LAPD detonated 5000 lbs of fireworks in the middle of a residential area, injuring at least 17 people and causing $900 million in various damages in a low-income, majority-POC neighborhood.

They then continue to pursue caging the person whose fireworks they stole while news media misreports to cover for police incompetency and destruction.

post on the damages

post on the explosion

in depth article

It took TWO YEARS to get the names of those involved with this incident. There are people still protesting, still living in hotels, still with unfulfilled claims to the city from this shit

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-22/food-plant-solutions-malnutrition-farming-edible-plants/12580732

https://fms.cmsvr.com/fmi/webd/Food_Plants_World

This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.

The database is a little clunky to use (especially on a phone), but still loads of excellent information.

Here’s their website - Food Plant Solutions - and they can use volunteers! And $ of course. What they really need help with is connecting with NGOs/groups on the ground already working in countries, to get them access to the database. They also need help from formally trained agronomists, people good with website stuff, and people good at marketing / getting the word out about their project.

I got somethins to say

i already fED you

IRRELEVANT

I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of "people also watched" and "for you" into the results. That's not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.

"I despise your wretched little games" perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy

They also refuse to actually show the parameters you searched for. If you sort by “upload date,” the first few videos might be more recent ones by upload date, but anything past that you’ll find a video that was uploaded five years ago, then five months ago, then three years ago, etc, which—NO! That’s NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!! PUT THEM IN ORDER!!!

Also sometimes the “people also watched” bullcrap will not only be entirely unrelated, it will also be videos with violent, sometimes outright triggering thumbnails. I’ve gotten some AWFUL unrelated video thumbnails just when searching for video game music videos.

If you use Firefox this extension is god send :D

Guelaguetza hairstyles by Netzahualxochitl Huerta featured in Vogue México shot by Luvia Lazo

I'm serious when I say the United States is actively hostile to children. Constant school shootings our leaders refuse to do anything about. Child Protective Services that overwhelmingly do nothing of the sort. No healthcare. Our education system is abysmal. Very few areas in the public that are safe for children to be in. Large swaths of states making gender affirming care for trans kids a felony. Child marriages are legal in a lot of states. Treating kids like property parents have every right to do whatever they want to, to the point where the U.S. is one of the very few countries that refused to ratify the U.N.'s Convention On The Rights Of The Child explicitly on the basis that treating children like people erodes the rights of American parents. And now states are enacting laws that overturn child labor laws like it's the goddamn Victorian Age. And even before those laws were made, it turns out that migrant children have been working in factories for a lot of companies, including the supposedly socially-minded Ben and Jerry's.

As complicated as adult life is, I would never want to be a kid again, with no say or agency in my life and completely helpless to the whims of the adults around me.

THIS SHOW IS SO PURE!

It’s worth noting that Kenneth spent the entire episode making the game (and the subsequent fight) as inclusive as possible for JJ and his disabled friends (all of whom were played by disabled actors/actresses).

BONUS:

Bonus #2

Of course I had to show the best part:

watching spiderverse makes me never wanna see another live action movie ever again like. why did we ever start making comic books into live action movies?? make it animated to explore the art form instead of trying to make it hyper realistic you fucking cowards

Okay but have you just concidered

Robert Downey Jr.

i have and i don’t care about him

He was a punk she did ballet: ❌

He and she are both punks and have a crush on a same art baby: ✅

Part 1 of Nimona as quotes from my friend group’s “no-context-quotes” discord server channel & other assorted nonsensical conversations i’ve had (both featuring @duolingocaticon <33)

Part 2

i've been thinking about hobie spiderverse since i came out of the movie theater, about how on a superficial level he acts like every other stereotypically alt character, stealing and instigating and bantering and being chaotic and rebellious and looking Cool™ but on a second look it's so so clear that every single thing he does is motivated by kindness and compassion towards his friends in general and miles in particular, and that's so viscerally truly punk of him

the already famous palm suggestion that makes miles break out of miguel's containment thing. miles initially reads this as condescending but hobie's genuinely trying to help

already he's looking out for miles by trying to keep him away from hq, a place where he knows miles isn't welcome and might be in danger

now, they get to hq and he immediately starts lifting stuff to homebrew a watch for miles, a guy he's known for five minutes (bc you can't convince me he didn't already have a bunch prepped for gwen and the other spider-people he trusts). he even lampshades it with the line above.

he's questioned miles' motives to join the spider society and he knows they're the same as his own: it's literally just to get a watch, to have a means to travel dimentions, to see his friends, to build community. he's already made the decision to grant that ability to miles without subjugating him to the oppressive restrictions and requirements of the spider society. at this point we know he's strongly ideologically opposed to the society and he later in this scene admits he's only there to look out for gwen, just like miles

this one makes me insane. it's a "are you safe at home in your dimension? do you have one? do you need a place to stay?" bc we know he's given one to gwen, who's not safe and does not have nice parents and has been crashing in hobie's dimension for the previous months

and then he tries again to warn miles off the spider society

and when push comes to shove and all the other spider-people are set on stopping miles from going home and changing his timeline he's the only one in miles' corner

btw notice how the palms thing is the first and last thing he says to miles in this film?

anyway. he was in this movie for like 15 minutes tops, showed up exclusively to hype up his friends and protect them by whatever means necessary, adoption papers and illegal interdimensional tech included, and he looked that cool the whole time while doing it. most character ever.

