chocoholic-pigeon

Latest Posts by chocoholic-pigeon

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…

And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…

Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.

He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

2004 was an election year, and much like conservatives are whipping up anti-trans hysteria and anti-trans bills and propositions to drive out the vote today, in 2004 it was all anti-gay stuff. Specifically, preventing the evil scourge of same-sex marriage from destroying everything good and decent in the world.

Enter Gavin Newstrom. At the time, he was the newly elected mayor of San Francisco. Despite living next door to the city all my life, I hadn’t even heard of the man until Valentines Day 2004 when he announced that gay marriage was legal in San Francisco and started marrying people at city hall.

It was a political stunt. It was very obviously a political stunt. That shit was illegal, after all. But it was a very sweet political stunt. I still remember the front page photo of two ancient women hugging each other forehead to forehead and crying happy tears.

But it was only going to last for as long as it took for the California legal system to come in and make them knock it off.

The next day, we’re on the phone with an acquaintance, and she casually mentions that she’s surprised the two of us aren’t up at San Francisco getting married with everyone else.

“Everyone else?” Goes I, “I thought they would’ve shut that down already?”

“Oh no!” goes she, “The courts aren’t open until Tuesday. Presidents Day on Monday and all. They’re doing them all weekend long!”

We didn’t know because social media wasn’t a thing yet. I only knew as much about it as I’d read on CNN, and most of the blogs I was following were more focused on what bullshit President George W Bush was up to that day.

"Well shit", me and my man go, "do you wanna?" I mean, it’s a political stunt, it wont really mean anything, but we’re not going to get another chance like this for at least 20 years. Why not?

The next day, Sunday, we get up early. We drive north to the southern-most BART station. We load onto Bay Area Rapid Transit, and rattle back and forth all the way to the San Francisco City Hall stop.

We had slightly miscalculated.

Apparently, demand for marriages was far outstripping the staff they had on hand to process them. Who knew. Everyone who’d gotten turned away Saturday had been given tickets with times to show up Sunday to get their marriages done. My babe and I, we could either wait to see if there was a space that opened up, or come back the next day, Monday.

“Isn’t City Hall closed on Monday?” I asked. “It’s a holiday”

“Oh sure,” they reply, “but people are allowed to volunteer their time to come in and work on stuff anyways. And we have a lot of people who want to volunteer their time to have the marriage licensing offices open tomorrow.”

“Oh cool,” we go, “Backup.”

“Make sure you’re here if you do,” they say, “because the California Supreme Court is back in session Tuesday, and will be reviewing the motion that got filed to shut us down.”

And all this shit is super not-legal, so they’ll totally be shutting us down goes unsaid.

00000

We don’t get in Saturday. We wind up hanging out most of the day, though.

It’s… incredible. I can say, without hyperbole, that I have never experienced so much concentrated joy and happiness and celebration of others’ joy and happiness in all my life before or since. My face literally ached from grinning. Every other minute, a new couple was coming out of City Hall, waving their paperwork to the crowd and cheering and leaping and skipping. Two glorious Latina women in full Mariachi band outfits came out, one in the arms of another. A pair of Jewish boys with their families and Rabbi. One couple managed to get a Just Married convertible arranged complete with tin-cans tied to the bumper to drive off in. More than once I was giving some rice to throw at whoever was coming out next.

At some point in the mid-afternoon, there was a sudden wave of extra cheering from the several hundred of us gathered at the steps, even though no one was coming out. There was a group going up the steps to head inside, with some generic black-haired shiny guy at the front. My not-yet-husband nudged me, “That’s Newsom.” He said, because he knew I was hopeless about matching names and people.

Ooooooh, I go. That explains it. Then I joined in the cheers. He waved and ducked inside.

So dusk is starting to fall. It’s February, so it’s only six or so, but it’s getting dark.

“Should we just try getting in line for tomorrow -now-?” we ask.

“Yeah, I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.” One of the volunteers tells us. “We’re not allowed to have people hang out overnight like this unless there are facilities for them and security. We’d need Porta-Poties for a thousand people and police patrols and the whole lot, and no one had time to get all that organized. Your best bet is to get home, sleep, and then catch the first BART train up at 5am and keep your fingers crossed.

Monday is the last day to do this, after all.

00000

So we go home. We crash out early. We wake up at 4:00. We drive an hour to hit the BART station. We get the first train up. We arrive at City Hall at 6:30AM.

