Sylvia Rivera, born on July 2 in 1951, was a Latina American queer rights activist, member of the Gay Liberation Front, and community worker from the state of New York.

Rivera, who identified as a "half-sister", participated in demonstrations with the Gay Liberation Front. With her close friend Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a socialist group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women.

At different times in her life, Rivera battled substance abuse and lived on the streets, largely in the gay homeless community at the Christopher Street docks. Her experiences made her more focused on advocacy for those who, in her view, mainstream society and the assimilationist factions of the LGBT community were leaving behind.

Rivera died during the dawn hours of February 19th, 2002, at St. Vincent's Hospital, of complications from liver cancer. Activist Riki Wilchins said this of her: "In many ways, Sylvia was the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement, a term that was not even coined until two decades after Stonewall".

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  • Black_Mald_Futures [any]
    ·
    2 months ago

    whew, the various symptoms of the slightly bad burn on my arm that made me think "oh, oh no, this might be getting infected" have abated, and quickly, cheers all around

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      ·
      2 months ago

      what made you think it was infected/how did you clean & care for it?

      this is completely exploratory, i've been burned a bunch but i don't really understand it so tips abt what to look for and do are welcome

      • Black_Mald_Futures [any]
        ·
        2 months ago

        what made you think it was infected/how did you clean & care for it

        I just kept it clean and sometimes put on aloe based lotion, plus a burn ointment with whatever benzalkonium chloride is as a disinfectant. (I SHOULD HAVE CONVERED IT WITH A CLEAN BANDAGE OR GAUZE TOO).

        But earlier tonight it was feeling more painful on contact with things (i'm clumsy don't @ me) and despite being closed earlier it had been oozing pus a bit which are both not great signs to start but it's fine now, probably

        i've been burned a bunch but i don't really understand it

        Okay, and, so I cannot stress stress this enough, and this is with the most certainly I have ever said anything on this blessed site across so many accounts, but the most important thing to do imo when you've burnt yourself in a kitchen (or anywhere) is to run the wound under cool water. Don't put your hand into some ice because uh I'm pretty sure that's worse. Freezing temps can damage tissue. COOL WATER for a couple minutes

        Basically like think about cooking. You burnt yourself. You're cooking. You need to stop the cooking process. It won't stop the damage that's been done but it can help stop it from being worse (think about 'letting meat rest', it's still cooking as it does). I've had burns where the skin comes off and takes weeks to fully heal and burns where it is kinda fucked but stays together and heals without further harm in a day or two and the difference has been applying cool water for a few minutes to the burn

        I mean it varies with severity but like, for real, this is the most important basic burn first aid, get that shit under cold water

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
          ·
          2 months ago

          How'd you get a burn like that? I get burned constantly, I feel it's the price I must pay for never cutting myself but it's almost always just catching the side of an oven with my arm or the cloth I'm using as an oven mitt being wrapped a wrong on a pan or has a wet spot. So, lots of burns but never anything deep. Last Friday a pizza fresh out of the oven fell on my hand and that was a bit nasty, but even still only got through one layer of skin and I had some mild blisters for a bit.

          • Black_Mald_Futures [any]
            ·
            2 months ago

            the cloth I'm using as an oven mitt being wrapped a wrong on a pan or has a wet spot

            Dude I am so fucking sick of inferior oven mitts, like, I don't know if there's a reason why but they don't get the kind that are impregnated with silicone and at least somewhat water resistant, so they get clogged up with water (pulling big strainers of noodles out of the steam kettle) or grease (people are not careful with them and what they touch, I am though) or they just have random holes in them and WOOPS MY FINGER IS BURNING

            At least i haven't dropped anything yet. Well, in a way that lost food, lol

            But for real these oven mitts suck. I literally saw scorch marks on a brand new one after pulling a large roasting pan off the stove after sauteeing greens, like, they're hardly even heat resistant!

            And towels are worse, I need actual oven mitts so the back of my hand and wrists are protected

              • Black_Mald_Futures [any]
                ·
                2 months ago

                at that point I would honestly just buy my own to bring and use, like I'm sure you're like "skill issue" and good enough to not need them but for me it is a luxury that I would want to have. I really do not like fucking around with towels to handle hot things in a hurry

                • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  Oh, we should totally have mitts, it's really really stupid we don't. These are fucking bar rags too, not even real clothes and we go through them crazy fast cause they're probably made of mostly plastic so exposure to VERY extreme heat (trad pizzas, 620 or higher oven) and being washed each night. Our chef sucks at spending money cause he's a coward, which cuts well both ways at times. We haven't replaced our deep fryer that broke over a year ago and have been using a pot of oil on a convection burner. It's not great.

