Know your rights.

Sandra Cisneros, from "Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982", Woman Without Shame

Sandra Cisneros, from "Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982", Woman Without Shame

whatever I'm out of here.

Bisan says that among all the aid organisations working in North Gaza right now, Ele Elna Elak is one of the most effective, geared towards resolving the water scarcity and making clean water and vegetables available to Gazans.

Donate if you can and share.

I want to do a Halloween game show at our party this year...I wrote a bunch of family feud style questions and I'd love if you guys could fill it out for me :)

Survey here

last year i played around with different zine formats/ways to get creative with page layout. this design resulted in two distinct halves around a center spine, so i thought it'd be fun to add in a 90º rotation as well.

I live in Chicagoland and have family friends who are brown and undocumented. It’s not good here.

I want to specify that the US government ICE agents rapelled from Blackhawk helicopters to take over an apartment building, breaking open apartment doors in the middle of the night to drag barely-clad residents from their homes and detain everyone in UHaul trucks with the children zip-tied to each other. Regardless of citizenship.

There was too much traffic today, and an ICE agent deployed a tear gas canister in traffic in response.

This is not normal.

From the very bottom of my heart: what the ACTUAL FUCK

It’s not even near me yet, but where I live there’s lots of brown folks so they’ll come.

This is surreal. We’re being attacked by the United States.

"ICE Agents Rappel From Black Hawk Helicopters Into Chicago for Major Raid" - MSN, published October 1st, 2025

Most mainstream media is barely covering it.

I genuinely wish I were surprised by that.

Spread this far and wide - there's no paywall.

According to old finnish folklore, having a wild animal wander into your house is an omen of death. The bigger the animal, the more imminent the death. A small bird, like a sparrow or a finch, is a sign that someone who lives in the house will die within the year. If the animal that has somehow made its way inside the house is a small mammal like a hedgehog, or a larger bird like an owl or raven, would mean that death is coming to visit in the next few months.

Massive megafauna, like a fully-grown moose or a bear, is a sign that someone will probably die within the next 20 minutes.

This one doesn't get to stay hidden in the replies.

resources for staying safe online

always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”

feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important

note: very slightly updated, reblog this version instead

the internet connection and cell service in gaza has been completely cut off today (17/09). if you are able to, please donate esims, you can do so via connecting humanity, crips for esims for gaza, or you can donate one directly to a palestinian in need by following this guide. thousands of families are being displaced right now due to the onslaught on gaza city and risk being separated from their families due to lack of ability to communicate with one another. thats not to mention that disabling communications is a tactical maneuver to enable israel to commit a massacre without coverage. without communications some families are not even aware of evacuation orders for their areas. do not let them seperate families and annihilate innocent, unsuspecting people in the dark. please give whatever you can and spread the word

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."

very good tags from @downwarddnaspiral

literally saw this tweet this morning

behold, the privileging of ignorance.

It's also interesting to look at the way the gender-shift in roles changes how the roles are perceived.

Secretaries are a perfect example. Back in the day, secretary was a prestigious position, usually the right hand of a figure of authority. The term comes from the 1400s, or thereabout, and the fact that high political offices are still referred to as Secretary of Defence and Secretary of State show how important the position was.

There were, of course, women doing the secretarial tasks - for example Marie Maitland transcribed the family folio in the 16th century though skeptical Victorians insisted a woman couldn't have so fair a hand and Dido Belle wrote her uncle's correspondence in the 18th century, which was noted to be unusual for a woman to do such a task - but secretarial duties primarily fell to men.

However, outside governmental roles, as more and more women entered the workforce, especially during and after the World Wars, and were very good at secretarial work, the gender dynamic shifted.

The number of male secretaries diminished rapidly and with it, the respect due. Misogyny coloured how secretaries were treated, no matter how skilled or professional the women in question were, and even now, there are still the stereotypes of the sexy bimbo secretary.

