Tropicnook - Nook

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Can’t afford to keep myself and my SO afloat - please help a black trans woman survive!

My name’s Natasha, I’m a 25 year old black trans woman currently living in Washington. Due to COVID we’re running into a massive supply shortage at work, leaving me again with drastically reduced hours and lower wages. My SO works full-time, but she is currently experiencing COVID-like symptoms and thus can’t work for two more weeks (on top of the week and a half she’s already missed). Our bills are piling up, and even when we can pay them off, we literally have less than $5 to our names for food, transportation costs, etc.

There’s absolutely no pressure or obligation for anyone to donate anything to us, but if you are able and wanting to, it would mean the absolute world to us. Here is our Venmo, and here is our Cash App. We are currently trying to figure our Paypal situation out, so if that’s the only way you can donate, DM me. If you can’t donate (again, no worries!) but want to help, please signal boost this! Thank you all so much

Reblog if you genuinely support asexuals

It terrifies me that there’s so much raging passion in the lgbt+ community that insist on marginalizing asexuals and implying that asexuals don’t deserve to have safe spaces. There’s still so much acephobia so I just wanna know which blogs are genuinely supportive and a safe space for asexuals

Surviving Halloween with Psychosis

- The picture test: If you can’t tell if something is a hallucination or not, take a photo! If it shows up in the picture then you have a keepsake of that crazy creepy Halloween decoration. If not it’s a hallucination (or a vampire. No, i’m kidding it’s a hallucination.)

- Is some kid in mask causing paranoia? Ask them where they got their costume. Did they make it? How did they get the idea? Focusing on the person inside of the costume will help you remember that it’s just a person!

- Avoid haunted houses, haunted hayrides, ect. Actors will not stop scaring unless it’s an emergency, and I’ve yet to find a place that teaches actors how to deal with anything other than physical injuries. (I once met a haunted house actor who said causing a panic attack meant he was “doing his job right.”)

- There’s no shame in asking friends and relatives to avoid sending jump scare videos or anything else that could cause paranoia.

- Here are some tips on how to tell if a video is a screamer.

- (from freeasthepaperburns) Boggart it! If something is making you upset, make it silly. dance with the shadows, sing to the creepies, I bet if make a fish face at the scary face it’ll be a little less scary. I know this is harder than it sounds, but I’ve gotten better at it over the time, and find it helps!

Stay safe babes!

Happy Anniversary to Undertale!  (September 15, 2015)

I’m going to give you the best piece of Adult Life Is Hard advice I’ve ever learned:

Talk to people when things go to shit.

I don’t just mean get it off your chest, although that’s good. I mean: Something’s wrong with your paycheck/you lost your job/you had unexpected emergency car repairs and now you’re broke so your credit card payment is late. Like, not just 15 days late. We’re talking, shit got crazy and now you’re 90 days late with compounded interest and late fees and the Minimum Payment Due is, like, $390, and you’ve got about $3.90 in your bank account. Call the credit card company. 

I know it’s scary. I know you feel like you’re going to get in trouble, like you’re gong to get yelled at or scolded for not having your life together. But the credit card company isn’t your parents; they’re just interested in getting money from you. And you can’t squeeze blood from a stone or money from someone who doesn’t have any. So what you do is you call them. You explain you’re experiencing temporary financial hardships, and you’re currently unable to bring your account up to date, but you don’t want to just let it get worse. Can you maybe talk to someone about a payment plan so you can work something out? Nine times out of ten you’ll be able to negotiate something so that at least it’s not just taking a constant, giant shit on your credit score.

- Can’t pay your power bill? Call the power company.

- Can’t pay your full rent? Talk to your landlord.

- Had to go to the hospital without insurance and have giant medical bills looming in your place? Call the hospital and ask if they have someone who helps people with financial hardships. Many do.

- Got super sick and missed half a semester of class because flu/pneumonia/auto-immune problems/depressive episode? Talk to your professor. If that doesn’t help, talk to your advisor.

