a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck near the southwest part of haiti. there are hundreds of casualties and the number will probably rise. this is reminiscent of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010 that caused widespread devastation.
those that remember the 2010 earthquake also remember the responses by the un and the red cross, each a callous disregard for the haitian people.
despite the donations of roughly $500 million given to the red cross for rebuilding after the 2010 earthquake, only 7 houses in haiti were built. the red cross never even said where the money went.
additionally, after the earthquake, haiti suffered an outbreak of cholera. this cholera was brought to haiti by the un, something that took them more than 5 years to admit and killed more than 10000 people.
all of this is to say, do not donate to the red cross, the un, the clinton foundation or usaid. there will be those who say that these are reputable organizations with which to trust your money, but don’t fall for it. these imperialist organizations failed and caused suffering in haiti and should be met with suspicion when they ask for your money.
instead, focus your support on the actual haitian people and organizations run on the ground by haitians in haiti, not ngos organized without any connection to the country. support haitians in the diaspora to support their families back in haiti. one example of a trusted organization is the haiti emergency relief fund supported by the haiti information project, they work directly with organizations in okay (les cayes) that were impacted by the earthquake. send $$$ there or to other trusted anti-imperialist orgs before any kind of usaid type of situation.
Use dishwashing gloves. Get yourself a pair of nice ones that are made of thick latex and soft on the inside if you can. This will minimize the bad sensory experience of touching gross wet food, and you’ll be able to use the hottest water possible, which makes cleaning easier.
If you are sensitive to smells, use unscented dish soap, or a dish soap that has a smell you like.
Instead of filling up the entire sink with water, only fill up individual dishes with water. For example, fill up a mug with hot water, and put the cutlery inside to soak. Fill up bowls with hot water and stack them on top of each other. You get the benefits of soaking without the incredible inconvenience of turning your kitchen sink into a filthy pond of gross, stagnant water.
Get yourself a sponge with a handle on it, one of those that come with a reservoir for soap. Fill it up with dish soap and keep it in your bathtub or shower. That way, whenever you’re showering, you can use that opportunity to give your bathtub or shower a quick scrub.
Set your timer for 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever you can handle. Then do the thing (you know, that thing you don’t feel like doing) for the duration of this self-alloted time. And once the time has passed, you reward yourself, because you fucking deserve it. Example rewards: watching an episode of your favourite TV show, reading a good novel, etc. It helps to also set a timer for the reward. I often alternate 20 minutes of watching an episode of a TV show, with 20 minutes of doing a chore. This is an adaptation of the 20/10 idea from Unfuck Your Habitat.
If you can’t handle taking out the garbage until later (for whatever reason), double-bag it so that it doesn’t stink up your apartment and leak garbage juice. Yeah yeah, it’s wasteful, you’re using two garbage bags…look, who cares. Better to use twice as many garbage bags than live in an apartment that smells like garbage.
Use an app that gamifies your to-do list, such as Habitica (I might make a separate post with app recommendations).
"In the 70s it was black and minority ethnic people, in the 80s it was gay people, trans people are just the latest to get it in the neck from comedians who can't be bothered to try at their jobs anymore. I cannot stand there and watch another dogshit comedian go: 'Ooohh if a woman can identify as a man, maybe I'll identify as a chair!' Why don't you identify as good comedians, you hack motherfuckers?!"
- Nish Kumar: "It's In Your Nature To Destroy Yourselves pt.2"
someone reading this has the need and ability to schedule an appointment with a doctor and has not scheduled it
someone reading this might not even realize they are experiencing symptoms of treatable illness
someone reading this thinks everyone else is exhausted or in pain or numb or uncomfortable or struggling every single day
someone reading this has gotten mad at people in their life for saying they should talk to a doctor
someone reading this is scared of the worst case scenario, so they refuse to even try
someone reading has a treatable condition that may get worse the longer they wait to get that treatment
someone reading this has a condition that is relatively easy to diagnose and treat, if they would just talk to a doctor
someone reading this can still be saved, if only I could say the right words this time
hey
you know what? I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but I am actually still very upset that we never got to see John Boyega give an impassioned speech to an army of hostile stormtroopers, and partway through the speech just one trooper lays her blaster down and takes her helmet off, and by the end Finn has won them over and they all take their helmets off as the music swells, which signifies their change of allegiance and also reminds us the audience that underneath all those indistinguishable white helmets are people with faces and personalities and hopes and dreams and connections to the Force, people who will be led by one of their own as they rise up in rebellion against the fascist empire that treated them like interchangeable cannon fodder.
we should have had that in a movie! and we didn’t! and I’m still mad about it!
United Indians of All Tribes now has an online radio station that plays mostly music by native artists, you can listen here
To my uk trans people and allies out there.
Its come to my attention that a lot of people do not know how to deal with a hot car in summer. A lot of people will get back to their car, after hours of it being parked in the full sun, and will open the door to be blasted in the face with furnace-level temperatures, and you'll just clamber in and shut the doors and leave the windows closed and you'll start driving that thing, and you'll wait for the air-conditioning to battle and overcome the heat.
Thats. Insane to me.
