Clear Blue Eyes

kill the rhetoric that americans are so lazy that they won't take farm jobs. americans take labor intensive jobs all the time. the reason no americans will take farm jobs is because agricultural work is exempt from the vast majority of labor laws and labor protections, including the use of child labor. so only immigrants - people who have little to no protection from the law or other options for work - take most of these jobs. we have created a permanent underclass of labor and then say that americans are just lazy for not volunteering to be part of the underclass.

there are actually good discussions to be had about how alienated many americans are from food production (hi hello that's what my only popular post is about), but the real solution to this problem is to protect agricultural workers, citizens or not. ban child labor in its entirety. punish corporations and farm owners that abuse and poison their workers. reform the immigration process so that these people aren't barred from legal protection and recourse.

agricultural workers have been exploited since the dawn of civilization, but the US in specific has been doing this since slavery, and it evolved in the 30s when FDR's labor laws excluded them specifically because most agricultural workers at the time were black. now it's mostly latino immigrants.

food doesn't fucking pick or slaughter itself. but citizens aren't going to take these jobs when the entire industry is rife with abuse - both legal and illegal - and horrific wages and working conditions.

And WHY is agriculture exempt from New Deal federal labor reforms? Because not many white people were employed in agriculture.

listen. There's a whole mentality shift that needs to happen culture wide here, from the schools to the public infrastructure to pet ownership to the justice system

The proper response to your dog doing a natural behavior you dislike (digging/barking/protecting etc) it to give them an appropriate time and place to engage in that behavior

The proper response to skateboarders damaging infrastructure is to build more and better skate parks, or build skate elements into the public infrastructure on purpose.

The proper response to homeless people sleeping on park benches is to build them houses.

you see how there's like, a commonality at play here?

The proper response to a disruption is to address the root of the disruption directly, not somehow attack the disruption itself -

you don't invent a muffler by swinging a bat at the engine noise, you don't relieve your hunger by punching yourself in the stomach, you don't resolve public unrest by sending armed men to control them and you don't prevent homeless people using bus shelters as a roof by removing the bus shelters.

a whole ass shift in a basic mindset, i'm tellin' you. We need it.

You don't reduce abortion by banning it. You reduce it by making healthcare available so pregnancy is safer and helping people prevent pregnancy when they don't want to be pregnant (we could call it "planned parenthood" or something).

Y’all in the American SW and west Mexico better check the national hurricane center and your weather for this weekend and next week.

Hurricane Hilary is about to make landfall and that whole desert area is supposed to get a years worth of rain or more. Death Valley is supposed to get twice the annual rainfall. Severe winds, massive flooding, and landslides are all strong possibilities.

This is gonna get ugly. Please spread the word. This is a majorly anomalous event and people may be unaware of the threat headed their way.

Holy shit thank you OP. I lived on the east coast and moved to AZ 4 years ago… thought I was done with this stuff. Literally this is the first I heard about it so thank you for getting the word out.

Shit. I have a post I've been holding onto about hurricane preparation. One moment, I'll post it.

I’m sorry what

what the fuck is a hurricane doing on the west coast of north america

🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯

The whole bi lesbian backlash is just ridiculous at this point.

I can't think of any other situation where the people I follow/ed fully embraced a small subgroup's shitty interpretation of an identity that's been around for decades, and just completely ostracized the entire group, regardless of their actual beliefs.

Lesbian is an umbrella term, and it's a specific identity. Just like gay. Some bi women are going to call themselves lesbians. This is not a threat to the lesbian community, and it's definitely not transphobic.

At a certain point, the people enthusiastically playing gatekeeper are going to have to realize that they put too much stock into a purely online phenomenon. You were gullible. You took the bait. You became a bully and told yourself it was for the safety of the community, just like any other conservative. The threat isn't real. You're just behaving like an asshole who wants to control other people.

"You became a bully and told yourself it was for the safety of the community, just like any other conservative."

please block me if you read books with death in them. i don’t care your “reason” - it’s clear you have a death fetish, are pro-necrophilia, and think killing is okay. i don’t care if someone you know died recently or if you have a terminal illness. it is not okay to consume fiction with death in it to cope. and that’s that on that, you freaks. pro-death crowd dni.

FEMA is doing an emergency alert test on all TVs, radios, and cell phones on October 4, 2023, at approximately 2:20pm ET.

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.

