My abortion was really one the most hated kind of abortion. I wasn't underage. I wasn't raped. I wasn't in medical need.
I got pregnant not through some fluke or 1 in a 100 contraceptive failure. I got pregnant because I was knowingly and willfully having unprotected sex. Out of wedlock too if that matters.
It was my own fault, I was being irresponsible because I knew I could always get an abortion if I got pregnant. My abortion was as close as it comes to 'using abortion as a contraceptive' as anti-choicers love to say.
I didn't abort it because my health was in danger or because I didn't have the ability to care for it or whatever else. I did it purely because I didn't want a child. I wanted sex and I didn't want to deal with any consequences from it.
There's no moral here. I don't feel bad about it whatsoever. I suffered no karmic consequences or punishment from god. My life is amazing. I want to rub this in the face of every conservative and anti-choicer. I did the terrible thing. I had an abortion for the most selfish of reasons and literally nothing happened. Suck it.
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
Tags quoted from Previous:
#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma
Can you please share how you verified, and give alternate sources, so we can maybe quiet the accusations of "A.I. slop" in the comments?
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
Thank you.
Signal boosting for the Truth.
As I said in the tags previous to this, A.I. is damaging to our culture not only for producing slop, but also for spreading mistrust of the truth.
Reblogging not just for the awesome history lesson but also the beautiful display of step-by-step fact checking and source researching in this age of AI slop
That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.
It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.
The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.
It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.
They like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.
They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.
They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.
It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.
Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile - and for that purpose, you count as a cat.
This all makes me very happy to know.
I think maybe the most ironic part of the white supremacist “Muslims are taking over Europe, save European culture and its people!” rhetoric is that they’ve been saying it for the past 1,300 years. No exaggeration. This is something they’ve been fearmongering about since the 8th century.
Then they’ll complain about how historically inaccurate and woke it is that there are nonwhite characters in European period dramas like it is totally impossible for a North African man to be in England in the 13th century and we don’t have manuscripts of assholes complaining about it from back then.
Whole books have been written about this since the end of americas involvement in Vietnam. That's why there are so many action heroes whose wives or children are dead. If you have a family you have to be part of a community, but if you're freed of those responsibilities you can be an eternal child who can kill endlessly with no consequences. Once you recognize it, you see it in everything. Cool grizzled divorced antihero who plays by his own rules and lives outside the law doesn't have to put the seat down or remember anyone's birthday grrr rough 'n tough creampuffs
yesterday I had the thought "visual novel for normal people" (?) and halfway through making this image (which I thought would be really funny) I realized it was completely meaningless
recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.
... the worst bit is I know several people this could be, especially given the 'in Australia' clarification
If you know them then there's a chance I might know some of them and that thought will keep me up at night.
This wasn’t the guy who we all know who used to spray his jeans with Mortein and then light himself on fire, was it?
He used to sit at the back of the bus, cup his hand, spray deodorant into it, then open it and light it on fire with a lighter in one fell swoop to try and impress girls.
He had to stop because the bus company begged our school to tell him to stop bc of legal liability. His hands never actually got damaged after doing it for about a year.
I reached out to my old friend in question here, because I've been thinking about him all day.
I do not know what "the amulet" is. I have no idea what "the amulet" is referring to.
I instantly remembered when he said that.
While we were all at the local park doing legal things that teenagers would do back in the late 2000s, my friend here found a rock at our old smoke spot that was unusually smooth and flat. He liked it so much that he took it to the woodwork classrooms at school, drilled a hole in it, and hung it on a necklace.
When we asked why he weanwearing this dinky-ass pebble on his neck, he claimed it prevented him from ever getting food-related illnesses: wouldn't get food poisoning, couldn't over-eat, was able to ingest anything (prior to him finding The Amulet, a few of us used to play a game called "Devil's Piss" where we would take turns shoving random food bits into a bottle of coke, and the first person to take a sip would get two dollars from the other players).
When we all asked him for the proof that this rock is magical—because nobody believed him, obviously—he said to meet him behind the History block at lunch, where he said he would drink two litres (or half a gallon) of milk in one go and not puke.
We met him there, and about ten of us all watched him down a whole bottle of strawberry milk in two or three breaths.
He didn't puke.
He jumped up and down and punched his stomach to prove it.
He still didn't puke.
I'm so glad I'm alive.
if matsuo/mogami has no fans I'm dead
at the risk of being cringe with everything going on — this week, the last six months, the past five years — i keep thinking about that one quote from the great gatsby
“they were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
it’s just every day now, huh.
the next day after exerting myself too much because i felt good for once