i love you lab grown diamonds i love you slavery-free chocolate i love you community gardens i love you fact that the insulin patent was sold for $1 i love you locally produced meat and milk i love you streets turned into walkable parks i love you little reminders that Things Do Not Have To Be This Way and there are people working to build a better world!!
im remaking my post cuz help completely stopped and i rly need to get my phone on so i can get my unemployment back(locked out of account) and to get a new job i also gotta pay my storage unit($91) i can find a job if i get this stuff together im sry for asking so often but idk like i literally have no idea what to do im trying my best
please
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updatee:
paid for my storage unit! phone is still off and i have a dr appointment to refill my inhaler coming up that id like to make it to 🥺
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my appointments are tomorrow and i cant afford my way to and from both of them and my phone is still cut off so i cant get my unemployment back or properly contact jobs and services plz help
50/300🫀
plz help ive been trying to get my phone cut on for weeks now if anyone can help send a couple bucks plz like i cant do anything rn
my phone being off resulted in my doctors cancelling my appointment to get prescribed asthma care plz help me like idk what to do i cant do anything without a working phone
i woke up this morning and it hurts to breathe and i cant stop coughing idk what to do i keep begging but at this point all the support i get is the occasional 5-10 from mutuals which tysm moochies 🫀
ik the economy is shit and i ask a lot but like i cant breathe and there is no way for me to make this goal without help please
idk how to explain that people die without asthma medication like it hurts to breathe and it is getting worse and i see pets get huge swaths of help like please
im remaking my post cuz help completely stopped and i rly need to get my phone on so i can get my unemployment back(locked out of account) and to get a new job i also gotta pay my storage unit($91) i can find a job if i get this stuff together im sry for asking so often but idk like i literally have no idea what to do im trying my best
please
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0/400
updatee:
paid for my storage unit! phone is still off and i have a dr appointment to refill my inhaler coming up that id like to make it to 🥺
ALTALT
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0/300
my appointments are tomorrow and i cant afford my way to and from both of them and my phone is still cut off so i cant get my unemployment back or properly contact jobs and services plz help
50/300🫀
plz help ive been trying to get my phone cut on for weeks now if anyone can help send a couple bucks plz like i cant do anything rn
my phone being off resulted in my doctors cancelling my appointment to get prescribed asthma care plz help me like idk what to do i cant do anything without a working phone
i woke up this morning and it hurts to breathe and i cant stop coughing idk what to do i keep begging but at this point all the support i get is the occasional 5-10 from mutuals which tysm moochies 🫀
ik the economy is shit and i ask a lot but like i cant breathe and there is no way for me to make this goal without help please
idk how to explain that people die without asthma medication like it hurts to breathe and it is getting worse and i see pets get huge swaths of help like please
Sometimes I wish we would start calling out the performative radicalism on this site for the poser bullshit it is. “Remember, it’s always morally correct to kill a cop!” “Don’t forget to firebomb your local government office!” “Wow, it sure would be a shame if these instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail got spread around!”
Okay. But you’re not killing cops or firebombing government offices. You are posting on a dying microblogging website to a carefully-curated echo chamber that has radicalized itself into thinking that taking the absolute most extreme position on any subject is praxis but that anyone discussing the most practical way to effect actual change is your sworn enemy. You do not have the street cred OR the activist cred to be talking about killing cops, babe.
that’s fair, i probably wouldn’t do any of that stuff. i just like to complain about the system.
the more you donate the longer the text ill anagram, at a rate of 2 letters per dollar. ie, 10 dollars will get you 20 letters, 20 dollars will get you 40. if you want me to actually anagram you cant fight the homestuck youre probably going to have to singlehandedly fund the rest of the campaign
Sometimes I wish we would start calling out the performative radicalism on this site for the poser bullshit it is. “Remember, it’s always morally correct to kill a cop!” “Don’t forget to firebomb your local government office!” “Wow, it sure would be a shame if these instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail got spread around!”
Okay. But you’re not killing cops or firebombing government offices. You are posting on a dying microblogging website to a carefully-curated echo chamber that has radicalized itself into thinking that taking the absolute most extreme position on any subject is praxis but that anyone discussing the most practical way to effect actual change is your sworn enemy. You do not have the street cred OR the activist cred to be talking about killing cops, babe.
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
[ID: text reading: ‘The Milton scholars screamed and argued about how the serpent was supposed to move before it crawled on its belly. Dr. Matthews, enraged that Dr. Goldstein could believe the serpent bounced around on the coiled end of its tail, flipped over the conference table. “Satan is not a fucking pogo stick!” he howled.’]
I know this sounds dire but it is important to note that the layoffs have still not happened yet! AEGIS is also currently threatening to take SEGA to court for unfair labor practices so don’t lose hope and show AEGIS as much support as you can!
Big news: Google has lost its first antitrust case. Via Matt Stoller:
So what happens now? In this case, the judge will come up with remedies next year. The order could be broad, and will likely loosen Google’s control over the mobile app ecosystem. Google has already announced that it will appeal, so the case isn’t over.