It's still so strange to me how apparently taboo it is to like a post on someone's Instagram from a month ago when there are posts still circulating on Tumblr from 1550 BCE

If he didn't want it circulating in 2022 he should have sold better copper

OMG

ASEXUAL BIRD??

the Birb says Ace rights

Ace flag color picked from the Violet-backed starling

Birb

Lion King (1994) explaining the importance of stylized 2D animation: Lion King (2019) and Cats (2019):

Kimba The White Lion (1965) explaining the importance of an original idea:

Lion King (1994) Lion King (2019) Cats (2019)

Shakespeare (1564) explaining the importance of an original idea:

Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):

Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1160 – c. 1220) explaining the importance of understanding that all creative work is inherently derivative once you study the oral tradition of storytelling and history and that’s okay because generations have always reformatted tropes and themes to make them relatable to their current audiences 

Shakespeare (1564), Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):

Tyrannosaurus rex (Late Cretaceous) explaining nothing because he’s a don’t give a fuck

People seem to have forgotten that "proship" was the Fandom norm for the longest time.

Only, it wasn't called proship. It was called ship and let ship. Or minding your own buisness.

If someone had a ship you didn't like or thought was gross, you would avoid them. If they drew art or wrote stories you didn't agree with or like, you would ignore them.

There were tags like smut, whump, and angst to tell people about things they might not want to read. And then dead dove: do not eat for taboo subjects and especially gritty fic.

Then people started to ignore that. Younger fans started to bully people because they disagreed with shipping certain characters. Whether it be because it "wasn't canon", they thought it was gross, or they just didn't like it.

These people began calling themselves "anti-ship"

Pro-ship became a label to show that someone was against anti-ship.

Eventually, the anti-ship movement began to die down. So do you know what they did? They started accusing people. Of being pedophiles, groomers, rape supporters, and more. All because they wrote or drew things that these people didn't like.

They began claiming that THEY were the Fandom norm, and that these "proshippers" were the bad people. They started claiming that proship stood for "problematic shipping"

Due to this, the term "pro-ship" is often misconstrued as to what it means. Many people don't even KNOW what it means.

It means "anti-censorship".

It means that we support someone's right to produce art, no matter how gross, no matter how taboo, no matter how "problematic"

Because it's not hurting anyone.

If it's something you don't want to see? Block the person. Block the tag. Say in your bio that you don't like it. That's what they're FOR!

This was discussed in earlier days of fandom.

Except now, it would be like the person who didn't like the cherry pie and ordered it anyways then demanded that no restaurant serve cherry pie because it was poison. Not only is it a ridiculous request, it's blatantly untrue.

a little more information regarding the maui wildfires:

hotels are still operating. hotels are still operating. they are not the ones offering shelters or housing or food. even bowling alleys are offering shelter, but hotels have the audacity to build on burial sites but not open their doors to local families who have lost everything.

donate to maui united way, the maui food bank, mutual aid, and maui humane society

Actually that’s not even true. I’d rather eat dirt.

Btw, to Americans: the reason why a lot of Europeans balk and gasp at your working conditions shouldn't make you mad at us, it should make you mad at your government. Because it's your government failing you - we are also fucking appalled at it all.

But also, to my fellow Europeans - why do you act a lot of times like the failures of the American government are the personal failures of their citizens? You do realize that due to the centrism of American culture on the internet, most Americans don't know that the rest of the world has it better? With better working conditions, better taxes, better healthcare? They don't KNOW it's possible.

And that! Is American propaganda! Done ON PURPOSE! They make it so America centric in everything so we don't see what happens elsewhere so we don't question it! Forcing that "American pride" harms us as much as it annoys everyone else. We don't like it either but we don't have any way to stop it because it bombards everything and it aucks because most of us don't like what's happening either.

btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

"Why can't the freaks on AO3 just go and make a site for all the gross stuff and leave AO3 alone."

Because AO3 is that site. Because AO3 was that site long before you decided AO3 was better than the sites you bullied us off of before, and I can promise you if someone somehow comes up with a fanfic site you like better specifically for the 'gross stuff' you'll try to bully us off that too so you can benefit from it.

AO3's specific core purpose is to preserve fanfiction, yes, but it was also instigated as a host site for the fanfiction that kept getting yeeted off other platforms like Wattpad. Its designed to preserve all fanfiction, not just the fanfiction you, personally, think is 'allowed' to be written.

