I can’t get over this lmaooo

ok, after actually looking up the term and doing some goddamn research (my goodness somebody on the internet actually decided to look something up before forming an opinion, dear god what a day), i can pretty safely say that everyone hitting this post with the “that’s just a friendship!” bit is wrong! and i can explain why! i myself didn’t get this initially! but after looking into it, i realized that it’s mainly due to the framework i was thinking in! Yeah, there’s actually merit to what these people are saying, this is stuff that’s been considered and these are indeed terms that exist! they were also coined by ace people specifically to describe their relationships! So what gives? What does Queerplatonic Relationship mean? well i certainly fucking didnt get it at first, but it stems from attempting to define a kind of relationship that there arent really words for in the standard english lexicon! the poster above me is a TERF, and wherever i see myself agreeing with a terf i also see that there’s possibly some flaw in my logic or understanding of the thing. Basically (mind you this is only some very cursory and basic research, just type the term into google lol), QPR’s are a way of defining a relationship that has many of the same obligations and aspects of a traditional romantic relationship, without any of the explicitly romantic parts that come with having a spouse or romantic partner.

the idea of living in the same place, or jointly bringing up children, and performing many other tasks as a kind of unit that society would often mislabel as something done by two romantic partners in a union of some kind (i use that term to loosely define an exclusive relationship, not actual binding marriage, though this can include such). the idea of the QPR isn’t just “friends”, it’s very specifically “individuals in a platonic relationship that perform a number of the social aspects of a traditional romantic partnership”.

like, be real for a second. if someone described their relationship with someone to you and said “Yeah we own a house together, we have a kid that we adopted and take care of, we decided to get a dog last week and we file taxes as two members of the same household.”, you wouldn’t look at that person and assume that they arent romantic/sexual partners of some kind, because... well, traditionally, that’s shit that married people do. getting hit with the additional “Yup! And we’re not romantically or sexually involved at all! She has a boyfriend that she visits on the weekends and I’ve never had a romantic relationship in my life.” would throw you for a goddamn loop! What would you even call that relationship? and that’s where the term comes from: an attempt to define a very specific kind of relationship that certainly can and has existed, but isn’t commonly recognized or talked about!

so i think everyone shitting on these folks owes them an apology, i know i personally do for making assumptions that clearly weren’t true!

Actually QPR was coined by aromantic people but asexual people do also use it!

Finally I have a reason to reblog this after cringing every time it's come across my dash.

Update Harvard students are walking out in solidarity with Columbia’s students

These are billion dollar for profit institutions that directly impact financial backing of Israel’s apartheid regime

MIT is walking out! Do you not understand how huge this is? Do you understand what holds Israel afloat?

In solidarity with Columbia Yale students have just constructed an encampment. Organizers say they won’t leave until Yale divests from all military weapons manufacturing.

[image description: a screenshot of a tweet by braxtonbrew96 that reads, "unc students right now starting an encampment outside of the university administration building in solidarity with columbia students and palestine 🇵🇸." below the tweet is a video showing the encampment. the tweet has been quote retweeted by aditilrao, who adds, "encampments on every campus until the cops are off them all!! reclamation ❤️‍🔥 abolition ❤️‍🔥 divestment now ❤️‍🔥." end description.]

unc-chapel hill students as well! this is as of 4/19/24.

I was expecting anything but not Bard

It drives me insane how many people dont realise how often they break the law and that if the full force of it was ever applied life would basically be unliveable. Like between traffic violations, petty workplace theft, account sharing and piracy alongside how common it is to have been in posession of some illegal drug at some point in your life. People still manage to get away with thinking "criminals" are people who commit crimes not just populations that are surveilled enough to be routinely prosecuted

one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

you cant fucking hurt me bitch im protected by the migratory bird act

Please, I just want to know what your migratory flight path is, I promise I’ll release you after I give you this bracelet that will insanely up your game with the ladies

bitches love me for my bright and colourful leg band

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

here are my policy focuses:

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

Shout-out this stranger met for while recent, who saw we were AAC user and for whole time:

• made sure we not talked over in conversation

• stopped others from skip over us, and didn’t let them rush us either

• said any words AAC was say wrong verbally for us after we express frustration with that

• didn’t touch our device once or look at screen while using AAC (they were only person who didn’t)

• made sure we comfortable and accommodated whole time was with them

And don’t think any this was even big deal to them. This was first time they even saw AAC, but they still made sure were accommodated for it. Don’t think they realize how much meant to us, and it meant everything to us. To be include and supported so much by total stranger who we would never see again.

Gave us lot hope. Fact that there people like that out there. And wanted put all thoughts that couldn’t put into words when with person here.

Want other AAC users know that there people like that out there, and that there hope.

Random bee behavior fact for those who wish to read, just because I feel like it and because it’s late and I’m stalling on sleeping:

Bumblebees may seem like passive, cuddly, and docile creatures, but they won’t hesitate to defend themselves if they feel as if their warnings aren’t being read or taken seriously.

I.e. the photo and diagram below, when a bee feels threatened they will raise one or more of their legs into the air, signaling to whatever or whomever may be bothering them as a message essentiality saying: “hey, back off, too close!”

species pictured: bombus pascuorum, bombus impatiens

If their defensive posture goes unnoticed or ignored, they may be pushed into defending themselves by stinging (which is also a stressful experience for not only one such as yourself, but also for the bee.) If you ever find yourself getting close to a bumblebee while taking pictures, walking close to them, or just admiring them, remember this posture! If a bee does this, it is simply asking you to take a step back as it feels it is being threatened.

