The last time we were on a long flight, my wife and I invented a game we call “Little Guy.”
You start a game of Little Guy by saying, “I’m gonna hand you a little guy.” The little guy is some kind of baby animal you are imagining. “Oh,” she might say in response, “Okay,” and hold out her hands for it. I will then mime handing her the animal. This provides some clues as to the little guy’s size, weight, and general ungainliness.
She then gets to ask questions about what kind of little guy this is, BUT NO QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS ACTUAL APPEARANCE OR SPECIES ARE ALLOWED. Qualitative questions, or questions about his behavior, are the only ones permitted. She can ask “Is he soft?” or “Does he seem nervous about being held?” or “If I put him in the bathtub, does he seem okay with that?” or “Would he like a lil grape?” or “Is he the sort of little fellow who would wear a vest in a children’s book?” but not “Does he have fur,” “Is he a reptile,” “Is he from Asia,” etc. Some questions are in a grey area so you have to follow your heart, but the point is not to identify the animal as fast as possible: the point is to guess the animal purely based on vibes + how he would act if he were in your living room right now.
And I’m not limited to yes or no answers! If she asks, “Would it feel appropriate to see this little guy in a propeller hat?” I can reply, “Oh no, he has a gravity to him. A bowler hat would be a more appropriate hat.” Or if she asks, “Does this little guy have protagonist energy?” I can say something like, “he probably wouldn’t be the main character in a children’s cartoon. He’d probably be the main character’s ditzy best friend who’s always eating sandwiches, or something.”
We’re big Twenty Questions to kill time in a waiting room people, but Little Guy is more about the journey than the destination. It’s got a different kind of sauce that’s nice if “killing time” and “lowering anxiety” need to happen hand in hand.
does anybody else remember that reality show where they gaslit a bunch of americans into thinking they were competing to marry prince harry but it was really just some guy
happy 10 year anniversary to this game changer thank u @joscribbles for your services
can’t believe it’s been 10 years since i learned to always put my name on my art, even if it’s just a shitpost, bc u never know what’s going to blow up
anyway here’s a signed version if you wanna use it to shut up people who are trying to tell you their Opinions
FWIW, “mauve” was one of the coal-tar dyes developed in the mid-19th century that made eye-wateringly bright clothing fashionable for a few decades.
It was an eye-popping magenta purple
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HOWEVER, like most aniline dyes, it faded badly, to a washed-out blue-grey …
…which was the color ignorant youngsters in the 1920s associated with “mauve”.
(This dress is labeled “mauve” as it is the color the above becomes after fading).
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They colored their vision of the past with washed-out pastels that were NOTHING like the eye-popping electric shades the mid-Victorians loved. This 1926 fashion history book by Paul di Giafferi paints a hugely distorted, I would say dishonest picture of the past.
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Ever since then this faded bluish lavender and not the original electric eye-watering hot pink-purple is the color associated with the word “mauve”.
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Oh! Just like the Victorians did to the Gothic, where actual Gothic cathedrals which had been built to be bright and full of light were portrayed as dark and gloomy places, because that’s what happens after a cathedral is filled with candles for several hundred years.
message to all leftists: understand that landlords are bad because they are extorting you in exchange for a basic necessity of survival, not because they are “lazy” or “don’t have real jobs”
FWIW, “mauve” was one of the coal-tar dyes developed in the mid-19th century that made eye-wateringly bright clothing fashionable for a few decades.
It was an eye-popping magenta purple
ALT
HOWEVER, like most aniline dyes, it faded badly, to a washed-out blue-grey …
…which was the color ignorant youngsters in the 1920s associated with “mauve”.
(This dress is labeled “mauve” as it is the color the above becomes after fading).
ALT
They colored their vision of the past with washed-out pastels that were NOTHING like the eye-popping electric shades the mid-Victorians loved. This 1926 fashion history book by Paul di Giafferi paints a hugely distorted, I would say dishonest picture of the past.
ALT
Ever since then this faded bluish lavender and not the original electric eye-watering hot pink-purple is the color associated with the word “mauve”.
