missed him a bunch!! (he/him)

I mean, we knew, but it's nice to hear so succinctly

just to add to my notes in the tags - my Mom responded to this video and said she lucky she was raised by pretty loving tolerant parents.

And yeah my grandma was for the most part until she got sucked into the brainwashing of that fucker limbaugh by my uncle (same one that molested me).

And my Grandpa would beat the kids when they were little for making noise (looking back he probably had trauma from being raised super poor in the Ozarks and being in WWII in the navy) and my Mom ended up having to be a second mother to her eight surviving siblings (one died as a toddler) cause if they cried in the night and Grandma got up to go take care of them he would beat her and if she stayed in bed and they kept crying he would give them something to cry about. So my Mom as a child would have to get up and care for them. She has erased a lot of that and insists that he loved them but I know from other mentions of times by other siblings that he was an abusive jerk that my Grandmother should have left but couldn't because of the difficulty of divorce and the inability to make it on her own with all the kids.

Granted he mellowed slightly through the years and didn't kick my Mom out when she got pregnant out of wedlock and was dumped by the father (a piece of trash who only went out with her to get revenge on my Grandpa for being an asshole as his teacher). But she was the firstborn and his favorite. Which all the others resented her for to this day except for one aunt.

And all the surviving siblings (the molester and one aunt are dead) only one aunt is an actively liberal and tolerant person who is fighting to make change for the betterment of all. The rest are born again evangelicals (the males) or evil bitches (two aunts who are legally no long part of the family) or a mentally abused woman who never escaped her mentally abusive ex-cop husband and she is slowly dying from MS (and was surprised that her son who became a cop was actually finally kicked off the police force for excessive force and ignoring a call (three times in a row) to stop an abuser who was attacking his victim (who had a restraining order)).

So yeah Boomers were raised by traumatized people who passed that trauma on in new fucked up ways and now we are suffering the results.

So we need to keep fighting to regain all that those fuckers stole from us and to make a better future for the kids. Who now thankfully have better tools to recognize trauma and be able to help themselves heal and call out abuse when they see it.

That's a great table design (credit)

Tumblr already has a personalization algorithm it's called my beloved mutuals who have great taste and only wish to psychologically damage me sometimes

if you've never seen The Mummy Returns (2001) i desperately need you to watch this scene right now and appreciate the impeccable delivery from everyone involved

I have commited arson.

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.

Leona's post is here.

Her YT video is here.

Please spread Leona's story, and her evidence, as much as you can. She has a mountain of evidence proving Bethesda/Zenimax a hostile work environment for trans women, and she deserves to be heard and to receive justice for being forced out of her job.

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.

Nobody my age is voting republican. Let's be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We're all afraid of dying of thirst because there's no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they're trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.

This liberalism and party affiliation doesn't preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is... Well

No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic but they're still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn't have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can't avoid it you're a sex addict. That's a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist

If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can't understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it's because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent's nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don't know how to organize because we're raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.

They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than "young people vote republican and watch Fox news"

I've never seen anybody explain it so well

Fear me, if you dare!

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unmute

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PLEASE UNMUTE

i thought this was a hospital drama why does he have a shotgun?!??!?

It’s a really, really good hospital drama

I’m so glad I turned on the Audio bc it turns out this is set to Boney M’s Rasputin and is basically perfectly synced

I’m glad to see the ancient art of vidding is alive and well.

some arknights characters

From Skadis official artist, Mizuki eating their sister (again.)

GO, MY PSIONIC WARRIORS! I COMMAND YOU:

VOTE MISSILE NOW!!

me: haha oh god this is so bad im making so many unsupported claims and pulling all this analysis out of my ass

my prof in the margins: excellent analysis!

me: 

when i was in high school i used to write my papers thinking wow i’m just bullshitting all of this. then like a week before my senior year ended after all the grades were set, i was talking to my english teacher and told him you know i just bullshitted every paper i wrote. he told me that while i may have thought i was just pulling it all out of my ass, i genuinely knew what i was talking about and made well-supported analyses. i only thought i was bullshitting because it didn’t take much effort and it all seemed obvious to me. if you do well on your essays even though you think you’re just making it up as you go, chances are you’re not pulling it out of your ass. you’re just a genuinely talented analyst, even if the analysis that you’re making comes from a subconscious understanding of the material rather than a conscious effort to study it. give yourself some credit. 

anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow

Anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow

@shitpostsampler 

my little brother got a girlfriend recently and the two of them have been making their discord icons matching anime couples, so my other brother, his twin, keeps changing his icon to a third wheel character to annoy them

not to give pirates of the caribbean too much credit but it really is the only major franchise Ive seen that was able to pull off the “historical and mythical exist at the same time” with any sort of success

#like how on land theyre in history but on sea theyre in mythology really communicates the wonder and love the #pirates have for the sea so much better than long soliloquies or good cinematography #and then the meta narrative is constantly indicating that the spread of empire and greed for money is driving it away #man……………………………………………………………….. (@liridi)

Building on this its so funny how everyone has a globe but the moment the pirates hit the seas they sail off of the end of the (flat) world. its all in the details etc etc