It’s so sad that students are now relying so heavily on AI for writing essays because they’re missing out on the best part of writing an essay which is when you’re a few paragraphs in and you just reach that flow state where your thought process becomes one with the essay and you’re slamming the keys so hard that you’re on the verge of destroying your laptop. I used to get high off of that shit

I live by the motto, “if you can’t buy what you want, make it.” And this motto came to life recently in the form of a floral mosaic dining table for my back deck.

Our deck table had been showing its age already when the wind caught the umbrella and cracked it. I wanted to replace it with a mosaic table because I’d been enjoying that art form recently. But I couldn’t get one the size I wanted so I got creative.

I spent a few weeks looking for tile and figuring out a very loose design concept. I started by picking a limited set of tile shapes and a color palette.

Once the tiles arrived I had a piece of particle board cut to size for the base and I experimented with different motifs until I settled on a selection of floral shapes that gave me plenty of variety to fill space without locking me into one repeating pattern.

And then I was off! I basically doodled my way around the table, attaching tiles with Weld Bond (I went through 4 full bottles!) and rocking out to the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack.

Once the florals were done it was time for the background…

Over 3,800 1cm glass tiles make up the not-design part of the design. It went pretty quickly though because I just had to fill the space, leaving room for grout.

Once I had the tile done, my husband assisted with disassembly and reassembly. We used the legs off the original table for this one (waste not).

One huge bucket of black grout later…

She is finished.

I enjoyed making it and just looking at it makes me so happy - I can’t wait for all the dinners we’ll have around this table 🌼❤️

This is the best idea of all time

Beth McCarthy gives trans fan new name

Queer joy detected!

Honestly it boils down to reparenting yourself & rewiring your own neuronal pathways & telling yourself a firm “stop” when you notice your mind slipping down negative loopholes & being present in the moment & enjoying being mid task rather than waiting for it to end & not thinking of inertia as your baseline and natural way of living

So tempting to keep embarking on the same self destructive cycle over & over & over again . But at some point you have to put ur foot down w ur own behaviors & be the thing that truly saves u

#this is unfortunately true#it’s not easy to tell yourself Hey Drop It#like you’re your own dog furtively eating pinecones and rocks#but you gotta#sometimes it’s a Hey We’re Not Doing That#you gotta though

American Pika (Ochotona princeps), family Ochotonidae, Western United States

photograph by Gregory Smith

Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here

A Wikisource entry can be found here.

Mirrors can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Gosh it would be a shame if this got even MORE visibility.

Whoops my cursor slipped.

i dont think whites understand how being white makes literally everything easier.

it effects everything.

being trans is easier when youre white.

being gay is easier when youre white.

being disabled is easier when youre white.

being a woman is easier when youre white.

being autistic is easier when youre white.

oppression is eased when you are white, as you get extra privileges, and your whiteness is seen as a positive characteristic that in some ways counter-balances your other forms of being a minority. whiteness controls everything.

you are automatically way more innocent in your own oppression as a gay, trans, disabled person because of your whiteness.

never forget this.

three things:

1. it’s true

2. white people get pissed when i bring this up/wear this shirt

3. the comments to this thread melted my fucking eyeballs seriously why the fuck are y’all like this

white people you don’t need to say you’re white when you reblog this btw. you don’t even need to mention it btw

I wish more people understood this. if you are white, you are white before anything else. before EVERYTHING else. they see your skin color, and decide how much respect, decency, agency, rights, you “deserve”. you disliking this fact doesn’t make it less true.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21

Recent update from this org: they’ve launched System 03 (in 2023) and have gone on over 100 expeditions and collected over 1 million pounds of trash! They also are working on cleaning up rivers :)

‘roofs’ looks unbelievably stupid typed out. why can we not say ‘rooves.’ clown language with clown plurals

If the plural of roof were rooves, the singular of grooves would have to be groof. Is that what you want?

point taken I’ll do anything to avoid groof

Leaf and leaves

Beef and beeves

"Stop saying we'll survive this because Renee Good didn't!"

It's very important to talk about what happened to Renee Good, the horror this administration has inflicted upon the world, and how we got here. I do not, however, think it is ever ethical to essentially encourage suicidal thoughts and aggressively tell people things will never get better. In fact, things won't get better if everyone gives up and believes resistance is futile because we're all dead anyway. In addition, someone trying to talk themselves out of a dark place isn't necessarily undermining what happened to Renee, either. The people saying we'll survive are generally people who are scared and have taken Trump seriously for years, not the people who downplayed him before the election.

I'll say what I began saying in January of last year; if you're really in such a dark place, you have no right to drag others down with you. It's not "raising awareness" to scream at people trying to get through the day during very unsettling times. When you're telling people to stop even saying we'll survive, what are you actually doing? What are you accomplishing? If your answer is "being aggressively hopeless until my last breath", then go do that somewhere else.

Oh I definitely think part of this is that people really didn't believe things would get this bad, so they're having a delayed reaction and are feeling what we felt before or immediately after the election. There's a reason why I cried every day for about 3 months straight, but have shed few tears lately. I was actually just talking about that with my supervisor; she asked me if I'd seen what happened to Renee Good, and I said yes, and, "Some people really screwed up over a year ago and didn't think anything would fundamentally change. But I knew. That’s why I was crying my eyes out the next day and needed to go home from work."

