WA State residents!

The legislature is looking at a bill for requiring age verification for "adult content" online. We all know what garbage this is. These things never really protect kids, and they always wind up restricting much more than actual pornography. Tumblr's stupid effort to ban "porn" should show us more than enough about how this plays out.

Every rational person wants to protect kids online. Measures like this don't do the job. It doesn't even come close to an honest conversation about what protecting kids means.

If you want to tell your reps this is dumb, make a comment here. It doesn't even have to be long. Just tell them you're against this move.

usa: you do not need to go to the post office to mail a package

you can order priority mail shipping boxes and envelopes in any size from store.usps.com for free. if you do not have a printer, you can buy them with the postage already paid on them. the postal service will deliver these boxes to your house. you can pack your item into the box at home, then go back to usps.com and schedule a time for the mailman to pick the package up from your house. this is also free. you do not have to visit the post office at any point in this process. if you use flat rate mailers you also do not need to weigh anything.

i have to explain this to people about 20 times a year, no joke. it is some sort of anti post office conspiracy that everyone thinks you have to buy shipping boxes and then drive to the post office and stand in line to mail things. you do not. shipping mailers and boxes are 100% free. priority mail service or above (and prices are now adjusted to the point that its usually pointless not to use priority mail) entitles you to a free pickup, and if you have even one priority mail package to ship, you can ask for all your other packages to be picked up on the same trip too.

if you are shipping JUST books, use Media Mail. its very cheap

Everything above is accurate. It's how I handle mailing out almost everything I need to mail. Every so often I go to usps.com and order a bunch of flat rate boxes and envelopes and put them in my office. When I run low, I do it again. I mail these all out with printed labels and scheduled pickups. Priority Flat Rate isn't super duper cheap but neither is my time, now is it.

I also order all my stamps from usps.com and always just get a huge batch of fun Forever ones.

As a money saver, it's worth noting that Media Mail is not JUST for books either. CD's and DVD's also qualify under media mail, as do "comics" without advertising such as fandom zines, and doujinshi.

Media mail is usually a TON less expensive than traditional mailing, especially on textbooks and other heavier items that will qualify, so it's worth checking to see if what you're shipping qualifies...

If you mail things frequently, please look into Pirate Ship. They get bulk discounts on labels from USPS (as well as Fedex and UPS), so the shipping cost drops a lot. It's entirely legitimate (I have used it myself many times.) It works exactly the same as postage bought direct from the shipping services. It's literally just cheaper.

Source: Facebook

**** Unmute!

@blueandbluer

Well that’s just fucking delightful. 😍

This was custom these are still geting made!!!!

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of decoden and polymer clay questions about what to use to as a gloss/glaze. Almost every time the first response is “Clear nail polish, duh!”.

This needs to stop if people want to be creating quality items. Sometimes I’m afraid to buy handmade things for fear that they have been sealed with clear nail polish and they will deteriorate over time. I want to buy things that will last!

I’ve reblogged this before - but it’s sooooo important. crafting signal boost 

Oh jeez, I didn’t even know that was a thing. No - never use nail polish thats a horrible idea. 

As a person who makes crafts, I must do my part in the war against nail-polish!

I tried using clear nail polish before for that purpose and I don’t recommend it. It was the only thing I already had at home and I figured why not.

It smelled like nail polish forEVER, it was somehow sticky, you could see every brush stroke, and it just ruined the project.

Do yourself a favour and buy something that is actually meant to be used that way. Even if you’re a teen and all you have at hand is your mom’s nail polish.

The Gavele Goat must burn. It is our offering to the spirits of winter, a prestation for a good new year.

It fell over.

"Because I Love You" by Lex Marie.

She spent hours upon hours just beating the canvas with a belt...

when you look at the finished painting, you can almost see letters - but there aren't any. It's all noise. a lot of adults process this sort of beating by insisting there is a lesson in it. with the title and artist statement in mind, it's like they're trying to read a message of love written in that chaotic canvas.

hi my sister is telling me a bunch of shit about transformers & in specific the mecha pilot jazz (???? i think) au and she said i should write down this stupid brain worm idea i came up with:

has anyone considered one of the mecha pilots (not knowing that the fuckin. cybertronians?? is that it?? whatever, the human doesnt know that they arent also mecha pilots) while under interrogation deactivates the mecha for some reason idfk, and seeks to first take out the other "pilots" before they can try to escape. what im saying is make a human climb in one of those robots' guts trying to find the control center b4 figuring out there's not another human in there

Holy shit.

Signal boost for this! It’s the same in France. Most of french people don’t even know that their country is originally - and still is - a multilingual country. 

Yes,  Occitan, Catalan, Breton, Gallo, Flamand, Picard, Basque etc are still spoken. But France refuses to sign the European charter for minority languages. Good job destroying the cultural patrimony that we are so proud of.

