hammerhead dog

Y’all in the American SW and west Mexico better check the national hurricane center and your weather for this weekend and next week.

Hurricane Hilary is about to make landfall and that whole desert area is supposed to get a years worth of rain or more. Death Valley is supposed to get twice the annual rainfall. Severe winds, massive flooding, and landslides are all strong possibilities.

This is gonna get ugly. Please spread the word. This is a majorly anomalous event and people may be unaware of the threat headed their way.

Flash floods are definitely gonna kill people, so here’s your regularly scheduled PSA:

Desert soil does not absorb a significant amount of water. It reaches maximum saturation very very quickly, and all the rest of the water rushes downhill. Even if you can’t tell that the ground is not perfectly flat, the water can. And it will move. Quickly. No, faster than that. Nope, still faster. If you try to cross moving floodwater, you will get swept downstream and probably die.

Do not try to wade in/cross flood water that is any deeper than the thickness of the sole of an average athletic shoe, no I am not kidding, the water will get deeper literally while you’re standing in it.

This goes for cars, too. I’ve seen entire vehicles getting swept downstream in flash floods because the driver thought they could cross the “puddle” and Found Out.

Stay safe, y’all.

also if you're going into water intentionally (cleanup, obviously as things RECEDE), PROTECT YOUR EYES. Flood water is NASTY AS HELL and you will be getting a tetanus booster right off the bat if you end up in the ER for any reason.

From the article:

“Oh my god! This is like in the 1500s with the Indigenous people and smallpox,” she says. “They had no defences against it!”

Wait – what did she just say?

I pause and look to my friend. Did the Barbie film just compare women and patriarchy to Indigenous people and disease? Was that really necessary?

Other people obviously felt as taken off guard by the comment as I did, judging by the response on social media: “this line was unnecessary and not needed for the plot,” one person wrote. Another remarked that it “reeked of white feminism,” while another called it “a sloppy attempt at intersectionality.”

The thoughtless line about Indigenous people and smallpox ironically comes right before an insightful and impassioned monologue by Ferrera’s character on how complicated it is to be a modern-day woman.

—

I would have loved to have grown up speaking nêhinawêwin (Swampy Cree). My father understands it, and my grandparents spoke it fluently. My grandfather even had a radio station in Manitoba where he exclusively spoke nêhinawêwin. This loss began with the same history that dates back to Pocahontas’s “story” — dispossession, expulsion from our lands, forced assimilation, and discriminatory laws that disbanded many from speaking it for a time. Because of this, I didn’t get that opportunity. In the same way so many others didn’t.

Speaking of my grandfather, Murray McKenzie, he was a photojournalist. He received his first camera while recovering from tuberculosis at the Clearwater Lake Sanatorium. We know now that my grandfather was given a blanket carrying the disease. Murray was one of the few little boys who survived his ward at the sanatorium.

So imagine my surprise when a movie about another fantasized character, Barbie, goes on to include a reference to a disease that wiped out so many Indigenous peoples on the continent. For example, my colleague recently wrote a piece on the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation’s 100-year amalgamation anniversary, where it was shared that 100 years ago, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (the Squamish people) at one point went from a population of 30,000 to 400 because of disease.

—

I’ll end by saying this:

It is literally impossible to be an Indigenous woman.

We have to be beautiful but not too beautiful, or we might go missing.

We have to leave our homelands to become ‘educated,’ and to enter the ‘workforce.’

But we can’t forget who we are and where we come from.

We want to be good and loving mothers and protect our children,

But we can’t make a single mistake, or our children will be taken into the child welfare system.

We want to preserve the natural world for the next generation,

But colonial law will remove us with an injunction and put us in prison.

We want to honour our dead, but governments tell us that it “isn’t feasible.”

We want to speak our languages,

But so many of our language keepers have been lost to colonial violence.

Aren’t we tired of watching every single Indigenous woman kill herself to simply exist?

HEY CALIFORNIA PEOPLE!

HURRICANE ADVICE FROM A FLORIDIAN!

Make sure you've got shelf-stable food and water for everyone in the house, including pets. The rule of thumb is a gallon per person per day. Freeze water bottles if you want cold water.

Make sure you have enough meds!

Make sure you have batteries, candles, flashlights, and a manual can opener. 