The line stretches around the entirety of San Francisco City Hall. You could toss a can of Coke from the end of the line to the people who’re up to be first through the doors and not have to worry about cracking it open after.

“Uh.” We go. “What the fuck is -this-?”

So.

Remember why they weren’t going to be able to have people hang out overnight?

Turns out, enough SF cops were willing to volunteer unpaid time to do patrols to cover security. And some anonymous person delivered over a dozen Porta-Poties that’d gotten dropped off around 8 the night before.

It’s 6:30 am, there are almost a thousand people in front of us in line to get this literal once in a lifetime marriage, the last chance we expect to have for at least 15 more years (it was 2004, gay rights were getting shoved back on every front. It was not looking good. We were just happy we lived in California were we at least weren’t likely to loose job protections any time soon.).

Then it starts to rain.

We had not dressed for rain.

00000

Here is how the next six hours go.

We’re in line. Once the doors open at 7am, it will creep forward at a slow crawl. It’s around 7 when someone shows up with garbage bags for everyone. Cut holes for the head and arms and you’ve got a makeshift raincoat! So you’ve got hundreds of gays and lesbians decked out in the nicest shit they could get on short notice wearing trashbags over it.

Everyone is so happy.

Everyone is so nervous/scared/frantic that we wont be able to get through the doors before they close for the day.

People online start making delivery orders.

Coffee and bagels are ordered in bulk and delivered to City Hall for whoever needs it. We get pizza. We get roses. Random people come by who just want to give hugs to people in line because they’re just so happy for us. The tour busses make detours to go past the lines. Chinese tourists lean out with their cameras and shout GOOD LUCK while car horns honk.

A single sad man holding a Bible tries to talk people out of doing this, tells us all we’re sinning and to please don’t. He gives up after an hour. A nun replaces him with a small sign about how this is against God’s will. She leaves after it disintegrates in the rain.

The day before, when it was sunny, there had been a lot of protestors. Including a large Muslim group with their signs about how “Not even DOGS do such things!” Which… Yes they do.

A lot of snide words are said (by me) about how the fact that we’re willing to come out in the rain to do this while they’re not willing to come out in the rain to protest it proves who actually gives an actual shit about the topic.

Time passes. I measure it based on which side of City Hall we’re on. The doors face East. We start on Northside. Coffee and trashbags are delivered when we’re on the North Side. Pizza first starts showing up when we’re on Westside, which is also where I see Bible Man and Nun. Roses are delivered on Southside. And so forth.

00000

We have Line Neighbors.

Ahead of us are a gay couple a decade or two older than us. They’ve been together for eight years. The older one is a school teacher. He has his coat collar up and turns away from any news cameras that come near while we reposition ourselves between the lenses and him. He’s worried about the parents of one of his students seeing him on the news and getting him fired. The younger one will step away to get interviewed on his own later on. They drove down for the weekend once they heard what was going on. They’d started around the same time we did, coming from the Northeast, and are parked in a nearby garage.

The most perky energetic joyful woman I’ve ever met shows up right after we turned the corner to Southside to tackle the younger of the two into a hug. She’s their local friend who’d just gotten their message about what they’re doing and she will NOT be missing this. She is -so- happy for them. Her friends cry on her shoulders at her unconditional joy.

Behind us are a lesbian couple who’d been up in San Francisco to celebrate their 12th anniversary together. “We met here Valentines Day weekend! We live down in San Diego, now, but we like to come up for the weekend because it’s our first love city.”

“Then they announced -this-,” the other one says, “and we can’t leave until we get married. I called work Sunday and told them I calling in sick until Wednesday.”

“I told them why,” her partner says, “I don’t care if they want to give me trouble for it. This is worth it. Fuck them.”

My husband-to-be and I look at each other. We’ve been together for not even two years at this point. Less than two years. Is it right for us to be here? We’re potentially taking a spot from another couple that’d been together longer, who needed it more, who deserved it more.”

“Don’t you fucking dare.” Says the 40-something gay couple in front of us.

“This is as much for you as it is for us!” says the lesbian couple who’ve been together for over a decade behind us.

“You kids are too cute together,” says the gay couple’s friend. “you -have- to. Someday -you’re- going to be the old gay couple that’s been together for years and years, and you deserve to have been married by then.”

We stay in line.

