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Your daily dose of cat memes

THEIR GRANDMOTHERS SET THEM UP FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE~!

#reverse gifts of the magi

i think everyone needs to get into wildlife identification it's like a minigame for real life

i’m one of those annoying people who’s always like “omg i know that actor from somewhere omg i recognize them whAT WERE THEY IN” when watching tv shows/movies who then proceeds to look it up on their phone and inform everyone that said actor was an extra in an episode of some stupid 90s sitcom once

Still remember when a homo- and transphobic acquaintance tried to bring up JKR’s views on trans people in conversation and I shut it down with «oh yeah she’s been saying a lot of dumb shit on Twitter after she finished writing Harry Potter, like when she claimed Dumbledore was gay, just to be politically correct», which made it absolutely impossible for him to admit that he agreed with anything JKR had ever said. Sometimes you just have to weaponise people’s homophobia against their transphobia.

Other ways to stop family members/acquaintances from going on bigoted rants:

The point is that I’ve used all of these in various contexts and they’ve saved a good number of dinner table conversations from derailing into pointless debating. You don’t de-radicalise friends and family members by entering into political discussions they initiate just to stir up shit. You de-radicalise them by shifting the focus away from their shitty opinions and onto the things you have in common and the practical everyday stuff that exists outside their internet echo chambers.

I de-radicalized (or at least kept him from that pipeline) by stealing his phone when he napped. Just if you need another option.

Use tax dollars to feed children/students who, by law, have to attend schools.

Not just free lunch, but free community college for people over 25!

public middle school teachers should be paid 3x what they’re earning because I could never do that

soldiers fight a couple tours of duty and call it a heroic art. middle school teachers enter an active war zone 5 days a week for 36 weeks a year their entire career

I don’t think middle schoolers are inherently evil, by the way. I just think it tends to an extremely difficult and transitionary period in adolescence and often kids that age are pushing boundaries and taking their pain out on their peers AND the adults in their lives. like, middle school was the place I saw the bloodiest battles I’ve ever witnessed. you could not pay me enough money to make me go back to middle school or to experience being 12 again.

sometimes neurodivergence questions will be like ‘do you find activities more enjoyable when they are activities you enjoy’ and it really makes me wonder if this ‘neurotypical’ thing has just been a big practical joke all along

‘do you find it disruptive to your focus when your focus on a task is disrupted suddenly and without warning’ this CANNOT be diagnostic criteria. they are playing us for fools

ok NOW we can all freak out marvel vfx workers voted to unionize

article here

Something just occurred to me.

You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?

Twitter’s algorithm is literally the social media equivalent of that.

In middle/high school I put all the music I had on an off-brand mp3 player and would just set it to Shuffle All. I quickly realized the player’s shuffle fuction wasn’t purely random–it was weighted towards my favorite songs (aka the songs with the most plays).

Only I had never chosen those songs. They were just the random few to pop up the first time I shuffled everything, and they started playing more and more frequently as this horribly short-sighted algorithm fed itself bad data, until I was so annoyed at those few songs that I stopped listening entirely.

Anyway a few years later Facebook did the exact same thing with my friends list, siphoning me off from seeing most of my feed because OBVIOUSLY I interacted with them the most, therefore they must be my besties. But really they were just the only people showing up for me to interact with in the first place, until I was down to just a few people I never really talked to from high school, a college prof, and my racist uncle I kept calling out.

And shortly after that, YouTube followed suit, replacing “Subscriptions” with “Recommended” as the default category, and trying to find “things I liked” when it was really just whatever three channels I’d watched last, whatever unrelated viral vid it wanted to push that week, and weird perennials like Whose Line clips or lockpick reviews or YTPs that seem to hibernate for months at a time then return like locusts.

All this to say: the big mysterious algorithms that now run all the major platforms on the internet are never acting in your best interests. They’re just that junky mp3 player’s Shuffle All with a fresh coat of paint, and, to be clear, this is by design. They are VERY good at what they do, which is funneling users into nice predictable pockets of content that advertisers can exploit.

being in your early 20s is crazy bc there’s people who are literally married and people who’ve never even dated and people who are trapped in their childhood bedrooms waiting to get out and people who are trying to live out romanticized dream lives and people who are completely on their own and people with multi tiered support systems and we’re all supposedly peers and none of us think we’re doing it right at all

the most Child Emperor urge i have is to shout "BOOORRIINGGG!!!" when i have to witness something i dont like for too long

as a huge lover of birds, 90% of the concern against wind turbines being used for energy is literally just pro fossil fuel propaganda. birds ARE at a risk however there is a lot of strategies even as simple as painting one of the blades that reduces a lot of accidental deaths. additionally renewable energy sources will do more in favor of the environment that would positively impact birds (and all of us). one study found over one million bird deaths from wind turbines. while that is a shockingly high number and we should work to drastically shrink it, at least 1.3 billion birds die to outdoor cats on a yearly basis. it was never about caring about birds

there was a study done in 2015 that shows an even greater possible yearly divide than the 2012 one

i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i've seen people saying things like "well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it" and it's like, that's not the point. it's that companies /shouldn't/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i'm still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn't have to begin with though?

An important message to heterosexuals, listen carefully: you do not, and I repeat do NOT, have to marry someone you actively dislike, don't enjoy spending time with and/or whose hobbies you despise. You do not have to do that!! stop doing that!!!

"hahaha I hate my wife and made an entire room of the house dedicated to evading her company"

"hahaha I hate my husband and I drink industrial quantities of wine to cope with having had kids with him"

MAYBE STOP?