Please Help. I'm Paying Off 3 Hospital Stays At The Psych Ward And I Am Struggling Without A Job. I Can't

Please help. I'm paying off 3 hospital stays at the psych ward and I am struggling without a job. I can't even pay for gas right now.

Anything helps.

Venmo: chalquist

I recently found out a show I liked is 10 years old now so to not be the oldest thing on this blog I'm talking coelacanths for Wet Beast Wednesday. Coelacanths are rare fish famed for being living fossils. While that term is highly misleading, it is true that coelacanths are among the only remaining lobe-fined fish and were thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago before being rediscovered in modern times.

(image id: a wild coelacanth. It is a large, mostly grey fish with splotches of yellowish scales. Its fins are attached to fleshy lobes. It is seen from the side, facing the top right corner of the picture)

Coelacanth fossils had been known since the 1800s and they were believed to have gone extinct in the late Cretaceous period. That was until December 1938, when a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was informed of an unusual specimen that had been pulled in by local fishermen. After being unable to identify the fish, she contacted a friend, ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith, who told her to preserve the specimen until he could examine it. Upon examining it early next year, he realized it was indeed a coelacanth, confirming that they had survived, undetected, for 66 million years. Note that fishermen living in coelacanth territory were already aware of the fish before they were formally described by science. Coelacanths are among the most famous examples of a lazarus taxon. This term, in the context of ecology and conservation, means a species or population that is believed to have gone extinct but is later discovered to still be alive. While coelacanths are among the oldest living lazarus taxa, they aren't the oldest. They are beaten out by a genus of fly (100 million years old) and a type of mollusk (over 300 million years old).

(image: a coelacanth fossil. It is a dark brown imprint of a coelacanth on white rock. Its skeleton is visible in the imprint)

Coelacanths are one of only two surviving groups of lobe-finned fish along with the lungfishes. Lobe-finned fish are bony fish notable for their fins being attached to muscular lobes. By contrast, ray-finned fish (AKA pretty much every fish you've ever heard of that isn't a shark) have their fins attached directly to the body. That may not sound like a big difference, but it actually is. The lobes of lobe-finned fish eventually evolved into the first vertebrate limbs. That makes lobe-finned fish the ancestors of all reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including you. In fact, you are more closely related to a coelacanth than a coelacanth is to a tuna. Coelacanths were thought to be the closest living link to tetrapods, but genetic testing has shown that lungfish are actually closer to the ancestor of tetrapods.

(image id: a scientific diagram depicting the taxonomic relationships of early lobe-finned fish showing their evolution to proto-tetrapods like Tiktaalik and Ichthyostega, to true tetrapods. Source)

There are two known living coelacanth species: the west Indian ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) and the Indonesian coelacanth (L. menadoensis). Both are very large fish, capable of exceeding 2 m (6.6 ft) in length and 90 kg (200 lbs). Their wikipedia page describes them as "plump", which seems a little judgmental to me. Their tails are unique, consisting of two lobes above and below the end of the tail, which has its own fin. Their scales are very hard and thick, acting like armor. The mouth is small, but a hinge in its skull, not found in any other animal, allows the mouth to open extremely wide for its size. In addition, they lack a maxilla (upper jawbone), instead using specialized tissue in its place. They lack backbones, instead having an oil-filled notochord that serve the same function. The presence of a notochord is the key characteristic of being a chordate, but most vertebrates only have one in embryo, after which it is replaced by a backbone. Instead of a swim bladder, coelacanths have a vestigial lung filled with fatty tissue that serves the same purpose. In addition to the lung, another fatty organ also helps control buoyancy. The fatty organ is large enough that it forced the kidneys to move backwards and fuse into one organ. Coelacanths have tiny brains. Only about 15% of the skull cavity is filled by the brain, the rest is filled with fat.