Make sure your electronics, including backup batteries, are charged. Unplug things you don't want fried in case of a power surge. 

Don't tape your windows, it doesn't help and you'll just be stuck scrubbing goo off of them later.

Put a mug of frozen water in it in your freezer with a quarter on top of it. If your freezer defrosts, the ice will melt and the quarter will sink and tell you you need to throw things out.

Get everything that's not nailed to a foundation out of your yard. That dead branch hanging on by a thread? Time to get it down (it was probably time to do that three days ago, but now’s better than never).

Park away from powerlines and trees if you can. Rain makes the ground soft and then trees fall over.

Have an evacuation plan to a shelter. Evacuate if they’re telling you to.

If you start to flood, don't go in your attic. You'll get trapped if the water rises too high and you can't hack through your roof. This happened to a lot of people in Texas and Louisiana. Get ON the roof.

Be safe, be well <3 

What the fuck?

???? WHAT???

Ngl, "tropical storm in death valley" was not on my 2023 bingo card.

Drainage on our roads is shitty in SoCal, don't attempt to drive through water deep enough to touch your bumpers and don't attempt to walk across moving water, water only as deep as your ankles can knock you down and sweep you away.

Predicted wind speeds are similar to strong Santa Anas, so lock things down like you would for that, though keep in mind that yeah the combination of heavy rain and wind leads to more felled trees than just wind.

Take photos of the inside of your home now; flood insurance fucking sucks here and if you're in a possible flood zone you want as much documentation of your home and belongings as possible in case you need to make a claim.

Freezing water bottles also means you've got a lot of ice in your freezer if power goes out, and safe potable water once it thaws, so freeze bottles of water to have something to keep your fridge and freezer cool and store more water regardless of if you want cold water.

The flooding will keep getting worse after the storm. You're not safe because the winds let up and the water stopped falling. The waters will rise after, and keep rising. You may drive out through a shallow puddle the next morning and think you must still be safe through that puddle on your return with ice, water, and non-perishables, but you need to check the depth of that standing water on the road every time, until the water starts to go back down.

Put *all* your water bottles in the freezer. People above are hinting but seriously, as much as you can fit. Your fridge is the best insulated box in your house. If you can keep it cold you may save your food and meds. So freeze all that water you already have right there, let it cool your fridge until you need it.

Through the storm itself you're in tornado/hurricane mode: most secure place in the building. I know it's contrary to earthquake precautions and may make your skin crawl, you need to be in that closet with no windows and no exits to the outside in the middle of the building.

If you might lose running water (damage to municipal plumbing or wells run on the power grid), fill all your regular water containers, pet bowls, water troughs while the water is clean. Fill bathtubs or buckets--or big storage tubs, garbage cans, whatever is watertight--with tap water. You won't trust standing water to be human-potable, but you can use it to flush and for cooling/rinsing when you've got no a/c but it's still August. Don't underestimate the value of sticking your head in a clean-ish bucket of water when you have been in post-hurricane power outage for three days.

Keep yourselves safe, folks!

idk y’all should treat fat men better. and i don’t mean mildly chubby guys i mean honest-to-god love-handles-and-double-chins fat guys. stop calling them shit like discord mods or gross weebs or nasty creeps or neckbeards or that they’re stinky or sweaty or beer bellied or whatever else. fatphobia isn’t cute, even repackaged in a neat little box of “ew men”

day 04: memories

NEW STRAW HAT POSTERS!!!!!

I literally jdkfkgkf AHHH I rely on that lil $250 a month. Patreon PLEASE

sorry but i'm making Yet another post, separate from the gofundme. i'm a black disabled author and when i say i rely on my lil' patreon money, i am not kidding. i usually get $290 but due to patreon having their little hiccup, i only got $150 of that. if it's possible, can i please get some funds to help me through the rest of the month, shit is dire.

p*ypal.me/marsinaries

c#shapp.me/yahyascholfield

Having to choose between eating breakfast/lunch and getting an Uber to and from Sophie's vet appointment uhm. Help me not have to choose????

$0/$70 (August 16)

$10/$70

Thankies for breakfast + Uber! So, I paid Sophie's bill with CareCredit (it was $380), but I think i can figure that out Monthly idk idk!

Midna