rysingsun

[rysingsun]

Ive said this before but swear the biggest skill to learn as an adult is how to resist high-pressure sales tactics. You do NOT have to answer questions with anything other than "Sorry I'm not interested." No matter how nice they are or no matter how many follow up questions they ask or even how agitated they get when you stand your ground. Just keep saying I'm not interested. Don't answer their questions. Don't give them an opening to try to push back on your reasons. Be a fucking brick wall of I'm not interested.

#adulting stuff

[rysingsun]

something i rarely see addressed on here in discussions of transmasculine bathroom issues is the difference between men's and women's rooms, and the way it excludes transmascs with vulvas.

I am a trans man pre-surgery of any kind. ideally i would like meta with UL, but for euphoria reasons primarily- STPs are expensive and a hassle, so i have no issue sitting to pee. i am 11 months on T and do not pass. using the women's room bothers me, but i live in the southern US so it's safer. i have no issue dealing with it to quickly piss and leave. what i do have an issue with, is when someplace claims to be trans inclusive, but in practice, is not.

i had a pretty awful night. my boyfriend and i had been planning to try out a local goth nightclub for weeks, and we finally got the chance to go. when walking in, there was a sign on the door that said "no racism, no homophobia, no transphobia..." etc. i was excited, thinking that i may actually be able to use the men's restroom for once! a few drinks in and the urge hit- i was feeling anxious, so i asked a staff member if it would be safe for me to use the men's room. "yes of course, we are very inclusive, there are plenty of trans people here." in i went and....

5 urinals, and one single stall- which was out of order.

i turned around and used the women's room. i had no choice. of course, there were 6 stalls in there.

this is not the first time i have experienced issues with men's rooms having a single stall- at a gay strip club, i ran into a similar problem, where the single stall in the men's room was not out of order, but instead, had a line of 20+ people. i, and a few other guys, opted to use the women's room instead of waiting (clearly this design flaw hurts cisgender men as well!)

men's rooms being built only with people with penises in mind, and often all but excluding anyone who needs a stall, is an issue that needs to be addressed far more often.

[rysingsun]

Since the r-slur is making a comeback (you know, the word that starts with R, has six letters, and ends in D), I'm gonna make a little PSA:

Yes, it's an ableist slur.

Terms like "asshat," "head-up-ass," "up their own ass," and "high on their own farts" exist. There's also words like crap, dogshit, half-assed, assclown, and chucklefuck. And on the less vulgar side, there are terms like ridiculous, nonsense, train wreck, pointless, insipid, self-absorbed, pretentious, annoying, boring, contemptible, vile, and disgusting.

Substituting words like restarted, poptarted, brain damaged, smoothbrain, etc. is still ableist, because either 1. you obviously still mean the r-word, or 2. you're still using disability as an insult.

#important

[rysingsun]

My anthro professor has three forbidden words for his essays: problematic, interesting, and large. Point being they’re all filler words, he wants you to just skip straight to why it’s interesting or why it’s problematic. But anyway, any time I disagree with him in class I say to him “mm, interesting, but largely problematic.”

#fggsdff #storytime

[rysingsun]

Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.

[rysingsun]

society really lost the war when dressing nice / slutty = “gay” “metrosexual” “is he 💅🏻”. we had decades of men wearing crop tops and short shorts without blinking an eye and now it’s ye ole pilgrim standards and talk of scandal if they show their knees

[rysingsun]

i really wish…i can share the warmth i feel when i’m at synagogue with other people at the least i want non-jews to hear our worship and how beautiful it is i think it would change a lot

#jewish stuff

[rysingsun]

to be honest its crazy to me people even entertain “kids shouldn’t be in public spaces” as like a legitimate point. like great thank you for your input anyway this is real life and we live in a society and people have children. your perspective is warped and misanthropic but most of all its just like laughably out of touch and unrealistic. you might as well be arguing that rain should be made of grape juice instead of water.

[rysingsun]

[rysingsun]

ngl I thought the puzzle piece as an autistic symbol meant like. I am a vital puzzle piece to your society. humans would never have invented half the things they did without us. you're telling me it means I'm missing something?? buddy. listen. listen to me reeeeaal closely. no human has all the pieces to humanity. no one. no one has all the features enables no one has all the strengths weaknesses or quirks. no one has a whole puzzle. we make the freaking complete picture together. that's the freaking point.

[rysingsun]

people who let me wake up to this get a special place in heaven. firefly_fox how does it feel to hold my life in ur hands....

#fanfic things

[rysingsun]

Anybody want to play hangman with me? Here's the word: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

#funny

[rysingsun]

Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

#sustainability stuff

[rysingsun]

#it’s going - i’m still alive so it wouldn’t be polite to complain but fuck #oh wait that was already listed #ye #‘good’ does genuinely mean good or at least not bad #the english language

[rysingsun]

in case you haven't thought about switching to firefox yet, here's an extension that will...

Notify you if a website you're on has employees that are on strike

Bypass paywalls for major news outlets like the New York Times

Change the browser theme based on the time of day

Directly install third party non-extension scripts

Save individual browser sessions to be reopened at any time

Use the TV format of YouTube in-browser

Make all chrome extensions compatible with Firefox

Turn YouTube dislikes back on

Fix Twitter and make it way less fucked up

Automatically remove trackers from URLs

And many more!

Feel free to add any other firefox extensions you think are slept on.

#free alternatives

[rysingsun]

a clip from my new comedy special (x)

#video #serotonin #funny #i was feeling a bit down and this video helped

[rysingsun]

the sigh of relief i let out after clicking on the last block of spoiler text