It’s while we’re on the Southside of City Hall, just about to turn the corner to Eastside at long last that we pick up our own companions. A white woman who reminds me an awful lot of my aunt with a four year old black boy riding on her shoulders. “Can we say we’re with you? His uncles are already inside and they’re not letting anyone in who isn’t with a couple right there.” “Of course!” we say.

The kid is so very confused about what all the big deal is, but there’s free pizza and the busses keep driving by and honking, so he’s having a great time.

We pass by a statue of Lincoln with ‘Marriage for All!’ and "Gay Rights are Human Rights!" flags tucked in the crooks of his arms and hanging off his hat.

It’s about noon, noon-thirty when we finally make it through the doors and out of the rain.

They’ve promised that anyone who’s inside when the doors shut will get married. We made it. We’re safe.

We still have a -long- way to go.

00000

They’re trying to fit as many people into City Hall as possible. Partially to get people out of the rain, mostly to get as many people indoors as possible. The line now stretches down into the basement and up side stairs and through hallways I’m not entirely sure the public should ever be given access to. We crawl along slowly but surely.

It’s after we’ve gone through the low-ceiling basement hallways past offices and storage and back up another set of staircases and are going through a back hallway of low-ranked functionary offices that someone comes along handing out the paperwork. “It’s an hour or so until you hit the office, but take the time to fill these out so you don’t have to do it there!”

We spend our time filling out the paperwork against walls, against backs, on stone floors, on books.

We enter one of the public areas, filled with displays and photos of City Hall Demonstrations of years past.

I take pictures of the big black and white photo of the Abraham Lincoln statue holding banners and signs against segregation and for civil rights.

The four year old boy we helped get inside runs past us around this time, chased by a blond haired girl about his own age, both perused by an exhausted looking teenager helplessly begging them to stop running.

Everyone is wet and exhausted and vibrating with anticipation and the building-wide aura of happiness that infuses everything.

The line goes into the marriage office. A dozen people are at the desk, shoulder to shoulder, far more than it was built to have working it at once.

A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence is directing people to city officials the moment they open up. She’s done up in her nun getup with all her makeup on and her beard is fluffed and be-glittered and on point. “Oh, I was here yesterday getting married myself, but today I’m acting as your guide. Number 4 sweeties, and -Congradulatiooooons!-“

The guy behind the counter has been there since six. It’s now 1:30. He’s still giddy with joy. He counts our money. He takes our paperwork, reviews it, stamps it, sends off the parts he needs to, and hands the rest back to us. “Alright, go to the Rotunda, they’ll direct you to someone who’ll do the ceremony. Then, if you want the certificate, they’ll direct you to -that- line.” “Can’t you just mail it to us?” “Normally, yeah, but the moment the courts shut us down, we’re not going to be allowed to.”

We take our paperwork and join the line to the Rotunda.

If you’ve seen James Bond: A View to a Kill, you’ve seen the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda. There are literally a dozen spots set up along the balconies that overlook the open area where marriage officials and witnesses are gathered and are just processing people through as fast as they can.

That’s for the people who didn’t bring their own wedding officials.

There’s a Catholic-adjacent couple there who seem to have brought their entire families -and- the priest on the main steps. They’re doing the whole damn thing. There’s at least one more Rabbi at work, I can’t remember what else. Just that there was a -lot-.

We get directed to the second story, northside. The San Francisco City Treasurer is one of our two witnesses. Our marriage officient is some other elected official I cannot remember for the life of me (and I'm only writing down what I can actively remember, so I can't turn to my husband next to me and ask, but he'll have remembered because that's what he does.)

I have a wilting lily flower tucked into my shirt pocket. My pants have water stains up to the knees. My hair is still wet from the rain, I am blubbering, and I can’t get the ring on my husband’s finger. The picture is a treat, I tell you.

There really isn’t a word for the mix of emotions I had at that time. Complete disbelief that this was reality and was happening. Relief that we’d made it. Awe at how many dozens of people had personally cheered for us along the way and the hundreds to thousands who’d cheered for us generally.

Then we're married.

Then we get in line to get our license.

It’s another hour. This time, the line goes through the higher stories. Then snakes around and goes past the doorway to the mayor’s office.

Mayor Newsom is not in today. And will be having trouble getting into his office on Tuesday because of the absolute barricade of letters and flowers and folded up notes and stuffed animals and City Hall maps with black marked “THANK YOU!”s that have been piled up against it.