I also want to note that the exact moment that Hobie went from "Oh sure I'll help this guy" to "This is someone that I will finally blow this place up for" is when Miles saves the police commissioner and disrupts a canon event. Miles doesn't know what will happen, but he DOES know that someone he trusts (Gwen) tried to stop him from saving someone, and rather than listening, his immediate reaction was "No, someone needs saving, I'm going to save them, I don't care what it costs me."

After that, Hobie goes from just friendly banter and helpfulness to being on Miles like glue and hyping him up at every possible moment.

He saw Miles in action for a whole five minutes, and immediately goes "This is what it's about. THIS kid understands what it means to be a hero fighting an oppressive system. He IS willing to make sacrifices, but refuses to sit back and be told he HAS to make sacrifices. THIS is what Spider-man should be."

Hobie has a line about the Quantum Mold, saying "It's a metaphor for capitalism" that is clearly meant to be a joke. But, as you pointed out, all his stuff that is 'meant to be a joke' is still actually genuinely sincere. And he is RIGHT, actually. It kinda IS a metaphor for capitalism. The Spider Society has basically gone "These are people that have to die for the greater good. In order to keep the system working. If we don't stand back and just let them die, the whole system falls apart." and when that happens, it takes the form of the Quantum Mold. That uh.... that very much IS (or at least can be read quite easily as) a metaphor for Capitalism.

I have no doubt that Hobie is sitting there thinking "If we can contain this stuff, why are we still just letting people die?", and he sees in Miles someone asking the same question, and willing to fuck around and find out because saving the life of even a single person is far more important than maintaining a system that allows them to die.

16 Tons: Company Scrip & Tokens

Hey. Gentiles. Listen up for a sec.

When September and October are nearing and you’re planning an event: google “Rosh Hashanah *year*” and *Yom Kippur *year*” and then, and I cannot stress this enough, don’t plan your event on those days. In fact, don’t plan any events starting sundown the night before. Those are the three most important days of the Jewish calendar, and, once again, I cannot stress enough how much this little bit of forethought and kindness will make every Jew you know cry tears of joy.

in 2023, the night before Rosh Hashanah is Thursday evening, September 14.

Rosh Hashanah ends Sunday evening, September 17.

calendar date

in 2023, the night before Yom Kippur is Saturday evening, September 23.

Yom Kippur ends Monday evening, September 25.

calendar date

Black panther poster. Just as relevant today

I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.

I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”

I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.

And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.

My friend, whom I love dearly, found out that the moon orbits the earth as a 20-year-old in an upper-level political science class, and was utterly and completely flabbergasted. When questioned, her defense was that she doesn’t have anything to do with the moon, so why would she have needed to know?

i was once talking to a friend of mine about how at that point in time you could see mars, jupiter, and venus at the same time, which was pretty cool, and she said “where’s pluto? wait, it was destroyed” and that’s how i found out that my friend, who is in her third year of a medical degree, thought that pluto stopped being a planet because it was eaten by a black hole.

When i was in physics class my sophomore year of high school, the teacher drew a simplified diagram of a person standing on the planet earth as part of the explanation for how it was initially discovered that the earth was round. And one girl sitting in the class said “wait… we live on the OUTSIDE???” she had spent her whole life thinking that the earth was a hollow sphere and that we lived on the inner walls of it

i had a coworker in his early twenties who, when i mentioned seeing admiring how bright mars was that morning on the drive to work, laughed and said ‘mars? like the planet?’ and i was like ‘yeah mars the planet. it looks like a very bright star, it was supposed to be extra bright and close lately.’ and he got quiet and oddly worried and he said, quietly, carefully, ’…are planets… real?’ like he was checking to see if i was completely insane.

i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’

he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’

i said, ‘i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’

he said, muttering now, ‘well, maybe that’s just what you think.’

the conversation did not get any better from there.

if i see one more fucking ‘reject modernity embrace tradition’ meme i’m going to lose my shit

it costs literally $0 to give a fuck about jewish people and not use fucking nazi slogans as ‘memes’

just don't say nazi shit. it’s easy. think about this: will not saying nazi shit have an adverse impact on my quality of life? if the answer is yes, then you're probably a nazi. if the answer is no, then you can stop it and easily make the world a safer and more comfortable place

I had no idea this meme is a fascist dogwhistle thing. But I looked it up and it’s clearly a thing fascists like, taken from the first two definitions of fascism by Umberto Eco, who lived under Mussolini’s fascist reign:

the other 12 are at the source: https://kottke.org/16/11/the-14-features-of-eternal-fascism

Budweiser beers used it in an ad tweet, but removed it when called out on their bullshit: https://www.newsweek.com/budweiser-tweeted-2-umberto-ecos-elements-fascism-1527252

thank you for adding these links, you wouldn’t believe that people have already reblogged this post calling me a liar for saying this is a fash thing