’s temperature has changed before.”

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People here are so unbelievably car-brained. Cheap gas - which US Americans already have, as noted above - is absolutely not a human right.

You know what should be a human right? Freedom from vehicular violence. Freedom from the PM2.5 pollution that cars produce both from tailpipe emissions and tire particulates. Freedom from noise pollution. Freedom from the absolute violence of urban highways. Freedom from a warming planet.

Poor people are absolutely those most affected by all these issues, both in the US and abroad. Global warming will hit poorer countries (those least responsible for producing it) hardest, and poor people in the US are most likely to live near highways (there are so many health and QOL effects for this) and to have the least access to they healthcare they will need because of the USA’s unhealthy, alienating, and economically disastrous development patterns. They are also more likely to have to walk or bike to work or just to get around - because cars are stupidly expensive even without factoring in gas expenses, just counting maintenance, registration, etc - and so are more likely to be killed by cars. Guess what happens to the groundwater under and near gas stations? It inevitably - and I mean this, you can look up records - is contaminated with fuel. Cities that don’t build densely are also more likely to go bankrupt, causing massive economic harm to residents, because of how difficult it is, just geometrically speaking, to build a healthy tax base and maintain roads and utilities when everything is so spread out.

You cannot advocate for cheap gas without advocating for the perpetuation of a system that is deeply, structurally inequitable and cruel. Gas should be more expensive. Without clear and immediately impactful incentives to move away from car-based culture and development patterns, people will maintain the status quo, even if the status quo makes them miserable. Even if it kills them. I think there’s a reason so many Americans count their college years as their happiest, and it’s that for many Americans their college years are the only time they live in a walkable community. College campuses are the least hostile environment most Americans will likely experience for most of their lives. Imagine having friends, work, food, enrichment in that kind of reach your entire life. That is what has been stripped from you. Cheap gas won’t bring it back.

My god, we are never getting out of this Hell are we, Americans are the fucking spoiled brats of the world and yet they demand to be pampered more

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For any German followers. Don’t repeat the same mistakes your forebears made.

I know we are all used to hear bad news from the USA or UK when it comes to trans rights but this time Germany wants to play in the same league.

Our idiots at home ministry came up with the fucking idea to start a register for all transgender and nonbinary people which would mean every person working at some public position could always at any given time see your assigned gender at birth, your deadname, your address and who knows what else.

We had been there in the past. Hitler Germany called it the "Travestite Law" back then. Our politicians didn't learn.

We all know this is unacceptable.

Please, if you are German, sign it. If you are not, spread it wide and far.

This had been stopped once a few years ago. It needs to be stopped again.

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For a long few moments the California towhees outside the window hit upon the ostinato from Ravel’s Bolero. Who needs monkeys at typewriters.

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Dying for Lou’s mushroom polo/sweater from episode 6 of cloudward ho.

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Crazy how resting when you’re exhausted makes you less exhausted. Who could have thought? Close my little eyes and get horizontal and feel a little better, ooooh.

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Just overheard:

Dad, riding a bike with two small children riding on the back in little seats: it would be cool if we could harness the awesome power of children

Child on back of bike: and then! We can take over and make the planet like it needs to be!

Not sure if they were talking about biking or some Dr. Evil style plot but it was cute either way

[bluebelly-sun-serpentine]

The vaping thing is so crazy, man. I left college for three years, came back, and suddenly everyone's addicted to nicotine in a way that my cohort's parents would have tanned their hides for. I don't consider myself a prude about drugs (downright an evangelist about the classical psychedelics), and a lot of my cohort is just now starting to wrangle with their relationship to weed (never got onto the stuff as I myself don't enjoy the experience) which /has/ been very normalized in Cascadia over my lifetime, but I thought we'd all agreed that nicotine was in the Hard Shit category???

Yeah, juul and all the companies that followed were great at marketing the product as “less harmful” and as a stop on the way to ending one’s nicotine addiction (step down to cartridges, then step off entirely), but once they realized they could get at kids really early their packaging really changed to entice really young demographics, and I think that’s a big part of it. Every generation needs some way to piss off their parents, so I’m not shocked it happened - just sad people are going to be reaping the consequences, and that those people aren’t going to be the cartridge/vape companies.

I’m lucky I kind of missed the boat on this stuff, but also my body just also doesn’t tolerate foreign substances very well. It sucks to be chronically ill and kind of a fragile flower, but also it probably contributed to my not developing any addictions and prevented me from even trying a lot of stuff (even just finding prescribed substances my body can tolerate is a struggle. I’m on the lowest possible dose - or less, where I can cut pills - of pretty much everything I’m on).

The weed stuff is serious though. A lot of people see weed as a safer alternative to tobacco, and while in some ways that’s true, it’s really only the case if you know exactly where your weed has come from and how it’s been processed. If you have to use weed for pain management or even just use it recreationally and you can grow it yourself or do gummies instead, I really implore everyone to switch. I had access to people in the industry and the widespread use of nasty fungicides and pesticides is really easy to hide from regulators and people do it. There’s no way to know your preferred brand (or the stuff coming from your dealer, if you don’t live in a legal state/country) isn’t using plants treated with this stuff. The eagle 20ew stuff is just particularly bad - you are basically huffing the same stuff the nazis used to gas jews in the holocaust. It’s not a joke.

In general I try to discourage longterm overuse of weed because it has cognitive effects, especially around memory and anxiety, and because it can cause other problems. But it has its genuine uses and I won’t deny that. I just want people to be aware of the risks they’re taking so that they can make informed decisions about whether the benefits they get are actually worth the cost.

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Because lead paint was considered a superior product, the smaller homes of the middle and working classes and the apartments, SORs, and doss houses of the poor were less likely to have been painted with lead paint, concentrating the effects of paint-based lead poisoning in wealthier demographics.

That said, leaded gasoline and lead in pipes had more widespread effects. It’s crazy to think we had only a few decades of much lower exposure to lead before vaping brought it all back again. I’m grateful not to have picked that habit up.

Don’t vape if you don’t want to turn out exactly as addled as your boomer and gen-x parents. Lead poisoning has really bad long term cognitive effects and if you don’t want heavy metal poisoning you have to get off the cartridges. Also, if you vape or smoke weed you yourself don’t grow, stop. So many growers - even the small, “organic” farms, even the “well-regulated” farms in legal states - use eagle 20ew, a fungicide that basically turns to zyklon B when combusted, so you will get lung and possibly neurological damage if you smoke or vape it. There are too many ways for growers to get around regulations, and if you can’t know what your supply is treated with, you’re running a massive risk. Eagle 20ew is somewhat safer when ingested, so if you have to buy rather than grow your own, switch to gummies.

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The fact people feel obligated to give their data to a private corporation just to get emergency alerts relevant to their local area is absurd. It should be illegal for agencies to only update to social media sites that not only require accounts but are known to misuse the data they collect.

Emergency updates belong on agency websites and rss feeds, not twitter and instagram.