Wandering Adventure Party

@AngelaPreston Hurray on the chili!

And who in the world gets rid of a perfectly good thermos for heaven's sake.

#SilentSunday

@AngelaPreston You could also use the shiny eyeshadow underneath, from about a third of the way in out to the corner of your eye where it would join the color from the upper lid? Then it show more color.

@AngelaPreston

@AngelaPreston I get what you're saying (and, agree that their assumptions about the data are a bit privilege-blind), but I think the main point of the article is sound: once again, billionaire capitalists have managed to extract enormous personal wealth by externalizing all their costs onto others and thereby impoverishing what was once a healthy ecosystem of direct commerce. Seems they destroy working ecosystems where ever they go, whatever they touch.

It's a particularly pernicious skill set, looking at a healthy, balanced commerce system supporting an interconnected community and saying to yourself, "I know how I can disrupt these connections, extract enormous wealth, make everyone dependent on the new 'service' I'm providing, and offload the cost and consequences on the very people now paying for the service!" In this case that includes not only the restaurants, but the gig workers and the customers as well.

Staggering, really.

As for indoor air quality in restaurants... Restaurants have notoriously slim profit margins, and fixing air flow/air quality can be a huge challenge. Also, restaurants often don't own the space they're in, (hence trying to pack as many diners into as small a rental space as possible), so it would have been up to the landlord to fix that -- and landlords are notoriously cheap.

When Biden was in office, there were a lot of pandemic grant funds available for small businesses to make those kinds of improvements, but you needed to know they were available, how to apply, have someone who could actually do the applying and tracking of paperwork (it was a lot; I know because our organization did it). Then it turned out there was quite a bit of fraud in the application process, and then we elected an autocrat who doesn't give a crap. So much for air quality.

ALERT: If you are a #nonprofit,
GoFundMe recently created donation pages for 1.4 million nonprofit organizations *without their knowledge or consent.* Please boost.

Why is this a problem?

- Lack of Consent

Nonprofits were not informed of these donation pages, nor were they given the opportunity to consent to any formal relationship with GoFundMe.

- Fees and Other Expenses

Donations made through the GoFundMe pages are charged processing fees that cut into the support provided to nonprofits, and donors are asked to provide a generous tip to support GoFundMe's efforts.

- SEO Optimization

GoFundMe has initiated SEO optimization as the default for the donation pages to improve their visibility when individuals search for information about nonprofits online. This could result in GoFundMe's pages ranking higher than the nonprofit's own website, pulling away potential donors and supporters.

- Implementation Challenges

Without safeguards in place, nonprofits report serious issues, ranging from unauthorized individuals claiming donations and the inability to remove pages without first agreeing to GoFundMe's terms and conditions or sharing sensitive banking information.

Check if your organization has an unauthorized GoFundMe page.
Decide whether to claim, edit, or request removal of the page.

Search Fundraisers on GoFundMe

Search on GoFundMe using a person’s name, location, or the fundraiser title. Also find trending fundraisers that are in the news.

(www.gofundme.com)

Yesterday afternoon at school, I heard one of our younger students calling my name. "Annie! Annie come help! There's a really big spider here! Like, REALLY big!"

They weren't calling out in fear. They were excited--and educated. They knew it was a Wolf spider. They knew it might bite if they reached for it and startled it. They just wanted my help in getting the spider safely away from the cubby room boot trays and back outside where it could thrive.

The spider was a beauty. And every adult and every child within earshot came to admire and offer help.

Together we all found a stray paper cup from someone's recent project and ferried Miss Spider out to the hostas that line the front of the building.

And that's how you educate a child. You model the care you want to see in the world.

- Help them understand what belonging and respect can mean across age differences and even species differences: Be on an easy first-name basis with one another; get the pronouns right if you can. Understand spiders' place and importance in nature. Don't destroy something out of fear or ignorance. We are all kin.

- Share: Share your excitement and wonder, share the work of caring for each other and the world around us, share resources. "Isn't she gorgeous!" "Here, use my paper cup!" "I wonder how she got in here?!"

- Be worthy of trust and act responsibly: Ask for help when you need it, lend a hand when asked. Care for each other and yet still know your limits.
#School #education #storytelling

@AngelaPreston how wild!

@AngelaPreston wait what. I am so totally lost—how is Skeletor connected?

