As someone who’s living with a middle school social studies teacher, all the posts along the lines of “why did we never learn about this historical event in school” just make me go “because your teacher was supposed to cover all of US history in one year, and they didn’t get to the Revolutionary War until Halloween because they were urged to slow down the progression of the lessons because a more senior teacher was running behind, and they didn’t get to the Civil War until Valentine’s Day because the school kept scheduling every special event during social studies because there’s no end-of-grade testing for that subject, and they didn’t get to WWI until May because they were sick for a few days and the substitute couldn’t do much more than babysit, and now they’re having to do the entire Cold War in two days, so that’s why you didn’t hear about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut. They would have loved to tell you about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut!”
Ma’am. What are you doing. You can’t be here.
This is my childhood home and my babies will grow up here too.
Ma’am. This is an orphanage.
And?
Good point. Welcome home, ma’am.
I AM FINE I’M NOT CRYING
This is the same program that had a near 60% fatality rate among its test animals because they were using glue (medical grade but NOT brain safe) to hold the fucking chips in place.
Test animals died horrifically after having GLUE POURED IN THEIR BRAINS. Some died of infection in the head wound. Some killed themselves by ripping off their own body parts. Some died when the glue failed and the chip started causing hemorrhages. In one fucked case, they gust put the wrong chips entirely into dozens of animals by mistake, killing them.
If even a single test chimp dies in a normal program, it's halted immediately.
He killed DOZENS and now he's moving on to humans.
He does not perceive anything outside himself as alive.
This will kill almost everyone who tries it. Do not sign up for it. Do not let your loved ones sign up for it.
This is a rich man tricking the poor into suicide for his amusement.
I desperately want to be a cyborg. I want to see a future with all sorts of cool and useful cybernetic implants.
But not like this.
Not with this man in charge.
Genuinely there is no benefit to having this done anyway. What are you hoping to accomplish by buying this. Google with your mind? Unskippable ads in your brain? Neurological hacks? I mean really even if it were safe (it isn’t, he just has enough money to bribe the FDA I guess) this wouldn’t be a benefit to you at all.
But yes, definitely do not sign up for the clinical study. I don’t care how much he offers to pay you. Money means little in the coffin.
Neural interfaces could have many, MANY useful applications. From being able to control sensory signals to reduce overload or pain according to a person's needs, to allowing for a person to regain motor control after nerve damage, etc. or even to simulate certain sensory signals to allow for sensations from certain synthetic materials so that a person could gain certain sensation (such as heat, or pressure) in synthetic limbs?
Yes, I have been informed this has been marketed towards disabled people.
Which is significantly more concerning.
Because if you ask yourself why the rich white man who grew up benefitting from apartheid and slave labor would be interested in implanting chips into the brains of the disabled, and you see how many trial animals died or were permanently mentally disturbed, the answer you come up with isn’t usually simple philanthropy.
I don’t trust that this is just incompetence and delusions of grandeur at this point. It feels purposeful when the victims are a severely marginalized group of people rather than his rabid fans.
We are not scientifically at a point where brain implants can be used to benefit the disabled, and even if the chips didn’t kill patients and worked as the manufacturer intended, it would open the door to far less ethical uses for that sort of technology.
Specifically, if your brain can send signals to a chip to do something for you, that won’t be a one-way street. Perhaps on the first day it will be used to give new freedoms to disabled people. By the third it will reach its natural conclusion as certain people realize you can use it to try to “cure” autism, or perhaps “cure” queerness. Not to mention how easy an interrogation would be if a person’s thoughts could be admissible in court, or if they can simply type a line of code to make a suspect feel the sensation of being on fire for twenty minutes if they don’t comply. Workers not productive enough? Just press the button that blocks all thoughts and memories irrelevant to work until their shift ends. Inhibit parts of the brain related to bond forming and rest, inhibit pain processing while you’re in there so if a worker is injured they only notice when they’re off the clock and don’t have to slow down.
I’m aware this sounds cartoonishly evil, but the USA is cartoonishly evil already. Any positive implication for this is strongly outweighed by the negatives.
And I go right to thinking of things like this:
...which is *not* the only medical device company in the US that has done this.