The inside of a car can get up to 40°C/104°F hotter than the outside temperature. Why would anyone get inside that????? It's gonna take your air-conditioning at least half an hour to combat that and bring the temperature down to something even remotely reasonable, and in the meantime you're sitting there risking heatstroke.
Now, I understand that it's currently winter in the northern hemisphere, which is where most of this site lives, but a) I'm in the southern hemisphere and today was Lots Of Degrees, and b) y'all should read this now and commit it to memory or queue it to reblog in summer or whatever, because it boggles my mind that some of you get into a car whose interior is literally oven-hot.
So!!!! Some tips!!!!!
Get a sun visor. One of the big ones that goes inside your windshield. You will not believe how much cooler those things keep your car. Get one, use it. Leave it to bounce around in your back-seat on cooler days, but have it on hand for the stinkers. They range in price but two-dollar stores usually have them for pretty cheap.
Leave the windows of your car cracked open. It doesn't have to be much. Literally just the tiniest amount will mean that the heat building inside your car has a way to escape, meaning the interior temp will naturally be kept lower. The larger the opening, the better, but depending on the neighbourhood you're parking in, maybe it would be better to have them open just a sliver. Even the tiniest crack will help. Ever tried warming up an oven with the door open? It doesn't work well. This is the same concept. If there is a way for the hot air to escape, the inside of your car will stay a lot cooler than it otherwise would have.
If you're fancy enough to have an openable sunroof (that's the dream) then leave that open a bit as well.
Youve just gotten back to your car and opened the door, and its hot as fuck in there. Open another door, ideally on the other side of the car, and let the hot air escape. If you can open all four doors and the boot, then thats even better. A bunch of the hot air will flush out. Not all!!! But a lot. Give it anywhere from a few moments to a few minutes, depending on how much of a hurry you're in.
Get in, start the car, open all the windows. Yes, even if you hate having the windows open.
Put the air-conditioning on full blast, and make sure the recycle is turned OFF. This means it pulls fresh air from outside the car (hot, but less hot than inside) and pumps that into the car, further displacing the heat inside the vehicle.
Start driving, still with the windows down. Once you get up enough speed, the force of the air from outside coming in will blast the rest of the excess heat out of the car.
The temp inside the car will now be roughly equivalent to the temp outside the car. Still hot!!!! But MAJORLY less so, and majority more handle-able by your air-conditioner.
Put all your windows up, and switch the air-con over to recycle. This means it takes the air in the car and cools it, then spits it back into the car, meaning that with each cycle, the air gets progressively cooler a lot faster.
If you do this, your car will be a hell of a lot more comfortable a hell of a lot sooner than it would be if you got into a 60°C/140°F cabin and just.... endured that, until your aircon could overcome it.
This post has been brought to you by an Australian who knows not one but TWO people who get into 60°C cars and wait 15 to 30 minutes for their car to drop back down to a temperature that's even REMOTELY tolerable.
Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.
here's some more unsolicited adult advice as someone in her 30s who knows there are a lot of twenty somethings and teens that follow her: if you're trying to build a new habit you really want, and are struggling, you have to break it down to the smallest building block possible. If you're failing, you haven't thought small enough. I know it's possible to hear stories of people who just snapped into new life mode one day by "just deciding", but truly what's happening there is a confluence of events and experiences that force the brain into some sort of epiphany. You cannot will an epiphany. It'll never work. For most times of your life, you will need to build habits intentionally, and that means not working against yourself and to set micro goals. like laughably tiny goals. because once that easy tiny goal is met, you can build off it, tiny goal after tiny goal until you reach your big goal.
so for example, if you want to be a morning person that gets up at ass crack dawn so that you can work out, eat brekkie, shower, and get to work at a leisurely pace, and you're not that person because you will hit your snooze button 800 times, you have to get the big picture goal out of your head. think smaller. "I want to get up 15 minutes earlier than I normally do." If you can't do that, make it 5 minutes. "I want to cook breakfast every day" hell no too big. "I want to eat something, anything, before I leave the house" hell yeah, fantastic. When you go to the grocery store to make sure there are things in the house for breakfast, if you keep buying bagels and microwave sandwiches that you ignore, you gotta think smaller. SMALLER. What's something so easy to eat that you'll never say no to. Is it a yogurt? Is it a handful of grapes? Is it a hostess ho ho? is it hot cheetos? FORGET the big picture of the fantasy put-together woman preparing a full nutritious meal that you'd be proud to admit to. Think only of the smallest goal you can achieve. If you know you can't say no to an ice cream sandwich, put a ton of ice cream sandwiches in your freezer and have one for breakfast every day until it's so instilled in you that you gotta get up to eat something you can start diversifying.
It sounds like, from the lack of habit place, that must take forever. But really it doesn't take too long to form the habit once the discipline kicks in. the trick is that you have to give your brain something easy to become disciplined to. If it's too hard, think easier and smaller. No one has to know. Literally no one in the gd world has to know that for 4 weeks when you were 22 you had an ice cream sandwich for breakfast every day. who cares. If it gets you eating oatmeal with fresh fruit in a few months who cares. you did it, yay. smaller, easier. if you can't do it, think smaller and easier. smaller!! EASIER!!! You are not thinking smaller and easier enough. break your brain thinking how small and easy you can go. SMALLER. EVEN SMALLER, SIS.
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