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now more than ever, it is imperative that you spend time with people you love and doing things that you love. be prepared but please please please don’t dwell on things that have yet to happen. you have to have hope for a better future in order to build one. it’s gonna be okay. we’re gonna make it. i love you.
the older I get, the more the technological changes I’ve lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn’t even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents’ house and our wall-connected landline; my mother’s first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend’s house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend’s massive CRT monitor wouldn’t fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room’s dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist’s in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that’s a decade’s worth of pictures I’d have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can’t ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don’t have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they’re obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there’s a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven’t had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?
My grandfather, who is 100, remembers his dad’s accountant doing math on an abacus. Now he texts me “<3” on his flip phone.
My grandmother, who died in 2021 at the age of 103, didn’t have electricity in her town in Indiana when she was born. My grandfather from the same town rode a horse to high school.
My dad, who was born in the late 1940s, used slide rules for math, and programed computer programs on punch cards.
When I was a teenager, if you wanted concert tickets, you would go to your record store of choice, which sold tapes and CDs, but not records. I used to only have to dial seven digits to call my friends. I had their numbers memorized. I was born before credit scores. My dad had a car phone, which was a handset up in the front of the car, and a big box in the trunk, with a little antenna on top of the car for signal. When he got it, only 11 people in the St. Louis area could use the service at once.
if you are looking for a sign to stop doomscrolling: this is it. staring at your screen in despair is not doing anything but making you as an individual miserable right now. take a break now.
to everyone who doesn’t like good omens or neil gaiman anymore, i implore you, READ HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE.
i am being so serious. it’s like if monty python was sci fi and the main character was chuck bartowski with an anxiety disorder.
it needs more fandom and has so many hilarious jokes and the two main characters are shippable to the level that crowley and aziraphale are.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is its full name, and im sure many have heard of it, but im telling you to READ IT. pleasepleasepleaseplease i need more zaphod beeblebrox fanart in my life. i am suffering.
I would add to that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and its follow up, The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul*. Both absurd humor like Hitchhiker’s Guide, clearly in Adams’s voice. And they’re short books, written back when “novel” meant 60k words and not 100k+ words, so you’ll blast through them.
[*] I think Teatime is the stronger book tbh, but they’re both good
Douglas Adams was my gateway to Terry Pratchett (who co-wrote Good Omens). Another great absurd British author is Jasper Fforde. Anything my Adams, Pratchett or Fforde is worth reading … and re-reading.
Adult Transgender Legislative Risk Map, November 2024
This map is made and maintained by transgender journalist Erin Reed. She read all 550 bills targeting trans people in America in 2023 and 586 so far in 2024 and she scores state safety based on proposed and enacted legislation. She regularly updates the map (including explanations of recent legislative changes) on her site. She has a separate map for trans youth (which: warning, is even more scary), since a lot of policies target minors specifically.
It’s depressing as all hell, but Erin does great work and I’ve been using her maps to plan my career and vacations for years. It’s helped me figure out where to apply for grad school, and helps me keep track of what states I cannot do a layover in while flying because of bathroom bills.
Absolutely amazing how AO3 is a part of the internet that doesn’t sneak in any ads and doesn’t have an algorithm and doesn’t watch you or record how much time you spend looking at each fic or whatever. It’s just right there to use for free. Legend
ALT
