#trustworthy information

[tomorrowusa]

« I can attest to the idea that tech companies behave nothing like traditional journalism outlets. They’re run by engineers who might as well be wiring your house for cable or fixing your water main for all they care about the quality of information you consume online. »

— Columnist Matt Bai at the Washington Post. (archived)

Good analogy. No matter how good your electrician or plumber may be, would you consider them regular and reliable sources for news outside their professional fields?

Facebook and the others make money by sharing your eyeballs with advertisers – not by providing trustworthy information.

A disproportionate percentage of Republicans get their news primarily from social media. That tells us a lot about how they form their worldviews.

We need to support credible free news media like public broadcasters NPR, the BBC, the CBC, or Australia's ABC.

At one time most people got reasonably accurate news from free media on TV and radio. The internet has scrambled the media landscape – so far in a chaotic way.

People who spend lots of time on free social media are having their views shaped by digital oligarchs who have no interest in accuracy or responsibility. Indeed, some of those oligarchs have political agendas which are self-serving and promote fringe worldviews.

So support for remaining free credible news media is essential as they navigate their way through the changing informational terrain.

For now, question the credibility of dubious items which people tell you about which they see on social media. Successfully debunking something provides you with credibility you can then use to cast doubt on additional dubious items.

[ezmedicalcannabiscertificate]

Obtaining a medical cannabis certificate is an important first step for anyone looking for safe and legal access to this alternative treatment. With so many alternatives, it’s critical to select a respected agency that can assist you through the process with experience and integrity. Here are some reasons to work with EZ Medical Cannabis Certificate to receive your medical cannabis certificate.

[barksbog]

taking the adhd vitamin C post away from yall because you're still uncritically reblogging it and from what me and my friends could find the effects are at best negligible especially in normal food

unless you're chugging orange juice it can't reasonably interact to the degree implied by that post and it's more likely that you just built up a tolerance to your meds.

please consume vitamin C we really don't need everyone here with ADHD to get scurvy (half joking)

[dailyloopdeloop]

Fairy Loop, since you asked for suggestions

DAY 85: hey! listen!

[dailykugisaki]

Day 101| id in alt

Stand united. Because they do not deserve to be familiar with death. (Read my tags please💥)

[justanechoflower]

I'm sorry, I won't read your journal or peek. 😢

Regarding the birthdays though, I'll be turning 16 this June 7. ^u^

[wolfsbanesparks]

I completely support Israel being held accountable for its crimes against humanity, but we also can’t ignore that Indonesia has been violently occupying West Papua - a region more than twice the size of occupied Palestine - for the past 55 years, and has murdered 500,000 indigenous West Papuans in the process. Indonesian soldiers routinely burn indigenous villages to the ground, pose with the bodies of murdered Papuan civilians, and actively prevent journalists from reporting on the genocide. West Papuans often refer to their homeland as “Indonesia’s Palestine.”

Thank you for sending this to me anon. I completely agree that we should put in the effort to both be aware of the atrocities happening in other parts of the world and to do what we can to help those victims of violent occupation and genocide.

The world's eyes are on what's happening in Palestine right now--and I genuinely hope that the steps being taken will put a stop to the awful things happening there--but you're right that we have to remember that it is not the only place actively experiencing violent occupation.

I admit that I am not as informed on the subject as I should be. I've been doing some reading on what's going on since I got this ask, but I certainly don't know enough yet to speak about the best ways to help the people of West Paupa.

If anyone seeing this knows of any legitimate ways to help please reblog this to spread the word.

[watermelinoe]

i had to disclose my medical information every semester to every instructor because i had instructors who wouldn't give me accommodations unless they judged for themselves whether i deserved them and student disability services would not advocate for me, so with that in mind i think it's a terrible shame when institutions can't be trusted to collect private medical information and make fair and responsible decisions, resulting in the public demanding that information for themselves

[set-phasers-to-whump]

i've been trying very hard to be brave

prompt: tortured for information, "hit them harder"

whumpee: peter sutherland

fandom: the night agent

here's something different for a change :) it's tentatively part 1 with a second bit later this month but i cannot make any promises lol. title from st. cecilia's by animal flag

Peter Sutherland is utterly alone. He is in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night, and there is absolutely nothing around him. No movement, no light. Just him and the stars. 

He wishes he knew what he was doing here. He’d been told to come here, and that is all that he knows. 

He’s beginning to wonder why he’d listened. Why he’s here, in a more general sense. 

