Magician

I thought it would be funny if I cropped out the author's name on the article, but I decided grace, citing my sources to avoid the irony singularity

I just mean things you do or can do for yourself as part of self-care?

Here are some of mine:

Relaxation Break - 10 Minutes: Like if you're sitting at a desk, or have some time where you can steal five minutes away from whatever's bothering you.

Little Chore - 5 Minutes: Some small productive thing you can do in that time and no longer. Like if you want to do some dishes or you want to replace the toilet paper roll.

Listen to Music uninterrupted - ? Minutes: Pick a song or an album and just let it rip without getting up to do anything. This one is really hard for me where even doing a 2 minute song was hard.

Watch something - 2 Hours: Movie, video essay, anime, whatever. Challenge - Impossible: Do it without doomscrolling.

Like no shit, I'm going to make my one safe place look nice.

Fellow Hexbearians,

I was thinking about how embarrassing it is to ask questions about things that seem obvious, so why not make a thread here? We can pool our understanding and clear up any misconceptions we picked up living in a world not built for neurodiverse people.

Ask questions about things you don't understand that might seem obvious. If there are things you do understand in someone else's question, please do so and help clear it up.

I ask that we ask and answer questions sincerely. This is a discussion about confusion and trying to understand. I think it would feel safer if we don't think we're being mocked or trolled.

I'll put a comment in the thread to get things rolling.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_Presentation

This originates from an annual tradition from the 1940s where the turkey presented by representatives was later killed and eaten. It wasn't until the 70s when they started sparing the turkeys. During Bush Sr's presidency, it became a formal ceremony with a pardon and everything.

It's this big ceremony on TV where named turkeys are brought to the White House to get ceremonial pardons. Some have food-related names like Marshmallow or Drumstick.

Charlie in 1987 trying to finish what John Hinkley Jr. started. He spent the rest of his days at a petting zoo.

The first president on record issuing a "pardon" to his turkey was Ronald Reagan. Reagan had been sending the turkeys presented to him to farms and zoos since at least 1982, and 1987's turkey, Charlie, was likewise headed to a petting zoo. At the time, Reagan was facing questions over the Iran-Contra affair, on whether or not he would consider pardoning Oliver North (who had yet to be tried for his involvement in the affair); Reagan conjured the notion of the turkey pardon as a joke to deflect those questions.

Reagan did not make any pardon references in the 1988 presentation, but his successor, George H. W. Bush, instituted the turkey pardon as a permanent part of the presentation beginning his first year in office, 1989. The phrase "presidential pardon" in that ceremony was apparently inserted by a speechwriter; Bush initially was indifferent to the terminology, saying "'Reprieve', 'keep him going', or 'pardon': it's all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn't end up on the president's holiday table."

50-80 turkeys are selected based on their behavior from a pool of turkeys up for slaughter. The 10-20 best looking and most behaved turkeys are selected, then two are finally picked and get named by the president.

This year, Jennie-O brand is bringing two currently unnamed turkeys for Biden to pardon.

For those curious about the fates of the turkeys. It's not great. In a fashion that's particularly telling of the US:

For many years the turkeys were sent to Frying Pan Farm Park in Fairfax County, Virginia. From 2005 to 2009, the pardoned turkeys were sent to either the Disneyland Resort in California or the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, where they served as the honorary grand marshals of Disney's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2010, 2011 and 2012, the turkeys were sent to live at Mount Vernon, the estate and home of George Washington; Mount Vernon stopped displaying and accepting the turkeys due to the fact that they violated the estate's policy of maintaining its own historical accuracy (Washington never farmed turkeys)

For many years, the pardoned turkeys were documented to have very short lives after their pardoning, frequently dying within a year of being pardoned; for comparison, heritage turkey breeds have lifespans on par with those of wild turkeys, at least five years.

Emphasis mine:

The lifespans of the pardoned turkeys have steadily improved in recent years, frequently having lifespans of over two years and occasionally reaching three years of age, an improvement attributed to better choices of homes after the pardons; rather than serving solely as tourist attractions, the turkeys are now placed in the care of experts who make conscious efforts to maintain the turkeys' health for as long as possible.

So yeah, in the spirit of aesthetics, the US president puts an animal on TV, promises it life and then leaves it to survive the machinations of an empire in violent decay. All the while the rest of them are condemned to die away from the general.

It just really makes a mockery of so many things the US pretends to care about.

I've noticed a lot of posts asking how we're going to vote, and people coming in trying to shame people for not voting for Biden, or any candidate in the general election at all.

So I'm curious and, asking in good faith, want to know - what will make you stop voting for Biden?

Hey, so I'm trying to work on organizing my life and to do so, I'm looking for specific apps. Preferably free. I'll include helpful apps that have worked for me in the past. If you have any suggested programs/apps that have helped you, I'd appreciate knowing about those too.

Apps I'm already using to great effect:

• Obsidian: A great note taking app that's faster than Google Docs and isn't run by Google. You can pay $10 monthly to have sync between several different devices, but it's not necessary if you're just trying to make quick checklists or journal entries.

