I had the biggest fucking epiphany on the way home from dinner. Utopia has made me nothing but miserable with loose ends and shitty plot and crappy characters that I don’t even know what the hell species they are.

Fuck that noise.

I’m going to do what I already know I do best. The world I built is the most in-depth world I’ve ever had access to, the characters can be rooted in true myth and I have 12,ooo of History at my disposal.

I’m going to write a Tooth Fairy novel. 

7/3/2013.

The man, the myth, the legend.

Alright, that settles it. 

I have just under a year to write the second half of book 3 and reasonably polish the series. 

7/3/2023. 

Me, calling in to my shift supervisor: Gooooooood morning! Are we ready for another super splendiferous day with the public?! 😀

Her: That is too much energy

Me: It iiiiiis fake!! 😀

Her: Still too much energy

ALT

ALT

Did you just know this

#whitewomantears

i feel like no one really wants to hear that sleep/exercise/nutrition/hydration are major factors in treating mental health issues bc we’ve all talked to that person who thinks your depression would be cured by one good session of goat yoga or whatever but unfortunately they do help and i’m chronically annoyed about it

yes, and - it's often not possible to implement these lifestyle measures until your issues are otherwise treated. many people can't get good sleep, for example, without medication

#LateStageCapitalism

(sigh)

It wasn’t boomers who made it impossible to survive on a librarian or gardener’s salary - it was rich people. 

Plenty of boomers work as librarians, teachers, gardeners, and so forth, and are finding that as the cost of living skyrockets and corporations take over more and more of the world, that their salary is no longer able to support them.

And thus you have boomers - who understand how much you want to be a librarian because they also work as librarians - going bankrupt, losing their homes, drowning in debt, and dying because of unaffordable healthcare. And they get why you’re becoming an IT specialist instead of a librarian - because they! Know! That you can’t survive! On a librarian’s salary anymore!

On the flip side, the rich people sucking money out of every service and person they can! Aren’t! Always! Boomers! Tons of them are Gen X! And an increasing number are millennials! I haven’t seen a Gen Z billionaire yet but I’m willing to bet there’s a couple by now!

Oh, and it’s not like they “don’t know” how much people want to do these sorts of jobs - they do! That’s how they justify underpaying people, because it’s your passion, you don’t ~need~ to be paid a living wage for your passion.

You have more in common with poor boomers than you do with Kylie Jenner (born 1997). Go and talk to them. Organize with them. You’ll find they have a lot to offer once you stop dismissing them as rich old folks who ruined the economy.

As someone with a super leftist boomer father I feel this

Samuel L. Jackson

This is a confirmed real quote! Find it unredacted in his interview with Vulture (July 20, 2023).

Reblog with link!

There's tons of other good stuff in it. What a life and career.

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help.
He went to guidance counselors for help.
He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because... he liked wearing eyeliner. That's it. he had a girlfriend. He's still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.

And later learned that a number of people I'd known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.

Kids started calling me a "lesbo" on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became "boy crazy" as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn't a dyke.

It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for "girls." Ha ha, it's funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.

That's my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.

Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn't.

If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss "homosexually" (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn't an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).

Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.

Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as "a lesbian with a man's body" and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female "transvestites" didn't exist, so I guess I couldn't feel like that? Painfully.

So why didn't you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren't getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.

Yall are talking 2000 and earlier but ik kids at my fucking school who are too terrfied to come out bc they're in a bad class.

I spent middle school clutching my identity in secret because if it came out I was more then a emo girl with funky colored hair we'd be fucking dead. Litterly.

We went to a good school, in a big-ish city. Our current school is considred one of the queerest, and yet we can still point out each and every closeted person we only know to be trans because they've confided in us.

Its still like this. It's better, but it's never been the time. It's been that if we come out, we're fucking dead.

Graduated high school in 1996. One of the first people I met in the school who wasn't awful to me was a splendid, but awkward individual who took me home and handed me off to their big sister as a more suitable mentor for a weird, loud, mouthy little baby lesbian.

Said person was several grades ahead of me, and graduated long before I did, but I remained very close with the sister.

Said person fully transitioned the minute we were all out of high school, and he was my manager at my first full-time office job. No, he never talked about being trans on campus. He would have been beaten to death by the other students. But he was trans, and the minute he could live his truth, he did.

It’s a cold and it’s a broken mamma mia

hallelujah, here i go again

Since it's watermelon season!

My grandfather used to grow watermelons, among other things, and he told me about most of this, especially the orange spot. Those are the absolute best!

KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users' Mental Health Crises for "Content"

I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.

Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)

But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.

I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:

• What you say on there won't be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn't even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)

• Also, what you say on there? Is now...
• Koko's intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
• Publicly performing or displaying your "content" (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
• Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
• Sell / share this "content" with other businesses

• Any harm you come to using Koko? That's on you.
• And Koko won't take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)

I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)

They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.

So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.

(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)

Keep reading

Kokobot is incredibly predatory and exploitative. I wrote a post about how it exploits minors' empathy and gamifies "giving mental health advice", resulting in an unregulated mess that can only do harm to teens' mental health in the long run.

There are young people on tumblr that actively seek support from KokoBot right now, if you check the tag for recent posts. Those people did not get paid to promote it, so do not harrass them. If you can, direct them towards resources about Kokobot (like this post) that are more transparent about what this company is up to.

This... is DEEPLY DISTURBING.

SIGNAL.
BOOST.