fallingskiesandrisingseas

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

just heard a coworker say "I know this thing wouldn't even work for Jesus" about her printer

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

Richard Siken… Richard Fucking Siken. You asked RICHARD SIKEN if his poems were inspired by BUDDIE. Gay men do not exist in people’s heads except as props huh?

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this is simply the greatest video i have ever seen

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

Activism is not cold-calling.

Activism is not cold-calling, and this is critically important to understand.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here about 'building bridges' and 'finding community,' and then (extremely valid) response posts saying "BUT HOW??" And I'm going to explain something that can be very counter-intuitive: there is strategy involved in community.

As a longtime volunteer labour organizer, I’ve taken and taught many trainings on the strategy of talking. Something that surprises a lot of people is the very first thing you do in a union campaign. You sit down with your organizing committee, take out pen and paper, and literally map it out. You draw a physical map of the workplace: where are the entrances, exits, break rooms, supervisor offices. Essentially, ‘where is it safe to have a union conversation.’ Then you draw another physical chart of your coworkers. You sort out who is union-friendly, openly hostile to unions, or somewhere in the middle, and then you plan out very deliberately and carefully who talks to whom and in what order.

Consider: If Vocally Leftist Jane walks up to Conservative David and says "hey what do you think about unions," David is going to shut down immediately. He's not inclined to listen to Jane. But if Jane talks to Moderate Jason and brings him into the fold, then Jason is a far more effective strategic choice to talk to David, and David may actually hear him out without an instant reaction.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If Conservative David turns out to be Alt-Right David, and could be dangerous to follow organizers, we write him off. We are not trying to reach Alt-Right David. We are trying to reach Conservative David, who may actually be persuaded to find solidarity with other employees as fellow workers. Jason is a safe scout to find out which one he is. It does no one any good if Leftist Jane (or even Moderate Jane who is a visible minority) talks to Alt-Right David and puts herself on his radar. Not only has she done nothing to convince Alt-Right David to join a union - she's probably actively turned him against the idea - but now she's also in danger and the entire campaign is at risk. NOBODY WANTS THIS. Jane was NOT a hero for doing this. The organizing committee was foolish and enacted a terrible strategy to everyone's detriment.

Where you can make a difference is with people who will listen to you. You having a conversation with your well-meaning but clueless Centrist Democrat Auntie, and maybe gently helping her understand some things the media has been glossing over, is way more strategically useful than you marching up to MAGA Neighbour You've Met Once and trying to "build community" or "understand" them. They don't care. They're impervious, dangerous, and cruel. But maybe your beloved auntie will think about what you said, and then talk to her friend Anna who IDs as "fiscally conservative" but didn't vote because she can't bring herself to get on board with Trump. Then perhaps Anna talks to her brother Nic who has MAGA leanings but isn't all the way there yet. Proto-MAGA Nic would not have listened to you, nor would he have listened to Centrist Democrat Auntie, but he might absorb some of what his sister is saying.

This is not a cop-out or an echo chamber. This is you spending your time and energy strategically and safely. You are not a useful activist to anyone if you’re dead. Anyone who is telling you to hurl yourself directly at MAGA assholes like cannon fodder has no understanding of the strategy behind community building, and you should feel comfortable writing them off.

Last point: If you are tired, emotionally devastated, and/or in danger: take a break. This post is for people who would feel better jumping into action, not for people who are too overwhelmed to even think about it right now. You are worth so much even if you’re not actively Doing Activism, and your rest is worth more than “a break period so you can recharge and Do More Activism.” We all deserve the individual dignity of being worthy of comfort, rest & safety just on the basis of being human, outside of whatever we're doing for others' benefit. To deny ourselves that dignity is to devalue ourselves, and that’s the absolute last thing any of us should be doing right now.

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

Richard Siken… Richard Fucking Siken. You asked RICHARD SIKEN if his poems were inspired by BUDDIE. Gay men do not exist in people’s heads except as props huh?

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

Broke af?

But still interested in feeding yourself? What if I told you that there’s a woman with a blog who had to feed both herself and her young son…on 10 British pounds ($15/14 Euro) per week?

Let me tell you a thing.

This woman saved my life last year. Actually saved my life. I had a piggy bank full of change and that’s it. Many people in my fandom might remember that dark time as when I had to hock my writing skills in exchange for donations. I cried a lot then. 

This is real talk, people: I marked down exactly what I needed to buy, totaled it, counted out that exact change, and then went to three different stores to buy what I needed so I didn’t have to dump a load of change on just one person. I was already embarrassed, but to feel people staring? Utter shame suffused me. The reasons behind that are another post all together. 

AgirlcalledJack.com is run by a British woman who was on benefits for years. Things got desperate. She had to find a way to feed herself and her son using just the basics that could be found at the supermarket. But the recipes she came up with are amazing. 

You have to consider the differing costs of things between countries, but if you just have three ingredients in your cupboard, this woman will tell you what to do with it. Check what you already have. Chances are you have the basics of a filling meal already. 

Here’s her list of kitchen basics. 

Bake your own bread. It’s easier than you think. Here’s a list of many recipes, each using some variation of just plain flour, yeast, some oil, maybe water or lemon juice. And kneading bread is therapeutic. 

Make your own pasta–gluten free. 

She gets it. She really does. This is the article that started it all. It’s called “Hunger Hurts”.

She has vegan recipes.