We make it to the marriage records office.

I take a picture of my now husband standing in front of a case of the marriage records for 1902-1912. Numerous kids are curled up in corners sleeping. My own memory is spotty. I just know we got the papers, and then we’re done with lines. We get out, we head to the front entrance, and we walk out onto the City Hall steps.

It's almost 3PM.

00000

There are cheers, there’s rice thrown at us, there are hundreds of people celebrating us with unconditional love and joy and I had never before felt the goodness that exists in humanity to such an extent. It’s no longer raining, just a light sprinkle, but there are still no protestors. There’s barely even any news vans.

We make our way through the gauntlet, we get hands shaked, people with signs reading ”Congratulations!” jump up and down for us. We hit the sidewalks, and we begin to limp our way back to the BART station.

I’m at the BART station, we’re waiting for our train back south, and I’m sitting on the ground leaning against a pillar and in danger of falling asleep when a nondescript young man stops in front of me and shuffles his feet nervously. “Hey. I just- I saw you guys, down at City Hall, and I just… I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud of what you could do. I’m- I’m just really glad, glad you could get to do this.”

He shakes my hand, clasps it with both of his and shakes it. I thank him and he smiles and then hurries away as fast as he can without running.

Our train arrives and the trip south passes in a semilucid blur.

We get back to our car and climb in.

It’s 4:30 and we are starving.

There’s a Carls Jr near the station that we stop off at and have our first official meal as a married couple. We sit by the window and watch people walking past and pick out others who are returning from San Francisco. We're all easy to pick out, what with the combination of giddiness and water damage.

We get home about 6-7. We take the dog out for a good long walk after being left alone for two days in a row. We shower. We bundle ourselves up. We bury ourselves in blankets and curl up and just sort of sit adrift in the surrealness of what we’d just done.

We wake up the next day, Tuesday, to read that the California State Supreme Court has rejected the petition to shut down the San Francisco weddings because the paperwork had a misplaced comma that made the meaning of one phrase unclear.

The State Supreme Court would proceed to play similar bureaucratic tricks to drag the process out for nearly a full month before they have nothing left and finally shut down Mayor Newsom’s marriages.

My parents had been out of state at the time at a convention. They were flying into SFO about the same moment we were walking out of City Hall. I apologized to them later for not waiting and my mom all but shook me by the shoulders. “No! No one knew that they’d go on for so long! You did what you needed to do! I’ll just be there for the next one!”

00000

It was just a piece of paper. Legally, it didn’t even hold any weight thirty days later. My philosophy at the time was “marriage really isn’t that important, aside from the legal benefits. It’s just confirming what you already have.”

But maybe it’s just societal weight, or ingrained culture, or something, but it was different after. The way I described it at the time, and I’ve never really come up with a better metaphor is, “It’s like we were both holding onto each other in the middle of the ocean in the middle of a storm. We were keeping each other above water, we were each other’s support. But then we got this piece of paper. And it was like the ground rose up to meet our feet. We were still in an ocean, still in the middle of a storm, but there was a solid foundation beneath our feet. We still supported each other, but there was this other thing that was also keeping our heads above the water.

It was different. It was better. It made things more solid and real.

I am forever grateful for all the forces and all the people who came together to make it possible. It’s been twenty years and we’re still together and still married.

We did a domestic partnership a year later to get the legal paperwork. We’d done a private ceremony with proper rings (not just ones grabbed out of the husband’s collection hours before) before then. And in 2008, we did a legal marriage again.

Rushed. In a hurry. Because there was Proposition 13 to be voted on which would make them all illegal again if it passed.

It did, but we were already married at that point, and they couldn’t negate it that time.

Another few years after that, the Supreme Court finally threw up their hands and said "Fine! It's been legal in places and nothing's caught on fire or been devoured by locusts. It's legal everywhere. Shut up about it!"

And that was that.

00000

When I was in highschool, in the late 90s, I didn’t expect to see legal gay marriage until I was in my 50s. I just couldn’t see how the American public as it was would ever be okay with it.

I never expected to be getting married within five years. I never expected it to be legal nationwide before I’d barely started by 30s. I never thought I’d be in my 40s and it’d be such a non-issue that the conservative rabble rousers would’ve had to move onto other wedge issues altogether.

