Ok wait let her speak

What is the current status of KOSA? As of last night, 2024-04-20, this is what congress.gov had to say about it:

I'm seeing lots of posts fearmongering about how it's passed the Senate and is now in the House.

I've seen coordinated attacks against the democratic process over the past 8+ years. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that this might be part of a coordinated attack to get us to let up pressure on our Senators, letting them think that we're suddenly okay with it.

Please remember that Tumblr can just as easily be used to spread misinformation as Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. Check authoritative sources.

What I would do? Call your senators, your representative, and the White House switchboard to leave comments on pending legislation.

The government website says it's still in the Senate. Call your senators to oppose it as a current issue.

Call your representative to oppose it as a heads-up to ensure they are aware of it and your opposition.

Call the White House to ensure that President Biden knows not to sign it if it crosses his desk.

Former President Trump already destroyed 50 years of women's rights, and presided over the initial hysteria of the anti-trans groups. He appointed enough justices to the Supreme Court that we're guaranteed social regression until at least two conservative justices retire and are replaced with new Ruth Bader Ginsbergs. He and the GOP (he is basically synonymous with the GOP, after Laura was elected as co-chair) have done a huge amount of damage to our ways of life and our ability to address climate change and global warming. We need to say that enough is enough, and that they won't deprive us of our abilities to discuss the topics they find uncomfortable and want to prevent any kids from hearing about in any online spaces their kids could possibly stumble into.

OUR LIVES AND EXISTENCE AND CULTURE ARE NOT POLITICAL PAWNS TO BE BARTERED AWAY IN BACKROOM DEALS.

We must stand united, or divided we shall surely perish.

I thought. Maybe. it would be able to conjure a more saturated corpus if I gave it an album era hint. But

❗CRIPPLE TIPS❗

✨ Able bodied friends edition ✨

If you are in a group that includes anybody who is using a mobility aid, if you are out and about and a Stairs Situation arises, either ask them which they'd prefer, or opt for the elevator (given your group is small enough. If not, have a couple friends use the elevator with your disabled friend, after asking if this is what they prefer (they may enjoy a moment alone, everybody is an individual with their own preferences). This means they don't lose the emotional "high" of being part of a group, conversation can continue so they won't suddenly feel lonely and excluded on the solo elevator ride, which can creep in and ruin their mood especially if they're new to their disability, and there's less of a chance of confusion once you're at your destination. Nobody likes being lost, but the inherent exhaustion and physical exertion that comes with using and mobility aid is incredibly... Unfun. And distressing! This can be easily avoided and you have the chance to be an Excellent friend! We notice these things!

This post is about being Physically Disabled, Able bodied people are encouraged to reblog, but Do Not Derail-- make your own post if you need to say something not related to being physically disabled.

really need to get him pregnant i think

the fact that people keep randomly finding this untagged post from like over a year ago is so beautiful. it’s message really touches people

never mind people are tagging this with f1 drivers let’s all die

I think a lot of like discourse of what to focus on with this or that thing gets the end goal and things to ease newcomers into your ideas confused with each other.

Like yes perhaps the end goal is to get UBI going but if your Uncle Jerry is currently struggling with the concept of taxes maybe get him to understand the cost of road maintenance first before you start trying to get him onboard with free preschool.

Also just because someone is explaining the concept of taxes to Uncle Jerry doesn’t mean they don’t believe in free childcare.

Yes those ramps are for people with mobility aids. Able bodied moms with strollers can manage. But if you hear your neighbor Jessica complaining about how hard it is to get on the sidewalk with a stroller that can be an opening to be like ugh right and my sister can’t even get her walker up there either

Like yeah there’s other things more important to focus on but now you’ve got Jessica thinking about accessibility and she’s very good at writing angry letters to the city council.

Also I got my family to be politically anti-car by showing them cool technology like Dutch pedestrian-centric crossing lights and trolley busses because they’re people that are into neat technology and motors and things like that. The angry politics came later. Now they even take the bus once in a while in the car-centric city they live in.

Obviously neat little fun facts about crossing lights aren’t the end all be all of being politically anti-car but it’s a fun icebreaker for the right kind of person. And you shouldn’t assume that better crossing lights are my end goal just because I open with that.

