Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice

@lizzzs

Feminist/white/Jewish/parent/writer. Solidarity is action (Mia McKenzie). Courage then action then hope. Interested in trauma. I write songs and stuff sometimes. (Like ptsdthemusical.net) I mostly curate and comment. Bike riding is the best fun. she/her

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Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· 10d

I appreciate you. My trans daughter is amazing. Cats are cute. My city will probably be changing a bunch of streets in the next few years in such a way that a lot fewer people will be injured or killed by cars.

Photo of a couple of extremely cute cats, one calico, one orange striped, relaxing on top of the chapter I was reviewing, and also my closed laptop

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· 15d

Oh and also this. I'm tuckered out, not going to show the t-shirts and hot sauce I got from the Sigh folks (they're gifts), or the slightly boring tote bag from Karepango. This is for my mathy and musical kid.

Photo of a print with cute color illustrations of a calculator and a cello, both with faces, arms and legs, fist bumping. Text above them reads Math and Music are FRIENDS

You can also see my feet in a pair of beige sandals, and my legs in black jeans

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· 15d

What I got at #SDCC this year. Going to ship a box home, no way I can carry all those books.

Very tall stack of books. They are, top to bottom:
Emancipation Illustrated/Declaration Illustrated, R.Sikoryak
You're all just jealous of my jetpack, Tom Gauld
Paying For It (film edition), Chester Brown
All the Cameras in my Room, Michael Deforge
4 Kids Walk into a Bank, Boss & Mauer & Rosenberg
The V Chronicles, Aura Marquez
Claimed by the Orc King, Roxy Taylor (a freebie)
The Subtle Art of Folding Space, John Chu
Wish We Weren't Here, Peter Kuper
Bury Your Gays, Chuck Tingle
Feo the Chupacabra, Blankenship and Thompson
Do Admit It! The Mitford Sisters and Me, Mimi Pond
Mouse Guard Fall 1152, David Petersen
This Place Kills Me, Tamarindo & Goux
Charity & Sylvia, Willie Walden
Young Shadow, Ben Sears
My Life in 24 Frames per Second, Rintarô
The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief Carol Tyler

Photo of an embroidered sticker from Karepango with text, Trying is already an act of change and I hope you can give yourself KINDNESS to go through it instead of around it, with art of a shining sun and some light and dark clouds

Photo of a few things next to that huge stack of books: a magnet with an illustration of a crow swearing, $#@&, and text, TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO CUSS and a round sticker with an illustration of a cartoony vampire biting a big red heart with text, LOVE BITES, I BITE, I AM LOVE, from Inner Monsters that I got from Rebecca Hicks.

Also a silver sticker from Karepango with a snake monster illustration and text, Do something scary every day but do not forget to be kind to yourself and to all of humanity

And a big stack of colorful and adorable postcards from Lea Hernandez

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· 17d

Here's a beautiful bike lane in the Gaslamp district of San Diego!

Photo of a buffered bike lane on an urban street. There's a huge piece of heavy equipment, painted orange, in the bike lane. Some kind of lifter.

Same bike lane and heavy equipment blocking it, from the opposite POV.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· 19d

On my way to San Diego on the Surfliner. I love this part of the route. There's a permanent stop right by the beach now.

Photo of the view out a train window. There's a wire fence, then some medium sized dark gray rocks, and then the Pacific Ocean, water right up to the rocks.

Similar photo, no fence, gray rocks, a beach with scattered people and some blue and blue striped umbrellas, and the surf, with distant people standing in the water.

Photo through a train window, wire fence, sandy beach with some palm trees and an open wooden structure, with lots of people, colorful umbrellas, and in the distance the water, with a long pier on the right.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· 24d

Greetings from their long lost cousins.

Calico cat curled up on a desk which is crowded with papers; she's behind a laptop screen and has her paw over her face.

Gray striped cat with a substantial white bib sits comfortably on top of a huge pile of files and papers, a bookshelf behind her. She gazes off into the middle distance, thinking about that one toy.

Tortoiseshell cat relaxing in a cylindrical thing halfway up a cat tree. Her chin rests on a round opening on the left. Behind her is a view of green trees, bushes, a bit of street, and a black painted balcony railing.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Jul 9

(You could spend all day on the quote posts.) I had seen Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) because the image was on postcards when I was a feminist activist in the late 80s-early 90s. I encountered it recently at the Broad in L.A. A postcard is tiny; the art is huge.

Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) by Barbara Kruger. Slightly pixelated black and white photo of a white woman's face looking into the camera. The image is divided by a vertical line. On the left, the image is as expected; on the right, dark and light are reversed. Three blocks of text are placed at top, in the middle over the nose, and at the bottom, white sans serif text on red background. They read: Your body / is a / battleground. There are also vertical red borders running top to bottom at left and right.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Jun 14

Work from home conditions: intolerable

Photo of a large, crowded desk top. There are piles of files, a stand up metal holder full of files on the right, papers, an open laptop, printer in the far left back corner, cups with pens against the back wall, which has framed art on it. Also, four cats are arrayed on the desk, big black one and calico lying stretched out on top of papers, striped gray sitting on top of a plastic box at the back right and striped orange sitting right by the laptop on the other side from the calico.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Jun 1

Trying to change the minds of people who actively oppose you is a waste of time. The goal in ANY political work is to activate passive supporters and move the neutral in your direction.

