You are the most influential and powerful person in the kingdom. Even the royals walk eggshells around you at risk of offending you. The thing is, you have no idea what you’re doing or how it has gotten to this point, but you’re in way too deep now and you have to keep the lie going to survive.
I actually like that all media is now created to be thoughtlessly consumed within a single alloted month before it’s destroyed by business guys whose stated favourite book is a dingy unread copy of The Art of War they left on their bedside to “reference”. it’s cool that everything is just one middling budget twelve episode season and half of it is dropped all at once directly onto streaming services so you have to sit down for six miserable hours to watch it in the most antisocial way possible. this is probably how art was meant to be consumed. this is how humans best process things, like death.
I let it all pass over me like a limp breeze. did I see the new show? oh no, and I suppose I will not, but that’s okay because I don’t feel much of anything at all about it. [pleasantly] I don’t feel much of anything at all.
don’t know what you’re talking about specifically but my understanding of US agricultural policy in general is that being a farmer in capitalism sucks and has since colonization and for a long time the US government tried to make it suck less with subsidies which sometimes work (because people get paid predictably regardless of demand and its less like gambling with crops) but sometimes go over really badly (because then too many people grow it and the price per bushel goes down and then government has too much corn) and then a couple times they got rid of all the subsides and related regulations and that REALLY didnt work (because then the price just crashed hard and with nothing to compensate them a bunch of farmers, many of whom were in debt for other farming-related reasons, couldnt get paid and actually had to foreclose their farms, which accelerated the long-standing trend of farms getting foreclosed on and then being bought out by bigger farms that then ended up running INSANE multi million dollar operations, sometimes even on farms in other states where the owners do not live, in communities they do not contribute to) and they had to backpedal on it and then eventually they just started on the current system where you simply pass a farm bill every 10-12 years instead of yearly or biyearly and that way you simply dont have to think about it, and then when it is election time you go stand by a cornfield for a while for tv. it does not fix the huge enormous farms buying out smaller farms problem or any of the complicated related problems but it DOES put it off for longer which is more important.
sometimes also you (USAID for instance) can give the too-much-corn you have from farm subsidies to a foreign country as a ‘gift’ and say youre just being a helpful little guy, but in the process of doing so undercut the local farmers in that country because they cant compete with free stuff but that’s cool because then the foreign country can’t really survive as well without US agricultural aid and you can manipulate them to do imperialism better AND you have more demand for the corn which might raise the price per bushel in the US. also sometimes the corn is fed to livestock en masse because the meat is worth more and sometimes its made into gas or high fructose corn syrup, and sometimes the price is so low per bushel that the insurance on the field is worth more than the actual corn.
but. i CANNOT stress enough that the most important thing about corn is that you can stand next to it on tv and if you cant do that, maybe you can stand next to a guy who is around it a lot and say you are helping him.
in my relatively uneducated opinion the most epic way to solve this complex multi-century interdisciplinary push and pull of supply and demand would be to just pay farmers a salary through the state since youre already paying out massive state subsidies for crops you dont need anyway and the farmers are performing a vital service and that way you can guarantee people a consistent salary AND control how much of each thing gets planted so you dont have a massive stockpile at all times AND you reward individual people instead of paying out large amounts of money to whatever massive operation sells the most corn by virtue of being big, but if you dont want to do that then the second best thing is to just pass another mediocre farm bill whos inflexible 10-ish year lifespan makes it impossible for it to respond well to changes in market demand and that way you can just put off making tough decisions and instead stand next to a guy and a cornfield on tv again. which as we have covered is the most important part of american agriculture
messed up seed fact of the day is that even the ability for a ‘crop’ of plants to come up and flower and make fruit all at once is bred for. if you’re just some seed buried in wild uncolonized woods or prairie there is no such thing as a hard set emergence time even if all the other plants are doing it. it’s just when the vibes are correct and for some native plants that takes legitimately years and multiple winters. or you could do the opposite and try to grow all at once with everyone else right away in the first spring if it suits you but still, no guarantees. no point to this post it just weighs on me heavily
i arrive at the gay bar in full butch getup and i look like super hot like trust me and i start buying chocolate milk for the femmes at the bar…..between my striking good looks and my generosity concerning tasteful dairy products i have impressed them greatly and after an hour of chatting I make my move. i reach into my pocket and remove a large, gorgeous lichen affixed to a piece of bark from its protective herbarium packet that I have concealed in my pants pocket. “it’s a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae,” i begin,
I hate glamorizing over-working. It’s not healthy. The fact that there are so many people going without sleep, food, personal hygiene (not to mention time for relaxation, personal time, and socialization, which are very necessary for mental health) just to stay afloat is not something to be celebrated or applauded. It’s a problem, not a goal that all good employees should aspire to, or a norm everyone should be expected to perform.
