Hey I'm Aitana and I don't know how to edit HTML so this is shit. Someday I'll ask a friend to do it for me, that day is nowhere near today, so for now enjoy the mess!
My brother’s girlfriend had HPV, so he went to get himself the HPV vaccine. There is a fee to pay (nothing much, something like €87) but it’s completely free if you’re in one of the “at risk” groups.
“What does that mean,” he asks. “It’s free if you’re gay,” he’s told. “Ah. Would I have to like, prove it, or…?” “Just put in a check mark here.”
My brother is in no way, shape or form attracted to men, but also he’s stingy as it gets. So now he’s officially gay. Congrats bro.
“Doctor, give it to me straight” “You sure, there’s a fee” “… Give it to me gay”
You can bend over backwards trying not to be one of “those” cringey queers who wears pride everywhere and goes by arson and has they/it/fluff/pixel/boo pronouns on a catgender pin they wear everywhere and suppress everything “extra” unlikable about your identity and pass as a “normal” cishet and mock everyone who dyes their hair for pride and wears rainbow nail polish and guess what? Conservatives will still want you dead. There is no appeasing them. Stand by your community. Maybe you’ll find that arson (they/it/fluff/pixel/boo) is going to be the best goddamn person to have in your corner when the republicans you’ve given up your life to placate inevitably turn on you and try to sentence you to death because any amount of queer is too damn queer. Maybe you’ll find that we are a community for a reason. We’re all equally degenerate in the eyes in conservatives and equally worthy of joy and life in the eyes of the “weird” queer community you shun.
Shakuntala Devi, an Indian mental calculator,was asked to give the 23rd root of a 201-digit number; she answered in 50 seconds. Her answer was confirmed by calculations done at the US Bureau of Standards for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.
i am a firm supporter of changing your name to whatever it you want regardless of your gender. if a woman wants to go by matt then matt she shall be. godspeed
Likewise keeping your name regardless of gender, this exact sentiment is a major reason I’m fine still going by Jimmy.
In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.
Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.
What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.
The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.
So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly unscientific conclusions, I just remember those fucking sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.
There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.
I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.
Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.
People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.
Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.
People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.
