Friendos, Ferrets, & Feminism

Always love how much folklore especially creature folklore emphasizes that there is a way for you to win. These are the steps to ensure the dead don't rise: take them out through a hole in the wall and give them iron shoes. Vampires cannot abide sunlight. If you hear a dog howl on a churchyard path turn around and get home as fast as you can. Iron and salt and the colour red. None of this doomed idea, the world is incomprehensible but if you're a bit clever you'll survive it just fine, there's always ways out.

‘The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.’

– G.K. Chesterton, as quoted by Terry Pratchett

cackling at this, can NOT believe it's a real, actual quote. it reads so much like one of those clickhole pieces

He also said this about the snake.

All of this is hilarious, but a gorgeous quote from the same interview:

 “In all seriousness, this discovery is humbling. It’s a reminder that there’s still so much to learn about our wild world — and that humans are one small part of an impossibly vast biosphere. On this planet, all fates are intertwined, and right now, one million species are teetering on the edge of oblivion. We have an existential mandate to mend our broken relationship with nature and protect the places that sustain life.”

this is the most annoying phenomenon in the world bar none

Follow For More ❤️

one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

I don’t understand why people don’t wear motorcycle helmets. Genuinely.

Bicycle helmets? I understand why you wouldn’t wear one. It’s incredibly important to wear one, of course, but…

…I won’t blame anybody for not wearing one, though. I mean, look at it. It looks dorky as hell. I would also like to minimize my time wearing one.

But motorcycle helmets? MOTORCYCLE HELMETS?

Literally the coolest fucking accessory a human being can wear???

They make you look wicked. Kick-ass. Like a laser-shooting robot from the year 3000. It replaces your ugly mug with the sexiest face known to man: the tinted plastic visor.

I would wear one OFF the motorcycle. I would pay ACTUAL MONEY to have my head permanently transmogrified into a motorcycle helmet.

how on GOD’S GREEN EARTH can you participate in an activity where it is both socially acceptable and highly recommended to wear some SICK FUCKING SHIT and make the conscious decision to say “nah I’ll pass”??????

See? You get it.

Today, I saw a man ride by and every single part of him was the exact same shade of jet black. Everything from the visor on the helmet to the spokes on the wheels of his bike was completely solid and uniform. You couldn’t see a single inch of his skin— not even on his neck— it was all just black.

Felt like I just saw a cryptid.

I’d never wanted to instantaneously swap bodies with someone more.

29 BILLION?!?!

The IRS is not your enemy!

We all have to chip in what we can -- that's how society works. And if the IRS gets proper funding they can:

A) Audit more companies for tax evasion B) Process help requests faster C) Send your refund out faster D) Make filing taxes simpler and easier for the average American

And so on and so forth. Denying funds to the IRS just makes the whole system gum up, which lets rich assholes get away with all kinds of shit while average people get ground up in the gears because nobody can afford to lend a hand.

People against piracy fail to realize that no, I can’t just ‘buy it.’ They stopped making DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re barely offering digital copies for download. I am not spending money I could use for food or bills to pay for a subscription service just so I can always have access to a beloved piece of media. Especially not when the service will remove media on a whim without concern for how the loss of access to that piece will make its artistic conservation nigh impossible.

For example, I recently learned that Disney+ had an original film called Crater. It’s scifi, family friendly, and seems cool - I would love to buy it as a holiday gift for my little brother! But: it’s exclusive to D+ and THEY REMOVED IT LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE.

The ONLY way I can directly access this film is through piracy. The ONLY available ‘copies’ of this film are hosted on piracy websites. Disney will NEVER release it in theaters, or as something to buy, and it may NEVER return to the streaming service. It will be LOST because we aren’t allowed to purchase it for personal viewing. If I can’t pay to own it, I won’t pay for the privilege of losing it when corporate decides to put it in a vault.

So yes, I’m going to pirate and support piracy.

Addendum: This is also a really good reason to support trust-busting. A lot of this obnoxious behavior is only possible because corporations wield monopoly power.

another addendum: most modern (4K UHD) blurays use a form of online DRM that requires the player software to access a server to get title specific decryption keys. you don't really own a film on one of those disks any more than you do on streaming, the only way to truly preserve it is to rip off the disks or from streaming, not even the physical media you can "buy" can necessarily be preserved anymore.

PIRACY ALWAYS HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE MEDIA PRESERVATION

i have rule i semi-adhere to for media criticism which is to ideologically meet shit where it's at (or where it's presented to me). i like to call it the "i didn't make you market it that way" rule--like, if lancer's union was just presented as a sci-fi setting, that would be fine. i don't expect all sci-fi settings to be communist utopias! but when the creators of lancer use the word utopia like 20 times & bandy around words like 'mutual aid' and 'post-scarcity' and 'anticapitalist' when describing it, then to me that becomes absolutely fair game. similarly if someone says 'stardew valley is fun i like farming :)' then i'm not gonna reply with a long post about how it's ideologically petty-bourgeois--but if they say 'stardew valley is anticapitalist', then they've opened up that can of worms and it's fair for me to point out that the worms exist.

it's the same phenomenon where a fantasy novel that says 'for the duration of this fantasy novel you need to just believe in the divine right of kings for the emotional stakes to make sense' is infinitely less objectionable than a fantasy novel that's also about restoring a king but takes painstaking time to point out how this king is A Good King who is Progressive and Nice and is going to do Nice Monarchy. when you try to sanitize something you end up turning any otherwise neutral or at least palatable depiction or framework you've included into a normative statement!

"No climate justice on occupied land"

They switched up from golf clapping to police brutality real quick when she started talking about their racism.

Hi!! Wrist locks are incredible painful and pose high risk of damaging the wrist even between consenting sparring partners who can tap out at any time!

In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, it is illegal to wrist lock anyone below blue belt and anyone in the juvenile division!

We need to be pissed about this

Bothering the beast

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

Malicious compliance (and non-compliance) are incredibly vital as means of protection for consumers and the workers in the long run.

Source for the above via the IWW (International Workers of the World), they have a bunch on the history of strikes and different methods. Striking doesn't just mean picketing and a call to stop work.

Note (as always): Unions work, unionize.

“i don’t think we can use this one, guys. who exactly is the target audience supposed to be???”

these tweets are holding hands