we justifiably give Biden a lot of shit but I think “at least 3” is the funniest possible response to some right wing dipshit asking you how many genders there are
i cant stress this though but people have to relearn how to start creating for the joy of creation instead of creating for the sake of skill. art is supposed to be for fun and its up to You to indulge ur appetite for creation as sincerely and candidly as u can
it doesnt matter if ur art is “bad” or “unskilled.” the point of art is not to be good at it. the point is to create because u can and because it feels good
oh yeah! important news! Minecraft’s wiki has migrated off of Fandom! their new wiki is minecraft.wiki! it is SO MUCH BETTER and EVERYONE SHOULD USE IT INSTEAD OF THE FANDOM WIKI FOREVER. fuck fandom/wikia and all hail the new wiki! :D
I desperately wish people would start actually reading the AO3’s TOS before confidently making ‘user guides’ to the AO3 that are just blatantly, flatly wrong.
Yes the AO3 has banned content. They do not allow anything that’s illegal under US law - though US law, importantly, does not ban fictional depictions of things - and they do not allow any commercial content. That includes your ko-fi link, or mentions that you do fic commissions. If you do post fic commissions to AO3 and want to mention the commissioner, the fic is a 'request’ from the commissioner. This protects the AO3 and you from copyright law.
No the AO3 is not 'a creative fanfiction archive’. It is a fandom archive. Your meta, insights, and theories are absolutely welcome and encouraged there. AO3 also encourages you to post other types of fanworks, like fan videos, podfics, and art, but unfortunately isn’t able to natively host those like it does text, so fic has kind of become what it’s known for. That absolutely does not mean that other types of fanwork aren’t allowed, or are discouraged by the site culture! Anybody who tells you otherwise is just plain wrong!
oh shit the wizards are all getting onto an island together? fuck that, my space jellyfish library is too cool to just chill on a random island i gotta be everywhere
how else am i supposed to run my illegal fighting ring for drug animals, or drugimals as i call them
I condone drugimals.
My aunt was killed by one 😞
Do you mean condemn?
What’s the difference?
/srs idr what those mean it just sounded right
You think drugimals should be allowed because ur aunt was killed by one 😔
“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.
The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.
Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)
I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it
just so everyone knows, this has already been memorialized in a runestone
Everything about this post blesses those involved with a +4 on their next Today is Good Day roll
It’s fun reading writers who clearly grew up in suburban/urban environments as someone who grew up on a farm because they’re always like “oh it was so creepy, woods at night, eerily breathtaking, something was living in there…” and it’s like yeah that’ll be the deer.
EXACTLY
Same can be said about city streets. Random “gunshot” and “explosion” noises? That’s the road construction crew behind the corner. Mysterious howling and barking out of nowhere echoing through the street? That’s someone’s dumb dog that locked itself out on the balcony on the 3rd floor above you and buildings just happen to have the shape where certain areas just vibrate with echoes from all sides at once. Screeching of car tires and agressive shouting? Fucking teens are at it again.
But the city is the creepiest when it’s silent because if there are no cars and no chitchat and no humm of an A/C unit, then where is everybody?
Meanwhile in a rural area if you hear a gunshot that’s actually a gunshot
It’s nothing to worry about though, unless you hear a long, screaming NYOOM accompanying it. The Looney Tunes sound effect for flying bullets is legitimately almost what bullets flying past your head actually sounds like.