AO3 is the site for all the gross stuff the freaks make. We've been there just as long as you. We've been funding it just as long as you have. AO3 has specifically said you have a place here. The timeline was literally:

Wattpad/FF.net/LiveJournal purge fanfics > AO3 is born > The people who's fics got purged moved over to AO3 > AO3 gains popularity as the best functioning site > The people who pushed for the fics to be purged off Wattpad move to AO3 > The same people try to push for AO3 to purge fics.

AO3's source coding is open-access. You go make a polished, strict, rigid site where nothing 'icky' is allowed. You go make a site where you can control what is hosted. We already have our space.

Just the other day I was chatting with an older woman about this exact thing. She's retired so she enjoys going on almost-daily walks around her neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods. Well she told me that it was really weird that in the newer constructions where the younger families live, EVERYONE has their blinds closed all the time. In fact she can tell a younger family lives in a house based on the simple fact of whether or not their blinds are closed in the middle of a sunny day. It's to the point where she can't even tell if they're even HOME and available for a visit to welcome them to the neighborhood!

When she said that, I realized that I do that too when I live in a more publicly visible apartment. I told her that I think it's because of the internet. Younger people feel like we're constantly being watched, observed, and JUDGED for merely existing. So when we're home, we just want to be alone, unbothered, and unobserved because it's the one place we can control that. She was very surprised to hear that I felt like that and she was VERY concerned for us young folk (and to be honest after talking with her I became pretty concerned too...)

People from her generation will have their blinds open all day, hang out on their front porch, and randomly visit/enjoy random visits from neighbors and strangers. If a stranger knocks on my door it's scary and if they want to stay and chat? It's a huge inconvenience and it feels super awkward and weird and I'm stuck wondering why exactly they're talking to me, when just a few decades ago welcoming someone new to the neighborhood was just what you did! In fact to not do so was rude!

It made me really worried that as the Panopticon sinks its teeth deeper into our psyches, we are losing the very essence of what makes us human and got us this far as a species: community. I find that being on the internet for hours a day tends to almost trick my brain into thinking "I've been social all day, my social need is full" when in reality I've only talked to one, maybe two people I know from my real life all day, and only for short bursts, not REAL conversation.

I find it hard to have the energy to invite friends to hang out, and when I want to I feel like I'm a big inconvenience for asking them to take a break from their busy lives for me (not that they would ever say that's the case, but it's this nagging feeling internally). I feel like while we used to be a series of large islands of local community, our islands splintered apart and started drifting away from each other. Now your island is just you, your immediate family, and maybe a couple close friends. Those living physically closest to you feel like they're miles away and unreachable, to the point where you might as well not even bother.

I guess I just have one question for you: Do you know the names of your next door neighbors?

Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th

No guys you don’t understand.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing

This is humanity

Happy Birthday, Curiousity.

Happy birthday, Curiosity.

You people keep making posts about being pro-kink and pro-weird nasty gay sex but then moments later you're shaming fellow queers for ageplay or cnc or incest shipping and i'm sorry but it doesn't fucking work like that. You are not pro-kink if you're stricken with moral outrage at the extremely basic concept of people playing around with power dynamics. Get the fuck over yourselves.

Once again thinking about how every single sex therapist I’ve talked to (and I’ve talked to several; multiple of which were my own) has laid out the ground rule that whatever an adult does in their own mind, or does safely with another consenting adult in their own private space, is fine. That it only becomes a problem if they are hurting other people or ignoring the rules of consent (cnc notwithstanding because consent and non-consent are negotiated beforehand with scene planning and safewords).

Y’all don’t need to be comfortable with or engage with anything you don’t want to but you need to start realizing that we can’t keep policing what people do Safely, with other Consenting Adults, in their own Private Spaces. As long as they’re not hurting anyone (and “hurting anyone” includes having sex with, watching porn featuring, or being in relationships with people who Actually Cannot Consent; e.g. minors, animals, unconscious people who have not given prior consent, etc. with the porn stipulation being super important here) then it’s none of our BUSINESS. We don’t need to be on constant watch for sexual thoughtcrime.

You don’t have to interact with anything you don’t like sexually, this is another ground rule, but like OP said; quit shaming people for “fucked up” kinks and really try and interrogate yourself on why you have such “moral outrage” about people enjoying messing with power dynamics when they’re having sex (with other enthusiastically consenting adults).

Disney is going to stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays in Australia and to think of what this means for accessibility, residuals, quality, public libraries here etc and the precedent this will set for other studios and distributors around the world oh it's never been more over

...Not. Good.