A Partially Sunny Disposition

RAMEN (2019) As dinner time approaches, kitchens throughout Japan come alive to prepare an iconic dish: ramen.

Little Legs Cool Jabroni molted!! He’s bigger, now!! So proud of you, son.

Uni.

HEY LADIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DID YOU KNOW UHHHHHHHHH

Every time I see this, I imagine in the last frame the cat is also purring very contentedly.

[Stolen from Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends x]

sorry for the (vague gestures)

it's been a weird day because of (gestures are even more vague)

Spring Birch

the unstoppable force (adhd) vs the immovable object (also adhd)

#adhd in motion stays in motion #adhd at rest stays at rest

When it rains, it pours….

I love you. Most ardently

Audrey Helen Weber is from central Massachusetts. She studied theater design and drawing at Hampshire College, graduating in 2011. In the summer of 2015 she was the artist in residence at QVACH in Southbridge, MA.

The demonization of actual charities/orgs in favor of individual GFMs has done nothing but stripped marginalized people of their privacy + dignity by forcing them to become internet celebrities in order to get their needs met as opposed to an org that could privately help them if said org had the funding!!!! Also it’s why people feel the need to go as far as to fake their own kidnappings just to get traction! Not to mention it’s just made the lives of grifters so much easier

To circle back, who benefits more from this? The 65 year old drug addicted woman on skid row who can’t read or the young hot gen z college kid with 10k tiktok followers? This bastardization of “mutual aid” combined the constant like mining dopamine cycle social media has done almost irreparable damage to young wokey people especially young people of color.

Making every poor person dance for the internet in order to get their snazzy twitter begging flyer traction will only set people up for long term failure.

Imagine: I’m a young person down on her luck so I beg on twitter with my real name and face along with every personal detail, I get my coin, I am actually able to put myself through schooling but now whenever an employer googles me they can find this incredibly personal information about me!

I have nothing but sympathy for people who are in a position where they urgently need money and need it fast but we should instead put that money towards orgs whose whole job is to PRIVATELY help people

My guy you have entirely missed the point of my post and there are multiple ways to vet a charity

The person whose tags are screenshotted obviously doesn’t actually know what a charity is. They say “i want to make sure my money actually goes to the people in need rather than some big org avoiding tax.”

My dude. My person. Sweetie. Charities don’t pay tax. If it’s paying taxes, it is not a charity! The only organizations that pay taxes in most countries are for-profit businesses. That’s it! Charities don’t!

Now, in many countries including the US, individuals and corporations can reduce some of their tax burden by giving generously to charity. (So can individuals, but unless you’re rich and giving away a shitton of money a year it’s probably not worth the extra effort.) There is a persistent (but wrong!) belief that if a business is collecting money for a charity, they can then deduct that money from their taxes. This is NOT the case. If the business gives its own money that it has earned in revenue to charity, it can deduct that. But if they ask you at the cash register if you want to donate to whatever organization, they cannot deduct your donation from their taxes because it’s your donation. You can deduct it, if you keep your receipt (though it’s almost certainly small enough not to be worth it, but the business can’t.

As to their assertion that most charities are “sus,” they are wrong. I’ve had experience working with and volunteering with multiple nonprofits over the course of decades. Only a teeny-tiny proportion of charities are suspicious in any way. Most of them are extremely straightforward and desperate to tell you all about their mission and all the shit they do. And things like their budgets and where the money’s going are public documents. Most of their board meetings are public, unless they’re talking about hiring/firing/staff discipline issues. Anybody can go and see exactly what they’re doing. You give them your money, and they will do exactly what they say they will do with it. Now, you may not agree that their mission is worthwhile, and you may not agree with their tactics. But they will usually be very straightforward and honest about them.

The ones you should be suspicious about are mostly Christian charities and pregnancy support charities (which may not disclose that they are Christian because they’re trying to trick people into thinking they’re neutral rather than what they are, organizations to manipulate and gaslight women into keeping pregnancies they don’t want). This is not to say that all Christian charities are suspicious or bad, because there are a lot of them that don’t discriminate against or harm people who are queer or having sex outside of marriage or have abortions or whatever. But there are a lot of them that do discriminate, and they’re not always upfront about it. (It’s extremely rare, these days, to find charities that discriminate in that way unless they’re Christian.)

There are a few non-Christian charities that are bad, but in those cases it’s really easy to find out. Just google “[charity name] controversy.” For example, googling “Goodwill controversy” will give you all the dirt on Goodwill, which pays their CEO a large salary while paying disabled workers below-minimum-wage in states that can get away with it. Googling “Autism Speaks controversy” immediately brings up lots of blog posts going back years from autistic people about why A$ is terrible. That takes about five seconds, it’s really easy to find out if an organization you’re thinking of giving to has a bad rep.

And the thing is, very few charities have any significant level of controversy or problems attached to them. Most are perfectly legit! Even most explicitly Christian charities! (For example: a very high proportion of food pantries and meal providing organizations are run by churches, and extremely few of them discriminate, shame people, or try to proselytize to the people they’re feeding. Even if they wanted to--and lots of them wouldn’t want to--they would lose federal funding and resources which are one of the backbones of any food pantry.)

Certain specific charities are disingenuous or not as good as they claim to be. But the vast majority of charities are open and honest about their work and how they do it, and all are required by law to be open and honest about how much money they take in and where they spend it. And even the bad apples are pretty easy to spot with a few seconds of research. The only reason to be default suspicious of charities is if you ... don’t actually know anything about charities and how they work.

also like.... you know how buying in bulk works? charities are like that.

your money will go FURTHER in the hands of a reputable charity because they have the resources and connections to ensure that happens

for the record this IS an apple hate zone yes I have an android phone yes I have a bulky PC with its own USB port yes I use wired headphones. you can go ahead and try to fight me on it but keep in mind how scrappy I must be considering I’m broke as shit and have nothing to lose and can guarantee my phone screen won’t shatter in the brawl

I just finished a delicious cosmic crisp and for the first ten words of this I was ready to fight you

for the record this IS an apple the tech company specifically hate zone I would never dare insult the humble fruit which has done so much for us that said my personal preference is fuji all the respect though

chiming in to second the astonishing deliciousness of cosmic crisps, i don’t know who the fuck invented them but if we ever meet i’m going in for a kiss with tongue

The Life Cycle of an Apple by Yumiko Higuchi

hand embroidery

in this gay and age,

In the queer and now…

Nerdanel the Wise

“She was strong, free of mind, and filled with the desire for knowledge…She made images of men and women of the Eldar, and these were so alike that their friends, if they knew not her art, would speak to them.”

(In universe backstory)

This painting of Nerdanel, titled The Sculptor at Work, is painted by her husband, Fëanor. The subject of the unfinished sculpture is believed to be Fëanor himself.

SewBeautifulx on Etsy

Moondance Quilt by Dianne Browning

I’m a cis-gender man which basically means that, when I was born, the doctor went “It’s a boy!” and when I was old enough to understand I agreed with him.

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

Why do people feel like they are the gender that they are?

This is very soul filling to read. Thank you

My grandfather, who had a difficult time coming to terms with it when I came out, has been working very hard to understand me and my experience. About 5 weeks ago, he asked me, almost offhand, “why are you so sure that you’re a man?”

And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward. 

Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me: 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”

And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”

So, shoutout to my cisgender grandfather, for stumbling upon the essence of being trans accidentally, with very little help from me. I love you, grandpa.

watching cis folks suddenly and comprehensively grasp the inessential nature of gender is always a joy

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!