You may not be able to fix everything, but you’ll likely be able to make improvements. At the very least, it’s possible that they have a list of people you can contact to help you with things. (Also, don’t be afraid to google things like, “I can’t pay my power bill [state you live in]” because you’d be surprised at what turns up on Google!) But the thing is, people in these positions gain nothing if you fail. There’s no emotional satisfaction for them if your attempts at having your life together completely bite the dust. In fact, they stand to benefit if things work out for you! And chances are, they’ll be completely happy to take $20 a month from you over getting $0 a month from you, your account will be considered current because you’ve talked to them and made an agreement, you won’t get reported to a collections agency, and your credit score won’t completely tank.

Here’s some helpful tips to keep in mind:

1. Be polite. Don’t demand things; request them. Let me tell you about how customer service people hold your life in their hands and how many extra miles they’ll go for someone who is nice to them.

2. Stick to the facts, and keep them minimal unless asked for them. Chances are they’re not really interested in the details. “We had several family emergencies in a row, and now I’m having trouble making the payments” is better than “Well, two months ago my husband wrecked his bike, and then he had a reaction to the muscle relaxer they gave him, and then our dog swallowed a shoestring and we had to take him to the emergency clinic, and just last week MY car broke down, and now my account’s in the negatives and I don’t know how I’m gonna get it back out.” The person you’re talking to is aware shit happens to everyone; they don’t need the details to prove you’re somehow “worthy” of being helped. They may ask you for details at a certain point if they have to fill out any kind of request form, but let them do that.

3. Ask questions. “Is there anything we can do about X?” “Would it be possible to move my payment date to Y day instead so it’s not coming out of the same paycheck as my rent?” The answer may be “no.” That’s not a failure on your part. But a good customer service person may have an alternate solution. 

Anyway! I hope that helps! Don’t just assume the answer is “no” before you’ve even begun. There is more help out there than you ever imagined.

Sunset stroll artfight attack.

Ok but real talk here, big, important question for everyone:

Why do you like but not reblog?

It feels like the bare minimum in fandom to reblog stuff you like. It’s the easiest way to support artists/writers and guarantee they do more of that same kind of thing.

I thought of some reasons people might not want to reblog and I’m going to debunk them:

Reblog = repost and reposts are evil!!!

Reblogs are different than reposts. As long as the original post came from the artist, the artist gets the credit for it and that’s what they want. REPOSTS are when you find a piece of art you like, save it to your computer, and later make your own post with it, and that’s not cool

Reblogging is too much effort!!

It really, really isn’t. On mobile? Press and hold the reblog button. The post has now been reblogged. On desktop? Hold the alt key and then click the reblog button. Off it goes, letting more people enjoy the beauty of the post you just enjoyed yourself!

I don’t want to tag things though

So then...don’t? Just reblog it with no tags. You want to tag it later, you can. You never want to tag things? Cool, neither do I most times!

I DO want to tag things but I feel like I’m bothering people

I guarantee you, 90% of the time, artists love tags. Even the keyboard smash tags. The ones they don’t love are the ones demanding more art/for the artist to do things in a specific way/to change the art to suit one specific viewer’s preferences.

If I reblog things a lot, it’ll annoy people!

If people are following you, it’s for your content. If it annoys them, they can unfollow you. That’s on them. If you mean it’ll annoy the ARTIST if you go in and reblog their whole art tag...wrong, false, no, definitely not, they might even make more art specifically for you if you do that. Especially if you tag with ‘I love this piece because...’ and then give a reason why you love it, that is the most encouraging thing.

Reblogging doesn’t fit my blog aesthetic.

Idk what to tell you here, you’re in control of your aesthetic. Make a side blog maybe, reblog there and leave your main ‘clean’. Or vice versa. No reblogs = a quickly dwindling supply of art that people are willing to post.

Reblogging is an important part of fandom/tumblr community in general. It encourages more people to make more content which means more things for you to do/see/read.

It’s part of the fandom ecosystem; we have content makers and we have content viewers. Without makers, we have no art. Without viewers, there’s no reason to post it online. If viewers are limited, people start reconsidering whether to bother posting their art online or just share it with their friends they know will give feedback.

Reblogs are how you contribute to the fandom. Try it.

Completed comm for someone over on the bird site