Ok, I’ve seen this sentiment before, but the amount of Kindle Unlimited ads I’ve been seeing is forcing me to repeat it-
Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.
Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.
Use your library. They want so badly to give you all of the things for free.
USE LIBBY. Most libraries work on Libby to play audiobooks and ebooks for free. All it takes is a library card, and it’s a free app!
“Listen to minority voices” is the baseline you should start with & maintain but eventually you are going to have to do your own research and form your own opinions because social demographics are not monolithic blocks. A lot of y'all have fallen into the trap of just blindly accepting whatever you heard most recently and thus trying to silence other minority voices that disagree with the token opinion you’ve picked up.
Like every time a cis tries to tell me that “Leaders in the transgender community said XYZ,” I always think of this:
[Image description: a Monty Python gif of the exchange “I am your king / I didn’t vote for you.” End image description]
This is especially important online. Soma y’all just read any old thing online and are like “yes, this is most certainly A Truth From The Speaker of Minority Truths when it’s actually just some idiot 14-year-old running their mouth.
Saving up to move as someone living paycheck to paycheck is … complicated, haha. So, once again, if anyone’s looking for a discounted art commission right now, I’m wide open for those and please feel free to DM me about one! My turnaround time is usually pretty quick and I’d be happy to draw you fanart, OCs, or both!
Bust - 15 USD
Half body - 30 USD
Full body - 45 USD
Additional characters are half price; payment accepted through PayPal or Ko-if. Anything else, feel free to ask and I’ll quote you a price!
What an autistic person says: “How long is it going to take?”
What they mean: “I want to know whether to activate my short term waiting mode where I just wait and do nothing else, or activate my long term waiting mode where I occupy my mind with something else. I fully understand that both are possibilities, and I have no problem whatsoever with either one, but I want more information so I can best adapt to the situation.”
What neurotypical people hear: “I am impatient and demand that everything I want happen right now. Please scold me and publicly humiliate me for it.”
most “protect the children” campaigns come with the implication that what’s best for children is 1950s white christian nuclear families and rigid adherence to the status quo, and having been a children I can definitively say that is very very incorrect
For reference: according to the Kansas Secretary of State’s office, a normal primary election (where this referendum was abnormally placed) draws around 450,000 voters.
This election drew 800,000.
When everyone votes, progressives win. And now you know why the GOP is hellbent on making it harder.
I love informing people that the song “Macarena” is about a girl named Macarena who’s implied to be sexually promiscuous and the reason they remember the chorus as being made up of nonsense words is because it’s in fucking Spanish and they haven’t heard it since they were ten. I love the look on their faces.
Asdfghjkl
@lwoorl i mean. feel free to go give it a listen because this doesn’t really describe the tone with which these lines are said but
I think Macarena cheated on her boyfriend while he was gone and had a threesome with a couple of his buddies. Like, good for her. I’m just saying. I have a feeling you’ve got The Look on your face lmao. (Can’t really comment on what the chorus means though because I don’t understand much Spanish, but I ran it through Google translate and uhhhh. I mean. Given the context of the English parts of the song. Good for her.)
I just want everyone to know that I asked my friends and family, and I can confirm, no one in Latin America knows what the song is about either. Because everyone only knows the chorus and many people believe the rest of the song is nonsense words because it’s in English. Truly a shared experience in the most hilarious possible way.
ASDFGHJKL truly ‘tis a song for everyone to enjoy incorrectly
meanwhile everyone with Auditory Processing Issues is over here like;
One of the most bizarrely cool people I’ve ever met was an oral surgeon who treated me after a ridiculous accident (that’s another story), Dr. Z.
Dr. Z. was, easily, the best and most competent doctor or dentist I’ve ever encountered – and after that accident, I encountered quite a number. He came stunningly highly recommended, had an excellent record, and the most calming bedside manner I’ve ever seen.
That last wasn’t the sweet gentle caretaking sort of manner, which some nurses have but you wouldn’t expect to see in a surgeon. No; when Dr. Z. told me that one of my broken molars was too badly damaged to save, and I (being seventeen and still moderately in shock) broke down crying, he stared at me incredulously and said, in a tone of utter bemusement, “But – I am very good.”
I stopped crying on the spot. In the last twenty-four hours or so of one doctor after another, no one had said anything that reassuring to me. He clearly just knew his own competence so well that the idea of someone being scared anyway was literally incomprehensible to him. What more could I possibly ask for?
(He was right. The procedure was very extended, because the tooth that needed to be removed was in bits, but there was zero pain at any point. And, as he promised, my teeth were so close together that they shifted to fill the gap to where there genuinely is none anymore, it’s just a little easier to floss on that side.)
But Dr. Z.’s insane competence wasn’t just limited to oral surgery.
When I met Dr. Z., he, like most doctors I’ve had, asked me if I was in college, and where, and what I was studying. When I say “math,” most doctors respond with “oh, wow, good for you” or possibly “what do you want to do with that after college?”
Dr. Z. wanted to know what kind of math.
I gave him the thirty-second layman’s summary that I give people who are foolish enough to ask that. He responded with “oh, you mean–” and the correct technical terms. I confirmed that was indeed what I meant (and keep in mind, this was upper-division college math, you don’t take this unless you’re a math major). He asked cogent follow-up questions, and there ensued ten or so minutes of what I’d call “small talk” except for how it was an intensely technical mathematical discussion.
He didn’t, as far as I can tell, have any kind of formal math background. He just … knew stuff.
I was a competitive fencer at this point in time, so when he asked if I had any questions about the surgery that would be necessary, I asked him if I’d be okay to fence while I had my jaw wired shut, or if it would interfere with breathing.
“Fencing?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “like swordfighting,” because this is another conversation I got to have a lot. (People assume they’ve misheard you, or occasionally they think you mean building fences.)
“Which weapon?”
“Uh. Foil.”
“No, it won’t be safe,” and he went off into an explanation of why.
Turns out, he was also a serious fencer – and, when I mentioned my fencing coach, an old friend of his. (I asked my fencing coach later, and, oh yes, Dr. Z., a good friend of mine, excellent fencer.) (My coach was French. Dr. Z. was Israeli. I never saw Dr. Z. around the club or anything. I have no idea how they knew each other.)
So this was weird enough that later, when I was home, I looked Dr. Z. up on Yelp. His reviews were stellar, of course, but that wasn’t the weird thing.
The weird thing was that the reviews were full of people – professionals in lots of different fields – saying the same thing: I went to Dr. Z. for oral surgery, and he asked me about what I did, and it turned out he knew all about my field and had a competent and educated discussion with me about the obscure technical details of such-and-such.
All sorts of different fields, saying this. Lawyers. Businessmen. Musicians.
As far as I can tell, it’s not that I just happened to be pursuing the two fields he had a serious amateur interest in – he just seemed to be extremely good at literally everything.
I have no explanation for this. Possibly he sold his soul to the devil.
