2sw:

“Kale’s a garnish.”
“It’s healthy. I’m watching my cholesterol, like you should be.”

(+)
✨organic✨

tributary:

antisemitism and islamophobia are not opposites; they very often go together. you do not cure one with the other. if you hear rhetoric to the contrary, ask yourself: who does this serve?

2sw:

I don’t go looking for my sins you know, they come out waiting and I just get on and go

Spiritualized - The Straight and the Narrow

inkskinned:

inkskinned:

i wasn’t supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i’d go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i’d go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it’s ending, i’m alone, help, it’s dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn’t pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn’t handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i’m not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don’t have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we’re dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon’s leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don’t know what i’m doing.

when i wrote this 2 years ago, i put in the tags the other thing that was happening: right before covid, i had changed my tune. instead of telling my students here is what you can’t write, i asked them to please choose something that brought them joy. choose something beautiful. in college, i am not looking for a specific topic, there is no “winning” the essay, i am just making sure that you know how to format an essay and accurately cite your sources.

the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. our colleges are owned by the same person. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but -

the world is pretty bleak right now, and i asked my kids to write about joy, because i couldn’t stomach what is unsaid in the above post: kids were writing too much about gun violence. they were writing about blood smeared across the hallways of their middle schools. i would get essays about how they huddled under a desk while the bell rang around them, this strange and eerie tune. one of the only times i told my siblings out loud i love you was while we had an active shooter. i was locked in a friend’s room up in a dorm while we all huddled around unwashed pastel dollar-store bowls. we called our families and loved ones. what else was there to do.

i couldn’t read any more of those accounts. how cowardly.

i wish i could say i was braver, that i heard the weight of what they were handling and was able to bear it, but it adds up. i had 50 to 100 students. every semester, at least 3 of them would have visceral memories of a school shooting. their friends and neighbors and loved ones. their hands shaking around their phone as they type out this message might be my last one. i couldn’t read that and stay calm. i had to call my mom. sob to my therapist - how the fuck do i resolve that. how do i help them? we both still have to go to school in the morning - me and my students. how am i supposed to just read that and then go on and teach them about prepositions? i can’t even promise they won’t ever have to experience that again. i feel like we’re just waiting for trauma and instead i’m showing them how to keep their commas in the right place. how the fuck do either of us navigate that space?

i forget it can be different. a few years ago, a series of roof tiles fell off our building and made a loud scattered popping noise when they met the ground. i remember the strange accidental culture shock: most of my students went quiet and flattened to the floor; i leapt up and & turned off the lights & shoved my desk against the door. there were three kids who hadn’t been raised in america. i remember the look on their faces; shocked and confused, nervously laughing because they hadn’t assumed a threat. the gentle hands of their american friends helping them get down; shushing in a way i can only describe as kind, sympathetic. one of my students whispered you get used to it.

how can i see how they are suffering and then still ask them such an incredibly selfish request: please just write something about love, about joy, about something that reminds you of passion.

i get novels in return. technically, i have a page limit, but i never enforce it. every semester, students are delighted by the prospect. i get essays about being a dog show judge and about the history of the throw rug and about how prismacolor chooses certain paints. about glitter controversies and about their favorite albums and their role models who helped them come out as gay. students came in with visuals and little movies they made. they would go above and beyond just to ask their heroes i have this assignment. will you tell me about what joy means to you? i have records of interviews from writers and tv producers and youtube stars. i hear stories about tracking down the recipe for their grandmother’s soup and making bread with their uncle and learning about dance from other cultures. they put their whole heart into it.

i said: this is just for your freshman english class! you do not have to try this hard! i am just one teacher in a million!

my students looked up to me, coated in the viscera and insincerity of their lives; this harrowing space so slick with their own mortality, their childhoods never awarded to them. they do not have the same promise of future. they have never assumed they would live forever. love is not in an arrow-speared heart for them; it has always been too fleeting to tattoo. if they catch it, they release it back into the wild, horrified by how little territory it has left. they wish it well but do not keep it for long. they have always been aware of the cost of their own body.

and they said: it brings me joy, which means it’s time well spent.

something about that. something about the fact they can find it anyway: i wish i could write each of them my own essay, and it will be full of all the words you’re not supposed to use. ribs and teeth and middle fingers. i wish they related to that, that in their heart were only poems about falling asleep and soft blankets and galaxies. every rainbow peony cliche. i wish i could hold their hand and push the desk in front of the door and say: i got you now. it’s gonna be okay.