A drawing of the Spectrum of Allies. Half circle with five slices. From left to right the slices are labeled Active Allies, Passive Allies, Neutral, Passive Opposition and Active Opposition. Arrows show movement to the next slice to the left. There are no arrows that originate from the Active Opposition slice.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· May 27

Screen shot with #AltText

Screen shot from the New York Times. Headline reads Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade. Subheading reads, While global warming is still a threat, the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated.
The text is accompanied by a photo of a burning landscape with a sun obscured by smoke.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Apr 23

Some NASA research. I'm guessing the language and projections may have been softballed; it says 30-50 years but there's already killer heat regularly in Southern India, and Arizona, among other places. It's worse in humid places since sweating won't save you. science.nasa.gov/earth/climat...

Screen shot of the end of the linked article. Text reads:
Future Hot Spots
Raymond says it's hard to say when we might see global wet-bulb temperatures regularly topping 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius). That's because it's a complex process that's happening gradually and unfolding differently in different places. But climate models tell us certain regions are likely to exceed those temperatures in the next 30 to 50 years. The most vulnerable areas include South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea by around 2050; and Eastern China, parts of Southeast Asia, and Brazil by 2070.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Apr 15

Necklaces. I'm less ambitious with earrings these days, but I got myself a jewelry store sort of thing to hang them on. I am scarf aspirational but there are only one or two I actually wear.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Apr 6

Wow, banned at one UK school! That's one way to eliminate it, I mean, to make sure it becomes extremely popular.

Excerpt from the linked Wikipedia article which reads:
...as the "Meet me at McDonald's haircut." The hairstyle achieved media exposure after a school in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk banned pupils from possessing the style.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Mar 29

C.L. Moore! Leigh Brackett! Judith Merril! Zenna Henderson! I was thinking about Ellison and the New Wave. He was first published in 1957 (although he was publishing fanzines before that). Le Guin was first published the same year. I suspect the influence ran more from her toward the New Wavers.

Photo of the cover of the book Women of Wonder: The Classic Years - Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s, edited and with an introduction by Pamela Sargent, cover art has a couple of young looking white women with large breasts, skimpy bustier-and-miniskirt outfits, and helmets that look like inverted glass jars on their heads. One is holding a flip phone sort of gizmo and they both have impeccable manicures.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Mar 28

Various people have added me to various lists (including some that are head scratchers) but this one I definitely belong on.

Screen shot from my direct messages that informs me that a user whose handle is guillotinefred has added me to the "Alt Text scolds" moderation list

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Mar 6

you're in good company

Screen shot showing the bottom of the original screen shot about Kalshi and a post from Jesus Lizard Superstar replying, kinda sad tbh

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Mar 4

Folks in conservation work are very depressed. There are the usual issues of small nonprofits: pay you can't live on, bad managers, uncertain funding. Plus remote locations. Plus you might get shot. And there's the biodiversity crisis, which requires POLITICAL battles. In all our spare time.

"The climate breakdown and biodiversity crisis has reached a point where I don't think many people believe that we can recover anymore," says Jessie Panazzolo, the founder of Lonely Conservationists, a group devoted to caring for conservationists.

But sometimes the psychological distress goes beyond burnout and grief and into full trauma. There is a lot of conservation work happening in conflict zones, which can lead to deadly incidents and ongoing distress.
"I had a conversation with a colleague who does inspiring conservation work," Mohan says. "Their program site was attacked by a terrorist insurgent. A couple of their staff members were killed....We were talking about how to support the team at this time. [They] said to me, 'Whoever thought that conservation would be like this?'"

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Mar 2

It was a beautiful, emotional experience, thoughtfully organized, with multiple altars, music, poetry, silence, singing, movement, and lots of water on a hot, sunny day. I was on the job as a safety marshall and only took two photos. Here's one of them, a poem at one of the altars.

Photo of a paper printout of a poem. There's a fuzzy shadow of tree branches on it. The text reads:

The Seed and the Tree

The trees who remained
That teach us to grieve
Are the elders bearing wisdom
We are their seeds

The Seed and the Tree

Weeping at the stump
Laughing under leaves
This land remembers
We are their seeds

The Seed and the Tree

Rhythms of the village
Dena's beating heart
Hermanas y hermanos
Construyendo hogar

The Seed and the Tree

Note: the Spanish lines mean
Sisters and brothers
Building community

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Mar 2

Everything is terrible but this weekend I visited a park and a neighborhood of Altadena with a group of neighbors and friends to remember those lost and to celebrate and sanctify renewal and rebuilding.

Close up photo of green grass and several tiny daisy type flowers blooming.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 28

With #AltText (It's a quote and tweet from Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego talking tough about big corporations in an interview.)