September by Grace Paley

YouTube is implementing an AI policy that tracks your watch history and determines your age with it. The only way to be able to continue watching the videos you want on YouTube if you've been falsley flagged as a minor by their AI is to give YouTube your government ID. This is being implemented in the US right now. It is essential to rage against this and put YouTube in the fucking ground if they continue with it—that may be the only way to make them backtrack. But damn isn't that hard to do when responding to this announcement with a polite but negative comment flags you for violating community guidelines and bans you from even posting it?

After I reblogged this, I did some looking, and found the policy update page that talks about the implementation of age verification.

It's called "Extending Protections to More US-Based Teens" and it goes into effect on August 13, 2025.

Like the op, I tried to voice my displeasure at the further encroachment of artificial intelligence onto internet platforms. And like op, my reply "failed to post."

What I want to know is what about the above reply or mine

violates community policy? Or does Google just have AI content filters set up to ping key phrases? This is particularly grating when community policy specifically prohibits spam comments and shit like this

makes it through but comments that disagree with policy decisions are automatically flagged as inappropriate.

Regardless, this is fucking bunk, on three levels.

Firstly, what a child consumes on the internet is not the responsibility of the internet--or its users. It is the responsibility of the parent of that child.

Parental controls exist not just on televisions, but on phones and computers as well. Not only is it available via the hardware we're using to access the platform, it's also already available on the fucking platform.

Secondly, with this AI age verification rollout, Google is telling its consumers that they get to decide what we consume. That we as consumers are not in control of our experience and that we clearly do not know what is in our own best interests.

This is a violation of the concept of consumer sovereignty.

Thirdly, this model is more or less the implementation of Google's own privatized version of KOSA. Which, as we've discussed ad nauseam here on Tumblr and on the internet at-large, is largely the first step toward internet censorship.

I don't think I need to remind anyone that censorship is bad. For lots of reasons.

And look, I know we're all tired. There are Things Happening and they just keep fucking happening. I know it's a lot.

But you and me? We're the boss in this situation. No company should ever feel comfortable enough to dictate what its consumers can and cannot access. Companies work for us. Without consumers, companies cease to exist. So we have a lot more power than it feels like we do in this situation.

For better or worse, Google and YouTube are part of the ecosystem of information on the internet. And access to information is important. The freedom to access information is a right that we must protect at all costs, regardless of the age of the person accessing that information.

So take a deep breath. And keep yelling at them about this.

You can:

And if you're sick of Google's bullshit, you can also just... stop. Stop using their services. And let them know that's why you're leaving.

There are alternatives to Google services:

There is, unfortunately, no perfect solution. Google has a monopoly on many of the services it offers, including video-sharing.

But that's another great reason to contact your reps! If you want to keep using YouTube and other Google products, or you don't want other companies to follow Google's lead, go yell at your representatives about it. They have the power to demand action on a state and federal level to protect their constituents.

Call and demand they protect their constituents from predatory business practices (which demanding an ID or credit card, when they have a history of data breaches, most certainly is). Tell your reps that it's against your freedom as a consumer for Google to decide what is and is not appropriate for its consumers to consume, and nowhere in the Constitution does it say that Google is arbiter of our access to information. And let them know that their action or lack thereof will directly impact your voting decisions during the next election.

The only way we can get companies like Google to stop doing stupid shit like this is to get loud about it and to stop using their services.

---

For the curious, here are the links I used in my attempted reply:

This one is from 2021, when they were sued for allegedly selling user data to third parties: https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-users-personal-data-despite-promise-federal-court-lawsuit-claims/

This is from today (08/08/25) about user data being compromised, and has been confirmed by Google itself: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/08/08/google-confirms-it-has-been-hacked---user-data-stolen/

This is a worker’s reprieve checkpoint. I only want you to engage with this post if you’re shirking your duties on the clock right now. We are going to make it. We are going to text and scroll on company time. We are going to find a corner or bathroom to linger in while something needs doing. Get some!