Road tripping all day with the fam, listening to podcast and playlists.

Up comes Concrete Blondes’ version of Tomorrow Wendy, and it never fails to utterly slay me. I could listen to it on repeat forever and never tire of the yearning and sorrow.

And then, out of nowhere, I think of the other song I could loop till my ears fall off: 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up.

And it hits me—they’re the same song, just opposite sides of a musical coin. Gritty goth spooky folk versus pop rock.

Well okay, brain. That’s… nice?

@AngelaPreston what do you have to do to prepare them for storage and eating? Did you plant the tree yourself?

In case you were thinking of getting me a birthday present, Bear has set the bar pretty high.

Holy guacamole did that mRNA vax hurt. I love my pharmacist, but I think he really got the angle wrong. Hurt a LOT while he was administering, and my whole upper arm is angry-achy now.

@AngelaPreston
I’m sorry to disagree, but you are absolutely, one hundred percent, made of sugar

@AngelaPreston I thought it was a dud, too.

Silverio Montelongo was the best boss I ever had.

Back in the late 1980s, I was putting myself through college; NYU. Dirt poor, I lived a long train ride away in a neglected neighborhood for the cheap rent, snagged every scholarship, grant, and loan I could, and took a work-study job on campus in addition to the three other part-time jobs I already had. Silverio was my work-study boss.

Silver managed all the money for all the student clubs and organizations. He approved budgets, expenditure requests, anything having to do with how clubs got funding for their campus activities.

If people were nice to Silver, respectful, they generally got their budgets approved. But talk shit to him, act like a privileged asshole, and he could slow-boat your funding requests endlessly. More than once I watched him slide some twit's paperwork to the very bottom of the pile with a chuckle.

I was good with numbers, grokked basic spreadsheet foo, was quick to learn and showed up for work on time. We got along just fine. I was also an officer in the NYU Science Fiction Club, so our gang saw a few very plush years there, where we got to screen some seriously good sci-fi movies, and our annual zine went to a much better printer than usual.

Then Silver started getting sick a lot, and I would be there alone in his office space, crunching the numbers and balancing the books, wondering when he'd be back. At one point, he took a two-week vacation to a tropical beach. When he came back, the tan couldn't hide the circles under his eyes. He coughed all the time. He got thin.

One day, he invited me over to his tiny apartment, I forget where. Brooklyn? The Lower East Side? Mostly I remember the interior of the place, every room long and narrow and claustrophobic. Sitting on his couch, my knees almost touched the edge of the chair against the opposite wall.

Silver wanted me to meet his cat, Spot. I didn't realize it at the time, but he was looking for Spot's new home. For whatever reason, I didn't pass Spot's sniff test. We greeted each other, but the chemistry just wasn't there, and so Silver never popped the re-homing question.

I visited him once in the hospital, where he lay panting in a bed, in a room with many beds, each with a curtain around it. He was angry that I was there; I didn't stay long.

I didn't attend the funeral, though the president of our club did. My mother had ingrained in me that funerals were to be avoided. I can't blame her, as she'd been severely traumatized by death and privation during the Great Depression. At any rate, I didn't know any better at the time, didn't understand death, had never grieved anyone, barely grasped what was happening with aids, the gay community, the government, medicine. I should have been there, I should have been more aware, I should have been more active. But most of my friends were racial minorities and they weren't about to bother trying to educate my dumb white ass – it was the 80s. It wouldn't have worked anyhow. I never knew at the time just how shallow those friendships were, how little I could be trusted.

Silverio was done in by the dual whammy of neocapitalist fascism and white ignorance. He didn't deserve the Reagan years. And I didn't deserve his openhearted friendship, his patience, his extraordinary humor, and most certainly not his cat.

#storytelling

"I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life."

I Am An AI Hater

I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

moser’s frame shop (anthonymoser.github.io)

@AngelaPreston

Grapes were on sale when I went shopping today, so I bought some. And you know how it is with grapes. Sometimes they're sweet, sometimes tart, sometimes not much flavor at all.

THESE grapes!

Imagine taking concentrated grape juice and somehow magically turning it back into a crunchy-skinned grape.

They are the grapiest of grapes. They are the Platonic Ideal of a grape. They taste like the color purple.

Wow.

#food #fruits