(image id: a coalacanth. It is similar to the one on the above image, but this one is blue in color and the head is seen more clearly, showing an open mouth and large eye)

One of the reasons it took so long for coelacanths to be rediscovered is their habitat. They prefer to live in deeper waters in the twilight zone, between 150 and 250 meters deep. They are also nocturnal and spend the day either in underwater caves or swimming down into deeper water. They typically stay in deeper water or caves during the day as colder water keeps their metabolism low and conserves energy. While they do not appear to be social animals, coelacanths are tolerant of each other's presence and the caves they stay in may be packed to the brim during the day. Coelacanths are all about conserving energy even when looking for food. They are drift feeders, moving slowly with the currents and eating whatever they come across. Their diet primarily consists of fish and squid. Not much is known about how they catch their prey, but they are capable of rapid bursts of speed that may be used to catch prey and is definitely used to escape predators. They are believed to be capable of electroreception, which is likely used to locate prey and avoid obstacles. Coelacanths swim differently than other fish. They use their lobe fins like limbs to stabilize their movements as they drift. This means that while coelacanths are slow, they are very maneuverable. Some have even been seen swimming upside-down or with their heads pointed down.

(image: an underwater cave wilt multiple coelacanths residing in it. 5 are clearly visible, with the fins of others showing from offscreen)

Coelacanths are a vary race example of bony fish that give live birth. They are ovoviviparous, meaning the egg is retained and hatches inside the mother. Gestation can take between 2 and 5 years (estimates differ) and multiple offspring are born at a time. It is possible that females may only mate with a single male at a time, though this is not confirmed. Coelacanths can live over 100 years and do not reach full maturity until age 55. This very slow reproduction and maturation rate likely contributes to the rarity of the fish.

(image: a juvenile coelacanth. Its body shape is the same as those of adults, but with proportionately larger fins. There are green laser beams shining on it. These are used by submersibles to calculate the size of animals and objects)

Coelacanths are often described as living fossils. This term refers to species that are still similar to their ancient ancestors. The term is losing favor amongst biologists due to how misleading it can be. The term os often understood to mean that modern species are exactly the same as ancient ones. This is not the case. Living coelacanth are now known to be different than those who existed during the Cretaceous, let alone the older fossil species. Living fossils often live in very stable environments that result in low selective pressure, but they are still evolving, just slower.

(image: a coelacanth swimming next to a SCUBA diver)

Because of the rarity of coelacanths, it's hard to figure out what conservation needs they have. The IUCN currently classifies the west Indian ocean coelacanth as critically endangered (with an estimated population of less than 500) and the Indonesian coelacanth as vulnerable. Their main threat is bycatch, when they are caught in nets intended for other species. They aren't fished commercially as their meat is very unappetizing, but getting caught in nets is still very dangerous and their slow reproduction and maturation means that it is long and difficult to replace population losses. There is an international organization, the Coelacanth Conservation Council, dedicated to coelacanth conservation and preservation.

(image: a coelacanth facing the camera. The shape of its mouth makes it look as though it is smiling)

Help two trans disabled people very close to escaping homelessness!!

Feb. 20

My roomate and I got news that the final paperwork we need to fill out to get the check from my relatives will has arrived. This means its about 2 weeks at most till we get the check and about a month at most, till we will be in an apartment.

We were able to get food, so I'm no longer starving to keep my roomate fed while he's so sick. His antibiotics arrived so hopefully he'll improve soon.

We are already behind on the hotel bill again though, and we have barely gotten d0nations at all in the past few days. Things are urgent again, and we are desperately trying to stay safe until we get into an apartment. All d0nations will go to food and hotel/storage bills, or when possible other necessities, like masks, because we have needed to replace our masks for over a month now and we are both severely immunoconpromised. Please d0nate or share if you can't!!! We are so close to being okay. And please do not speculate about this being a scam, just ask me for fucking proof, I can get pics of the hotel billing, have storage billing screenshots, etc etc.

@hostile-flower is still doing tattoo designs for people who d0nate $50 or more!