samwisegamgeeee:

hematomes:

hematomes:

i ended up liking how gendered french is solely because i can say that i want people to use he/him pronouns for me the same way they use it for angels, blood and blunts

i asked a trans friend to give me her fem version of this and she said that people should use she/her with her the same way they use it for the sea, flesh and stuffed toys

I don’t speak French but I speak Spanish and I’m nonbinary so the whole gendered language thing is… difficult. I couldn’t get this post out of my head and so I wrote a poem. It’s a first draft but i just had to get it out there

It’s called “Masculino como el amor, femenino como la espada”

Si tienes que usar
el masculino conmigo,
usa el masculino cómo lo usas
para el azúcar
para el lobo
el amor
y el mar.
Pero si tienes que usar el femenino,
úsalo cómo lo usas
para la tierra
para la anaconda
la guerra
y la mar.
Llámame masculino cómo el día
cómo el melocotón
el pecho
y el cometa.
O, llámame femenino cómo la noche
cómo la piedra
la leche
y la mano.
Masculino cómo el viento,
femenino cómo la tormenta.
El hueso, la sangre.
El mito, la magia.
El sol, la luna.
Si tienes que usar el masculino conmigo,
o si tienes que usar el femenino,
llámame femenino con la boca y la lengua
o llámame masculino con los dientes y los pulmones.
O
si puedes
llámame por mi nombre.
Llámame
yo.

Translation: Masculine like love, feminine like the sword

If you have to use
the masculine for me,
use the masculine like you use it
for sugar
for the wolf
love
and the sea.
But if you have to use the feminine,
use it like you use it
for earth
for the anaconda
war
and the Sea.
Call me masculine like the day
like the peach
the chest
and the comet.
Or, call me feminine like the night
like the stone
the milk
and the hand.
Masculine like the wind,
feminine like the storm.
The bone, the blood.
The myth, the magic.
The sun, the moon.
If you have to use the masculine for me,
or if you have to use the feminine,
call me feminine
with your mouth and your tongue
or call me masculine with your teeth and your lungs.
Or
if you can
call me by my name.
Call me
myself.

reasonsforhope:

Why everybody wants to drink like the Namibians

In an era of megadroughts, politicians are flocking to a small African city to learn the secret to its circular water supply

Positive News

“Namibia is the driest country in Sub-Saharan Africa, and home to two of the world’s most ancient deserts, the Kalahari and the Namib. The capital, Windhoek, is sandwiched between them, 400 miles away from the nearest perennial river and more than 300 miles away from the coast. Water is in short supply.

It’s hard to imagine life thriving in Windhoek, yet 477,000 people call it home, and 99 per cent of them have access to drinking water thanks to technology pioneered 55 years ago on the outskirts of the city. Now, some of the world’s biggest cities are embracing this technology as they adapt to the harshest impacts of climate change. But Namibia leads the way.

How did this come about? In the 1950s, Windhoek’s natural resources struggled to cope with a rapidly growing population, and severe water shortages gripped the city. But disaster forced innovation, and in 1968 the Goreangab Water Reclamation Plant in Windhoek became the first place in the world to produce drinking water directly from sewage, a process known as direct potable reuse (DPR). 

That may sound revolting, but it’s completely safe. Dr Lucas van Vuuren, who was among those who pioneered Windhoek’s reclamation system, once said that “water should not be judged by its history, but by its quality”. And DPR ensures quality. 

This is done using a continuous multi-barrier treatment devised in Windhoek during eight years of pilot studies in the 1960s. This process – which has been upgraded four times since 1968 – eliminates pollutants and safeguards against pathogens by harnessing bacteria to digest the human waste and remove it from the water. This partly mimics what happens when water is recycled in nature, but Windhoek does it all in under 24 hours…

Pictured: These ultrafiltration membranes help to remove bacteria, viruses and pathogens. Image: Margaret Courtney-Clarke

“We know that we have antibiotics in the water, preservatives from cosmetics, anti-corrosion prevention chemicals from the dishwasher,” Honer explains. “We find them and we remove them.”

Honer adds that online instruments monitor the water continuously, and staff ensure that only drinking water that meets World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines is sent to homes. If any inconsistencies are detected, the plant goes into recycle mode and distribution is halted until correct values are restored. 