Literally people’s eyes and ears have been tendered obsolete and turned off as companies paywall advances or go out of business.
Now think about how Every. Single. Musk endeavor -none of which he invented himself - is currently under recall, investigation, or both.
Think about Musk’s lack of business sense and maturity in how he runs Twitter. How he rewarded even the people who tried to please him with 90% layoffs.
Now ask yourself if a brain that thinks computations are currency, sends poop emojis as conversation, and named his car models S-3-X-Y should be in charge of him, much less you.
today I recited Shakespeare to a small army of eight-year-olds
So last week an email got sent round my college asking if anyone wanted to read some poetry to primary school kids and I was the only one who responded and I asked if I could do some Shakespeare, since I have quite a lot of experience with it, and the teacher said that would be fine.
So I was discussing with friends what I should do and they said ‘er yeah, don’t do Shakespeare.’ And I was like ‘what why’ and they went ’well, maybe if they’re over 10 but otherwise you’ll just get blank looks’ and I went ‘well I don’t want to insult their intelligence’ and then another friend was like ‘hey you should do that kid’s song ‘When I Was One’, they’ll like that!!’ (it’s a really babyish song for toddlers with silly actions) and I thought about it and was ‘like nah actually, I’ll do the ‘Once more unto the breach’ speech’
So I learned that over the week, and I was walking up to the school, and the whole way I was thinking ‘Oh god this was a terrible idea they’re going to hate it, they’re going to look at me blankly like those kids in The Polar Express, my friends were right it’s going to be a disaster’, and I was there early, so I sat in the classroom for the first half an hour, got given a cupcake by some kids from a different class, said hello to some of the kids in my class, they got a look at me.
At half 2 the teacher mentioned I would be reading some poetry, and I asked if we could go outside, which she was more than happy to allow, and the kids were all so confused (‘where are we going? Isn’t it only poetry?’) and we got onto the field, the teacher got them all to stand an arm’s length apart from each other, so I could walk around them, and I did a brief overview of where the scene came in the play, how the king is on the battlefield, talking to his soldiers (“Could all you be the soldiers?” “Yes!!”) and they’re attacking the French, who are all in a castle (forgot it’s really a castle town), and they’re attacking them through a gap in the wall, the breach. Me and the teacher emphasised that if there was anything they didn’t understand, that was completely fine and they could ask me at the end. I asked the kids to watch for when I held my fist in the air, which is when they had to cheer loudly, we had a practise at that, and then I did the speech.
Everything I had been scared about evaporated. All the kids were totally engaged, they were all watching me, they all listened right the way through, I saw lots of excited faces, and they all cheered really well at the end.
Afterwards, there was a lot of chatter, several of them asked me questions (”how do you remember all those words?”, “what did you mean when you talked about nostrils?”), one boy asked me to do it again, they were all really lovely and had genuinely enjoyed it. It was so much fun, and they especially loved it when I told them how my big college friends had told me not to do Shakespeare because they wouldn’t like it. Those kids 100% proved them wrong
Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?
Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.
All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)
But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.
But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.
I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?
It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.
Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.
Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, my Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)
This thread omg
Family doesn’t have to be blood related.
Sometimes family is a righteously angry little girl, her supportive brother, a random stranger with a thirst for chaos and justice, two foreign grandmas, and The Rest Of The Plane.
yasss this makes me happy like nothing else lol
Not a random stranger, an award-winning fantasy and horror author with a thirst for chaos and justice.
Your phone battery percentage determines what year of the 1900s you'll live in.
How screwed are you?
this is peak Craigslist
I want to know if they got answers.
I really wanna know how this turned out.
Just so you guys know.
cracking open 500 cold ones with the dads
I’ve seen this ad, but i can finally rest knowing what happened.
Sorry, I don’t care that Netflix shows are delayed, I’m catching up on anime from 1989.
Doing my part by posting about nothing but Star Trek TOS and Oliver Twist.
See, I’m not rewatching MASH and Seinfeld for the mumbledy-deenth time. It’s called solidarity.
