🎶 When there’s trouble, you know who to call 🎶

Happy 20 years, Teen Titans!

TREE! LAW! UPDATE!

Because smallpox used to kill about 30% of everyone who caught it. The successful vaccine program run by the world’s medical community means that no one will ever die of smallpox ever again.

Because rabies is 100% fatal without a vaccine. No one needs to die of rabies ever again. It is entirely preventable.

Because 1-2 in 1000 who get measles, die. Vaccines let us contain outbreaks or fully wipe them out. There is no specific treatment for the disease once you have it. Your immune system either wins or you die.

We like vaccines because vaccines save lives and raise our standard of living.

My mother, now in her 70s, talks about how her mother wept for joy when her children received the polio vaccine. Because she didn’t have to be afraid of polio anymore.

A 2019 study found that measles can cause “immune amnesia”, cutting your antibodies by 10%, up to almost 75%.  Meaning, you’ve become that much more vulnerable to a whole slew of illnesses that you used to be protected from, and it doesn’t matter if you acquired the antibodies via a vaccine or recovering from an illnesses - they are gone.  All those shots you got as a baby?  The boosters you got through grade school and as an adult, including the annual flu shot?  Guess what: measles most likely wiped your body’s immune memory of those and you’ll have to get them all.  Over.  Again.

o/ <- person waving

o7 <- person saluting

ol <- person raising hand

o1 <- person scratching head

\o> <- person stretching

\o/ <- woohoo!

<o> <- EXTREME STRESS, LIKE "OH FUCK OH SHIT" STRESS

I interpret <o> as this

<o> ∆ <- Levitating Pizza

If the WHOLE COUNTRY'S economy cannot work without the labor that UPS workers provide, than their labor is worth their demands and more.

No other conclusion can be rationally made from this information.

The fact that Microsoft Word has to be a subscription is upsetting. I already paid for it why do I have to pay again

Yes please be mad about it, genuinely- You used to be able to purchase a single disk to install it and use it forever after that initial purchase of one key. It sickens me to see all this stuff which used to be a one time purchase be shunted under a subscription now.

THIS

“Why is pirating going back up?!”

This. This is why. People don’t mind paying a high price for software if it’s only the once, or every 4-5 years.

But having to pay a high price regularly? Especially in the cases where you lose access to your own work if you don’t?

That’s why people are pirating software.

It’s possible to buy a non-subscription version of Word; Microsoft just intentionally makes it very difficult to find (and also expensive).

However, I know a guy who knows a guy website: MS Office Pro for $50. If the link starts going to a Page Not Found, just search the site; they usually have some form of this sale available. 

Worth noting: while $50 is still more money than $yo-ho-ho, that money is a great way to make VERY clear to Microsoft that we DO want one-time-purchase products, not subscriptions.

Or just download libre office or one of the MANY open source word clones

OpenOffice is completely free, legal, virtually identical and all of their files are compatible with MS office. You can even save in MS office formats.

I would recommend LibreOffice to OpenOffice– OpenOffice was last updated in 2011 (over 12 years ago from the time I made this)– and while it still works, there are newer and more supported forks of it out there.

LibreOffice is updated super regularly and has support on a ton of devices (I can use it on a Chromebook if I’m so inclined).

There’s also Apache OpenOffice, another fork of OpenOffice that gets updated, less often than LibreOffice, but still exists. However, it can’t export into any Microsoft format post 2007, which LibreOffice can.

I have a Microsoft subscription through my university so I generally use that these days, but when I’m on a computer that doesn’t support that, I use the LibreOffice suite.

By the way, LibreOffice Calc won’t forcibly turn all your numbers to dates in your CSVs, which alone makes it a superior piece of software to Excel

I am a huge fan of LibreOffice!

If you need to use MS Word, here’s another place you can find a non-subscription version for $50 or less.

HUGE LibreOffice fan here!

I’ve been using it for years, both for my freelance work and my traditional publishing work, and it’s fantastic.

idk if unalive has ever helped anyone not get banned from any website but it is impossible for me to separate it from deadpool in that one episode of that one animated spiderman show

they were so ahead of their time

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

It's important to me that everyone understands that if you've got an autistic friend who periodically sends you pictures/videos/whatever of your Thing, because they know you're into it... They love you.

Now don't get me wrong, It may not necessarily be romantic love, they might not want to run off to a little farm in Montana where you'll be married forever and raise little sheeps...

But they definitely love you. And they're so happy when they spot a post about X and go "ooh, my friend likes X! I'll send it to them!".

Because they love you and want you to be happy.

Happiness is stored in the 3am discord DM of a link to a Tumblr post of a cute raccoon

Neurotypical people might do this too for the same reason, but I can't speak for them. I don't understand how they work.

my little cousin confidently declared that mother nature had a counterpart named daddy electric and i feel like this concept needs to be explored

Daddy Electric and Mother Nature sounds like a cute 70s act

Daddy Electric is Bill Nye's cousin

I want this to be real I want it to be real so badly

Well If you just donate to my kickstarstfhsujfmsnckd hblb fnvlcb m

Poor dear... Walked right into an electric daddy

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:

on trust and manipulation

Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -

And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”

And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.

Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.

The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.

I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.

I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.

I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.

And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.    

Felice never played a trick on me again.

Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed. 

And I feel like this is information worth sharing.  

Ruby Bridges is 68. This is not ancient history. Not even close.

I know Ruby. She's a really nice person. The idea that they would try and write what she did as a girl out of history is shocking to me on so many levels, the simplest of which is just, but don't they know how lovely she is?

Ruby was in Tucson, AZ last Thanksgiving. I wasn't able to attend due to illness, but I appreciated the opportunity.

Neil behind the camera all day tomorrow

Neil not being part of the Good Omens junket or the cast and crew and press screening because he's WGA and we are on strike.

But I'm so proud of our cast and our crew and everything they've made.

CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it's part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions

if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators

THEY ARE TRYING!!!!! SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE DISNEY ANIMATORS' UNION RECOGNIZED

this petition is from IATSE (union), btw! it actually has credibility, unlike most change.org/etc petitions! please sign it!!

I made another thing.

With apologies to Neil Gaiman.

No apologies needed.

Ok y’all brace yourselves cuz I just learned about a new animal

Yes, that is an animal. Yes, scientists refer to it as the purple sock worm. No, that’s not it’s real name, silly, it’s real name is Xenoturbella!

When these deep-sea socks were first discovered, no one knew what the fuck they were looking at (and, really, can you blame them?). They have no eyes, brains, or digestive tracts. They are literally just a bag of wet slop. DNA analysis initially seemed to indicate that they were related to mollusks, until the scientists realized that DNA sample was from the clams they had recently eaten (yes, they can eat with no organs. We don’t know how.)

Scientists then analyzed the data again and tentatively placed them in the group that includes acorn worms, saying that their ancestors probably had eyes, brains, and organs, but simplified as a response to their deep sea ecosystems.

Later DNA testing has since shown that they are their own thing! Xenoturbella, along with another simple and problematic to place creature called acoelomorphs, belong to their own phylum called Xenacelomorpha! This places them as the sister group to all bilateral animals. So, they just never evolved brains, eyes, or organs. They are a glimpse at a very primitive form of animal that never bothered to change, because apparently what they do works. Rock on, purple sock worm.

Real "Luigi Wins By Doing Nothing" animal here.