Okay I wrote a whole THESIS on this last year:

Wind in Texas is a great case study bc we’re a closed grid that HEAVILY relies on wind production. Texas produces so much electricity through wind at night that Sweetwater turbines will often generate double the electricity we actually use. Battery storage companies have begged ERCOT and petitioned the Utilities Commission for YEARS to allow battery repositories to join the grid, but were repeatedly denied because other producers lobbied against them.

Why lobby against battery operation? Well, unlike oil/gas/coal generation, renewals require a power grid that’s able to accommodate sporadic high production and zero production in the same day. When you add batteries, it stabilizes the power grid and maintains power during periods of transition between night (wind in TX) and day (gas in TX). This eliminates what are called “peaking markets” - times of day when natural gas operators charge eight times the normal price of electricity to flip on a switch and provide power to a starved, unstable grid. By powering the grid with cheaply generated wind electricity during transition times, batteries and other renewable-support infrastructures eliminate the need for a peaking market. This in turn would eliminate up to 30% of gas producer’s profits.

This tweet states wind would “make electricity enter the negative,” implying this is bad because power grid operators would make less money. But this is simply not how power grids work. The tweet is actually trying to deceive & distract you from the TRUE consequences of increased renewable integration and infrastructure support: nonrenewables becoming more expensive.

Except for rare spot markets, you will never actually pay $0 for electricity because providers on a variable generation grid charge you more for cheap power to balance out charging you less for extremely high peaking prices. This is true even when your state/country doesn’t use peaking or power generation markets, as generators in set-price systems just raise the “set” market price across the board, building expensive peak scarcity demand into the government-negotiated price. Wind and solar do NOT therefore make “electricity enter the negative” for the average consumer, but they DO disrupt power generation economy by eliminating the peaking markets and structures that make ALL of your electricity expensive. Renewables are so productive - particularly when combined with batteries and other grid stabilizers - that they don’t just make electricity cheap; They make oil, gas, and coal electricity generation more expensive and less desirable.

(This has its own pros and cons, as we need SOME type of backup power source and atm there are no completely reliable renewable options. But that’s a WHOLE other debate that does not justify fear-mongering about electricity markets.)

Tl;dr: it’s not about your power provider or grid making less money because the price of electricity is so low - you’ll still be charged the same amount for power. It’s about coal/oil/gas generation becoming more expensive and thus less desirable sources of electricity generation. The tweeter doesn’t care about the effect of market prices on you or your power company. The tweeter cares about the O&G company (who contributes $5mil/year to his university) that will - if we build stable, renewable-supplied grids - no longer be able to rake in $billions manipulating electricity supply & demand on our power grids twice a day.

This reminds me of a woman I used to live with who had a boyfriend at the time. I was told that their relationship was always gay because "we both feel like men or both feel like women at the same time!"

Gender is smiling now, evidently

me making conversation at family events

I thought this was my hometown for a second

So this has actually been cited by academics as part of the major draw to online spaces is the fact that just existing in public is reacted to with hostility and punishment. Gretchen McCulloch discussed this is in her book Because Internet, citing research that shows teens and young adults want to be outside! We want to spend time in social places, it’s just that there aren’t any places to exist in public without being charged for it.

When I was homeless as a kid my little brother and I loved to go to the library. We would keep warm in there reading good books all day long. Until residents of the town complained about us “loitering” at the library each day. The library staff then told us we were no longer allowed to stay more than an hour at a time. Imagine seeing two homeless children spending their entire days quietly reading just to keep out of the cold and having a damn problem with it.

Here’s a relevant passage from Because Internet! 

Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twenty-somethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed! (page 102-103) 

The source I’d really recommend for lots more on this topic is It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd, a highly readable ethnography spanning a decade of observation of how teens use social media. Here are a couple relevant excerpts: 

I often heard parents complain that their children preferred computers to “real” people. Meanwhile, the teens I met repeatedly indicated that they would much rather get together with friends in person. A gap in perspective exists because teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like. Whereas parents often highlighted the classroom, after-school activities, and prearranged in-home visits as opportunities for teens to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.

Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation. Many middle-class teenagers once grew up with the option to “do whatever you please, but be home by dark.” While race, socioeconomic class, and urban and suburban localities shaped particular dynamics of childhood, walking or bicycling to school was ordinary, and gathering with friends in public or commercial places—parks, malls, diners, parking lots, and so on—was commonplace. Until fears about “latchkey kids” emerged in the 1980s, it was normal for children, tweens, and teenagers to be alone. It was also common for youth in their preteen and early teenage years to take care of younger siblings and to earn their own money through paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs before they could find work in more formal settings. Sneaking out of the house at night was not sanctioned, but it wasn’t rare either. (page 85-86)

From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transportation presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents. While parental restrictions and pressures are often well intended, they obliterate unstructured time and unintentionally position teen sociality as abnormal. This prompts teens to desperately—and, in some cases, sneakily—seek it out. As a result, many teens turn to what they see as the least common denominator: asynchronous social media, texting, and other mediated interactions. (page 90)

Anyway, more people need to read It’s Complicated, danah boyd really takes young people and technology seriously and doesn’t patronize or sensationalize, and it was a huge influence on me in figuring out the tone for Because Internet so I want to make sure it gets credit! 

