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[zenathezee]

It's been nearly 6 months since the storm. Everyone has PTSD when we hear the wind blow. When the river rises even a little. When we remember that our little mountain bubble isn't safe from climate change, just like everyone else.

My coworker told us about a lady she met who runs a support group for "environmental mourning." A phrase none of us have heard before but likely will know as well as "potable water" before long. A name for the feeling that lives in me whenever I go anywhere in the county.

It grows inside me when I drive past the river and still see trash in the branches and piles of debris everywhere. When you see trees with chunks neatly cut out of them so cars can drive on the roads, both halves separated by the asphalt grave they fell across. When you see the cars covered in river muck and the abandoned houses and the remains of a life that once delighted in living here and now cannot be returned to. When you see evidence of flooding on the roofs of nearby buildings, higher than you ever thought the river would rise. When you hear another hiking trail/small business/cultural landmark is not re-opening because the damage was too intense. When you drive down a wooded road and see the wreckage that could only have come from a tornado, knocking down a swath of the forest like a giant stomping down a bootprint into the hillside. When you see part of a toy or picture frame or bag peeking out of the trash pile as a grim reminder their owner was a real person who lived nearby and cannot return to being the person they were before.

Environmental mourning. I will remember what the park next to the river looked like before Helene for the rest of my life. I can only hope I forget what it looks like with trash dangling from the trees.

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these buttons from the dying party city go so hard

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person trying to get out of a timeloop but they keep getting brutally murdered by the other person stuck in the timeloop, who is having the most amazing vacation of their life and refuses to leave

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I find it kind of funny that human babies are so fragile and helpless and useless that natural selection went like HARD-hard on humans finding babies cute. This thing is a wailing messy resource sinkhole so please find other reason to enjoy it. And the humans that did find baby cute and invest time in them, the crazy bastards?? Lived!!

And now there’s so much spill-over from “baby cute” gene that humans see literally any “baby” creature that even slightly resembles us, like

and we’re like 😍🥰🤩🥺🥺🥺 I wanna love you so bad. I wanna make so many images of you, you are so small, just baby. I’m inventing new emotions as we speak bc I love you so much.

Like, I’m almost convinced humans didn’t even domesticate dogs bc we thought they’d be useful, we saw some puppies and it activated our Big Boi Primate Baby buttons, it wasn’t even logic time baby, it was 🥺 time.

[zenathezee]

Psych − 5.05: Shawn And Gus In Drag (Racing)

[zenathezee]

I had this one coworker at the jewelry store that I just loathed. She was the shittiest kind of devout where she made her whole deal bigotry. Now it’s important to note that I’d already had a run in with her that made me give exactly zero fucks how rude she perceived me as.

One day in the back room several coworkers were gathered on break discussing bakers refusing gay clients. The general tenor of the conversation was damning on the bigoted bakery that wouldn’t serve gay clients.

This fucking lady has the audacity to go, “Well if I could just play devils advocate-“

And I whipped my head around to make piercing eye contact and announced, “No, I have enough devils in my life.”

It was honestly one of the most satisfying moments ever, to have the perfect comeback in my mouth right when I wanted it and to have had the balls to whip it out.

Her mouth snapped shut and the break room went awkwardly silent with suppressed delight. I turned back to continue talking to a friend of mine.

Afterward my friend reveled in the moment, telling me, “I just keep seeing her shocked expression over and over. This is the best day.”

She ended up getting let go a few months later and she was unilaterally unmourned.

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told my girlfriend that if she proposes i want a secondhand wedding ring. i explained i don't want to contribute to a vanity-based industry like diamond mining, and that it would be important to me to continue marriage traditions in a way that causes minimal environmental and personal harm. she asked me if i was just trying to roll the dice on obtaining a haunted object, and i told her i can want two things.

[zenathezee]

burnout be like

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no yeah babe it’s not weird they’re just my friend that i met on my horny porn blog. yeah no we bonded over hardcore fetishes back in the day haha. now we’re buddies we’ve been exchanging pastry recipes for a couple months now. nothing weird.

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Found that over at mastodon

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i so deeply understand the reasoning of every comment

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25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people