Ca$happ: $creepiecrippl

Venm0: @ tab-99

https://www.paypal.me/creepiecrpple

UPDATE

So my brother is trying to get me put in jail because I'm wanted in the state of Utah meanwhile we live in Missouri........ so the sooner we move out the better. And I don't want to point fingers but SOMEONE had been spilling their coffee or soda on my car and im p sure it's because they don't know my apartment number, but know where I park...

Here's the story

my literal nazi right-wing brother doxxed me online on tiktok, after finding out I am a trans man and had a breast reduction (to save my back... not even top surgery). He has threatened me, among telling other people how he's going to shoot me and or get me thrown in jail.

the person who told me everything he was saying is refusing to testify for me in court, because she "wants to stay on his good side"

why haven't you told the police?

I'm a schizophrenic queer trans and is wanted in the state of Utah. He is an ex jailer and firefighter so the police are already on his side. And I didn't know this, but the law of springfield required that I report his threats 24 hours within the date the threats were said. And when I had blocked him I lost all of his threats (evidence) he had sent me. Everyone connected to this has straight up told me they "don't want to get mixed up in this drama", so I've already lost the court case.

Oh have I also mentioned hes an alcoholic who's been known to be very impulsive and have outbursts of anger? Did you also know he physically and verbally abused me all throughout growing up and treated me like I were his battered girlfriend?

why don't you move somewhere inside the US?

My brother isn't the first and only transphobe who threatened my life in any state.

so, yeah, I'm fucked and stressed out until I can move safely out of America where I can safely cut ties with my mormon family.

but you can help by spreading the word so people that can donate will be able to

(please ignore my dead name. I haven't been able to afford changing it to Simon Mossheart yet)

gofundme.com

Move us out of America, organized by Emmily Pippin

hi, my partner and I are trans men named Simon and Blue, and I need to get out of America as my … Emmily Pippin needs your support for Move

all I need left is $3,344

thats all thats left so my trans boyfriend and our 3 cats can pack what we can in a suitcase and find a home in sweden. I'm hoping to leave at the end of October.

if you have any questions please feel free to dm me. I'm also willing to talk about how far the abuse went.

Please help a queer black woman leave an abusive household

TW: Abuse, Rape mention and mention of cancer and homophobia/queerphobia

Hi everyone, I am a queer black woman, my name is Chelsea and I desperately need $3500 to help move out of an abusive household.

Throughout my life I have been living with my narcissistic parents who are frequently abusive (both emotionally, physically and homophobic/queerphobic) and it has taken a toll on my mental well-being as I've been diagnosed with chronic anxiety and undiagnosed adhd. My parents continue to speak negatively to me and they have a tendency of using personal hardships that I have been through to belittle me. In 2018 I was raped by someone I knew in highschool. That incident made me ill and I had to be treated for vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia which is a precancerous skin condition. Both my parents use this incident to gaslight, belittle and manipulate me. They also constantly speak down on the queer community and say hateful things, which suggests that they would be physically violent towards any queer people. They are unaware of my sexual orientation and I've been hiding that from them to keep myself safe.

They do not allow me to leave the house unless I am accompanied by someone. I have been trying to look for work so I can become financially independent, but they physically stop me from going to job interviews. I do not know how many more years I can go on being trapped like this.

I’m raising money so I can move out and afford a one-bedroom apartment and start healing in a safer environment and to gain financial independence. I will need funds for transport to move, and for a couple of months groceries and rent as well as funds to get a new ID and passport, my parents keep them from me. I’m hoping to be able to move to another city because my rapist lives in the same neighbourhood and city as me, so not only am I not safe when I am at home, I'm also constantly paranoid during the few occasions that I'm allowed to go out. Please please help if you can!

I will be extremely grateful to anyone that donates any amount at all. If you can't donate may you please share it and hopefully reach someone that can.

