Hey yeah in the midst of all the hype and the strikes, can we PLEASE fucking talk about this
tiktok teen lgbts would not survive in the 80s and 90s when lesbians called gay guys fags lovingly and gay guys would call us dykes lovingly
now rebloggable. fuck with me
So we've been having a bit of a debate in the office because we wanted to do the headline "Local man gives up sugar for 12 minutes" but then overdoing the "local man" trope is a bit male-centric, so we considered "Local woman" but then that sounds like we're typecasting women so that wasn't great either, but I think we've finally found a worthy compromise:
the concept of a freakshow never fully went away. nowadays people collect posts/screenshots of disabled/mentally ill people literally just Existing Online and put them on their accounts with the intention of displaying them for people to hurl abuse towards. And they think that this is a Normal and Moral way to behave and carry themselves.
Also? TLC shows are often freakshows rebranded to be inspoporn or "these are obviously freaks but we're HELPING them". I'm a literal bearded woman and had a TLC show producer reach out to try and make a show about me in 2018. See also: British tabloids and reality shows. They're even more aggressively obvious that they're into freaks. Freakshows are everywhere in modern media.
i don’t know if i can do this blue sky app anymore
Dril, on twitter a couple of months ago, said that he would block every single user with a blue checkmark. people on bluesky, a website that is not twitter, have said that this is bad because content creators and sex workers sometimes buy blue checks on twitter to advertise their content. that’s literally the entire thing leading up to these posts
I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven.
I think the turbolift is stuck…
troi faces without context
but it gets progressively weirder :)
I believe I've just created a hard pic of all time..,,. feel free to screenshot,.,,,.
I wanted to help drive home just how much reblogs actually do for a healthy art and social community-- not even a social media community, I'm talking about "This is Our Internet, these are Our social circles, and I'm Tired of the Constant Scrolling and Hate Engagement Machine that was invented by techbros and capitalism taking these refuges away from us". This is from one of my posts that has around 40k notes on it and still gets enagement to this day. I wanted to get an even bigger reblog graph on it, but wow, all that engagement actually started breaking the tool. Check out how big that is though! Reblogs and comments (and commenting on reblogs, starting conversations) are not to be underestimated. The social media model of "SCROLL AS FAST AS POSSIBLE feed Likes to the GREAT GOD ALGORITHM" is a new and frankly bullshit method of Internet culture. There's so many artists, writers, and hell, FRIENDS you haven't and likely never will meet becuase they don't appeal to the algorithm. It didn't used to be that way. It used to function via Seeking and Sharing and building communities. We really don't have to just be okay with letting capitalism and soulless techduds taking these networks away from us.
happy Tuvok Tuesday, lads
[Image description: an edit of Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager. He has flames and lightning all around him, one of the flames forming a growling tiger on his shoulder. He's been edited to be wearing black sunglasses as he looks at the viewer. Text above and below in a yellow to blue gradient says, "It is indeed Tuvok Tuesday." /end image description]
normalize being in your 20's without a drivers license. normalize being in your 60's without a drivers license. normalize never ever getting your license. death to automobiles peace and love on planet earth
The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States
I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.
People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.
So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.
The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.
Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.
The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.
light pollution is also actively harmful to many species of birds, mammals, and insects
I took these photos on the Isle of Skye, in a place with no light pollution. Skies can look like this.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was not a perfect show but its treatment of imperialism, war crimes, and genocide was light-years ahead of some of the stuff coming out today (looking at you, Star Wars).
In DS9:
- Bajor, a world struggling to recover from decades of genocidal colonial policies, is front and center
- Bajoran characters, most prominently Kira, are allowed to grapple with their own trauma and their stories don’t revolve around making their oppressors, the Cardassians, feel better
- Kira’s history of violent resistance against the occupation is not sugarcoated, nor does the show shy away from the fact that she hurt innocent people in the process. But neither does the story condemn her for using violence to resist genocide
- Not only was Kira a terrorist, but a religiously driven one as well. Belief in the Prophets held Bajor together during the occupation, and is a major subject of exploration in the show
- Despite all that Bajor suffered, Bajorans are not relics of the past or a destroyed, defeated people–their culture is vital and alive, they are rebuilding against incredible odds, and are working toward Federation membership
- Bajorans themselves are not some misty spiritual cardboard cutouts, either. They are complex, they lash out, they are spiritual, they are lovers, killers, reactionaries, weirdos, mystics, the full range of experiences and personalities
- And then there’s Kai Winn, who is an entire book in herself. She is such a well-drawn female villain, a complicated portrayal of self-serving ambition, self-deception, and self-entitlement
- Because Bajorans are given their own stories, it actually works when some Cardassians–generally minor and one-off characters–are shown to be dissenters, or themselves traumatized from the occupation
- We actually see Dukat, the leader of the occupation, trying to play the misunderstood hero/redemption card only to get slapped down by the narrative time and again
- Dukat isn’t a one-note villain either; he is often charming and sometimes inspiring, as when he has a stint as a resistance fighter himself against the Klingons occupying Cardassian territory
- Ultimately, though, the story reveals Dukat to be a liar, a virulent racist, an abuser, and at heart an imperialist megalomaniac who almost destroyed the Alpha Quadrant with his lust for power
- David Brin was right and Star Trek is better
You are right to center Bajor in this but let me talk about Cardassians too:
- the show makes an effort to explore Cardassian culture without ever trying to excuse their imperialism and the brutality of the Bajoran occupation
- Cardassian civilians who just want to do their thing outside of the military or secret agencies are shown
- the complex questions of accountability of small cogs in the machine of the administration of totalitarian regimes are explored without easy black/white answers
- they are shown as victims of imperialism as well without diminishing their own responsibility
- the reasons (lack of resources, cultural pride, militarist society) that drove Cardassians to occupy other planets including Bajor are explored openly without excusing their actions
- the selection of characters complicit in Cardassian imperialism range from true believing patriots to small minded bigot to ambitious asshole to nihilistic egotist, just like real world dictatorships