Highlights of Ace Austin vs Mustafa Ali TNA Under Siege 2024

This was the funniest hour of my life

At the end of the panel we gave them a round of applause for being so brave in trying to write straights and cisgenders

Especially Jasika, who got very emotional about her childhood with straight parents

types of comments on this post:

-straight people saying :/ love is love :/ gay or straight why does it matter ://///

-gay people saying wait no really i’ve never written a non-lesbian pls help

-people pointing out that even straight people don’t know how to write straight people without unnecessary romance

the truly impressive part of this panel was how for an hour, a FULL hour, they talked about writing straight characters like the st8s talk about writing queer characters and they did. not. break. It was the most amazing piece of improv comedy i’ve ever seen. 

Some flowers I saw in the woods!

Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Time UK law was updated to make these illegal practices that Amazon is undertaking costly for them.

In the meantime I'm sponsoring foxglove to take them to court.

Zendaya at the Met Gala 2024, wearing custom Maison Margiela Artisanal by John Galliano, and hat by Stephen Jones.

The fruit, flowers, insects and birds on the gown fit the dress code of the night, 'The Garden of Time', inspired by J.G. Ballard's 1962 short story (explained here by the BBC).

The gown also references John Galliano’s Spring 1999 couture collection for Dior, in particular the gown below, decorated with grapes.

Maison Margiela said:

Yeah you say this, except there's a good chance you were chronically dehydrated as a kid. The reason you didn't think you were is because a) no one was talking about dehydration at the time, and b) the effects weren't immediately obvious.

But when my grown-up massage clients get on my table and I have to keep reapplying lotion because their skin absorbs the first layer immediately? When they have a million "knots" because their soft tissue fibers got dried out, lost their elasticity and became sticky, basically glued themselves together, and now it hurts when you move your arm like this, or your neck is always achey?

Yeah, that's chronic dehydration. That's shit that builds up over years of not drinking enough water (and/or not stretching, and/or having shitty posture, and/or not healthily processing your difficult emotions, and/or...)

Health is mostly maintenance. You have to act in "healing" ways consistently if you don't want to spend your life in a cycle of pain -> fix -> same pain again. And the younger you start, the better your results will be.

So yeah, treat the youth and yourself like beached orcas and drink that water.

So yeah, treat the youth

and yourself like beached orcas

and drink that water.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

@themosscreature asked me to share these with you all :)

Thank you for sharing!

he went out, he left, no longer with us

Please forgive me, I wrote this dumb joke in my drafts TWO YEARS AGO and I saw it today and cracked up. Seems appropriate since Dracula is everywhere,  enjoy my failure to launch vampire romance.

If this made you laugh you could consider donating to my Ko fi or check out my Redbubble or Teepublic.

Ayunga for the cover of Knight Magazine

Ayunga singing en français.

If I could only return to the water’s embrace Wouldn’t the world be a lovelier place? Dear Mother, would you be able to forgive As the dancing water flows, so too we would live The city it would nourish And you too, my dear, would flourish But love alone could be to no avail Only farewell, I fear, would prevail Thus are our lives filled with joy and sorrow I’ll be here always, forever and tomorrow To behold the world’s undying beauty And that shall live on in perpetuity…

english translation of fei yuqing and ayanga’s 新鸳鸯蝴蝶梦

Scalped and beheaded multiple times

“If a woman is an analogy to you, you’re not ready to be talking to a woman” omg you’re so right bestie

.☝🏻☝🏻

阿雲嘎 Ayanga《少年賦》【封神第一部 Creation of the Gods I OST電影片尾曲】Official Music Video

Really a better representation of the movie even though it’s the music video of the movie end OST. Here’s the dialog: 

[Scene of a winter seige]

Voice over from Jifa (the young man): I’ve been a hostage-son in Zhaoge for eight years, I want to become a man like him.

[Scenes of an prisoner man barefoot being hurled insults by the crowds, soldiers doing a sword dance at court, a young soldier puts a sword beneath his chin at the winter siege]

Jiangziya (the old man): He doesn’t care whether anyone lives or dies. 

Jifa (the young man): You lie! The king’s willing to sacrifice himself for the world. He’s a hero. 

[Scene of a triumphal return and a royal ceremony]

The old man: But he’s playing you all for fools. 

[Scene changes to a blood moon then the court; four warriors stand in front of four older men in court dress]

The king: Go, stand in front of your fathers! Draw your swords!

[Scene back to winter siege]

The king: Warriors of Yinshang! Take Jizhou!