He isn’t sure that he wants this. 

He doesn’t want to be alone. 

A sound - far off, but like a gunshot in the silence. An engine. 

At least something’s going to happen, now. 

Headlights appear on the horizon, blinding and high up. A military vehicle, maybe. 

They hadn’t said anything about the military, but he figures he should’ve guessed. 

He approaches the vehicle, waves, then wonders whether it’s stupid to wave in a situation like this. 

The vehicle stops. Peter goes to open the door, but it swings open from the inside before he grabs the handle. A few men get out, and he tries to greet them, but they don’t say anything. 

His skin starts to crawl. Something is wrong. 

But it’s too late, and there’s nowhere to run. 

Someone throws a cloth bag over his head and ties a thick rope around his wrists, and then he’s being manhandled into the vehicle and can do little more than wriggle around in the grips of his captors. 

He tries to talk to them, at first. But no one says a word. He falls silent and tries to keep track of where they’re going, counting left and right turns, but the journey drags on forever and in total silence and he’s fucking afraid, and at some point he just stops paying attention. 

After an eternity, the vehicle stops. Dead silence. Hands pull him out of his seat and shove him down. He hits the ground hard, unable to break his fall. His body sinks slightly into soft sand that does very little to lessen the impact. 

He’s hauled to his feet and dragged along, stumbling and desperately trying to keep to his feet. They walk for a long time. It’s cold, and Peter feels numb. 

The squeak of a metal door opening. Clattering. Footsteps echoing in a hallway. There are a lot of them, Peter realizes. He’s horribly outnumbered. 

He’s forced to sit on what can only be a metal chair. He immediately tries to move it, but nothing happens. It must be bolted to the ground. 

A rope around his chest, securing him to the chair. More rope around his ankles. He is clearly not going anywhere anytime soon. 

“Who are you,” says a voice, somewhere to his right. There’s a slight accent to the words, but he can’t put his finger on it. 

He says nothing. Let me see how much they already know, he thinks. 

“I said, who are you.”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

A cold laugh. “You’re not in any position to be asking questions.”

Peter remains silent. 

A fist connects with the side of his head. It takes him by surprise, and his neck jerks so violently he swears something cracks. 

“My name is Chris.”

Another hit to the other side of his head. “No, it’s not.”

“Why are you asking my name if you already know it?”

He pictures a shrug to fill the silence. Receives a kick to the shin that really fucking hurts. 

“Fine. My name is Peter.”

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“What do you want?”

“Whatever you’re willing to give us.”

He really doesn’t like the sound of that. 

“Last name?”

“Seems like you already know who I am.”

Another kick, this time to the other shin. 

“Answer my questions. Don’t bother saying anything else.”

“Jenkins,” Peter says, like a challenge. He’ll make them fight for every word, if that’s how they want to play. 

A punch to the shoulder that feels almost gentle, compared to the other hits he’s received. 

“Hit him harder,” he hears a different voice say quietly. It sounds…almost familiar, in a strange way. Peter strains to hear whether it’ll say anything else, but the only thing that happens is that a fist drives into his stomach with such force that he cannot breathe for several seconds. 

By the time he can breathe again, his interrogator has already moved on. 

“Who do you work for?”

He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t really want to waste his newly-regained ability to breathe properly on responding to a question that the asker surely already knows the answer to. 

A punch to the chest, painful and solid but not horrible. 

“Who do you work for?”

The question is repeated by several other voices, echoing around him. 

“Who do you work for?”

“Who do you work for?”

“Who do you work for?”

“Who do you work for?”

The noise is nearly overwhelming. He doubts that they’d even be able to hear his answer over all of it. 

Eventually the echoes die away. His feet are starting to go numb from the rope binding his ankles. He’s long since stopped feeling his hands. 

“Once more. Who do you work for?” The singular voice is quiet, now. And very serious. 

Footsteps behind him, and then an arm wraps around his neck, not squeezing, not yet, but there. It’s a clear warning. 

Peter barely breathes as he forces the words from his mouth. “The United States government.”

The arm disappears. Peter takes a deep breath, the cloth bag sticking to his face so that the breath is not as deep as it otherwise might be. 

And then the arm is back, and it is squeezing this time. He chokes and tries in vain to get away, to gain any room at all to breathe. 

He’s on the verge of passing out when the pressure stops. He gasps and coughs in the confines of his cloth prison. 