• Spreeder: You can copy/paste any amount of text and have it play back at your desired speed. If scrolling through a doc/PDF/ebook, this can be a nice alternative that breaks down text. I don't lose my place when I read and it's easy to adjust. Sucks that premium costs though.

• NewPipe: Just a good YouTube alt that lets you play videos in the background free.

(I'll add more as I think on them)

So far, I'm looking for:

• Calendar: A calendar program that lets me go to specific dates in the past to mark events. Ideally, I'd like to go back to a date in 2010, see what day of the week it is, mark it, and then update events as I find more bits of my personal history. Even better if I can then zoom out and see by month or year the events that happened in a given period of time.

• Voice-to-Text: Any inexpensive program that could reliably transcribe what I'm saying into readable text. I think there are paid programs, but if there are good programs out there that are easy to edit/revise by hand or just navigate in general, awesome.

• Anything Budgeting: I'm really bad with money sometimes want to keep better track of my finances without paying a subscription or putting my banking info at risk.

• Self-Care: Is there something you use to implement self-care into your daily schedule to avoid burnout? I tried the free trial of Calm and was very much not calm when they overdrafted my account without warning.

Anyway, that's really about all I'm looking for now, but as I said, if you have anything you use for free/cheap to help organize your life, I'd love to know about it

And maybe we could make a pinned post later with what we put together?

I know there are more people struggling, but it's really fucked up that a single apartment complex could end homelessness in my city.

Instead we have parking lots, franchises that go out of business, and encampments that get routinely cleared out.

I know it's more than indifference to human suffering. It's spite at the thought of anyone else catching a 'break.' It's the belief that being an eyesore is worthy of the death penalty so long as they don't have to see it.

It's the result of a lack of class consciousness. It's social murder in slow motion.

Bruh, maybe it's the commuter apartments and the bloated police budget and not the panhandling that's the problem.

I saw a sign that said 'keep the change' as I left a grocery store, discouraging people from giving money to people desperate enough to use change to survive.

I hate that there's this delusion that people carry about homelessness that it would never happen to them. One day they'll say they're blessed and lucky, but then say that homeless people are just ill or made bad choices.

We don't live in a fucking vacuum. Where does someone get treatment for mental health? Why does it have a price tag? What bad choices were freely made and not under the duress of immediate survival in a cruel society?

I give money when I'm able, sometimes when it hurts me. I believe in a world that could cut out all the bullshit middle parts and let people lead lives of dignity. It doesn't even have to be communism.

If they increased taxes by 10 dollar a year per person, that would be $2,000,000 for the hundred people in our recorded homeless population.

Ten dollars a year, and that would make a world of difference in my community. I'd pay more than that, but we're fucking building prisons and sending weapons to countries most people couldn't point to on a map.

It's fucking horrifying to think of the reality of homelessness in this country. I live in a blue state and I still think about the ways summer and winter affect homeless people because they're an inconvenience.

I'm writing this because I'm struggling worse than I have ever struggled in my life and it's not a fraction of what people are going through while unhoused. I'm writing this because I know there are people like me who had two financial hardships happen when I just had one. I'm writing this because nobody in my life wants to talk about it because it's too depressing for them. I'm writing this because things don't have to be this way, but the powers that be need a homeless population to keep capitalism working.

It's sick and I feel powerless in the face of this reality.

For god's sake, the name alone sounds cool as hell. Like if I didn't know about them,

But in the US, they're treated like a joke. It's a punchline to drop out. I can't think of a story where somebody transferred from a community college, either to save money or use the time to think on a major.

Elitism in academia isn't a new thing with Ivy League nepo baby factories, or the STEM-Lord Cinematic Universe, but the disrespect for local schools is incredible.

Finishing community college and not going on to another university, for whatever reason, is great, and perfectly valid on its own. It's not a failure.

The way the US works is stacked against people going to college if they can't afford it. Like what sick shit is that? Education shouldn't be an investment opportunity. It's not supposed to be a business risk.

Community College isn't the solution, but it's a great starting place if you want to study for relatively cheap. The professors are usually pretty cool too. I was able to sit in on some extra classes when I had down time during the day. You can meet experts who love teaching so much they do it as a hobby.

You don't need to get a degree or have a track like you want to transfer. If you occasionally want to take a creative writing or fitness class, you can do that a lot cheaper than a writing workshop or personal training. It's also kinda nice for physical education if you don't want a lot of one-on-one attention.

Do you want to talk about movies for shits and giggles? There's a film as literature class you can take as an elective. You can watch two classic movies a week and debate/write about it.

Do you want to have a better understanding of mental health? Intro to Psychology can bring you up to date on trends in mental health.

If you know where to look, you can find comrades teaching sociology and political science. It's how I started reading about Engels.

Another cool thing is there are people of all ages there. You don't to make connections, obviously, but it feels nice when you know the population includes people who are working full time, or trying to figure things out in your community.

I know not every city has them, but I highly recommend checking them out.

'm th n tr lftst!