HEY CALIFORNIA PEOPLE!

HURRICANE ADVICE FROM A FLORIDIAN!

Make sure you've got shelf-stable food and water for everyone in the house, including pets. The rule of thumb is a gallon per person per day. Freeze water bottles if you want cold water.

Make sure you have enough meds!

Make sure you have batteries, candles, flashlights, and a manual can opener. 

Make sure your electronics, including backup batteries, are charged. Unplug things you don't want fried in case of a power surge. 

Don't tape your windows, it doesn't help and you'll just be stuck scrubbing goo off of them later.

Put a mug of frozen water in it in your freezer with a quarter on top of it. If your freezer defrosts, the ice will melt and the quarter will sink and tell you you need to throw things out.

Get everything that's not nailed to a foundation out of your yard. That dead branch hanging on by a thread? Time to get it down (it was probably time to do that three days ago, but now’s better than never).

Park away from powerlines and trees if you can. Rain makes the ground soft and then trees fall over.

Have an evacuation plan to a shelter. Evacuate if they’re telling you to.

If you start to flood, don't go in your attic. You'll get trapped if the water rises too high and you can't hack through your roof. This happened to a lot of people in Texas and Louisiana. Get ON the roof.

Be safe, be well <3 

What the fuck?

???? WHAT???

Ngl, "tropical storm in death valley" was not on my 2023 bingo card.

Drainage on our roads is shitty in SoCal, don't attempt to drive through water deep enough to touch your bumpers and don't attempt to walk across moving water, water only as deep as your ankles can knock you down and sweep you away.

Predicted wind speeds are similar to strong Santa Anas, so lock things down like you would for that, though keep in mind that yeah the combination of heavy rain and wind leads to more felled trees than just wind.

Take photos of the inside of your home now; flood insurance fucking sucks here and if you're in a possible flood zone you want as much documentation of your home and belongings as possible in case you need to make a claim.

Freezing water bottles also means you've got a lot of ice in your freezer if power goes out, and safe potable water once it thaws, so freeze bottles of water to have something to keep your fridge and freezer cool and store more water regardless of if you want cold water.

Now is an excellent time to tell your Democratic Congress Critters trans Healthcare is important

If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

This is extremely important, y'all. They're trying to Hyde Amendment trans care for people of all ages.

Medicaid and Medicare coverage would go away, no matter what state you are in. ACA plan coverage would go away. Hospitals would fully just have to stop offering trans care, full stop, or lose their federal funding.

I know we hate the phone but we absolutely can't sleep on this. If you have a Democrat rep, you absolutely have to tell them to hold the line against this.

Someone in an autism facebook group I'm in just asked "How am I supposed to earn enough to make a living without burning out?"

Someone replied: "You're not. Even neurotypicals can't right now in the system designed for them. We're the canaries in the coalmine. When we start failing, they know something is wrong."

love 2 learn new things

me too

So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.

Basically they realized hey no one's cleaning this shit up, it's polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there's a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?

They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it's in a painting, if it's in your home, it's not poisoning wildlife.

anyway its cool as shit, please support tf out of these people https://gamblinstore.com/reclaimed-earth-colors-set/

On October 4, at about 2:20pm Eastern Standard Time (EST), FEMA is doing an emergency alert test. This means that all phones, regardless of if they have been placed in do not disturb will go off with that beeping noise. If you have a secret backup phone that you need the people you're with to not know you have, set a reminder to turn it all the way off.

For apple phones, this means holding the power button for five seconds and swiping the "power off" switch that shows up on the screen. Same with androids and early google pixels, except you'll be tapping a button. For google pixels 6 and later, you'll hold the power button and the volume up button at the same time. To turn on for all phones, you'll hit the power button and wait a sec.

Remember that the alert will still come through when you turn your phone back on, so make sure that you are in a place where that noise is safe.

Note that, for whatever reason, if they can't put out the alert, the backup test date is October 11th.

The link below is to the official press release with the information.

I cannot stress this enough, write it poorly. Write the shittiest draft you possibly can, stick 'ah fuck something happens here and now they're fighting' to get over

Write the worst fucking version you possibly can and stick it in a folder and forget it for a month or two before you look at it again. You know what you have now?

A first draft. And with enough time to think some new thoughts about it, you'll soon end up with a better, second draft! And eventually, you'll end up with something you'd be perfectly okay with letting other people read!

You'll never believe this process works no matter how many times you do it, but it totally does. You just have to drag your brain kicking and screaming to that blank page and get the bones down first.

Write the shit out of that shit.

oh this is evil

What is that?

discord is adding parental surveillance. as nerdskii's tags pointed out its a ridiculous measure that doesnt help anyone because apps like Signal exist for actual illegal/sketchy activity and this just hurts lgbt teens looking for somewhere to be themselves and have resources especially with conservative parents