                  • Black_Mald_Futures [any]
                    ·
                    2 months ago

                    they're probably made of mostly plastic so exposure to VERY extreme heat

                    yeahhh that's a good way to get bad burns, I don't think synthetic fabrics are supposed to be used in kitchens because they pretty much melt under heat, then burn

                    We haven't replaced our deep fryer that broke over a year ago and have been using a pot of oil on a convection burner. It's not great.

                    christ

                    well at least you don't have a big ass deep fryer to clean out, but I bet that's real fun to deal with a lot of orders with yea

                    do you use pizza crispers/steels or whatever to put them in the oven on or do the pizzas just go straight in the oven? When I did the pizza station here we used what were basically special short tongs that clasp onto the steel, that might be something that works better to get them out safely

                    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
                      ·
                      2 months ago

                      We don't do pan pizzas, those boys go straight on the stone with those bigass pizza paddles. We only really need clothes for pans that get baked in the pizza oven

          • Black_Mald_Futures [any]
            ·
            2 months ago

            I smacked my arm into the open oven door while i was trying to quickly get out a bunch of sheet pans of bratwurst because I needed to start heating up frozen pretzels and was in a hurry. I then somehow got the other side of my arm but don't remember how

            What really sucks is because I was by myself I felt like i couldn't stop what I was doing even for a minute or I might not have had time to get everything ready and I had nobody to take over for a second. So I didn't run it under cold water and it's worse than it could have been as a result.

            It's kind of a bad burn too because it's right in my "clumsy bumping into shit" zone, so the skin quickly got ripped off. I should have covered it but ran out of self adhering tape and didn't wanna get more and I thought it'd be fine but woops

            It's almost better now but it's been a week

            • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
              ·
              2 months ago

              Oh, I know that spot. I worked at a place where those doors opened to basically a doorway do people coming in with stuff would hit it by accident and burn you all the time because they never figured out to just fucking wait if the oven is open. Those suck cause they're in a spot that will end out touching all sorts of other stuff.

              • Black_Mald_Futures [any]
                ·
                2 months ago

                oh my god it would be so difficult for me to keep my cool if I got burned because someone busted through a doorway and made the oven smack into me, especially if it happened more than once

                the most annoying thing about this particular burn is the flaps to keep the cold air in the walk ins keep smacking me right on them when I'm running through

                • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  Oh, I did not. This one dude kept doing it and almost getting me, and we had all agreed to just hold our horses and in this 3 person kitchen (small scale catering gig), this lummox kept doing it. When he finally caught me off guard and I did get burned, I went the absolute fuck off on him. I prefer to Take a Relaxed Attitude Towards Work to quote Apu when he was trying to be American, but yeah, when you get injured due to someone's absolute ambivalence to an easy to follow safety procedure, it sets anyone off. What sets me off in general is just people being self serving. Like, today, our town is on a boil order, our morning dishwasher who is the first guy in and also has been around crazy long and used to be the chef's boss, so they're old friends decided that instead of throwing a pot on that we could cool off to wash our salad greens in, so we'd have some for service, to just not. So we couldn't sell salads after a point. He decided he didn't need to do numerous things on the prep list, that I wrote, because he decided it wasn't necessary. His method for this was sometimes seeing there was a bin of whatever but not seeing how full it was. Or sometimes i want shit cut up to make fridge space for when I order more and also sometimes I'm thinking ahead by a day or two. Regardless, this dude took off two hours early today saying there was nothing left cause he just crossed shit off the list he deemed unnecessary, he's done by 3pm at the latest, he has no clue what we need done or why I put it on the list and if he hasn't taken the chance to do any cooking, then it's really not his call. I've also got people never putting stuff away or cleaning up their stations before doing other stuff and CONSTANTLY leaving an unusable tiny amount of something on the line instead of just giving a customer a tiny bit extra to kill off a container and swap to a new one so.thr next guy has to. When you're closer to the top, it can be even worse. I understand Gordom Ramsay at least in Kitchen Nightmares sooooo well.

      • blight [any]
        ·
        2 months ago

        i think it’s funny that “dolores” replied to a post about pain