I have a PayPal account which is currently the only place I can accept donations:

PayPal.Me

Pay Chelsea Summer using PayPal.Me

Go to paypal.me/chelseanovasummer and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.

Pete Wentz is an Abuser. Let’s Talk About It.

tw abuse, rape, pedophilia, intimate partner violence, rape culture

I’m nervous to write this post. In order to write it, I have to talk about a lot of things that scare me and a lot of things that make me feel empty and powerless and angry. Plus, there are a lot of awesome people writing awesome things about this topic and I don’t have much to add to the conversation as a whole except my own individual perspective as a kid who loved Fall Out Boy more than she loved herself. So that’s what I have to offer you today: a hopefully-coherent series of thoughts about the ways in which Fall Out Boy perpetuate serious harm.

If you scroll down  bit, you’ll be reminded that my last post was about the ways Fall Out Boy shaped my understanding of my own identity and personhood. I spent a lot of my adolescence feeling very protective of FOB and the other bands I considered part of my identity, and I think a lot of other people do this too. The whole “Band as Self” thing was a huge part of who i was, and it’s impossible to separate that from who I am today. I would never try to take that history away from anyone because I cannot take it away from myself. I probably have Fall Out Boy lyrics etched into my bones the way they’re etched into the rubber of my Vans at the back of my closet, or something overdramatic like that. I have a Fall Out Boy tattoo, for crying out loud. But I have to own that along with all of the things that come with it.

One of those things is this: Pete Wentz is a statutory rapist. This is an undisputed fact. When Pete Wentz was 23, he was dating a 15-year-old girl. His relationship with her was the inspiration for Take This To Your Grave, the soundtrack to revenge porn before “revenge porn” was a thing. Pete Wentz is an abuser, and he and his bandmates and everyone else involved in the functioning of Fall Out Boy is directly profiting off of the exploitation of a child.

I’m not going to include too many links in this post because the facts are easy enough to find thanks to Google, and I don’t particularly want to contribute to the constant name-dropping this woman has been subjected to for the last eleven or twelve years. The information is everywhere. Even as a kid, I knew the story of the woman who had inspired such poetic lyrics as Let’s play this game/called when you catch fire/I wouldn’t piss to put you out and With every breath I wish your body would be broken again, among many others. Pretty much every song on the album, and many songs on future albums as well, are about killing her or at very least wishing that she’d crash her car and die.

This, of course, is not something I picked up on immediately. In fact, it took me an embarrassingly long time to look critically at Fall Out Boy. It began in 2013, over six years after I first began listening to the band in earnest. I was twenty years old and though I’d long since stopped subscribing to Alternative Press, I bought the September issue because the cover story was a piece commemorating the tenth anniversary of Take This to Your Grave, FOB’s first official album. It was billed as an oral history and a tribute to the album, and I was feeling the weight of my own mortality as the end of college drew nearer. Fall Out Boy was still one of the most important things to me, and I was beginning to explore my interest in oral history and music history as a whole, so I eagerly sought out the magazine and sat in a Target Starbucks to read it.

The article addressed the band’s history up until the release of TTYG and got into some detail about the studio where the album was recorded, but for the first time in my life i noticed the silence around the meaning of the songs. Growing up, I mostly heard TTYG explained as a breakup album detailing Pete Wentz’s heartbreak after his girlfriend cheated on him, and somehow this was enough reason for 12 songs about wishing her dead. As obvious as it sounds, it took reading this article and feeling nauseated by all of the men praising the album to make me realize that I have to detangle my emotional attachment to Fall Out Boy from the reality that Pete Wentz is a rapist and everything Fall Out Boy has ever made is predicated on that fact. It took me another few months to start compiling information and developing enough of a framework around community accountability to have a fully-fleshed-out opinion on the subject, and it took experiencing an emotionally abusive relationship to get angry enough to finally make some decisions about how to progress in my communities.