i’d say no, because it’s not a man’s place to mock the oppression they put on us in the first place. 

what would be more revolutionary and true to oneself, would be to wear dresses and skirts and long hair and sparkles, and colours, and be soft spoken, and flamboyant....WHILE STILL CALLING YOURSELF A MAN, AND BEING PROUD OF WHO YOU ARE. male femininity should exist outside of entertainment, it shouldn’t be entertainment. what’s so funny about a man dressed up and “acting like a woman”? why do we find that entertaining? why do we find fake breasts and hips on a man funny? why are men only allowed to be feminine to perform for others? when men are genuinely feminine, no joke involved, people  suddenly start to ask about pronouns, referring to them as “they”, and implying that they’re not actually men. 

drag doesn’t defy gender, it reinforces it by pushing the association of garish and toxic femininity with womanhood. they’re only allowed to be like that as a “she”. 

FINALLY!!! Another radfem has read my favorite feminist text! I’d just about given up on recommending it, but it’s SO GOOD you gals! You’ve gotta get a copy.

SERIOUSLY. what happened?

the word terf. that’s it. 

before that was in use, in 2013-204 when i was first on, even libfems would criticise makeup and shaving and more societal aspects. but as soon as terf and witch hunts for “interacting with a terf” came along, you couldn’t reblog actual feminist content for fear it’s created by a terf or somehow “terf rhetoric”. any mention of female oppression and femininity critique is now called terf shit, and it has completely shut up the last remaining legitimate dredges of feminism within liberal feminism, so only the parts beneficial to men and harmful to women remain.

remember the blow up of witch hunts in 2015-2016? where every woman on this site regularly got “delete that post, it was made by a terf”, “you associate with terfs?”, “do you think trans women are women?” messages spammed to them constantly until pretty much every non radfem woman felt compelled to add ‘terfs dni’ to their bios, and obsessively comb any other blog they interact with, in order to not get accusedof being a terf.

oops

i think the suicide of leelah alcorn in 2014 (a very obvious gay man who was transing the gay away) was the tipping point

okay, rant time

thinking about that still pisses me off because a ton of radfems suddenly turned around and started reblogging ”leelah was a girl”, “leelah was she” shit and throwing under the bus any radfem who dared try talk about how tumblr and the cult of transgenderism made things much worse because of the rhetoric of how suicide is the only other option. in the full suicide note that i read myself, that is largely impossible to find more than small excerpts of now, he literally said something to the extent of “if i don’t get to transition young, i won’t look like a woman, i won’t pass” (i believe he said something about looking like an ugly old man as well, or an ugly woman, but this may have been on another post on his blog that i saw before the blog was deleted). any discussion of him was met with “you’re terrible people politicising a suicide” despite it being inherently political in the note he wrote, he wanted it to be political. about half the radfems on this site either participated in a witch hunt with tras against the “mean” radfems, or remained silent and said nothing when we were getting over 20 awful hate anons a day. 

maybe that era of “i’m a radfem, but these women are evil disgusting bigots that should be calling leelah she out of respect, and not talking about her death” was the nail in the coffin. “if they’re turning on their own kind, they MUST be terrible, evil people”. i hope none of those women are still on this site, you know who you are, you attacked us for daring to used sexed pronouns (which is now the radfem norm), talking about how suicides are not only egged on, but weaponised (which is now the radfem norm), that acts within mental illness can be not okay (now the radfem norm) and daring to criticise a deceased person (which is now the radfem norm).

yes, i am still salty about that, and will rage whenever leelah comes up, because i was a 15 year old girl with severe mental illness getting explicit threats from tras, and thrown under the bus and insulted by majority adult radfems, because they cared about their image more than holding their own beliefs. we have to be nice and polite and kind and put others before ourselves, don’t we women? we reminisce abotu the good ol’ days, but boy am i fucking glad that we can be honest and consistent in our beliefs and criticise people even if they’re dead, mentally ill, gay men, or religious because back in those days, you’d get slammed with radfems yelling “stay in your lane”, “shut up asshole/ableist/homophobe/islamophobe” for stuff that today is considered basic radical feminist opinion (religion bad, surrogacy bad, mentally ill people can weaponise it/wind themselves and others up into making themselves and each other worse, pronouns or sex based, not respect based, etc).

2015 was also the year Michfest ended. I only found out about it because so many trans people were celebrating the end of this supposed “terf festival”. Before that I had only heard of the concept of “transmisogyny” but not “terf”. It really gained so much popularity and made a clear divide of ‘good afab vs bad woman’.

soooooo dont dismiss that trump getting elected had an effect, a huge effect

Gay marriage was also made legal around tht time which only furthered the narrative that gay rights were now “achieved” and that we had to move on to more “oppressed” trans rights

A gift for your fiancee

oh my god dkfjdhgksdjk

@kronkk

two people in a cartoon: *hug*

me:

Meanwhile, Stuido Ghibli:

Originally posted by zechs

now THATS a hug!!! look at the movement!! look at the the arms and the closeness!!!!!

Can we make this a Studio Ghibli hugs appreciation post?

Like this one! The joy!! The pure happiness and delight!!!

yes yes yes