“The most important rule is, and was, and always will be ‘safety first’,” says Honer.  The facility has never been linked to an outbreak of waterborne disease, and now produces up to 5.5m gallons of drinking water every day – up to 35 per cent of the city’s consumption.

Namibians couldn’t survive without it, and as water shortages grip the planet, Windhoek’s insights and experience are more important than ever.

Interest from superpowers across the globe

In recent years, delegations from the US, France, Germany, India, Australia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates have visited Windhoek seeking solutions to water shortages in their own countries. 

Megadrought conditions have gripped the US since 2001, and the Colorado River – which provides 40 million people with drinking water – has been running at just 50 per cent of its traditional flow. As a result, several states including Texas, California, Arizona and Colorado are beginning to embrace DPR.

Troy Walker is a water reuse practice leader at Hazen and Sawyer, an environmental engineering firm helping Arizona to develop its DPR regulations. He visited Windhoek last year. “It was about being able to see the success of their system, and then looking at some of the technical details and how that might look in a US facility or an Australian facility,” he said. “[Windhoek] has helped drive a lot of discussion in industry. [Innovation] doesn’t all have to come out of California or Texas.”

Pictured: The internal pipes and workings of Namibia’s DPR plant. As water becomes scarcer in some parts, countries are looking to DPR for solutions. Image: Margaret Courtney-Clarke

Namibia has also helped overcome the biggest obstacle to DPR – public acceptance. Disgust is a powerful emotion, and sensationalist ‘toilet to tap’ headlines have dismantled support for water reuse projects in the past. Unfortunately, DPR’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness, as the speed at which water can re-enter the system makes it especially vulnerable to prejudice, causing regulators to hesitate. “Technology has never been the reason why these projects don’t get built – it’s always public or political opposition,” says Patsy Tennyson, vice president of Katz and Associates, an American firm that specialises in public outreach and communications.

That’s why just a handful of facilities worldwide are currently doing DPR, with Windhoek standing alongside smaller schemes in the Philippines, South Africa and a hybrid facility in Big Spring, Texas. But that’s all changing. Drought and increased water scarcity worldwide are forcing us to change the way we think about water. 

Now, the US is ready to take the plunge, and in 2025, El Paso Water will begin operating the first ‘direct to distribution’ DPR facility in North America, turning up to 10m gallons of wasterwater per day into purified drinking water – twice as much as Windhoek. San Diego, Los Angeles, California, as well as Phoenix, Arizona are also exploring the technology.”

Of course, DPR is not a silver bullet in the fight against climate change. It cannot create water out of thin air, and it will not facilitate endless growth. But it does help cities become more climate resilient by reducing their reliance on natural sources, such as the Colorado River. 

As other nations follow in Namibia’s footsteps, Windhoek may no longer take the lead after almost six decades in front.

“But Windhoek was the first,” Honer reminds me. “No one can take that away.”"

-via Positive.News, August 30, 2023

rabbitindisguise:

eggshellsareneat:

Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it’s a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all–the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it’s immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs–nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There’s a specific chain of reblogs that I’d like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

ALT

99% percent of the people who have seen the post–virtually unchanged from how it left my dash–have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That’s insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they’re part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.

This is also why people are well known on Tumblr, it’s because it’s cultural and referential knowledge vs following the original person. If I see one (1) post by a very popular account once, I’m just going to forget it unless it was especially funny or something. On Tumblr, I will see ten different versions of that post, some with added tags that make it funnier, some with discourse, some with a random guy I know of from that other joke that got popular and caught on as a meme for awhile- and suddenly it’s sort of like a small town community rather than just a webbed site and it’s permanent fixture in my vocabulary. Effervescent. Spiders Georg. Hey I like your shoelaces. Etc. Some users I only knew on Tumblr from a funny post for a long ass time and found out much later they sold books or something (@dduane comes to mind, sorry I still don’t know what you do?)