I never thought that I could introduce another man as my husband and absolutely no one involved would so much as blink.

I never thought I’d live in this world.

And it’s twenty years later today. I wonder how our line buddies are doing. Those babies who were running around the wide open rooms playing tag will have graduated college by now. The kids whose parents the one line-buddy was worried would see him are probably married too now. Some of them to others of the same gender.

I don’t have some greater message to make with all this. Other then, culture can shift suddenly in ways you can’t predict. For good or ill. Mainly this is just me remembering the craziest fucking 36 hours of my life twenty years after the fact and sharing them with all of you.

The future we’re resigned to doesn’t have to be the one we live in. Society can shift faster than you think. The unimaginable of twenty years ago is the baseline reality of today.

And always remember that the people who want to get married will show up by the thousands in rain that none of those who’re against it will brave.

LGBT people, I need you to know that any “pedophile execution bill” passed in the US is meant to put you, personally, to death. When the right says “groomer,” they’re talking about you. When they say “predator,” they’re talking about you. When they say “pedophile,” they’re talking about you. Any actual child sex abusers who are convicted and executed would be, to them, a happy accident, a cherry on top of a law that’s meant to exterminate anyone who deviates from the cisgender, heterosexual norm.

this blog hates donald trump

Look how many people hate him. I’m pretty damn happy about that 😁😁😁😁😁😁

POV: mister Devon Price, PhD, telling me that I am right about everything

Source: Unmasking Autism, discovering the new faces of neurodiversity

Donald Trump gets attacked by an eagle.

This eagle truly represents America. What a majestic symbol.

In regards of the Trump government scraping all trans inclusion in its queer information portion of its websites I have made this thing. Spread the word. Don't let them pretend we never existed.

P.S: Don't like! Reblog! <3

EDIT: Well this got a lot of attention! I got a few users asking to print or repost my art and I am unimaginably grateful to everyone's interest, especially since it's a really simple drawing I made on a whim haha! Anyone who is looking to print these out to hang or hand out or repost on another platform is free to do so, although I ask you to credit me and let people know it's from my Tumblr profile! If anyone wishes to do anything else with my art or post and wants to clarify what I consent to then they can message me privately and I'll explain! <333 all my love to my queer siblings

Okay all -- few quick thoughts about the Elon Muskifying of the government, especially the takeover of the Treasury and associated financial data for every single US citizen and organization, that we are learning about in detail today.

Don't panic. This sounds bad, because it is bad. It's really, really bad. It's outrageously fascist bad. But we've still gotta take a deep breath and get through it.

This is the kind of shock-and-awe exercise of untrammeled fascist power where they are absolutely counting on gleefully terrorizing, paralyzing, and stunning you into mounting no resistance, or just giving up and giving in. They are literally live-tweeting it in real time and boasting about all the access and influence they have right now. They want you to know about it and feel like you can't do anything, so you might as well let it happen.

We have to show them that's not true.

TIME TO MAKE SOME NOISE. Because it's Sunday night, I've gone ahead and contacted my state Attorney General and both senators by email (but come Monday morning, we should all be calling). Here is the email that I wrote to my AG:

Dear Mr. [AG],

As you will be aware, today (February 2, 2025) the Trump administration has granted wide-ranging access to sensitive US Treasury data, including the personal and private information of [state] citizens, to Elon Musk's so-called "Department of Government Efficiency." Musk is an unelected private citizen who has no legal right to access this data, and is engaging in extensive intimidation and coercion to fulfill his personal and harmful ideological agenda. The present and material harm that this causes to US citizens, [state] residents, and basic laws of government, privacy, and financial security is direct, unconscionable, and actionable. I strongly urge you, in your capacity as [state] Attorney General, to file direct suit against the Trump administration, Elon Musk, the "DOGE" office, and any identifiable individuals who have taken part in this action, in order to protect consumer data, citizen privacy, and basic faith and trust in government.

All the best,

[Qqueenofhades]

Short! To the point! Doesn't waste time, tells him what I want him to do, how Elmo's nonsense directly harms the residents of my state, and why he should take action to stop it! And frankly, given how on-the-ball blue-state AGs have been thus far, they're probably already working on it. You are very welcome to copy-and-paste this message and fill in your AG's last name and your state as appropriate. Super easy to do. Takes five minutes. Call tomorrow.