A carrot, a can of kidney beans, and some cumin will get you a really filling soup…or throw in some flour for binding and you’ve got yourself a burger. 

Don’t have an oven or the stove isn’t available? She covers that in her Microwave Cooking section. 

She has a book, but many recipes can be found on her blog for free. She prices her recipes down to the cent, and every year she participates in a project called “Living Below the Line” where she has to live on 1 BP per day of food for five days. 

Things improved for me a little, but her website is my go to. I learned how to bake bread (using my crockpot, but that was my own twist), and I have a little cart full of things that saved me back then, just in case I need them again. She gives you the tools to feed yourself, for very little money, and that’s a fabulous feeling. 

Tip: Whenever you have a little extra money, buy a 10 dollar/pound/euro giftcard from your discount grocer. Stash it. That’s your super emergency money. Make sure they don’t charge by the month for lack of use, though.

I don’t care if it sounds like an advertisement–you won’t be buying anything from the site. What I DO care about is your mental, emotional, and physical health–and dammit, food’s right in the center of that. 

If you don’t need this now, pass it on to someone who does. Pass it on anyway, because do you REALLY know which of the people in your life is in need? Which follower might be staring at their own piggy bank? Trust me: someone out there needs to see this. 

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

Folded like a lawn chair.

And honestly who wouldn’t.

Straight and bi men 🤝 lesbian and bi women

gushing over Vi

MAWN-GOOSE?

The way Cait says mongoose is so fucking funny. "You look.. like an angry oil slick." that was her best attempt at a comeback and she had to think about it a little bit fasdjk I love her. Also can we talk about the fact Vi awakened her girlfriend like a fucking sleeper agent with the activation phrase "cupcake." GIRL YOU ARE EMBARRASSING YOURSELF. That was ALL it took lmao. I feel bad for Maddie at this point.

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

i’m so glad earth only has one moon, if there were more i’d have to pick a favorite and that sounds too emotionally taxing to even fathom

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This girl was crying and begging the policeman not to hit her or any of her friends. Then the policeman started crying as well and he said to her: “You just hold on girl.”

The photo comes from protests happening in Bulgaria right now. Students are protesting poverty and corruption in Bulgaria’s Socialist-backed government, chaining themselves to the doors of Sofia University and clashing with police outside of parliament.

After the photo was taken it quickly went viral

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

i hate viruses so fucking much. literally getting attacked by a fucking shape. a concept. consumes no energy. responds to no stimuli. its only existence is to fuck with you. like fuck offf

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A meeting of dragons.

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Thousands of premature infants were saved from certain death by being part of a Coney Island entertainment sideshow.

At the time premature babies were considered genetically inferior, and were simply left to fend for themselves and ultimately die.

Dr Martin Couney offered desperate parents a pioneering solution that was as expensive as it was experimental - and came up with a very unusual way of covering the costs.

It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.

The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s.

Behind the gaudy facade, premature babies were fighting for their lives, attended by a team of medical professionals.To see them, punters paid 25 cents.The public funding paid for the expensive care, which cost about $15 a day in 1903 (the equivalent of $405 today) per incubator.

Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon. The smallest baby Couney handled is reported to have weighed a pound and a half.

His nurses all wore starched white uniforms and the facility was always spotlessly clean.

An early advocate of breast feeding, if he caught his wet nurses smoking or drinking they were sacked on the spot. He even employed a cook to make healthy meals for them.

The incubators themselves were a medical miracle, 40 years ahead of what was being developed in America at that time.

Each incubator was made of steel and glass and stood on legs, about 5ft tall. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of mesh, upon which the baby slept.

Race, economic class, and social status were never factors in his decision to treat and Couney never charged the parents for the babies care.The names were always kept anonymous, and in later years the doctor would stage reunions of his “graduates.

According to historian Jeffrey Baker, Couney’s exhibits “offered a standard of technological care not matched in any hospital of the time.”

Throughout his decades of saving babies, Couney understood there were better options. He tried to sell, or even donate, his incubators to hospitals, but they didn’t want them. He even offered all his incubators to the city of New York in 1940, but was turned down.

In a career spanning nearly half a century he claimed to have saved nearly 6,500 babies with a success rate of 85 per cent, according to the Coney Island History

In 1943, Cornell New York Hospital opened the city’s first dedicated premature infant station. As more hospitals began to adopt incubators and his techniques, Couney closed the show at Coney Island. He said his work was done.

Today, one in 10 babies born in the United States is premature, but their chance of survival is vastly improved—thanks to Couney and the carnival babies.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/23/how-fake-docs-carnival-sideshow-brought-baby-incubators-to-main-stage/

Book: The strange case of Dr. Couney

New York Post Photograph: Beth Allen

Original FB post by Liz Watkins Barton

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

Seasonal affective disorder havers how are we all coping

[ID: Two versions of the cat screaming at food bowl meme. The first has a clock showing 4pm and is captioned "WHY IS IT NIGHTTIME". The second has a November calendar and is captioned "WHY IS IT TEMPERATURES".]

[fallingskiesandrisingseas]

cant stop thinking abt ursula k. le guin’s essay abt the carrier bag theory….. she’s like, maybe the first human tool was not a weapon, but rather something that holds, a bag, a pouch, a vessel, something for gathering and storing and sharing. let’s shift the narrative of humanity from that of violence to that of safekeeping. and i’m like