Jokes that would be shared with like two guys on a blog and forgotten literally the next day are now something inflicted on you by mutuals like ten times in 48 hours, and kept immortal and never aging via the queue function, and it’s a feature ^^

moki-dokie:

furiousfinnstan:

@stvksn on ig

i hope your god has asked you for mercy and i hope you’ve refused to forgive him

is so insanely powerful. that’s gonna be seared in my brain for a long time. fuck.

marauders4evr:

ALT

ALT

ALT

ALT

ALT

ALT

ALT

Since July is Disability Pride Month

(as opposed to every other month when we’re all demure about disability rights /gentle sarcasm)

I wanted to highlight one of my favorite artists: Liberal Jane.

hajima-7:

he’s just a lil hangry i think…💜

Image ID: full color drawing of Miguel O’Hara from Spider-verse. He looks angry and is wiping blood off of his face. The background is a vibrant red that matches the red details on his costume.

supremegeekmonkey:

A very quick sketch on the back of an envelope, but wanted to start making a contribution to this amazing fandom!!

Image id: slightly cartoony pencil sketches of Kit and Jade from the Willow tv show showing their torsos and faces

worth-beyond-a-number-scale:

This pride and all year long, I want to give a shout out to us fat queer people

To fat queer people who never get to see representation of themselves because the vast majority of queer representation is of thin people

To fat queer people who have to put ten times the effort into their gender expression just to be viewed as 10% of their gender

To fat queer people who get misgendered no matter how they look

To fat queer people who can never present how they want to anyway because affirming clothes in their size are either nonexistent, triple the price, or terrible quality

To fat asexuals who are believed even less about their identity because they’re told it’s just a matter of “no one wanting to have sex with them”

To fat aromantics who aren’t respected because their aromanticism is viewed as “No one loved you anyway”

To fat gay people who have their identities denied because “You just couldn’t find a man/woman who wanted you”

To fat nonbinary people whose bodies are viewed in the queer community as inherently gendered and incapable of being androgynous

To fat binary trans people who are always viewed as whatever gender hurts them most

To fat trans people who are denied surgeries due to medical fatphobia, have difficulty finding products like binders in their size, are told that thinness is a must to “pass” as their gender, and have their bodies weaponized by terfs

To fat queer people who are viewed as “cringe” for the crime of existing as fat and queer

To fat queer people who can’t even buy pride merchandise without having to worry if their size will be offered and then have to pay more than thin queer people just to show their queer pride

To fat queer people who developed eating disorders due to the fatphobia peddled by their own communities

To fat queer people whose identities are partially influenced or entirely caused by the fatphobia they have experienced for years and decades

To fat queer people who are forced by fellow queer people into sexual positions they’re uncomfortable with, such as topping, just because they’re bigger and have stereotypes forced onto their body

To fat queer people who joined a relationship and experienced sexual trauma because their partner only wanted to humiliate a fat person and ignore your boundaries

To fat queer people who only see themselves in queer porn as a tool for the humiliation of thin queer people who dared to have sex with a fat person or never see your body in sexual content at all

To fat femmes who are viewed as butch no matter what they do because their fatness is gendered against their will

To fat butches who don’t feel able to experiment with femininity if they want to

To fat queer people who have an even harder time finding a partner in the queer community because of rampant fatphobia

To fat queer people who have had to hear “No fats, no femmes”

To fat queer people who are constantly told they’re not “truly oppressed” because they “don’t have it as bad as [X queer identity]”

To fat intersex people who have to deal with strangers believing they’re an expert on your body because fat people can’t have knowledge about how their own bodies work

To fat queer people who can’t even trust that other queer people fighting for equality won’t use fat bodies as symbolism for immoral behaviors and beliefs

To fat queer people who can’t rely on doctors who accept queer identities to not still discriminate against them because of medical fatphobia

To fat queer people who don’t believe they can be loved without being fetishized

To fat queer people whose queer identities are viewed even more as a fetish because their bodies are viewed as a fetish

To fat queer people who took way longer to realize they’re queer because they never saw any queer representation that included them

And to so, so, so many other fat people with experiences of fatphobia in the queer community

You all belong. You are the identities you say you are. You do not make the queer community “look bad” just because fatphobes want to use our bodies as weapons for fatphobia and queerphobia. You deserve to be respected and have representation. You deserve to not be treated as an afterthought.

We are queer, and our experiences matter.

pillsburysoyboy:

pillsburysoyboy:

“Why are you so upset about adult content bans? You don’t even post that stuff. can’t you just look at porn somewhere else?”

Well, you see, I have this small problem where my very existence is considered adult content by a small but very powerful group of people and I actually rather enjoy being able to exist in public without restriction so uhhhh put that in your bong and smoke it kiddo.

Extremely good point

Also there’s this weird thing where I care about things that hurt other people? Even if they don’t directly hurt me (yet). *headdesk*