ALT
Oh! Just like the Victorians did to the Gothic, where actual Gothic cathedrals which had been built to be bright and full of light were portrayed as dark and gloomy places, because that’s what happens after a cathedral is filled with candles for several hundred years.
Apparently people who don’t have executive dysfunction think that actually working on something is the hardest part of doing something. And that’s why they get mad that you call the rest of the project “easy” after you’ve finally worked through doing the plan and know what to do when you’re working.
So when you’re through with the epiphany of how to make it physically possible to make the thing you’re making, and you’re sharing the plan with excitement, because the hard part is over, and now you only have to get your hands moving and do it, they get mad at you like
“it’s not that easy! It’s a lot of hard work! >:C”
they mean it, because
to them, working is the hardest part.
They don’t have to fight their brains to get started. They don’t have to fight their way through making the choices, making the plan, making yourself make the thing. People who don’t suffer from executive dysfunction think that the hardest part is actually doing the thing.
when you have executive dysfunction, it’s like… you’ve just clawed your way up a long steep embankment of loose gravel, and you flop exhausted into the construction site, and you’re like “oh thank fuck, time to lay some bricks, i absolutely could do this all day” and the guy who drove to the site goes “what’s wrong with you man bricklaying is hard graft!”
not as hard as crawling up the gravel mountain bro
there’s also good hard and bad hard. doing the thing might be hard, but at least you’re doing it; it’s good hard. just getting to the thing in the first place is hard and it’s fucking miserable. executive dysfunction puts so many bad hard things in your way before you can get to even the good hard things.
sometimes i describe it as my transmission is broken, every thing else works fine but no matter how hard I pump the gas pedal, I ain’t getting anywhere because I can’t
the actual descendants of murderers calling completely historically uninvolved stateless refugees jew gassers… genuinely has anyone ever done an analysis of how germans maintain this belief on a psychological level? its just incomprehensible to me 🤦🏻
im stealing and reposting this because even without any added commentary it should be a self-evidently ridiculous example of the way that the panic over AI art has led to an overtly (and in some cases, explicitly) religious concern over the Sanctity of the Human Soul taking the spotlight from any discussion of labor rights or creative implications, but if i just reblogged the post on its own i run the risk of a smoothbrain assuming i actually agree with it. no i didn’t add the circle and no i don’t know why it’s there either
Too many people have only one real problem with AI art, and that’s that it looks ugly to them. That’s how I know all the screaming and whining about how AI is ruining everything is going to die down once AI art stops standing out so much and starts blending into the background. The majority of the people panicking don’t care about jobs, they don’t care about artistic integrity, they don’t care about IP law, they just don’t want to look at ugly art and they want to rationalize their reaction into a moral imperative.
Once the AI images look “good enough”, these staunch advocates of the fair treatment and wellbeing of artists will go back to looking the other way when artists continue to suffer under low pay and crushing deadlines, when artists continue to have their work stolen by capitalists with little or no compensation. It didn’t start with AI image generation and it won’t end with it. It will only end with real class consciousness and the education to understand the underlying issues at the root of it all.
It is literally crazy how often people will, without a hint of irony, say shit like “if you are into cnc/intox/somno/incest/etc I’ll fucking kill you/kill yourself/you should fucking die” all in a million variations and it’s like damn, looks like someone is really thinking about inflicting violence, you could even say perhaps fantasizing about it, quite a lot. But don’t worry you’re wayyy better than those filthy degenerates because unlike them, you don’t ask for consent before telling them to kill themselves, negotiate boundaries prior, keep channels of communication open, and care for them afterwards and strengthen the relationship. No you’re sooo much more moral than them cause you actually just want them to die. No further reflection needed 👍
honestly, any us politician that didnt immediately stick up for palestine when the genocide began should not be relected or be able to walk around in peace.
it took over 30,000 murdered palestinians and 6 months of your constituents begging you to do something and you spent those months locking your office and calling said constituents/activists “anti-semites” “terrorists” and “communists”.
these people dont deserve a quiet status quo they hope for after whats been said and done. the least they can do is step down from their positions.