That said, Google is likely to be in trouble now, because it is facing multiple antitrust cases, and these kinds of decisions have a bandwagon effect. The precedent is set, in every case going forward the firm will now be seen as presumed guilty, since a jury found Google has violated antitrust laws. Judges are cautious, and are generally afraid of being the first to make a precedent-setting decision. Now they won’t have to. In fact, judges and juries will now have to find a reason to rule for Google. If, say, Judge Amit Mehta in D.C., facing a very similar fact-pattern, chooses to let Google off the hook, well, he’ll look pretty bad.
It’s really fucked up when you treat characters like people and people like characters.
No seriously it’s REALLY fucked up when you treat characters as if they were real live people while you treat people like they’re just characters.
I’m gonna go ahead and repeat: it is super, duper, extra scooper fucked up when you treat a character as if it were a living person while treating other human beings who are interacting with you like they are merely characters who can be written out of your personal story if you just find a remark mean enough.
“Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”
HOLLA!!!!
A lot of people don’t realize, but the Friends and Elves themes are actually LEGO trying to fix the massive mistake they made with gendered marketing in the ‘90s.
LEGO panicked in the ‘90s. They were losing money hand over fist as video games and movies occupied more of kids’ time. In response, like a lot of toy manufacturing at the time, they took a sharp right turn into highly gendered marketing. They made sure that all the new parents of the Reagan/Bush era knew that LEGO was safe and not challenging for their little boys’ masculinity. ALL of their advertising went to promoting LEGO as a “boys toy”, and they invested in “action” themes and cartoons for boys, like Clutch Powers and Bionicle. Even plain, non-themed bricks were advertised exclusively by and for boys. They even reduced the number of different colors and the vibrancy of those colors to make sure the bricks seemed masculine enough.
This came back to bite them, as naturally it should. They, along with the other toy companies in the ‘90s, pressed so hard with the gendered marketing, that there was literally no crossover market in most areas anymore. They had alienated half of their customer base. Those Reagan/Bush parents they were so worried about bought into the gendered marketing hook, line, and sinker. Many of these parents (especially the conservative ones with more money to spend on toys) wouldn’t even consider allowing their little girls to shop anywhere but the “pink aisle”. I know many women who grew up in the ‘90s have stories about that, of parents and other adults telling them they couldn’t shop anywhere else. There are parents all over, but especially in conservative markets like the Bible Belt, that will still not buy a toy for their girl unless the box is pink.
Because LEGO had remade itself as a “boy’s toy,” it had now been purged from the market of girls’ toys entirely. They tried to get back into the “pink aisle” with the Belville line, but Belville was shit, because they were made to appeal to the conservative parents rather than the kids. They were mostly about big, awkward dolls with almost DUPLO simplicity to the build aspect, most pieces were incompatible with regular LEGO system bricks, and they were just not fun.
Then, in the late ‘00s, someone at LEGO had the brilliant idea to actually ask little girls. They spent 5 years and millions of dollars doing hundreds of focus groups with girls with their parents not in the room to influence what they were saying. The resounding response? The girls wanted the exact same brick their male siblings had, but with more color variation, detail work, and also could we have people that look like people instead of blocks with arms?
LEGO Friends is the result of this feedback. Released in 2012, it has been the best way for LEGO to sneak past conservative parents and into little girls’ hands again. Friends is all LEGO brick, but as the little girls requested, it comes in more, brighter colors, has more small, storytelling-themed details, and features characters that look more like people. The sets were a bit tentative that first year, not a particular challenge to build, but have since gained complexity rapidly as the line took off. If you look closely and actually build the sets, you will notice that while the boxes are pink, the builds are usually another color. Still generally “cute”, but rarely exclusively pink. The pink is mostly the box to get it past the parents who see nothing but the box.
LEGO Friends is the third most popular LEGO theme of all time, after Star Wars at #1 and LEGO City at #2 (mostly because City has been there forever). Think about that. Five years, and it has beaten the sales numbers of most other LEGO lines in the last 80 years since the company was founded. Additionally, the LEGO Friends theme has entirely shifted LEGO’s statistics. In 2010, surveys indicated that the gender breakdown of end-users of LEGO products across all themes was 90% boys, 10% girls. In 2013, one year after Friends was released, it had shifted to 60% boys, 40% girls. That’s across all themes. Some quick market research discovered that little girls would get a Friends set or two, and then expand into other themes. Because obviously my town with a juice bar and a cupcake shop has to have a police station or a pirate fortress too, mom.
And LEGO added the Elves theme last year, specifically because older girls wanted to tell more complex and fantasy-themed stories with their LEGO builds. Elves is targeted at a slightly higher age group than Friends, and the complexity of the Elves constructions rivals any Star Wars set of similar size. Every single development with “girl” LEGO in the last 5 years has been at the express feedback of actual girls.
LEGO still has a long way to go to fix the mistakes of the ‘90s. There are still marketing people in the company who don’t fucking get it, and think that they’re just shilling “girl LEGO.” There are still a lot of old white men in very high positions in the company who don’t understand what’s going on, they’re mostly just coasting on what market research and focus groups are telling them. And some themes, like Ninjago, are still very clearly marketed for boys while Friends and Elves are marketed for girls. They have a long way to go to fix what they broke.