She said, "Yes, I remember that." (She'd comforted me in that time. She'd just gotten citizenship, and despite her facing hardships in Algeria, I think she's shocked over the past year.)

But I'd also put myself back in therapy immediately after the election because I knew what a bad place I was in, and I didn't want this administration to kill me. We must live to see this end. We have to try, and we can't be dragged down by people who've given up. As I said many times, Trump 1.0 taught me that daily misery doesn't change current events, and only puts your own life on hold

I haven't said this before because I don't want to be misconstrued as undermining what's happening, but this is actually my take as well. The administration is WEAK. They're desperately trying to display strength, which is dangerous because they see violence as strength, but Renee's death only increased protests against ICE. You have people shouting at ICE, "You can't kill all of us!" People simply aren't going down without a fight. The National Guard was told to get out of the states that didn't request them (like CA). Resistance is much stronger now than it was this time last year; just think of how bleak things felt in January-February 2025. Trump is polling underwater on basically every issue, and not by a small amount. The administration keeps LOSING in a lot of ways. All their attempts to prosecute their enemies have been thrown out by courts thus far. They couldn't even keep Jimmy Kimmel off the air. They drastically lowered hiring standards and training times for ICE officers because they're NOT hitting their hiring goals and NOT hitting their deportation quotas. Democrats did very well in elections last year, and they could very well overperform this November in the midterms

Things have, indeed, gotten scarier as things fall apart more, but it doesn't mean they aren't falling apart. This will end. It's still a long road until the end, but we inch closer to the end every day. It doesn't mean bad things won't happen until then, but it means we need to keep trying to survive and looking forward to when he's gone forever and we can pick up the pieces

ICE has profiled and detained at least 5 Native people in Minneapolis in the past 2 weeks. One man has been identified and released, but the other four were unhoused and have yet to be located.

there is an initiative to ensure tribal members have ID:

[image text: Free Tribal IDs Available This Week

Native Nations members are being targeted by ICE. Get your tribal ID now.

White Earth Nation - Jan 12-13: 9am-4pm; Jan 14: 9am-12pm At Minneapolis American Indian Center, fees waived

Red Lake Nation - Jan 14: 9am-4pm; Jan 15: 9am-1pm At Red Lake Embassy Building, fees waived

Bois Forte Band of Chippewa - Jan 13: 1pm-6pm At Bois Forte Minneapolis Urban Office, fees waived

Leech Lake Band - Jan 13 + 14: 8am-4:30pm At Leech Lake Twin Cities Office, fees waived

Mille Lacs Band - At Mille Lacs Urban Office

Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate - Dates and location coming soon

Contact MHA Nation or check with MIWRC for pop-up event times.

MIGIZI]

Maria Skłodowska-Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me

hey did you know that uhh

oh shit i didn't expect this to actually get notes lmao

these are all direct quotes from jeffrey jerome cohen's "monster culture (seven theses)" (full pdf linked) i highly encourage you to read it yourself!

that said, while i think cohen's writing is evocative, it can be a little dense, so while i'm here, here's my capsule summary (you can also hear me talk about this in the first episode of my podcast) (listen to @ghostswerepeopletoo)

THE advantage of memorizing poetry is that when somethings happening, maybe even you’re in a situation or a location, you can just go “ok. lady of shallott time” and boom. you reclaimed your mental space and attention for YOU for the next ten minutes

Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.

— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

i know this is humorous but! i learned from one of my college friends (who learned from a therapist) that reciting a poem you have memorized is a great grounding & focusing technique when you’re spiraling into anxiety or panic. i can personally attest that The Tyger has staved off several panic attacks.

so like if said “situation or location” is freaking you out really badly, “lady of shallott time” can help reclaim your mental health too

Ok everybody share what poems you can recite in case we’re trapped in an elevator.

I’ve got the first 42 lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, the first 10 lines of Beowulf in Old English, the first canto of Tolkien’s Lay of Beren and Luthien, and Sonnet XVI by Pablo Neruda (“I love the handful of the earth you are”). I used to have the Proem of the Kalevala but I’m a bit shaky on it it now and I think i’ve only got the first two sentences. Anda handful of others I half-remember which i could probably do if I were with someone else who half-remembered the same ones and we could prompt each other back and forth.

"Friends outside of Minnesota please read. I'm sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor: Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:

Here's an AP news brief with a little more info. It's limited in the way major news outlets are right now but provides context that supports the personal account shared.

It's amazing I didn't end up with issues around beds given the two very bizarre experiences I had relating to beds as a child.

When I was four or five, my dad and uncles dug out the basement of the cabin to add more bedrooms, and they cut a hole for where the new stairs into the basement would go. Where was this hole? UNDER MY BED. Did I know about it? NO. Not until they randomly pulled my bed back one day to reveal a Pit Of Darkness (no lights or stairs had been installed yet) under where I'd been sleeping. And then I just. Kept sleeping there until my new room in the basement was finished.

Then, when I was six, my parents DRUGGED ME WITH COUGH SYRUP on Christmas Eve so they could get me out of my old bed in the middle of the night and build my new bunkbed. They then put me in the new bed ON THE TOP BUNK and waited for me to wake up Christmas morning. I did wake up. Eighteen inches from a ceiling that I had previously only seen from several feet away at the closest. I screamed, flailed, almost fell out of the bed, and managed to save myself by clinging to the outside of the railing until my brain reset enough to climb out of bed properly. I did not find out about the drugging portion of this until I was nearly thirty.