I’ve been seeing lots of articles and posts claiming that China is interning the Uyghur Muslim population in camps, killing, torturing, and even forcibly sterilizing people. This post is the main one I’ve seen going around. I wanted to put together articles on how these claims are false, and why it’s important to be critical of what US funded media is telling us.
1. The “China Scholar” who made the claims that China is locking up ‘millions of people’ is an ant-semitic white man
Almost every article on XinJiang references Adrian Zenz, a ‘China scholar.’ Adrian Zenz is the one who estimated that the camps contain “Up to 1.5 million people.” He also called it cultural genocide, and alleged that they were labor camps.
He also alleged that XinJiang is forcibly sterilizing women. However, these reports were based exclusively on the fact that the government had spent money providing free birth control to women in XinJiang. While China has denied these claims, other countries have also come out in support of China on XinJiang.
Adrian Zenz is just one person, and he’s also incredibly anti-semitic and racist. He says that he is “led by God” to defeat China and bring Christianity. This man is a self declared China expert who has only been to XinJiang once. He is a right-wing propagandist backed by the United States.
2. When these allegations first emerged, the United Nations and the United States were invited by China to visit XinJiang. Both refused. However, over 37 countries came out in support of China.
If the UN and the United States were truly concerned about the state of life in XinJiang, wouldn’t they have visited? This invitation remains open.
On the other hand, many other countries have sent diplomats to XinJiang, and have concluded that the camps were more like centers designed to teach people vocational skills and how to integrate into society after radicalization. One diplomat said, “The vocational education and training centers in Xinjiang are not
‘concentration camps’ as described by some Western media, but schools to
help those influenced by extreme thoughts to eliminate the harmful
thoughts and learn vocational skills” These countries include Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, the Phillipines, Sri Lanka, Bahrain, and Nigeria.
In addition, when the United States first alleged human rights violations, a total of 50 countries came out in support of China. If you look at the list of countries that are accusing China, you’ll see it’s mostly white countries that are settler colonies, and former or current colonizers. If you look at the second list of the many more countries that support China and refute these claims, you see many formerly colonized countries, as well as Muslim led countries. These are allegations, and many countries do not support them. Notice that Palestine is in support of China, as well as Cuba, both countries that have been targets of US imperialism. Regardless of how you feel about these countries individually, there’s a clear split between white, colonizing countries and POC, formerly colonized countries.
“We appreciate China’s commitment to
openness and transparency. China has invited a number of diplomats,
international organizations officials and journalist to Xinjiang to
witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of
counter-terrorism and de-radicalization there… We
call on relevant countries to refrain from employing unfounded charges
against China based on unconfirmed information before they visit
Xinjiang.”
However, neither the UN nor the United States have actually visited XinJiang since they made these allegations. Instead, they have continued to make broad allegations without actually visiting XinJiang or researching these claims. Meanwhile, the United States has been sterilizing women in ICE camps, encouraging rampant islamaphobia, and continues to blame China for COVID.
3. The United States has a vested interest in portraying China as evil. Only a few leftist organizations have spoken up.
Many of us are familiar now with blaming China for things. China is blamed for COVID time and time again, even being called the “China Virus” by the president of the USA. However, despite such a right wing push for Americans to hate China, the left has bought nearly everything they’ve said.
The Black Agenda Report, a Black American led news site, has published many articles on China and the US’s lies about it.
I’m making no claims on the merit of China as a country. It is a huge, complicated place. Many groups within it have done good and bad things. Merit isn’t the question. Rather, my point is that the United States is in a cold war and is accusing China (and all its people) of things it hasn’t done. The US has been in this situation before. It has used vague claims of “human rights abuses” to justify invading and killing innocent people in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Hawaii, Yemen, and many other regions.
Everything the United States says about China is pure projection.