There is not enough air. He keeps trying to breathe and it isn’t working properly. He’s on the verge of hyperventilation, panicking and thrashing uselessly against the ropes binding him. 

The bag is removed from his head almost gently. He catches a flash of light, mottled colors and shapes that are too bright and too much, and then a blindfold is tied around his head, plunging him into darkness again, but at least he can breathe. 

He gulps in air like he is never going to get the chance to breathe again, and eventually, his lungs stop burning and his head stops spinning. 

“You will tell us what we want to know now, I think.”

Peter barely even parses the statement, too caught up in the relief of breathing fresh, unobstructed air. 

The relief does not last long. They ask another question, and he doesn’t quite hear it, and then a fist drives into his stomach, even harder than before, nearly making him vomit. 

The question is repeated - “what part of the government do you work for?” - and Peter answers truthfully. The words taste like bile, like betrayal. 

This process continues for an eternity. A question. A brief period of time in which to answer. If he answers, usually nothing happens. Sometimes they smack him, but nothing more. If he doesn’t answer, if they think he’s lying, they hit him. The locations vary. The intensity does not. 

He lies, sometimes. When they ask for specifics, when he’s pretty sure they don’t know the answer already. Bases his answers in truth, but dresses them up or down. 

They swallow every lie he feeds them, not to mention the few truths they don’t believe. He’s not giving up too much. Nothing overly damaging. 

And then, the questions and the attack stop. Just like that. He’s untied from the chair, far too exhausted to even think about kicking out at his captors, and then he’s bundled back into (presumably) the same vehicle. 

He hadn’t really cared about how bumpy the ride had been before. But now, his entire body aches and every jolt of the vehicle sends a wave of pain from his head through his feet. He feels a million different things at once. Exhausted and nauseous and numb and resigned and afraid and angry and helpless. 

He wants to go home. Wants his mom, his dad. Wants Rose. 

They dump him in the sand again. He lies with his face pressed to it, slightly warm and unpleasantly itchy, and listens as the sound of an engine grows further and further away. 

He can feel the sun beating down on him, growing steadily more intense. He needs to move. He can barely feel his legs. 

After a long struggle, he makes it to his knees. He spends some time trying to untie his wrists, not stopping until he feels them start to bleed. 

Resigned to that particular fate, he very slowly gets to his feet. His head spins, and he nearly falls right back down to his knees. 

Instead, he makes it all of ten steps before he trips over something and falls, his knees and chin connecting with something hard. 

For a few seconds, he doesn’t move, immobilized by the shock and the pain of the fall. But when he starts shifting, he discovers something wonderful - he’s hit a rock, and its shape is such that he can rub the ropes against a fairly sharp edge until they break at last. 

The second the rope falls away, he reaches up and pulls off the blindfold. 

The sunlight is blinding and dizzying. He sinks down to sit on the rock that has freed him and looks down at his hands. His palms are streaked with blood and both wrists are encircled with red loops, deep indents in the skin showing how tightly he’d been bound. 

He looks down until his eyes adjust to the light. Then he takes a glance at his surroundings. 

He’s not sure what he’d expected. The middle of nowhere, probably. Nothing around him for miles, just sand and sun and the endless sky. 

He is not more than a quarter mile from an airport. He can see its buildings, watches a plane land, watches another one take off. 

He walks towards it, noticing all the time how much everything hurts. He cannot breathe without pain. Every step is a fresh agony, but at least he’s moving. 

He doesn’t stop moving until he’s through the doors. The air conditioning hits him like a blast, and he nearly sinks to the ground right then and there. 

As it is, he manages to stagger to a single-user bathroom and bolt the door behind him before his legs give out. 

He sits propped up against the door, breathing in the cool air, for several minutes. Eventually, he gets back to his feet and leans against the sink, examining his face in the mirror. 

They’d been relatively kind to him there, actually. There’s a scrape below his left eye and a bruise on his right cheek, but he’s looked worse. 

Less good is the blood on his chin - his own doing, from the rock that had turned out to be his salvation - and the bruise already forming across his neck. 

He does what he can. Washes away the blood and blots it out of his clothing as much as he can. Messes with his collar so the bruising on his neck is as obscured as it can be. 

His clothes are sandy and sweaty, but he leaves them as-is. He doesn’t want to look at the patchwork of bruises waiting for him underneath. 

He allows himself one final moment in the bathroom, sticking his mouth beneath the tap and drinking as much water as he feels able to. He’d scarcely noticed the thirst until now. The water tastes like blood and sand and it hurts to swallow. 