Now you can understand and use this knowledge to your advantage if you ever come across one in the future. (Of course, because it’s very hard not to anthropomorphize animals, I do have to admit that they do look pretty cute when doing it. Just remember to respect them though!)

I've seen wasps do this too!

More often, you'll see them pop their wings out if they're uncomfortable. I assume it's because they're preparing to fly- they've done it when I've moved too quickly or gotten too close to them, but also if they're walking around on something unstable.

[ID: The left image is a calm paper wasp on my finger. Her wings are laid in their natural position, flat over her body. The right image is a paper wasp haphazardly balanced between a bottlecap full of water and my finger. Her wings are raised up and to the side and she's drinking. End ID]

When you can read their discomfort they're a lot more predictable!

The focus here should be about why this attitude is so common, what this attitude implies, and for what reason major media outlets choose to platform people complaining about their disabled spouses rather than our ableist society.

NPR’s decision to platform a piece about the difficulty of navigating life with a spouse who can’t dine indoors, instead of a piece about the difficulty of navigating a society that has made dining indoors unsafe for vulnerable groups, is just that- a decision, and a political one. It is part of an ongoing effort to cast those who cannot play along with the “back to normal” fantasy- those who are being harmed and killed by it- as weird, paranoid, crazy, annoying, and “the problem.”

[... A]s Long COVID patients become louder, as their presence becomes more undeniable, as their numbers grow, the COVID normalization project must pivot from attempting to disappear these victims to steadily stigmatizing them.

This stigma takes many forms, but by and large it is a project aimed at pathologizing people with post-COVID health problems, portraying them as “crazy,” and presenting their increasing difficulties navigating our inaccessible society as an imaginary problem they made up [...].

This moment requires solidarity between those who have been affected by COVID normalization and those who have not yet been harmed. Instead, NPR and other media outlets encourage us to turn on one another and unleash the anger we feel at losing basic rights onto those who’ve been even more harmed than we have. It is not dissimilar to the mainstream efforts to turn poor native-born Americans against poorer immigrants, to turn people making minimum wage against people on welfare, to turn ciswomen against transwomen, to turn Asian Americans against Black Americans. All of these efforts shield and protect a state that immiserates all vulnerable groups; broken solidarity, in every case, harms both the targets and the perpetrators.

That NPR article really reads like "In 2022 my husband and I got in a really bad car accident, and I walked away fine but he was severely injured and still struggles with lingering health problems as a result, and now he gets mad at me when I run a red light or don't wear a seatbelt! Anyway, here's why that's ruining my life." god how fucking out of touch do you have to be to write that shit and in any way think you have the moral high ground.

It really does suck that this is just a thing that happens when you become disabled, even before the pandemic. Your friends and family are supportive at first, and if you're lucky they stay that way, but half the time eventually accommodating you becomes too hard or boring or makes them miss out on things they want to do and so you get dropped like a rock while they write pity party think pieces about how much of a saint they are for being close to someone with a disability. It's just like 8000% worse now because of COVID.

The response article is right tho, solidarity is key. Stand by your disabled friends and family, don't let the world turn you against them, it's the only way forward.

Very important addition @clownhag

Image ID:

#most disabled people I know have lost entire circle spheres for asking people not to ignore covid. at this point it's easier to be isolated #<- and I say that very much living the reality of a disabled person left to rot without community outreach #everybody wants to believe Their selfishness is separate from the Specter of ableist violence. you aren't an exception you're a piece of it

this headline is so fucking horrible why is it whenever indigenous people are murdered everyone avoids saying they were murdered

it’s so important to show solidarity with indigenous people right now and remember that this was a hate crime. rising hearts is an indigenous run organization and they’re asking everyone who can to braid their hair on monday regardless of if you’re native american or not

This article is actually about a very serious problem. If you overgenerate electricity it increases the phase frequency of the power grid, and if that goes out of sync with your generators (including solar panels) it can destroy them. In the kind of way where your power grid is fucked for months. It is very very very very bad.

California started a program to make solar panels more affordable by offering very low interest rates for solar panels, to allow people to benefit from their lifetime $/energy cost that's below fossil fuels, without having to worry about the high frontloaded cost. However they did not do this for batteries. And power grid quality batteries with massive energy storage and serious charge-discharge lifetimes, are expensive.

And they did this because while solar panels are cheaper than fossil fuels per kilowatt hour of electricity over their lifetime, solar panels plus batteries are not. And California wanted a supplemented free market solution and didn't really want to think about the part that direct government intervention in the form of taxation and paying for this change would be necessary.

So everyone in California just kept adding solar panels to the grid with no disconnect mechanisms, until eventually it hit a point where at noon, solar panels generated more power than the entire grid needed. With no batteries to store the excess. This is a motherfucking power grid killer. It is a scenario where people get left in the fucking dark for months because of how badly it destroys the powergrid.

So the power grid authorities did the only thing they could do. They called up every industrial plant with heavy duty equipment and ovens they could and paid them to turn it on full blast (because using that equipment costs money in wear and tear even without the electricity cost). And in doing so, avoided disaster.

That's what this article is talking about. They are solar panel researchers criticizing a capitalist adoption strategy and promoting direct government intervention to create renewable energy. However as with most newspapers they don't get to choose the title, the editor picks the most provocative title that will get clicks.