“What if we were normal about men” every time i walk past a man i send a psychic shockwave directly to their prostate just to remind them it’s there

Unlearning How White People Ask Personal Questions

http://www.samefacts.com/2014/05/culture-and-civil-society/unlearning-how-white-people-ask-personal-questions/

Holy shit. I have ALWAYS thought the people around me were being unconscionably intrusive and power-playing in their starter conversations and they told me I was antisocial and oblivious to culture norms. Turns out, maybe I’m just from a different culture.

****new link****

by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014           

When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do you do for a living?”.

He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.

At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law, since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.

For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict, and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we receive in response.

My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes them, rather than the questioner, look rude).

Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities: “signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies “Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.

Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct question it keeps the control under the person whose personal information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and know she will be interested.

Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people) choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.

From the perspective of ameliorating all the racial pain in the world, this change in my behavior is a grain of sand in the Sahara. But I pass this experience along nonetheless, for two reasons. First, very generally, if any of us human beings can easily engage in small kindnesses, we should. Second, specific to race, if those of us who have more power can learn to refrain from using it to harm people in any way – major or minor — we should do that too.

This is really useful stuff – as someone who’s on disability and knows a ton of people in the same boat, “What do you do for a living?” can be such a loaded question. “How do you spend your time?” is a much more compassionate thing to ask, because you can just enthuse about what you’re writing or how great your cats are or whatever.

See this is the shit they should have been teaching me in therapist school.

See this is the shit

they should have been teaching me

in therapist school.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

When I was little I wanted to be Italian REALLT badly bc I loved the movie cars and specifically had a crush on this fucking THING

Which doesn’t speak English at all, all it’s line are in Italian and it’s name is GUIDO. And everyone knew I was obsessed with Italy in elementary school but they didn’t know why bc I, even as a young autistic child, had the sense to know this was a rightfully so, highly mockable thing. So I would read about cars on IMDB and then one day someone posted a crackfic on the message boards there and it was about this guy getting drunk and beating his wife, and it snapped me out of my fugue long enough to realize how absurd wanting to be Italian was, but then it made me cry really hard and my parents were like ‘hey what the fuck’ and I didn’t have the chutzpah to admit anything so I told them I saw a naked lady online and then they went into the computer and found all the weird south park midi songs I downloaded on lime wire and I thought they were literally going to kill me for about two weeks.

The reason I was downloading South Park episodes and songs on limewire and frostwire was because I was also obsessed with Kenny McCormick and for school we had to make a shitty little website about a world issue, so I found this free platform that doesn’t exist anymore but it was like a horrible little wix site from the mid aughts, and we based my groups theme on global warming. But when we were done with it I repurposed it as a perosnal site and lied about being a voluptuous blonde 19 year old woman who worked at a fictitious restaurant called the lunchbox, and I just wrote about how obsessed I was with Kenny McCormick and my sister found it and was like what the fuck is wrong with you. But she never told my parents. She also found this 80 page story I was writing about buddy the elf and all my weird skater ocs breaking into the moulin rouge, and at one point I was sick of buddy so I had a herd of buffalo trample him in the middle of a city and it was very tragic but jarring and unexpected. And she referenced a part of the story to me and it made me SO fucking paranoid that I wiped our entire, family shared packard bell computer and got in huge fucking trouble for it.

I'm pretty sure my inclinations with respect to fantasy worldbuilding are 100% attributable to reading weird porn on Usenet at an inappropriately young age and getting drawn into twenty-thousand-word explanations of why doing genetic engineering in the author's setting absolutely has to involve a wizard getting buttfucked by a dragon.

@waheelawhisperer replied:

This was like 25 years ago, so I might not have the details right, but as I recall, there were complicated metaphysical reasons why only sex wizards could manipulate DNA (insert joke about "sympathetic magic" here), and there was a dragon involved because, in the setting in question, dragons were the progenitors of all sapient life. I genuinely cannot remember whether there was a specific reason it had to be buttfucking, or whether that part was just because the dragon was gay.