At the same time, if you’re unwilling to allow a pink building toy to be a gateway to other building toys just because it’s pink, the problem is not the pink building toy.
LEGO Friends I’m sorry for all that I said about you
A whooooooole lot of evangelical places should get shut down
For those who don’t know what this means (like I didn’t), a church is a 501c3 organization: a tax exempt entity. In order for it to stay that way they may not get involved in legislature- including endorsing a political candidate. So if you witness someone doing this, you can report them to the IRS using form 13909. (If you’re in the US)
A whooooooole lot of evangelical places should get shut down
For those who don’t know what this means (like I didn’t), a church is a 501c3 organization: a tax exempt entity. In order for it to stay that way they may not get involved in legislature- including endorsing a political candidate. So if you witness someone doing this, you can report them to the IRS using form 13909. (If you’re in the US)
Does anybody wanna come over and parallel play? Does anybody wanna sit in the same couch and watch TV? Does anybody wanna go for a little walk in the park? Does anyone wanna sit on my bed while I putz around trying to clean my room? For the love of fucking God doesn’t anyone wanna share space with me for a bit
This youth from Palestine here, was called after finding his friend’s house got bombed. They asked him to call his friend in order to determine his exact location so they can start digging.
Remember that in gaza there are no resources to dig people up from underneath the rubble, so civilians from the neighborhood have to use their own hands and be very careful because of the bodies underneath. I can’t even imagine the trauma he’s experiencing, his shaking voice and hands. I would never bear witnessing my best friend in such conditions and having to call them bc I’m not even sure they’re alive.
How would anyone heal from this? And yet all are we asking for is just a ceasefire. This genocide should stop.
you know how there used to be all those posts going around like “I don’t know any political theory, it’s not hard to have good politics, it’s called being a decent person” type stuff, where it’s like okay, well, if it works it works. but this year more than ever has convinced me that actually it’s really important to have political values to fall back on even in cases of high emotion, e.g. anti-imperialism or bodily autonomy. feelings like kindness, empathy, concern, just on their own, are politically neutral and can just as easily motivate conservative or even fascist political positions. you know. like what happens to empathy-based politics when it’s people whose lives are very different from yours, or where there’s a culturally-ingrained bias against seeing them as people, or if they are just interpersonally offputting and unlikeable. like how etiquette is for being polite when you’re not “feeling it”, you need something to fall back on, a metric to evaluate what a “just society” looks like for people you don’t personally know and/or like. am I making sense here
i dont know if this has been posted before. i’m sure it has. but when i did a search for “jerma dick” and “dick jerma” and “ultraviolet dick jerma” i didnt get any results so i’m just gonna post it anyway
was anyone going to tell me that the pope’s dressmaker posts dick and cock on instagram or was i supposed to find out for myself
waittttt there’s more. apparently he was outed as a homosexual by a competitor but the pope was like well the gowns are sickening so what am i gonna do about it? and so he’s still the pope’s dressmaker even though he said vatican priests tried to fuck him all the time when he was closeted. work
This is a perfect example of why we need things designed for a variety of body types. Far too many plus-sized clothes are skinny clothes just made bigger, which rarely (if ever) have the desired effect. Not only do things not look the same in this context, it’s fair to say they were not designed (or redesigned) to look good on these different body shapes. The options are often mumus or things not really designed for you.
This man has come up with a variety of amazing outfits that look fantastic on his body. We need more of this.
I love you sir. You are gorgeous and we should say so.
Also Jonathan’s saying “we don’t exactly hold socials” in response to Martin trying to make small talk about Not Sasha’s boyfriend was so fucking funny. Martin tried to be normal and Jonathan Sims was just straight up
nobody talks about it but like the fact that glasses exist is literally insane
put fucking melted sand in front of your eyeballs and now stuff stops being blurry??? and someone figured this out fuckin hundreds of years ago?
Glass technology evolved because of wine.
Wine used to be stored in clay pots for drinking but then people started blowing glass and realized how pretty wine was in a clear glass bottles. They also realized that glass bottles with curves magnified the image and after decades of experementation they started grinding glass with curves and sand to get that magnification. This is also where the telescope and magnifying glass came from. Eventually after telescopes and looking to the heavens were all the rage people started hand crafting reading glasses which gave their wearers an extra decade of reading with bad eyes. By the mid 1700’s they were common and Ben Franklin figured out how to combine two different magnifications into one lense. By 1900 it was incredibly common to have eyeglasses and actual perscriptions were being developed. Post WWII saw a boom in lense technology filtering down from industrial applications making it cheaper and more affordable. Now days you can typically walk into a dollar store and buy a pair of reading glasses all thanks to some glass blower a thousand years ago that liked to look at his wine.
All of human history comes down to alcohol and horses
don’t forget war
war is just an elaborate manifestation of horses. like a Pokémon evolution.
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