I use android. this is my secure folder, which was built into my phone. it has a customize option, so I've made it look like some bland fitness app. when you open it, it asks you to enter a password or unlock it in any other way you've set it to unlock before it lets you in

inside of this folder is like a 2nd phone almost, I can hide apps in here or have different accounts on apps I've already installed. I have a separate discord and tumblr inside of my secure folder (which I moved this blog to recently)

there are similar third party apps, usually disguised as a calculator that you set a certain number or calculation as the password to unlock. that's a lot more inconspicuous if opened, but also more well known, and parents might be looking out for any suspicious calculator apps

also, be careful what 3rd party apps you download, especially when it's concerning things like your accounts and data! make sure you're downloading something safe and secure

this isn't foolproof, depending on how far your parents are going to track you. if they've installed anything or had you install anything on your phone or computer, or had the chance while you weren't there, be careful for spyware. some apps report how long you look at each app, or can record sound from your phone on demand

also important: a good VPN can secure what you're looking at from the router, which parents may be able to access information from, but this also isn't guaranteed to work if the parental controls are set to block VPNs

another one, if your parents are tracking your location but not your app usage: download a GPS spoofer. you don't necessarily need to root your phone for this, as long as it's supported in developer settings. a lot of them are branded as tools for pokemon go, which can be helpful for plausible deniability

parents reading this: these are things I've learned from constantly having my shit taken and looked through as a teen. you aren't protecting your kids, you're ruining any chance of them trusting you with anything. if something goes wrong, you're going to be the last person they tell, because someone who goes to these lengths to see any little thing isn't going to be chill when something actually bad happens if this is how you act when literally nothing is happening

As a parent, let me tell other parents: what you're doing destroys trust. You want to know what your kids are doing? You want them to be safe? Or do you just want them under your control?

Trust your kids, and they will trust you. Be their fucking prison warden, and they will escape at the first opportunity, and you'll be lucky if you ever see them again.

Sincerely, an escapee

So uh….some dude apparently recreated Adobe Photoshop feature-for-feature, for FREE, and it runs in your browser.

Anyway, fuck Adobe, and enjoy!

Give credit to the 30-year-old who worked on this for free and offers this service for free!

WHAT?!

I study graphic design and my tutor recommended and used this in his classes at art college last year, it’s so good it has SO many features for free, I really recommend it, even if you’re just trying to learn the basics of PS, such a wonderful thing <3

Horrible fact of the day: Chevron just released a new boat fuel that WILL give you cancer.

Not "might", not "could", WILL. It has a cancer ratio of 1:1, as in, in a group of 10 people, ALL 10 would contract CANCER.

The EPA's safety limit is 1:1,000,000 as in 1 in a million people get cancer.

The EPA approved it anyways. I am not joking. The EPA approved a boat fuel that has a near 100% chance of giving someone cancer. It has such a good chance of giving someone cancer that if you DIDN'T get cancer YOU WOULD BE AN OUTLIER.

Fuck the oil industries.

this is just .

Just horrifying.

No, but this is actually crazy in the most dystopian sense.

this is the email btw

what the fuck

We live in Hell

"We know you make stuff because you enjoy making it, but have you considered not doing that and turning into yet another TTS Reader channel so you can churn out endless videos for the sake of getting us ad revenue?"

The study itself is titled, “Long-Term Regret and Satisfaction With Decision Following Gender-Affirming Mastectomy,” and sought to study the rate of regret and satisfaction after 2 years or more following gender affirming top surgery. The study’s results were stunning - in 139 surgery patients, the median regret score was 0/100 and the median satisfaction score was 5/5 with similar means as well. In other words… regret was virtually nonexistent in the study among post-op transgender people.

In fact, the regret was so low that many statistical techniques would not even work due to the uniformity of the numbers:

In this cross-sectional survey study of participants who underwent gender-affirming mastectomy 2.0 to 23.6 years ago, respondents had a high level of satisfaction with their decision and low rates of decisional regret. The median Satisfaction With Decision score was 5 on a 5-point scale, and the median decisional regret score was 0 on a 100-point scale. This extremely low level of regret and dissatisfaction and lack of variance in scores impeded the ability to determine meaningful associations among these results, clinical outcomes, and demographic information.

The numbers are in line with many other studies on satisfaction among transgender people. Detransition rates, for instance, have been pegged at somewhere between 1-3%, with transgender youth seeing very low detransition rates. Surgery regret is in line with at least 27 other studies that show a pooled regret rate of around 1% - compare this to regret rates from things like knee surgery, which can be as high as 30%. Gender affirming care appears to be extremely well tolerated with very low instances of regret when compared to other medically necessary care.

[...]

The intense conservative backlash, to the point of disputing reputable scientific journals, likely stems from the fact that reduced regret rates weaken a central narrative these figures have championed in legal and legislative spaces. Over the past three years, anti-trans entities have showcased political detransitioners, reminiscent of the ex-gay campaigns from the 1990s and 2000s, to argue that regrets over gender transition and detransition are widespread. Some have even asserted detransition rates of up to 80%, a claim that has been broadly debunked. Yet, research consistently struggles to find substantial evidence supporting this narrative. The rarity of detransition and regret is underscored by Florida's inability to enlist a single resident to bear witness against a lawsuit challenging the state's ban on gender-affirming care.

Side note: the question I always have regarding "detransition" is how nonbinary folks fit into the picture. While standards are changing, available trans healthcare still skews heavily binary. Concepts of bodies and sexual characteristics are similarly binary, with non-standard combinations or traits being treated as incomplete in some way.

Besides this discouraging (or occasionally disqualifying) people from accessing gender affirming care, there's the consideration that it also encourages what can look like detransition. In reality, stigma to things like low dose HRT or non-standard surgery can make things like limited HRT or "partial" bottom surgery the best option.

This is a problem I've continued to contend with as an androgyne. The more nonbinary people I speak to, the more I've realized how common this is. None of us identify as "detransitioners". The people around us identify us as such, though, and sometimes weaponize us against our fellow trans siblings.