The conclusion I came to begins like this: if you take away all of our connections to this band, if we detach our meanings and put them aside for a moment, the case of Pete Wentz the Rapist is unavoidably made. As stated, he dated a fifteen-year-old when he was twenty-three. He frequently refers to himself as Peter Pan and has at least one tattoo to that effect. As far back as 2007, people have been writing absolutely fucking mind-boggling articles about Pete Wentz/FOB that all but name him as an abusive partner (and refer to his ex-girlfriend as his “sulky teenage muse”—remember that Pete was twenty-seven in 2007). The cops had to come because he was breaking the windows of her car.

These are all things we were familiar with back then. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I knew the facts, and so did most of my friends. The thing is, we didn’t really care. We would have followed Fall Out Boy anywhere. Here’s the thing, though: it wasn’t our responsibility to disown Pete Wentz. It was someone’s responsibility to protect us from him, and whoever was supposed to do that job failed, simply and utterly. But whose job was it to do that? Here’s the answer: his bandmates, who have yet to denounce or even mention his behavior; his friends and managers and publicists, who should have known better; and the music community at large, a community which (like most other business endeavors) profits off of the exploitation of teenage girls. Fall Out Boy made millions and millions of dollars off of Pete Wentz’s marketability to teenage girls. Panic! At the Disco, Paramore, and tons of other bands made millions and millions of dollars off of Pete Wentz’s marketability to teenage girls. And this marketability is the result of the qualities that made him a textbook statutory rapist and certified man-baby. That’s the shit we’re selling girls.

In my opinion, the people who have the biggest responsibility to speak up, other than Patrick Stump, Andy Hurley, and Joe Trohman, are other pop punk musicians who have profited off of the Pete Wentz model of stardom. Luckily enough, there is already a blueprint for them thanks to New Found Glory. Allow me to direct your ears toward the band’s most recent album, Resurrection, released in the wake of former guitarist Steve Klein’s trial for lewd conduct with a minor. As this shitstain of a review explains, though Steve Klein continues to deny the allegations, his former bandmates have released an album eviscerating him to power chords, calling him out and describing why, exactly, they cut him off. This ridiculous fucking review, in true Alternative Press fashion, attempts to defend Klein by accusing NFG of “kicking someone when he’s down,” otherwise known as “speaking publicly against pedophilia, which is a good thing to do unless the pedophile is in your band, in which case you should shut the fuck up.” This isn’t a perfect solution or even a solution at all, really, but it is a movement toward public, unapologetic accountability among some of the most iconic pop punk bros. 

Listen: I’m twenty-two. I don’t have any answers, just a whole lot of sadness and a mountain of guilt about the way I was taught to vilify other girls for the benefit of older men thanks to the culture of pop punk. In a lot of ways, this right here is why i decided to start this blog: pop punk is not safe for kids like me, was never safe for kids like me, and particularly for kids who are oppressed along axes I am not. We are sold to, and welcomed in theory—until we show up to shows or listen too closely to lyrics, at which point we are constantly bombarded and harangued and leered at.  

So here’s my personal solution, as it currently stands: I will never buy another Fall Out Boy concert ticket. I will never buy another Fall Out Boy t-shirt. I can’t escape my history with this music, but i can refuse to contribute to a culture that celebrates and protects men who abuse young girls. I can’t fight every battle—hell, I can’t boycott every abuser because there are simply too many and no one can know all of them—but I can do this, and you can do something similar. Let’s talk about Pete Wentz as the abuser he is. Let’s make his people face what he’s done. It’s one small way we can protect the kids we once were.

This piece isn’t exactly what I want it to be, and I’m going to keep thinking and talking and writing it out. I want to talk to you about it. I want to learn more. I want to develop these ideas into something mobilized, maybe; mobilized toward what, I’m not sure yet. But if you have ideas, or questions, or a hurt you wanna share, please reach out.

Finally, a huge thank you to witchsong for this piece, which is an excellent response to a pro-FOB piece published on their site in the wake of this issue.