Look, we joke a lot, but really, “you were born evil, wretched, worse than the scum of the earth, and it took killing a god to make you salvageable, so now you’d better be grateful to that god and thank him 10,000 times a day for it and fill your thoughts with him 24/7 and abide by the letter of his every word, lest you suffer unimaginable torture for all of eternity” is a truly horrendous thing to believe about yourself and other people
Stop Citing The ADL For Hate Crime Statistics, They Are A Racist Hate Group.
Please click here and read this article before you cite the Anti-Defamation League as an authority on hate speech, or participate in any campaign they are named in.
Some highlights include:
The ADL has a history of going after Black power activists and civil rights groups. This included the Movement for Black Lives as recently as 2017 and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (as in, the Freedom Riders) as early as the 60s.
The ADL colluded with the FBI to spy on Arab-American and Black progressive organizations in the 70s and 80s.
The ADL’s definition of antisemitic hate speech includes any suggestion that the state of Israel does not have the right to control Palestinian territory, or that Israel should not be run as a religious ethnostate. It includes any endorsement of boycotts against Israeli goods or sanctions against the state of Israel for its war crimes.Given that definition, the idea of citing them for statistics on antisemitism is completely bananas.
The ADL supports apartheid in Israel as it supported apartheid in South Africa:
“The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the mid 1980s and employed an alleged ‘fact-finder’ named Roy Bullock to spy on the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States — a service he was simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL defended the white régime’s purported constitutional reforms while denouncing the ANC as ‘totalitarian anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American.’”
The ADL’s primary goal is the suppression of criticism of Israel and the elimination of international support for Palestine, with the ultimate aim of facilitating Israel’s annihilation of the Palestinian people. From Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource Organizing Committee (AROC): “The ADL’s agenda is to delegitimize Palestine solidarity. Anything they’re doing, one should see from that lens.”
I’ve seen a couple different posts circulated by leftists in recent months talking about hate crimes in the United States that cite the ADL as a major source. I cannot stress enough thatthe ADL is not a legitimate source, they are a white supremacist organization, they have a long and consistent history of collaboration with apartheid in the United States, Israel, and South Africa, and any infographic that draws on their data is inherently untrustworthy. White supremacists don’t yield good data.
a further couple of really good pieces from Jewish Currents:
as an honest attept to try and see your viewpoint, whats fascist about saying that a person has a right to defend themself against a home invader? Someone breaking into an occupied home clearly intends to assault the resident, a simple burglar would break into an empty building or gtfo when confronted. You cant exactly retreat from that assault because youre in the place where all retreat leads and if you can't feel safe in your own home then where can you feel safe?
it is really extremely simple actually – there is a gargantuan qualitative leap from ‘defending yourself’ to 'murdering somebody’ and maybe i’m just the sweetiest niciest loveliest girl ever but i think murdering people, is Bad,
and it is an obviously fascist fantasy to violently murder an ‘intruder’ (always parsed as: degenerate, mindlessly violent criminal that cannot be reasoned with and must be exterminated) in defense of your private property. and that is what it is for 99% of these people, a fantasy that they talk about like they want it to happen. white suburanites whipped up into a paranoid murder frenzy by watching news segments about violent crime whose dearest ambition is to blow someone’s brains out to defend the sanctity of their samsung smart tv. vile!
“Western Marxism is basically a kind of Marxism which has, as a key
characteristic, never exercised political power.
It is a Marxism that has, more and more frequently, concerned itself
with philosophical and aesthetic issues.
It has pulled back, for example, from criticism of political economy and
the problem of the conquest of political power.
More and more it has taken a historic distance from the concrete
experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam,
Cuba and so forth.
This western Marxism considers itself to be superior to eastern Marxism
because it hasn’t tarnished Marxism by transforming it into an ideology
of the State like, for example, Soviet Marxism, and it has never been
authoritarian, totalitarian or violent.
This Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact
that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the
Earth“
Truong My Lan is charged with taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. Prosecutors say $27bn may never be recovered.[…]
The evidence is in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes [!!!]. Eighty-five defendants are on trial with Truong My Lan, who denies the charges. She and 13 others face a possible death sentence.
“There has never been a show trial [sic] like this, I think, in the communist era,” says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. “There has certainly been nothing on this scale.”
