kodoandsangha

[kodoandsangha]

She was called Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that brought her, and Wheatley, which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal.

In Boston, the slave traders put her up for sale: “She's 7 years old! She will be a good mare!”

At thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At the age of twenty, Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs.

She had to recite passages from Virgil and Milton and some verses from the Bible, and she also had to vow that the poems she had composed were not copied. From a chair, she underwent her lengthy examination, until the court approved her: she was a woman, she was Black, she was enslaved, but she was a poet.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.

✍🏾: Black History Studies

#writers #poets #phillis wheatley #blacktumblr #black history #black liberation #african history

[kodoandsangha]

"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

[kodoandsangha]

[alt id] A Twitter post that reads going with a female friend to get her car MOT'd. I love this. We do it every year. They ignore her entirely and talk to me, since I'm a Man. I know nothing about cars. She, however, was for many years the Chief Mechanic of a Formula One racing team. She will pick her moment. [/end alt]

#girl power #for the girls #girl core

[kodoandsangha]

[kodoandsangha]

Project 2025 and how they're going to strip healthcare from everyone

I know everyone is focused on Gaza. The genocide happening there is unconscionable.

But, back here, in the States, where most of us live, there's this. This is the plan starting January 1. This is just ONE section - Health and Human Services.

I'm currently involved in a grassroots project to present the entirety of the 923 pages in this form to get the information out. Their plan is literally Gilead.

I want to be clear that nowhere in their policies, goals and rhetoric does it account for what happens to all of us when these things happen.

Summary

Scary vague thing:

Investigate, expose, and remediate any instances in which HHS violated people’s rights by:

Colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions during COVID

Colluding with abortion advocates and LGBT advocates to violate conscience-protection laws and the Hyde Amendment

P. 488

Public health entities (CDC, NIH, ACL, OASH)

Can’t prescribe any behavior (meaning masking/quarantine would never have happened) (454)

Can’t use fetal cells for research (454, 461)

No mask/vaccine mandates in hospitals (475)

LGBTQ

CDC - No data collection on gender identity (456)

Medicare - No national coverage determination for Gender Reassignment Surgery (474)

Allow discrimination

in healthcare

Reverse ACA’s prohibition on discrimination against gender identity and sexual orientation in health programs/activities (475)

Withdraw Ryan White guidance (aims at reducing barriers to HIV care, medication, and support for transgender people living with HIV) (485)

OASH will withdraw support for gender-affirming care (490)

Allow LGBTQ folks to be discriminated against in healthcare (remove Biden protections - 495) and intend to have the DOJ bring the discrimination protections to the supreme court (496) which could potentially set a precedent.

In adoption (477)

Possibly take children away from LGBTQ couples if they didn’t conceive them? “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them” (489)

Prioritize faith-based education programs & grants (that don’t acknowledge LGBTQ folks’ existence) (480, 481)

Reproductive rights

Programs/education

CDC - Implies the Division of Reproductive Health and the 6|18 initiative will be cut (454)

Fewer doctors trained in abortions - Make abortion training opt-in rather than opt-out in all medical schools (485)

No “approved curriculum” or “evidence-based lists” in Teen Pregnancy Prevention or Personal Responsibility Education Programs (477)

Deal with STDs and unwanted pregnancy by focusing on abstinence and strengthening marriage (490)

Remove the experts - Install pro-life advocates in the Health Resources & Services Administration advisory committee (who makes the mandates around abortion) and cut ties with American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (484)

eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force (489)

Foreign aid - Require foreign non-government orgs to certify that they wouldn’t perform/promote abortion as a condition of receiving funding. (493)

Protections

Remove protections from the woman and enforce protections for born-alive infants (including criminal consequences) (474)

Make it harder for people to understand how/where their protected health information is protected (rescind guidance - 497)

Drug/contraception access

FDA - Reverse approval of chemical abortion drugs (458)

Limit pills to 49 days gestation, in-person dispensing, report all adverse events (459)

Reduce access to contraception - Allow insurance providers to morally object to providing contraception on nonreligious grounds (it’s already allowed for religious grounds) (483)

Male condoms will no longer be mandated coverage (485)

No more Ella (week-after-pill) in the contraceptive mandate (485)

Make access harder - Withdraw OCR’s pharmacy abortion mandate guidance which prohibits discrimination when providing abortion meds (496)

Travel

Prohibit abortion travel funding (eliminate the section 1115 waivers that allow funds to help cross state lines) (471)

No abortions for refugees (478)

Government funds

No funds for Planned Parenthood (471) 

prohibit family planning grants from going to entities that perform abortions or provide funding to other entities that perform abortions (491)

Cut up to 10% of medicaid funds from states that require abortion insurance coverage (CA, IL, Maine, MD, NY, OR, WA, Vermont, Hawaii, Connecticut) (472)

Oversight

Track every abortion in every state (455)

New mission statement “furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death.’” (489)

Require health care workers to report abortion pill complications (459)

Medicare

Use AI to detect fraud (463)

Lots of regulations impacting healthcare system reporting/fund-access/insurance pool etc.