Thinking back on it now, what really strikes me about that era of pornographic fiction – and it's something I almost never see today – is that they'd do these massive worldbuilding infodumps, but still give most of the major characters cheesy porn names. Like, you'd get a hundred thousand years of meticulous imagined history establishing that the wizards-and-dragons fantasy world is actually an artificial planetoid created by fifth-dimensional aliens as a repository of cultural knowledge designed to survive the end of the universe and its subsequent rebirth, and then the secret master of this world is a godlike artificial intelligence named Daphne Dicksucker.

you want what

Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

There are people saying "what does this mean" so:

Meaningfully Faster

Faster Browsing

Faster if you are having an actual problem

Superficially Faster

Will not make your computer faster

If you are using an older computer and it is tortuously slow and you can't upgrade the RAM or swap in an SSD but you *can* install software, I would strongly recommend installing Linux.

The vast majority of people these days use computers primarily for web browsing and occasionally use an office suite. Most people don't even store their music or photos on their computers these days. If your computer is basically an internet machine that you don't use for anything other than browsing and basic word processing/spreadsheets, then there is no reason not to switch to Linux.

I would recommend installing Linux Lite, which is a well-supported, widely-used distro that most computers built within the last twenty years should be able to run. It's called "Lite" because it is an operating system that requires minimal processing, storage, and memory to run.

To do this you will need:

Here is where you can download Linux Lite.

Here is the Linux Lite help manual, I've linked you directly to the step-by-step installation guide. If you get to a step that you don't understand, search the terms that you're unfamiliar with phrased as questions like "why do I need an ISO to install linux?" or "how do I enter UEFI BIOS on my version of Windows?"

Follow the instructions for installing Linux Lite, and then you can install software on your new OS. Linux Lite comes bundled with Libre Office, which is a free office suite like Microsoft Office that has programs similar to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It installs with Chrome, so I would recommend installing Firefox and uninstalling Chrome as soon as you're able to get on the internet.

After that you can pick and choose from a wide variety of linux-compatible software and you can use your computer as a regular computer. I'd say that it's probably a good idea to be picky about what software you install, and to try to keep your computer as lean as possible if you're trying to get a longer life out of an old device.

There are a lot of people in the notes who are saying "my computer can't even load four tabs" or "my computer can't even open the software I need to do this" and if that is your computer I think you've pretty much got nothing to lose from installing Linux. If your computer is essentially unusable in Windows then it's probably not going to be *less* functional in Linux, unless you're keeping the computer the way that it is for some very specific software you're using.

A lot of people think that they can't uses Linux because it's entirely in the command line or doesn't have a graphic interface or something, but most linux distros only look about as different to users as windows does to mac or vice versa.

This is what the Linux Lite default desktop looks like:

It's got a start menu and a task bar and folders on the desktop, same as any other computer. It's very easy to use and has the help manual installed right there as soon as you're up and running so that you can troubleshoot your way through any issues.

Really, seriously: if your computer is slow as fuck and all you use it for is web browsing, this will make your computing experience significantly better without having to buy anything but a thumb drive.

People are reblogging just the first section of this post and asking what these things mean, so I'm reblogging this in hopes that they'll see the comprehensive update in the notes.

op turned off reblogs on this post for safety reasons but gave me permission to repost it because it's an important message.

[ID: screenshot of a tumblr post and subsequent reblog. the username has been removed so the op can remain anonymous.

the main post reads, "random Jews throughout online spaces and the real world have nothing to do with Israel or its crimes against humanity and to equate Every Jewish Thing with Israel is exactly what Israel wants in order to retain the idea of cultural homogeneity / the idea that Israel is the only safe place for Jews" 

The reblog reads, "the colonial state of Israel wants people to think that all Jews are affiliated with Israel so that goyim feel guilted into backing it otherwise they’re “antisemitic”, or it preys on Nazi ideas of a “global elite” controlling everything. Judaism pre-dates the state of Israel, and its presence is an exploitation of our religion by (mostly) the US in order to have an excuse to send Jews somewhere else and displace the people native to that region and now Palestinians are being slaughtered in order to build condos and beachfront hotels where their homes once stood

“Never again means now. Free Palestine” end ID.]

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)