The trial is the most dramatic chapter so far in the “Blazing Furnaces” anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.
A conservative [sic] ideologue [sic] steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.
The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country’s richest women could join their ranks.[…]
Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.
All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% [!!!] of Saigon Commercial.
They accuse her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% [!!!] of all the bank’s lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.[!!!!!][…]
David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.
“What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.[…]
faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption [sic]. Fight corruption too much [sic], and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity.
Theodore Herlz, father of Political Zionism: Yeah, it’s colonial
Ber Borochov, father of Labour Zionism: Yeah, it’s colonial
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, father of Revisionist Zionism: Yeah, it’s colonial
David Ben Gurion, founding father of the Settler state: Yeah, it’s colonial
Small bean fandom Zionist: Umm, lol, it’s literally not colonial???
Relevant quotes:
Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, “It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial…
Theodore Herzl’s letter to Cecil Rhodes from unpublished letters by Theodore Herzl (11th of January 1901)
"The Jews could in short time assume the leading position in the economy of the new land. Jewish migration must be transformed from immigration into colonization”
Poale Zion, Our Platform, B. Borochov (1906)
“We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non” and withdraw from Zionism. Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population“
Iron Wall, Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1923)
If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
David Ben Gurion, quoted in the The Jewish paradox, Nahum Goldmann (1973)
“Along this trajectory, the middle Miocene (~16 Ma) marks the last time that CO2 concentrations were consistently higher than at present; Greenland was not yet glaciated at that time, and independent estimates suggest that sea level was some 50 m higher than today.”
Did you know that NASA engineers considered the failure rate of some critical shuttle parts to be about 1 in 100 (significantly greater than what NASA upper-management considered the failure rate to be, and what was considered at all acceptable by the certification process)?
Do you know that NASA engineers currently have no idea how many rocket launches the next mission in the Artemis program (in 2 years!) is meant to involve, because the mission plan relies on SpaceX being contracted to deliver a supply of cryogenic fuel to the crewed Orion (™ Lockheed-Martin) capsule in orbit - a procedure that 1: has never been attempted before on any spacecraft, let alone the Orion™ capsule, not even in uncrewed technology demonstration flights; and 2: would require an as-of-yet unknown number of SpaceX ‘Starship’ launches, because said vehicle does not actually exist at time of writing?
Did you know they’re planning on using this 'starship’ as the crewed lander? A design for a lunar ascent vehicle, that is, that does not use hypergolic fuel, that relies on a swing-out crane as the only entry and egress point? During the original moon landings, the LEM had so many redundant methods to make sure it got astronauts off the surface of the moon, that in the most absurd, extreme case, where every single mechanism fails, there’s a procedure trained into the astronauts to climb around the outside of the capsule, take a pair of bolt-cutters from the equipment box, physically cut the couplings holding the capsule to the lander stage, and take off to get home. Artemis’ proposed lander, on the other hand, is planned to be a vehicle whose design didn’t even include heatshields until it was realised it would obviously need heatshields, which are ceramic tiles bolted after-the-fact directly through the steel hull, because SpaceX had decided to mass-produce the original-design hull sections all at once for all the 'starships’ first, before doing any integrated testing.
We’re seeing the exact attitude that led to the shuttle disasters not being prevented now expressing itself in (and even through) the Artemis program, a project pushed harder and faster through the gates than it should be, by a government (and NASA administration thereby) desperate to advance the eponymous Artemis Accords (that goes unsigned by China, Russia, and much of the world) and reneg on all previous space charters that onsidered ownership, commercial exploitation, and military usage of space forbidden. Something bad is going to happen, and it’s going to happen for the sake of SpaceX and the military-industrial complex at large.
imagine oceangate and challenger both happen at the same time, to the mission carrying The First Woman On The Moon, because nasa under biden backed elon musk. lmao
“The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the 20th century—without exception—has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise made life impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement—from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in Salvador—no one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; no one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.
It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.”
— Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II - William Blum (updated, 2014)
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