Screen shot of a couple of tweets by Nicholas Wu @nicholaswu12:
"Once we take power, whoever the president is, we're going to break up your companies."
Screen shot within the tweet reads:
"Once we take power, whoever the president is, we're going to break up your companies," Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz, told Semafor. "So all the investment you did to create these mergers are going to be for naught. Your investors are going to be pissed at you, and you're likely going to end up getting fired as the CEO because you wasted so much money and corrupted yourself in the process."
Quoted tweet from Nicholas Wu reads,
New - Top Democrats are weighing how harshly they would go after corporations that have courted President Donald Trump's approval if they retake the House in November.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 27

My timeline.

Post from Nicholas Slayton @nslayton.bsky.net that reads:
Everything in the news is very bad. No war.

Followed by a post from Better Things Are Possible @internethippo that reads:
(with barely contained rage) I'm going to have a nice weekend

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 21

(Sorry to hijack your post with my reminisces.) I sang with her at McCabes and a few other places, long ago.

Color photo of a white woman standing on a path with trees behind her. She's wearing a red top, dark pants, and a long red and black coat with loose sleeves, smiling and holding her arms out wide.

Photo of an elderly white woman wearing a long sleeved red shirt, dark pants, and a gold colored watch. She's sitting on a brown leather loveseat, right hand in her lap, left elbow on the armrest, leaning her left cheek on her closed fist. She's looking at the camera and smiling slightly.

An old black and white photo of a dark haired white woman sitting on a stool, wearing a long loose patterned dress, holding an acoustic guitar, with an angled microphone pointed at the guitar. Next to her is a small girl with long dark hair wearing a long patterned dress, sitting on a high stool so her head is at the same height. Their mouths are open slightly because they are singing together. That's me and my mom, fifty plus years ago. It's probably around 1972.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 11

Both state and federal regulators say "Whatever, seems fine." Scientist says, WTF?? Also, calling "spreading toxic and radioactive waste on farmland" a friendly term like "landfarming" is straight up 1984 Ignorance is Strength bullshit.

$But for regulators, fracking waste is, by definition, safe. Since the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency has treated oil and gas waste as "non-hazardous" by definition, allowing it to be spread on farmland without treatment. And the Texas Railroad Commission -- the state's confoundingly-named and notoriously underfunded oil and gas regulator -- left operators to, as Oldham said, "self-police." They didn't require oil and gas operators to test their waste for radiation or PFAS or require them to line waste pits with plastic to keep contaminants from seeping into the water supply.$

$Scientists have long warned this is dangerous. When John Stolz, a Duquesne University microbiologist who studies fracking waste in Pennsylvania's Ohio Valley region, first heard about Texas companies doing landfarming -- the technical name for spreading solid drilling waste on farmland -- around the Barnett Shale, his first reaction was, "Are you guys nuts?"$

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 9

Today I learned two specific and fabulous facts about hot tubs. First, they were invented with a disabled person in mind. Second, Jacuzzi was the Italian inventor's name. (Screen shot from The Anti-Ableist Manifesto by Tiffany Yu.)

Text about touch screens, the typewriter keyboard, and electric toothbrushes. Relevant part reads: And after Candido Jacuzzi created a therapeutic hydropump to give his son relief from his rheumatoid arthritis, the Jacuzzi family scaled and commercialized the invention to bring hot tubs into people's homes.

Additional text about Sam Farber, who founded OXO to make accessible kitchen tools, starting with a peeler that was easier to use by his wife, who had arthritis.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 8

Like this guy

Screen shot of a notification regarding my happy fan quote skeet of fabulous writer of weird stuff Charlie Jane. Fabulous writer of weird stuff William Gibson reskeeted it. Be still my heart, I bought Neuromancer when it first came out and now I'm old.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 6

Good time to get some work done at my desk. Um.

Photo of an orange and white cat sitting loaf-like on top of a laptop keyboard, tail curled around his feet. He looks alert.

Photo of the same orange cat on top of the laptop. Now his eyes are closed, dammit.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 6

I was going to do some errands this afternoon but I guess I'll do them later.

Photo of the front wheel, fork, and metal basket of a cargo bike (you can see the RemiDemi label on the fork). There's a green towel in the basket, and a petite gray and white cat is on top of it, looking out from the basket frame toward the camera. Bookcase full of books in the background.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 5

No chicken. Also, not cheap, but many flavors.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Feb 1

Gift link. Sounds like people in Memphis have gone to ground but there are networks of support. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u...

Screen shot from the article. Text reads, "We're fighting from just a small corner," said Rob Brown, the owner of Da Sammich Spot in the Orange Mound neighborhood, whose business fell off when the task force first arrived. But after a video went viral of Mr. Brown asking National Guard troops standing outside his business to leave after hours, he has sold out of loaded fries, sandwiches, and fried fruit pies almost every day.
A photo shows Mr. Brown, a Black man wearing a maroon hoodie, standing in the order window at his restaurant, a small bright space with vivid yellow walls. Below the window is a handwritten cardboard sign that reads Justice for Tyre.

Liz Schiller #DefundthePolice@lizzzs· Jan 24

Laura is on her way to Minneapolis with the protective gear she last used in Portland in 2020. There's a link in the piece to things you can do. Don't ask "What can I do?"