If you are in a red state, your voice is particularly important right now. The Trumpsters are counting on and are even emboldened by blue state pushback, but you really need to make it start coming from Republican strongholds. Congressional Republicans will only feel the slightest amount of unease about docilely enabling this BS when it starts threatening their own personal power. Hit them where it hurts.

Other lawsuits are coming. Marc Elias, Democratic lawyer extraordinaire, is well aware of this situation and has noted on Bluesky that more lawsuits are in the works. He often wins his cases. This does not mean that you shouldn't loudly make noise elsewhere, but please remember that this is one of those 24-hour periods where, as noted, they are counting on demoralizing you with a nonstop blizzard of bullshit. It does not say anything about how this will play out long-term or the opposition that can and will be mobilized to stop it.

Once again: courage. Take the small steps that you can do today. Then take a breath and get off social media for a little while. Try to take the long view. One step at a time, we will get through this.

Courage.

These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

Spread their names!

(Also doing a fake hick voice is gross.)

[In the interest of post length, I'm not including all of the subthreads - you can read this thread starting here if you have a BlueSky login:

]

[Spider's note: yes, she means the House version of the bill, HR 28.]

MSNBC.com

Opinion | The oppressive goal at the top of Speaker Mike Johnson’s to-do list

Making Democrats look bad by defending trans women — or look bad by not defending trans women — isn’t Republicans’ end goal here.

Who makes the porn bots. Where do they come from. What do they hope to achieve.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Normalize this response

medically accurate muscle chart:

“When the handle has snapped off the basket that held all your eggs…” gone girl tier monologue

Do not let them erase this. Do not let them tell you he meant "my heart goes out for you."

This man is the grandson of a Canadian Nazi sympathizer who moved to South Africa BECAUSE he thought the apartheid was just the coolest.

He has a gaggle of kids specifically because he believes his genes are superior and need to be spread to improve humanity.

He has thrown his support behind the neonazi party in Germany and the far right party in the UK, not to mention how far he's wormed up the ass of the Republican party.

He threw two sieg heil salutes back to back at the inauguration of the president of the United States and is trying to scrub the evidence off the internet.

Elon Reeve Musk is a fucking Nazi.

What to do if you find yourself homless- written by someone who has actually been homeless

Most important: Spend the money you have on a motel. Churches probably will not actually help and shelters can be dangerous or turn you away. At a motel you have free breakfast, access to running water, and a lockable place to sleep. Do not waste money on a gym membership like the popular version of this post says to do, YMCA memberships are like $40.

2. Contact family and friends. Now is not the time to worry about being a burden. Your survival and safety comes first and that is all that matters, anyone worth having in your life will agree.

3. Start a gofundme. Even if someone can’t offer you a place to stay, they might be willing to toss out $5 so you can eat today.

4. Libraries have free wifi. Apply to any and all jobs you can think of if you aren’t already working.

5. Any home is a good home. Even if it’s a dingy apartment in a bad neighborhood. If its cheap and you can afford it, snatch it up. 

6. Pancake mix and peanut butter are filling, cheap, and last a long time.

PLEASE SHARE THE FUCK OUT OF THIS

we need to step away from viewing marriage as inherently romantic, or the primary goal of romance. marriage is a legal contract we use to create important ties--financial, medical, next-of-kin, mediating shared property and parental rights. the details vary a lot based on where you are and what paperwork you sign. which is not very romantic! but it does have many real-world effects on our ability to share our lives with our partners.

first and foremost, marriage is a legal right we use to build and protect our families, whatever that family may look like

I grit my teeth and read the entire executive order regarding trans people, and I just want to take the opportunity to remind folks not to forget intersex people. One of the rescinded documents is “Supporting Intersex Students: A Resource for Students, Families, and Educators," and there is a huge emphasis on legally enshrining "only two sexes."

Yes, this affects trans people, but with the way intersex voices often get ignored in trans spaces, I just want to remind folks not to shut us out. Don't forget us. Don't keep talking over us. Don't act like we aren't on the front lines. Don't act like this is just about you. Please.

genuinely so scary that you can't access the page on the ssc website that guides you through changing your sex designation. so so fucking scary. they are already making our lives harder. they are already taking what little resources we have.

How to Ditch Amazon

Support your local libraries and the small businesses that are actually making the products you want.  Fuck Jeff Bezos and the systemic, universal worker abuse, gaslighting, and brutality they live off of.