There's An Open Pit In The Middle Of Our Office Plan That Drops Down Into A Bunch Of Very Sharp Spikes

it’s crazy how absolutely blatantly luigi’s constitutional rights are being breached and people seem more concerned about his appearance than a real, scary view of the power CEOs and the healthcare industry have over the legal system. like yeah he looks good in those photos i can appreciate that too but can we focus on the fact that the media is absolutely treating him as if he has already been found guilty. this could happen to anyone. anyone could be arrested over the death of a wealthy, influential person and the precedent being set right now is essentially that the prosecution can run wild and create documentaries declaring your guilt. like that’s really serious and scary.

I remember during puberty talk in 6th grade they handed out permission slips for parents to sign if they didn’t want their kids getting sex ed and like five students ended up having to wait in the library while the rest of us learned about puberty and health stuff.

Afterwards during lunch recess almost everyone in class spent our time telling those five kids what we learned and showing them our handouts.

diet culture is so rooted in the idea that our bodies are machines that our minds have to outwit. it pushes for the idea that hunger is something you have to “beat”, that cravings are an annoyance to ignore or outwit, that the way our bodies want to look and want to be is something to fight, that it needs to be helped to do things it was built to do.

here is the liberating truth- your body is so smart and it is trying to help you. it works so hard to keep you alive- sometimes it fails at what it’s trying to do, sometimes it does it in unconvential ways, but it is trying to keep you alive! hunger is our body saying “we need food”- it’s not something to ignore or supress. cravings are our body saying “we need a specific type of food”- they aren’t something to trick or prevent. natural weight and weight distribution are our body saying “this is the shape in which we work best”- they aren’t something to control or reduce. denying this is what hurts us most- even though diet culture tries to tell us that listening to our bodies and treating them with kindness and forgiveness is wrong.

do you know of any trustable source to learn about sex ed?

Scarleteen is an extremely reliable, extremely comprehensive resource for sex ed information.

Here is a series of sex ed courses for various ages put together by Planned Parenthood. It includes accurate, easily understandable information.

Wings of Pages

All the words on those wings are either bits of my own poetry and writing, or complete utter gibberish because my hand got tired 😂

terps: Epinetron” (επίνητρον) is a ceramic thigh protector that women in Ancient Greece used while spinning wool on their thighs. Penelope is usually pictured with one so it is associated with an activity you do while waiting. For Ulysses to come back, for the crisis to end. [...] I made this epinetron during the lockdown and sculpting it on my thigh, working on top of it for hours, I felt that I replicated the work of the women before me. The “spinning women” as they were called by male archaeologists, who perceived them as unethical because they were working.

Somewhat on the vibe of "your glorious revolution doesn't exist," I want to talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

That's an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer (~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department. Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs. insurance calculation to make sure they couldn't expell me from the program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.

now say it with me: authors/artists dont owe you moral purity. an author/artist job is not to hold you by the hand & tell you exactly what is Good™ & what is Bad™. you should be able to think for yourself

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.