This is a friendly reminder that none disabled people often do benefit from the same accommodations disabled people benefit from.

Yeah okay I'll reblog that!!

My dad used to work for Vodafone and likes to tell a story about when he was working on a voicemail transcription service.

And there was a woman there who was some form of disability advocate (it was the 90s so her existence in the company was a minor miracle) and apparently she completely blew his mind on that project.

See, he'd imagined that this service was exclusively gonna be for deaf people. Obviously very useful for the very small number of people who couldn't hear their phone, but why would you even own a mobile phone if you couldn't hear?

But she described to him all the times he might want to read a message instead of listen to it. Maybe he was in a loud football crowd. Maybe there was important info that he needed to copy down that was spoken too fast. Maybe he was holding his sleeping newborn (me) and didn't want his phone to be loud and wake them up.

This doesn't feel as revolutionary as all that to those of us that have only ever known phones with the ability 'send text message', but given the timing and placement of this conversation I wonder if this woman and this project is *part of the reason text messaging exists*. The first text (SMS) message was sent by Vodafone UK in 1992 - where + when this conversation was happening - and then for a long time it was supported exclusively for 'messages from the carrier', and this project was an early potential extra use of the SMS protocol.

So Yeh, building for disability is kinda handy..

If you're in the US, now is a great time to talk to the young people in your life about the US military:

All of this!

If you want an organization who WILL tell you the truth about your rights to conscientiously object, how to legally get out of the DEP (Delayed Entry Program) or about any of your other rights in the military (whether you’re enlisted, thinking about enlisting, or a family member or friend of someone enlisted (or thinking about enlisting)), who will do it confidentially & for free, you want the

GI Rights Hotline

run by NGOs & non-profits, which has been counseling folks for DECADES now:

Or by phone:

1-877-447-4487

Even if all the person you're speaking to cares about is the money, the money sucks.

Minimum wage in California just went up to $16.90. You need to be rank E4 or be E3 with at least 3 years of service before you're making more than the CA minimum wage in the military.

You will literally get better pay and benefits working at a costco. (And that's not even accounting for the fact that the military isn't a 40 hour work week, your entire life is on the clock)

I cannot emphasize this enough, if you're a desperate young queer person you will make better money, get better healthcare, and have more affordable options for school if you move to California, get a job at costco, live with roommates, and go to community college than you will have if you join the US military.

i think i just witnessed a miracle

There is always hope

[Image ID: Screenshot of part of an AO3 chapter listing. Chapter 3 was published 2015-04-02 and Chapter 4 was published 2025-12-15, 10 years, 8 months, and 13 days later. /end ID]

Maybe it's naive of me, but whenever I see portraits like this, with just a father and daughter, it restores my faith in humanity a little. Because people seem to love this idea that fathers never loved their daughters in the past and only saw them as bargaining chips for marriage or whatever, but look at the guy in the first portrait on the left, he loves that little girl! And the dad trying to do his work while his daughter bothers him with an Old Timey Barbie. The man teaching his daughter geography, his expression is so soft! The way the man in the last portrait holds the little girl's hand! And none of these are incidental, these aren't photographs, someone (probably the father) paid good money and sat down for hours so that they could have a painting of themselves and their daughter. Probably because they loved their daughter.

From left to right: 1795 Michał Jerzy Mniszech with his daughter Elżbieta - Marcello Bacciarelli; Christopher Anstey and his daughter Mary Ann by William Hoare 1776; A Musician and His Daughter by Thomas de Keyser 1629; The Geography Lesson (Portrait of Monsieur G. and His Daughter), 1812; Jean-baptiste Isabey And His Daughter; Portrait of a Young Girl and Older Man by William Harrison Scarborough

(this is probably somewhat related to my other favourite genre of painting, Husband With Multiple Kids Making Come Hither Eyes At His Wife)

oh I love those! People being people is one of my favourite kinds of paintings and an important reminder that people in past times were not all that different. There were dads who loved their daughters fiercely. There were fathers who happily looked after their babies too. The German reformer Philip Melanchton for example had a cradle in his office. His wife was busy organising a household for 20 people- she was out and about, he mostly worked in his office, it made sense for him to look after their babies too babies while she dropped by at snack time.

in fact often if it was kind of safe dads had the babies in their workshops for just that reason as we can see in these paintings:

The left is “the busy father” by Theodore Weber, the right one is “At the china repairer’s “ by Wenzel Tornoe. All dads who are actively involved in childcare and a painter who thought it was a cute topic rather than anything ridiculous.

I raise you:

First Lesson by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865 - 1931)

Un Coup De Main (The Helping Hand) by Émile Renouf (1845 – 1894)

Italian Winegrower And His Daughter by Francesco Baratta (1590-1666)

concept for a tv show: a cute simple love story between an assistant and a chauffeur or bodyguard or whatever else rich people have and in the background the rich people are having the wildest telenovela level drama that we only catch glimpses of

(Flustered assistant) "So... do you want to go on a coffee date?" (Very flustered bodyguard) "I'd love to!"

