swiftadrift

[swiftadrift]

Help me get cancer treatment for my dad!!

Saturday, August 16th: Hello, everyone. I’m Gem, a bi, mentally ill, and multiple disabled woman in desperate need of help, as I need assistance in covering travel expenses to help my dad get to his hospital appointment.

I regret needing to ask for help again, and I understand this is a long shot, but I’m hoping someone out there can lend a hand to my family and me.

Just yesterday (August 15th), I received a call from the hospital following some check-ups my dad had due to a persistent cough. Unfortunately, they found cancer in his throat. We’re still in shock and don’t know how long he’s had it or how far it has progressed. Right now, we’re faced with tough choices: chemotherapy or a laryngectomy (removal of the voice box). He has an appointment to discuss these options on Wednesday, August 20th, at The Royal London Hospital.

As my dad lives in London, we are his only family. It’s about a 7 to 8-hour drive away, and since neither my sister nor I can drive, we are in a bit of a bind. To be straightforward, we desperately need help getting there and back.

The quickest way for us to travel is by train, which will cost around £334 for a round trip. We’ll also need to rely on Uber while we’re there since neither of us has an Oyster card for public transport. Altogether, I'm hoping to raise £500. My sister and I are both disabled and depend on welfare, and my dad is living on a pension. We simply can’t afford this on our own, so any help would mean the world to us.

I know this is a big ask, but if anyone could spare even a small amount—just £1, $1, or €1—it would truly make a difference. And sharing this message would help just as much.

Thank you so much ❤️

£30/£500!!

✨️PayPal✨️

[swiftadrift]

also pls tag the first game you remember playing

[swiftadrift]

bath time

[swiftadrift]

welcome to my epic fantasy world. we have many developed fantasy kingdoms with 2000 years of rich lore and history. and to the south you can see the evil sand people and to the east theres japanchina.

[swiftadrift]

Car accents 🐈😺

[swiftadrift]

I made a bad comic and now you have to look at it

[swiftadrift]

I know I say that I'm kinda nuts for doing the amount of visual research I do, but at the same time: Specificity is SO much more compelling and real feeling, and imo not getting references often makes things look more amateur.

Eg. drawing a sofa- my mental image of a sofa is something like this:

Like. Its a sofa. It works. But it's not very convincing, the pillows are kinda wrong at the back, and it's not really giving any information about the owner. Even if you want a basic sofa... What kind of basic.

comfy and cheap?

kinda rigid?

inherited? ------

who does this comfy cheap ikea sofa belong to anyway?

guy living alone?

teenage girl?

Grandma?

Anyway I'll get off my soapbox but specificity is sexy and fun and it can do your storytelling for you!

[swiftadrift]

On the subject about parents needing to control their child's reading and invade their privacy in order to "protect" them from "inappropriate material:

Until I was in....college? At least? The vast, vast majority of the books I read were either a) assigned by my school or b) (the vast majority of my reading) provided to me by my mother.

My mom is a librarian. She filled our rooms with books, picked especially for us. She pointed out books on the shelves in our home library (separate from our bedroom shelves) that she thought we would like. She bought us books for birthdays, Christmas, and just stacks of recommendations. She once paid me $10 to read one of the Cirque Du Freak books because she said I needed "to be exposed to bad literature."

She respected my privacy in room, didn't go through my belongings. She explicitly pointed out to us that she wouldn't know if we took a particular book of the shelf, as long as we returned it, if we didn't want her to know we were reading it. She purposely brought us books that she didn't care for herself, because she thought we might find them valuable or enjoyable.

And if we wanted to read something she thought might upset or disturb us, she would explain why. She wouldn't stop us from reading it - just ask us to check in with her, to talk through it.

And so when I read something that upset or disturbed me, I would go to her. She would listen and talk through it with me.

If she said she didn't think I would like something, or that a book might disturb me, or that she thought I should wait until I was older, I listened to her.

She didn't need restrictions or control to protect me. Because she proved I could trust her.

Controlling kids is never about "protecting" them. It's just about control.

[swiftadrift]

dionysus big naturals

[swiftadrift]

have you lot heard about the tiktoker who’s taking on the actual government over a parking ticket? because she’s a hero

[swiftadrift]

be so real with me if I were on total drama island and I fucked up so bad would you vote me off. I'm talking like I fucked up really bad. like unforgivably

[swiftadrift]

it makes me sad the way cis women are so terrified of and disgusted by their own body hair. and i'm not talking "i have to shave for sensory reasons" i mean i keep seeing videos of women using hair identifier spray on their faces and hands so they can shave the tiniest barely-there bits of peach fuzz that came free with their bodies. hair that serves a purpose and that purpose is cleanliness and protection. i mean when i was in elementary school girls who had barely hit puberty were talking about shaving their arms. i mean full-grown adult women who will have a breakdown if they see two days of stubble on their legs/crotch/ jaw/pits because god forbid you don't look like a perfect plastic barbie doll. god forbid your body that keeps you alive comes with hair that may not be soft and glossy and photogenic. some women are so afraid of having any hair apart from their head and eyebrows that they've uno reversed themselves into six different kinds of gender dysphoria that they can't recognize as such because they're convinced that this unnatural state of highly-groomed capital-informed beauty is how women have always been. you're so scared of looking "gross" or "ugly" or "mannish" that you can't even look at your body in the mirror and recognize what it is. sister you are an ape. why are you so determined to deny your nature.

[swiftadrift]

there's been plenty of pushback against youtube's plan to age-check users by using an AI to analyze everyone's watching habits, but amidst that, i spotted this playlist circulating among some teens:

(picture is a reconstruction to protect the kids identity)

interesting! they're trying to trick the AI by watching videos that have a primarily adult viewer demographic? well im a curious fella so naturally i have to take a look-see, and

[swiftadrift]

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[swiftadrift]

i wanted to show everyone my favorite tiktok

[swiftadrift]

going through my camera after a day out birding

[swiftadrift]

Interesting news for fucked up weirdos who enjoy body horror and exploring differences between Self and Other