“To say there is no worth in learning a language that isn’t economically useful is like saying there’s no point in being friends with somebody unless they’re going to help you get a better job. It’s a spectacular, cynical miss of the point. It’s also inaccurate.”

as a hong konger i feel the need to speak out and give a local's perspective on the fire that has ravaged tai po's wang fuk court because there's so much disinformation and western gazed reports regarding it.

a quick background to the incident: a fire broke out in the housing estate of wang fuk court and caused the burning of 7/8 blocks in the estate. so far a total of 128 deaths have been reported with around 200 more missing and 79 injured. the fire burned for a total of 43 hours. the housing estate was undergoing a renovation project that cost 330 million HKD (around 42mil USD) when the construction material of one block caught on fire and subsequently spread to the rest of the buildings. around 4.6k people live there and majority of them are elderly.

a lot of the media is blaming the bamboo scaffolding for the cause of the fire's spread. that is not true and is a distraction from the actual problem of corruption that caused this avoidable tragedy.

for starters, bamboo scaffolding is a centuries old practice that is a recognized cultural heritage in hong kong. everything in hk, including the iconic skyline, was built using bamboo scaffolding. centuries of cantonese opera shows hosted in bamboo theatres had hot food stalls with no issues of burning. it is not because it's cheaper or from an inflated sense of nostalgia but a factual thing you can easily confirm by looking up any heat test with bamboo. but the most obvious proof you can find is that the site itself shows the scaffolding mostly in-tact while the safety net is almost completely gone.

which brings me to my next point about the nets. they have been proven again and again by residents own tests to not meet standards of being fire-retardant. there have been complaints made an entire year before that were dismissed as inflammatory rumors aimed at hindering the renovation. this is a test from TVB news showing how a net with fire-retardant properties vs a net without would react under fire. but if that's not enough, here are multiple videos showcasing how the fire's spread was completely accelerated by the nets flammability.

video showcasing the start of the fire (with jumpcuts showing the spread within a 10 minute window)

video showcasing another block of the estate that ignites into a chimney of flames within 30 seconds

rather conveniently as well is that construction sites across hk the day after have begun removing the safety nets. i know of people working in construction who can corroborate as well.

as always, the incentive for such corner cutting is money. fire-retardant nets cost 6-10 times more than regular nets. among this was the use of styrofoam boards as opposed to metal for blocking out the windows within the construction site, which as another factor in aiding the spread of the fire.

this renovation project was the most expensive out of the 3 proposed for the estate. it was in part paid by the residents, with each tenant required to pay 16k for the project. i would also like to add that as wang fuk court is a part of the home ownership scheme, they are owned by the housing authority, which is an agency of the hong kong government.

330 million in funds yet they could not even afford the bare minimum of fire proof materials? their greed and corruption is what turned the housing estate into a death trap for the thousands living there, NOT the bamboo scaffolding.

another tragic (and suspicious) factor in the deadliness of this incident is that the fire alarm system for all 8 buildings failed to sound, which likely caused the deaths of many more as most people reported not even knowing there was a fire until either the smoke reached them or they could see the flames.

the government's response to this has been to immediately roll out policies to switch to steel scaffolding as opposed to addressing the real issue of corruption involved. likely because of the election coming up next week (which has still not yet been cancelled despite the tragedy) where there are candidates directly involved or connected with district councilors that allowed this to happen by denying and shutting down resident's concerns. people are also concerned that this is just another method of streamlining the process of outsourcing labor from mainland, as their standard is using steel scaffolding and their labor is far cheaper. this would also allow the mainland industry of providing steel scaffoldings to break into hk.

majority of the relief effort has been funded by or provided the citizens of hk themselves. volunteers have poured in from across hk as well as the bordering shenzhen to help deliver supplies for displaced residents. if there is one feel good thing to take away from this incident is that we fucking care about each other, far more than this shit ass government. the initial relief funds offered by the government was a mere 10k per family, a whole 6k less than what residents paid for the renovations that took their homes and just plain disrespectful when they've lost their everything. (as of right now it has been raised to 50k, likely due to backlash)

i mostly wrote this post as a half rant and half psa to let people know from a hkgers pov the blatant display of greed and negligence that allowed for something like this to happen. this is not a tragic accident but a situation so preventable that all the people involved should all be charged with murder. this is the deadliest disaster hk has faced in the last 70 years, and the death toll is only expected to rise as the fire brigade actually starts breaking into flats individually.

hk is very small so most people, myself included either know or know of someone directly affected by the tragedy. about 50% of hkgers, again myself included, also live in these types of housing estates. i'm deeply disturbed and appalled at the implications and would like more people to know how complicit our government is in this incident.

Mum: Maybe you should get a new phone?

Me: I don't NEED a new phone, my current phone works fine, it may not have that much storage but it has enough storage for what I need to use it for and it's not my fault that everybody else keeps wanting me to download stupid apps that take up space I don't have!!

Me: All of these things worked fine before they had apps!! They want me to download apps for things that I don't NEED apps for! Not everybody is going to have a smartphone that can run the number of apps that companies want you to and I'm not going to replace a PERFECTLY FUNCTIONING PHONE just to comply with ridiculous demands to download apps for things you DON'T NEED APPS FOR

Mum: Sweetheart, you sound older than me

Me: And??? I'm RIGHT!!!

some days I really do just feel like

Same.

Recovering from autistic burnout as a high-masking adult:

To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler

You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it

If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life

If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.

Go through a sensory checklist.

SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights

SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.

TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?

TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?

SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?

INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.

Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.

This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.

If you want to recover, you need to relearn your whole body. And get over your idea of "normal" and just wear the damn sunglasses and put on the headphones. If people stare, fuck em. You're disabled and they can deal with that.

Fuck yeah, ya dont realize how much pants piss you off till ya get rid of them. To much i dont care just wear it ss a kid