(While they're looking at eachother cutely, we hear a woman screaming in the background "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CHEATED ON ME WITH MY BROTHER???" . Then somebody jumps off a window)

Exactly you get me

This is the exact opposite ratio of content that Murderbot wants in a TV show and would drive it up the wall lol

went to a peaceful, nonviolent noise demonstration tonight. (a noise demonstration is when you act the fuck up outside a hotel harboring ICE. so they don't sleep :) ) Not a bad crowd, I saw an estimate of around 1000 and we got some honking and fist-pumping from motorists and condo dwellers as we marched. In general a noise demo is a fun type of mobilization protest since you get to be loud as fuck and, in this case, roam from hotel to hotel, venting your spleen at the motherfuckers who are violating your rights.

tomorrow we're going to a more standard scheduled rally/march during the day. I'll fit in whistle packet creation and flyering the neighborhood around that (the flyers are things I made up). In between the laundry gets done and the cats get fed. we will not stop until the devil in the white house and his disgusting troll-faced VP are forced to back down from their preemptive hunt-a-lib licensing scheme.

a few bright spots: there was someone roaming around offering ear plugs, but right before we moved to the second hotel I noticed a young woman with an Instant Pot liner and a spatula, plugging her ears and looking mad stressed. I offered her my spare earplugs, she took them and asked if there was a protest tomorrow, I directed her to the one I know about. Talk to people, look out for them. TALK ABOUT WHAT'S HAPPENING. I also went to my local hardware store today and both the cashier and the guy who helped me find my tape were commiserating with how much this shit sucks. Minneapolis, granted, has practice with this, I know it's not exactly like this everywhere. But still: every single moment of human connection tells us that we are not alone. It is vitally important. My sister in the NC mountains went to a 50-person protest and said the same thing - that being with others helps.

and on that note: if you are in America, PLEASE go out there this weekend. the Trump administration wants to establish that they can flat out lie about video footage we all saw and it will terrorize everyone into compliance. We cannot let that happen. Go out, be loud and proud and unafraid. If you don't know of a protest check Indivisible's website and if you want to do stuff like noise demos look for the leftists with flags and join one of their mailing lists.

We will finish the work Renee Nicole Good died for. There is no other option.

I saw this on reddit and tracked down the source (Dinara Fakhritdinova, _climbinggirl_ on instagram), because I know there's a lot of girls here on tumblr who need to see her back muscles

If you want to see the best in their field, Google "top women pegging"

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."

"Rings" by ND Stevenson

My absolute favourite comic journal by Stevenson. Made me cry my eyes out. Even when I can't articulate it, it gets to the core of what I think love is.

I wrote another short story and this one is very short so it is definitely normal. It has no space to be weird.

How to escape the well

Trying not to do a disservice to the tragedy that happened today but seeing the counter protesters surround the ICE agents and scream "You can't kill us all, nazis!" while fucking daring them to shoot, well this sums it up quite nicely:

She was a queer mother shot in front of her wife while trying to flee. They were on the way to pick up their son from school. Their dog was in the car.

May that agent never know another moments peace for the rest of his disgusting wasted life.

Just for a source, but please if you are in a delicate headspace I would suggest skipping this for now, it's genuinely devastating.

I live in Minneapolis a short walk (.7 miles, as Nextdoor so helpfully informed me by emailing me an alert of the murder as I was already getting ready to walk down) from where this happened. The neighborhood there is just to the north of where George Floyd was murdered. Renee was new to the Twin Cities but many people on that block likely lived there during 2020, the TC metro area is small and most people do not move away.

The immediate radius of the crime scene becomes a gathering and rallying point. The outer radius becomes a site for increased surveillance and, yes, brutality.

In 2020 protests formed spontaneously, for weeks. People forget that Chauvin was arrested and charged only after the 3rd Precinct burned. What you are seeing in that video is people who have been here before.

Two blocks from my home at about 12:20PM yesterday, ICE was using a parking lot for staging. I and about 30 others stood on the icy sidewalk and on snowbanks and blew our whistles to alert neighbors to their presence and drive them away. I was about 10 feet away from a CBP officer - again, this was the early afternoon, AFTER they murdered Renee Good - when he drew his weapon and pointed it at a Latina woman in her car, trying to get away after being pinned by ICE using their vehicles exactly as they accuse others of using them.

I blew my whistle and flipped him and his buddies off. My whistle gets up to 120db. They fucking hated it. They can barely communicate. My ears are still ringing today and I hope theirs are too.

