sadcypress

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Grieve AND organize.

Good article by David Hunter on how to survive the Trump presidency, both on the personal and on the political plane.

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100% have been perusing your climate change masterpost, and understand you're probably swamped so feel free to delete of course. But if you can find the time, is there any kind of hope to give in fighting climate change now? Can we save ourselves against the oncoming steamroll?

You hang in there too. Thanks for finding the hope among everything else. It feels so bad rn but I have to believe it can change. I hope it can.

Yeah actually I do think there is hope.

Things are going to get rough. Things are going to get worse before they get better, both for the climate and for people living in the US (and for people living in lots and lots of other countries that will be affected by the US election results/the ways the climate will worsen as aa result).

I haven't posted about this yet because I didn't want it to come to this, but now that it has, here's something that people have been quietly saying/research has been showing for months:

-via Reuters, November 6, 2024

Renewables, especially solar, are just too powerful to be stopped. They just too much cheaper and too much better, and that's only going to become more true, not less.

Also, I think (and hope) it's actually inevitable that at some point, we'll get to net negative carbon emissions. I think it's like solar: the technology, cost, and planet all make it feel like an inevitable technological trajectory, the same way solar tech is on an exponential trajectory. (IF WE WORK FOR IT, OBVIOUSLY, but also so, so many people ARE working for it, have dedicated their lives to working for it)

I sure fucking hope that's the case, anyway.

(You can find my masterpost on going net negative on what that actually means here)

It is gonna happen more slowly and shittily than I hoped, but I do think it's going to happen.

And if we can get to net negative emissions in time to save ourselves (which I think we will, the rates of advancement in many of these areas are very impressive), then we'll be able to slowly start to undo and heal lot of the damage.

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my other grounding technique is remembering that the earliest abolitionists & the earliest suffragists had no proof that the world would ever make possible what they fought for and indeed many of them did not live to see it come to pass. and yet they did not succumb to despair so it would be disrespectful to their memory to let it overtake me

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i don't know what else to tell you except to be brave and to be kind. take it day by day. go outside and watch the clouds paint the sky. call a friend.

we are still here, and furious. you are still here, and that matters. you can still do and make and be something important. i promise. stay alive. it matters, and you matter. i know it is easy to succumb to anxiety and exhaustion and defeat.

communities can start with tiny ideas. google "dnd meeting near me" or whatever your interest might be. google "volunteering near me." google "support groups near me." start journalling. start a discord. start a book club.

when you close your eyes and hear hamlet, answer his prayer: it's better still to be.

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“We are here, and this is now.” Constable Visit, a strict believer in the Omnian religion, occasionally quoted that from their holy book. Vimes understood it to mean, in less exalted copper speak, that you have to do the job that is in front of you.

--Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

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I'm certain this is on Tumblr somewhere, but I haven't seen it around, so I'm sharing it myself

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Hey, also, all the anarchist shit aside, tomorrow I want you to make something.

I forced myself to draw something after the 2016 election. I forced myself to draw something when my mother died in 2018. I forced myself to draw something when my spouse was hospitalized for multiple organ failure in 2021.

When you are miserable, make something. Add a row to your project, bake a box cake, draw on a sheet of lined paper, write a poem on a napkin, fold an origami shirt out of a dollar bill, make your favorite recipe for dinner, but make something with your hands, something that you can hold and look at engage your senses in.

It won't fix the world, but it will change the world. You will have made something that didn't exist before. You will have impacted your reality, even in a very small way. And it is going to be something you made *after.* Something bad happened, something shook you, and you made something after, in spite of it.

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reblog to diminish the horrors from the person you reblogged from

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if you're feeling powerless right now—and god knows I am—here's a reminder you can donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, the Trans Law Center, Gaza Soup Kitchen, the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, and hundreds of other charities that will work to mitigate the damage that has been and will continue to be inflicted

life continues. we still have the capacity to do good, important work. that matters

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ive made several new friends recently and one of them inspired a new interest in me ive been pursuing and want to start soon. i havent had a job in years and i havent been paying rent in the same amount of time bc i live with my sister and its in exchange for babysitting full time. theres an expectation to get a job soon but it's not urgent. my parents give me money occasionally to pay for necessities like groceries and meds.

despite this kindness i still cant help but feel like none of it is worth anything. i dont see the point to continuing on and ive been struggling lately with trying to find a reason why i should keep going. i cant help but think at times that if i did go through with it all those years ago that i wouldnt have missed anything. theres this weight so heavy in me and every day i feel more and more tired. i cant see the worth in waking up and i cant find a reason to do it anyway. nothing feels like enough. and everything feels so large and scary. i dont know what i expect from sending this other than the catharsis of talking about it

it took me about five years to crawl out of that hole, myself, not counting the first attempt which took two years and ended by sinking me deeper. frankly, although I can stick my head up over the edge of my pit in the ground, I am still getting out of it, so let's go ahead and call me a Year Nine Pit Dweller.

when you're in the process of getting out of the pit you have to pause and look up to get encouraged by the sky above you. but you're still in the pit. the new interest your friend introduced you to is a shooting star over your pit. of course you want to start it soon. of course it isn't going to magically lift you the rest of the way out of the pit.

what matters now is the fact that this new interest will slightly increase your momentum upwards out of the pit, if you follow it, and slightly reduce your upwards momentum if you reject it without the immediate substitution of a superior interest. inertia applies to bodies in motion, as well as a body at rest. right now, it could make you slightly faster or slightly slower, depending on your choice.

when you're out of the pit, you'll have a whole sky of stars. if you stay in the pit, that circle overhead is all you get. and if you go deeper, that little circle will get smaller and smaller.

personally, I think living with the goal of firing shooting stars across other sinking people's cloistered skies is decent striving fuel. where you're at now, though, maybe try to strive to get to higher ground and witness more of those meteors and absorb more hope first. you seem all right to me and I prefer the timeline where you get out of the hole in the ground to the timeline where you don't.

also just as a little wizard PSA: the temptation to apply the sunk cost fallacy to the goal of staying alive is the Devil talking, our patient lover Death weeps when mortals break their engagement with Life too soon, don't invite demons to rules-lawyer you into dying

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folks who skipped s01 of babylon five will never truly get how funny the sinclair-sheridan transition really is.

like sinclair is a 6' tall man with kind brown eyes and a tragic backstory whose presence commands the room without him even saying anything. he solves diplomatic conflicts with a wave of his hand. he's so mysterious. he's larger than life. he's a reincarnated alien. the universe rests on his shoulders. what can't he do. sheridan rolls in bag full of shirts in cute colors, rambles about oranges, gives a speech to an empty deck, delegates negotiation duties to his least diplomatic staff member, who immediately starts a civil war (I'm sorry susan we love you but my god), gets locked out of his own flat. is he ok. can we put him on the heater to dry

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While it was a longshot, I do appreciate that Gimli did try chopping the Ring up with an axe first. It was worth a shot, and they'd have all felt like bloody idiots if they took the Ring all the way to Mordor only to find out it could have been chopped up by an axe all along.

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I become consumed with jealousy every time I look at mudlarking instagram pages.

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bury me in an unmarked grave

(aka gideon dealing with rejection aka me thinking about the fact that gideon's ultimate act of love is the ultimate act of betrayal for harrow)

details under cut!