I’ve been looking at (the honestly alarming numbers of) young-earth creationist books also, which makes me furious. But also it’s so interesting the specific ways they’re wrong about science and how those reflect the average person’s misunderstandings of science. But also these people had a lot of influence on the USA education system and weaseled their way into convincing a large area of the world that there was a “debate” between evolution and creationism, and probably they’re the REASON for a lot of misunderstandings about science, particularly evolution
With misinformation, there is a zone beyond the realm of incorrect ideas that can be remedied with correct ones, where the very words being used to discuss a concept are being so thoroughly misused that you cannot address anything the other person is saying without journeying deep into the malformed version of reality they have constructed. You would need to teach the equivalent of several college-level courses to pull them from the abyss they’ve got themselves into.
The cruel difficulty of this situation is that you will never be prepared for this person’s questions because before you can coherently answer them, you must first process what they have said and work out what on earth it means to them, archaeologically excavating and reconstructing their alternate version of the universe in order to understand how that universe differs from the real one and how to translate reality into a form they can understand.
Inevitably, when you stammer and scrabble for footing on the shifting sands of their pseudoscientific sand castle, they will interpret this as evidence that they have deftly outsmarted your trickery and deception with Facts and Logic, and if you happen to be a science educator or scientist, they will post a video to YouTube of the whole exchange with the caption “Evolutionist arguments DESTROYED by one simple question!”
This is how I feel about this page.
Sir. The reason there are no “transitional forms” in the fossil record, is that there is no such thing as a transitional form. Every organism fits into a category because we create categories to describe organisms that we find. We made the categories up. There is no difference between organisms “within” categories and organisms “between” those categories because all organisms are evolving constantly. Everything is a transitional form between the thing it descended from and the thing it evolved into.
because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn’t make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.
even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like “rape”, “abuse”, “queer” or “racist”. cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify “rape” as distinct from “sex” and “racism” as distinct from “acceptable behaviour” and “queer” as distinct from “invert”
like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that’s hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.
This is what’s so goddamn terrifying about the Internet slowly collapsing into the same 3-5 websites–if Facebook deprioritizes you for saying “sex” and TikTok shadowbans you for saying “suicide” and Twitter X locks your account for saying “racism” we’ve lost a lot more than just the culture of the old weird internet
oh so they’re just saying the quiet part out loud? Good to know they’re just out and open now
That’s not the quiet part.
There’s something else, something they might not even be fully aware of themselves. The real quiet part is that if it was *their* child or *their* ectopic pregnancy they’d pull out all the stops to save their life or get their grandchild aborted. Planned Parenthood sees reactionaries and regressives all the time, and they are every bit the nightmare patients you’d imagine them to be. But the one thing all those patients have in common is that *their* abortion is *justified*, and the next week they’ll be outside the clinic again, rejoining the protestors for “killing their baby”.
It’d be one thing to have ghoulish principles, but the far-right have none at all.
When I was younger and had more time to waste on the internet, and spent a lot of time in various online forums getting into arguments – on purpose – I made up a game I called Six Degrees of Slut.
The game (which is a variation on the well known Six Degrees of Bacon) was very simple. In any discussion of abortion, see whether you could get the other side to articulate, within six back-and-forth exchanges, some variation of The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. Regardless of where their argument started, the goal of the game was to get them to admit that.
I never once lost a game of Six Degrees of Slut. On a few occasions the match was inconclusive - the other person left off arguing before we reached round six - but I never lost; I never once reached six rounds of debate with a prolifer without them expressing some variation on this sentiment. But what was really remarkable to me was, a lot of times, that there was no effort involved at all – they would blurt it out themselves, with effectively no provocation.
Scratch a prolifer, and you’ll find right under the surface the conviction that The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. I have never once yet found an exception. Sometimes you don’t even have to scratch.
well. if this post get 10k notes by the time i get my adhd evaluation, theeeeen ill read homestuck. im not telling you WHEN my adhd evaluation is, you just gotta hope and pray it isnt soon. ill be nice and give you a 1 week warning though!