So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom
It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education
602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡
and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up
make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll
So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn't be deterred by the prank calls because they would 'taper off eventually'. It'd be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇
When Tina Turner left her first husband - who was also her boss, captor, and brutal tormentor - she snuck out of their Dallas hotel room with a single thought in her mind: "The way out is through the door." From there she fled across the midnight freeway, semi-trucks careening past her, with 36 cents and a Mobil gas card in her pocket. As soon as she decided to walk out that door, she owned nothing else. When she filed for divorce, she made an unusual request. She didn't want anything: not the song rights, not the cars, not the houses, not the money. All she wanted was the stage name he gave her - Tina - and her married name - Turner. This was the name by which the world had come to know her, and keeping it was her only chance to salvage her career. Things could have gone a lot of ways from there. She could have labored in obscurity for decades, maybe making records on small labels to be prized by vinyl connoisseurs in Portland. She could have stayed in Vegas, where she first went to get her chops back up, and worked as a nostalgia act. And, of course, given what she had been through, she might have … not made it. What happened instead is that Tina Turner became the biggest global rock star of the 80s. I'm old enough to barely remember this, but if you aren't, it was like this: The Rolling Stones would headline a stadium one day, and the next day it would be Tina Turner. A middle-aged Black woman - she became a rock star at 42! - sitting atop the 1980s like it was her throne. She managed this because of whatever rare stuff she was made of (this is a woman whose label gave her two weeks to record her solo debut, Private Dancer, which went five times platinum); because she decided to speak publicly about her abusive marriage and forge her own identity, and in doing so give hope and courage to countless women; and also because - in a perhaps unlikely twist for a girl from Nutbush, Tennessee - she had her practice of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, to which she credited her survival. She remained devout until the end. Tina's second marriage - to her, her only marriage - was to Edwin Bach, a Swiss music executive 16 years her junior. Of him, she said, "Erwin, who is a force of nature in his own right, has never been the least bit intimidated by my career, my talents, or my fame." In 2016, after a barrage of health problems, Tina's kidneys began to fail. A Swiss citizen by then, she had started preparing for assisted suicide when her husband stepped in. According to Tina, he said, "He didn't want another woman, or another life." He gave her one of his kidneys, buying her the remainder of her time on this earth and perhaps closing a cycle which took her from a man who inflicted injury upon her to a man willing to inflict injury upon himself to save her from harm. Born into a share-cropping family as Anna Mae Bullock in 1939, she died Tina Turner in a palatial Swiss estate: the queen of rock 'n roll; a storm of a performer with a wildcat-fierce voice; a dancer of visceral, spine-tingling potency and ability; a beauty for the ages; a survivor of terrible abuse and an advocate for others in similar situations; an author and actress; a devout Buddhist; a wife and mother; a human being of rare talent and perseverance who, through her transcendent brilliance, became a legend.
Credit: Will Stenberg
This is both entertaining and really important.
Yo if you’ll reblog the boob campaign, you can damn well reblog Deadpool discussing bollocks.
Deadpool is canonically riddled with cancer this is actually such an appropriate campaign
Always reblog
It does make far too much sense this is Deadpool.
his dark materials will literally always work bc every small child wants an animal companion that loves you most and goes on adventures with you and every adult wants an animal companion that can shoulder some of life’s immense psychologically damage for you. and you can pet it
And to tear down the feeble corpse of God! Every kid and adult wants that also!
Bra Comfort Poll
All my bra-wearing homies argue constantly over whether bras comfortable and wonderful or if they're manufactured by hell to make us suffer. I've long suspected that there is a correlation between this opinion and cup size... but let's get the data to see if that hypothesis holds up!
Please reblog for more data! This question has plagued me literally for years, plz plz I need to hear everyone's experience and feel less alone because bra struggles are so real.
If your bra is uncomfortable YOU ARE WEARING THE WRONG SIZE. Go to an actual bra shop (not Victoria Secret, they're the worst) and get an actual fitting.
A pastor, an imam, and a rabbit decide to donate blood.
The pastor comes out and says, “They tested it and told me I’m A positive.”
The imam follows up with, “Interesting! I found out I’m AB negative.”
The rabbit looks at the two of them and says, “Pretty sure I’m a type O.”