The airport is hectic, and hardly anyone even looks at him twice. By some miracle, his passport is still in his pocket, and so is a small amount of cash and his credit cards. His phone is gone, and so is his bag, but at least they’d left him with something. 

It’s a clear signal, to him. Get the hell out and do not come back. 

He doesn’t even think of trying to find the US embassy, of staying here any longer. He can’t. He’s exhausted and hurting and afraid and there is a flight to JFK in half an hour. 

He gets the last available seat, smashed in between a guy the size of a pro football player and a young child belonging to the family across the aisle who won’t stop talking. 

Despite this, he’s asleep before the plane even leaves the ground. 

thanks for reading!!! i had a really great time writing this and i really wanna do a follow-up...i have an Idea but we'll have to wait and see lmao

[largishcat]

genuinely so weirded out by people who don’t mind being advertised to. i was talking to my friend about adblockers and they were like “but if you never see ads how do you know what to buy” like WHAT are you talking about since WHEN do we trust companies to give an accurate description of their own products and obviously i shop by looking at reviews on reddit like a normal person

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

inchresting how many of the codex entries are from brother genitivi

[cuteniaarts]

@katkastrofa: *writes a single throwaway line in one chapter of Lost and Found that is never referenced again*

Me, completely randomly and with no prompting: Alright, bet–

[minglana]

man i wish i wouldve been at the doctor's when she told my mom i had hypothyroidism bc like. that day i remember just coming home and my mom telling me 'you have hypothyroidism' w a very serious face as if it was this like. deathly condition or something. which gramted, given the family history its not something to treat lightly, but idk. like i bet the doctor told her more. if i had been there i couldve asked her questions. like. what happens if i stop taking the pills. what are the symptoms. etc etc

[waffliesinyoface]

A New Business in the End-of-Year Rush

Is this the outbreak of a Christmas business war?

Things are always busy around the end of the year, but that's what makes it such a profitable time for businesses. And it seems that a new competitor has arrived. Many are well aware of "Christmas" by now. It's an event where a foreign saint called Nicholas comes, flying in the air as he whips his animals, sneaking into houses legally while the owner is asleep. This open-minded event has already become a fad in the outside world, and it looks like there are already signs of it appearing in Gensokyo as well. Ms. Seiga Kaku (hermit) seeks to make a business out of this fad. She says that with her ability to go through walls at will, she is planning to sneak into human houses. "During Christmas, everyone buys toys from Santa Claus (St. Nicholas), and he sneaks in to deliver them. That's how it works in the outside world. I guess it's an event that gathers faith from children." But Seiga claims that it isn't enough: "Why should we believe in some white-beard old man, especially when we don't even know if he's in Gensokyo in the first place? That's why everyone has such a hard time selling toys. So, I decided that I'm going to sell the toys directly to the owner, or, if they're asleep, I'll just take something that looks valuable." With that, she showed me a bag stuffed full with her treasure. Her service seemed rather prosperous indeed. Humans and hermits should be expecting a heated battle around Christmastime. Incidentally, St. Nicholas is known for his white beard, but when it comes to white beard in Gensokyo, we tend to picture Sarutahiko. Since he is also the god of us tengu, it wouldn't be good for him to develop a negative image. We just hope she will not conduct her Christmas business while wearing a white beard. -Aya Shameimaru

[bitegore]

if you are going to say "gaslight yourself" i think you should consider instead saying "lie to yourself" because a) it is true and b) it is a phrase that sounds less buzzwordy so people will actually take you fucking seriously. i dont trust a motherfucker who can't put the Most Popular Internet Words down and you shouldn't either. say the thing the way it is

[fluffypotatey]

Hold up ✋ were we ever told what happened when Wukong lost to the Jade Emperor? Did the Brotherhood know what happened afterward? About Wukong being sealed underground (which looks like he was caught in as he tried to run, based on how he’s standing) I often see it that he surrendered to save the Brotherhood, but Wukong is so salty about being left to suffer during that battle, combined with how Macaque got Team Monkie away from Possessed Wukong, I wonder if he teleported the Brotherhood out of there, really leaving Wukong to his fate and adding to that feeling of abandonment, and I wonder if Macaque would have done it because Wukong still cared about the Brotherhood regardless of how Macky himself felt about him prioritizing that over his promise of forever. Just for that extra kick of miscommunicated intentions.

oh but that’s the best part

they don’t know