The point of this is to say: get out there. Police brutality was already bad, this is a meaningful escalation that I fear could be a point of no return. Either federal agents with no legal authority over you can execute you at point blank range, with multiple witnesses and videos showing what happened, or they can't. There is no more egregious restriction of your rights. There is no clearer indication that fascism is here.

Trump's administration called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. One of his agents shot her point blank in the face. Stiff armed, clear eyed.

I can't tell other people what to do but I can describe what I am doing. ICE comes to town in large rentals, mostly with out of state plates. They drive like fucking psychopaths because they are trying to provoke confrontation. If you follow them on the sidewalk with your whistle, they smile like little bitches and drive away.

So.

No one can do everything but everyone can do something. Go and do it.

---

*ICE HAS NO LEGAL AUTHORITY OVER US CITIZENS. THERE IS NO ARGUMENT FOR PROBABLE CAUSE THAT A 37 YEAR OLD WHITE WOMAN WHO HAD BEEN WAVING ICE BY WAS ACTUALLY AN UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANT. This matters. The fact that police have trampled human rights for decades does not mean it doesn't matter when the federal government asserts authority over you that it straight up unambiguously does not have.

My understanding of how it went down:

Oh dear. This made me laugh, but not in the way it was intended.

Okay, I'm not going to get too much into the stuff with the creators of the shows. Except to say that it is absolutely not unprecedented for a studio to steal ideas from a rejected pitch and use them for a different project. There's no way to prove that happened here, but personally I think the details we do know are suspicious as hell.

No, it's the panel about the fans. Because that was not at all how the fans responded. There was an active, bitter fan war between the two fandoms. They *hated* each other.

Okay, to be fair, it's likely that the majority of fans either didn't care about the other show or enjoyed both. However, that doesn't change that other fans - from both shows - were very publicly engaging in trolling and harassment campaigns.

The reason why Majel Roddenberry guest stars as Lady Morella in season three of B5? It was an attempt to get the fans of both shows to calm the fuck down.

I know it probably doesn't seem like a big deal now, but it was intense at the time. It was pretty much impossible to be in fandom spaces for either show without eventually running into vitriol towards the other. And I remember for years, even after both shows had ended, feeling the need to tread carefully in fandom spaces. Like if you're hanging out with Trek fans, maybe don't bring up that you're a B5 fan? (I'd say and vice versa, but it was a little more complicated with DS9, since a contingent of Next Gen fans despised DS9. So you could be talking to a B5 fan who was also a Trek fan, but they would still get pissed off if you said you liked DS9. Ah, fandom.)

So yeah. It's nice to think that fans would just be excited to have two sci-fi shows on air, doing their own thing with similar concepts... But no, that is comically far from what actually happened.

but this IS how it went down in my brain, personally

Sometimes you will be a lesbian to your parents and a straight man to your partners parents and a gay man to your partner and a woman to your grandparents and out to your friends and stealth to your classmates and a nice young lady to the cashier at the coffee shop and then people on your computer will ask you to choose which of these identities you ACTUALLY are and which you are Appropriating The Oppression Of because don’t you know they contract each other. You can only be one thing solidly forever

"The postmark rule changed quietly, and it affects voting and healthcare. Let me explain what just happened at USPS, because this is not minor, and it's not theoretical.

So as of this week, the United States Postal Service clarified that a postmark date is no longer tied to when you drop your mail off; it's tied to when that mail is first processed by an automated facility. So, as an example, you could put something in the mailbox by Monday, but if it doesn't hit a sorting center until Wednesday, Wednesday becomes the postmark. That matters when deadlines are based on postmarks.

Think ballots. Many states say a mail-in ballot counts if it's postmarked by election day. Under this rule, you can mail your ballot before election day and still have it postmarked after. So that's not voter fraud, that's logistics quietly overruling intent.

So now let's talk healthcare, because this is where people really get hurt. Healthcare runs on mail deadlines, appeals, prior authorizations, Medicare notices, prescription paperwork. If an appeal has to be postmarked by a certain date, and USPS processes it days later, it looks late, so late appeals get denied. Denied appeals delay care. So in nursing and healthcare advocacy, timing is everything, and this rule shifts the risk from the institution back to the patient. The system didn't get faster, the rules just got tighter.

So if you're mailing anything time-sensitive now, ballots or healthcare documents, dropping it in a box is not enough. So this is what people need to do now:

Mail earlier than you think you should. Go inside the post office for deadline mail. Ask for a manual postmark or receipt. Use certified mail for appeals and legal documents, and do not rely on blue mailboxes for last week deadlines.

So this isn't panic, it's adjustment."

December 29, 2025 via cjnlegalnurse on Tiktok

Snopes has confirmed, and also links to a PDF of the update.

The good news: you can still take your mail in to the post office itself and request a manual postmark (free of charge) to ensure that it gets postmarked the day you drop it off in case you cut it close on a deadline, so not all hope is lost (just less convenient)