Would be good to get someone in healthcare to analyze, I’m betting these gut the ACA

“Separate the subsidized ACA exchange market from the nonsubsidized insurance market” (469)

Eliminated programs

Medicare Shared Savings Program (465)

Inflation Reduction Act (465)

Medicaid

Add work requirements and lifetime caps (468)

Eliminate benefit requirements/mandates and middle/upper income recipients (468)

Cut up to 10% of medicaid funds from states that require abortion insurance coverage (CA, IL, Maine, MD, NY, OR, WA, Vermont, Hawaii, Connecticut) (472)

Child/family welfare (some overlap with lgbtq, copied in here)

Combine child support with visitation support court (implied via example, 479)

Prioritize faith-based HMRE (healthy marriage & relationship education) programs & grants and don’t pressure them to conform to “nonreligious definitions of marriage” (480, 481)

“in cases where the father or mother does not make a sincere or serious effort to be involved in the child’s upbringing, termination of parental rights for children in foster care should be swift” (482)

Eliminate the Head Start program (482)

Potentially (implied) cut programs related to bullying prevention, children’s safety, health disparities, early childhood support, poisoning and SUID prevention. (486)

Take children away from LGBTQ couples if they didn’t conceive them? “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them” (489)

Housing

“Rescind legal analysis that authorized HHS to impose a moratorium on rental evictions during COVID” (492)

#democracy dies in darkness #project 2025 #us politics #election 2024 #american politics #voting

[kodoandsangha]

They busted out mimeograph images of the original configuration, sent the modification up and waited. It’s absolutely wild. Onward it treks towards the Kuiper Belt. I love that it’s journey continues unabated. Onward little Voyager. Onward.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

#voyager 1 #programming #holy fucking shit #nasa #space program #space probe

[kodoandsangha]

[kodoandsangha]

A hummingbird thought a man’s orange hat was a flower [x]

[kodoandsangha]

Not only is this stellar, it shows how fallible we are with the misspelling of parsnip. <3

Sir Terry Pratchett: on writing Good Omens with Neil Gaiman

I love the whole interview but this little snippet most of all:

Terry: “You can usually bet, and I’m sure Neil Gaiman would say the same thing, that, uh, if I go into a bookstore to do a signing and someone presents me with three books, the chances are that one of them is going to be a very battered copy of Good Omens; and it will smell as if it’s been dropped in parsnip soup or something in and it’s gone fluffy and crinkly around the edges and they’ll admit that it’s the fourth copy they’ve bought”.

You can never own enough Good Omens copies.

[kodoandsangha]

[kodoandsangha]

This is… all of the things.

The housing can’t be conditional.

You either accept it as a right or you don’t

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

#houses #homelessness #homeless #unhoused #there’s more than enough space

[kodoandsangha]

"who radicalized you" ever since i was a child i wanted other people to be treated nicely and fairly because i didnt understand why theyd deserve otherwise and it fills me with disgust seeing how people treat their fellow human beings sometimes

[kodoandsangha]

Disability. Disabled. Permanently altered.

The MRI is back and there’s lesions, anomalies, and signs of Graves’ disease.

I can’t even get a response from my neurologist right now. Which is worrying. I sent him a direct message today to get some follo up.

I got my handicapped placard, a wheelchair and some stuff to decorate my wheelchair.

So this is my life now.

The lesions point to MS.

I’m now searching for what to do for long term care for myself as I don’t have a support network.

I’m seriously looking at ending up in a Medicate approved nursing home where no one visits.

This sucks. I’m not ok with this. I am hoping I can get on a program for a caregiver.

I don’t want to die in a nursing home.

If anyone has suggestions, I am open to them.

#physically disabled #disabled #disability #multiple sclerosis #mental health

[kodoandsangha]

They hate everything that isn’t non-melanated.

#elon musk

[kodoandsangha]

I worked the 2016 election. We had two polling places on each side of the gym. My friend at the time worked one place, me at the other.

As the night went on, word filtered in Trump has won.

At the end, we walked to our cars. I remember looking back at her in her just slumped over the steering wheel, bawling.

We lost contact when she moved. I hope she’s doing OK. I think about her every election. How devastated she was.

We had had many conversations about how badly her life would change if he took office. I hope she’s ok.

[kodoandsangha]

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

#of course asks still exist #theyre just so much more of an afterthought than they used to be #i’m not popular enough to need them though

[kodoandsangha]

Every month is autism month for me!

[ID: A comic titled "April is Autism Acceptance Month!"

The narrator, a light skinned person with brown hair, says "You might see some places "lighting it up blue" or sharing puzzle piece imagery this month, but a lot of autistic people prefer to avoid that due to its association with Autism Speaks." Within the speech bubble is a blue puzzle piece with a red cross next to it. The narrator continues, "Autism Speaks sees autism as a disease that needs to be cured and eradicated, which it isn't. So to avoid that, we generally prefer RED instead!" The words "red instead" are shown on the narrator's shirt.

The narrator continues, "or the golden infinity symbol: (it's gold because au is the symbol for gold in the periodic table." There are illustrations of a gold infinity symbol and the periodic table symbol for gold, made to say "autism", next to the text.

Text continues "Not every autistic person celebrates autism acceptance month which is fine! It's optional :)

At the bottom, the narrator wears a red shirt with the gold infinity symbol on it and says "whether you celebrate or not, I hope you have a lovely month." End ID]

Thank you @teatual for the description!

#autism #actually autistic #autism acceptance #autism acceptence month #red instead #neurodivergent #autism in women