Mind if I SLYTHER IN?

REESE WITHERSPOON as ELLE WOODS in LEGALLY BLONDE (2001)

I love Rose Tyler because every time she encountered a new alien life form or a fellow human that seemed to be mistreated in some way she went “HELLO DO THEY TREAT YOU WELL, HOW MUCH DO THEY PAY YOU, ARE YOUR BASIC RIGHTS BEING VIOLATED, DID YOU KNOW YOU ARE ENTITLED TO AN EIGHT HOUR SHIFT AND THREE WEEKS OF VACATION ALSO YOU COULD JOIN A UNION, MY NAME IS ROSE I’M HERE TO HELP” and that was just so rad of her

It’s because she worked in retail

so prominent BLM activist deray mckesson just retweeted this which i think is super cool for various reasons :)))

I did not know this. Is it OK for a non Muslim woman to shake hands with a Hijabi? Or do we do the hand on chest thing too?@popcanpoli

hey so i don’t wear a hijab and i’m not muslim so i definitely don’t have the authority to answer this question (or any other questions i’ve been getting abt this) (i’m just a lil canadian politics blog i didn’t expect this to blow up lol) 

BUT here are some tweets by the original tweeter (who wears a hijab) that clarify some things

one: 

two:

three: 

This is also good if you’re meeting an Orthodox Jewish person who’s not the same gender as you!  Not all Orthodox Jews hold by this restriction, and many consider it a permissible exception to shake hands in a formal greeting context; I’d guess this is parallel to Ms. Soueidan’s last-quoted tweet above.  And as that says, the sensible thing is to wait for initiation.

learned something new. awesome

‘Statues are not the mechanism by which we understand history. We learn history through museums, through books, through television programmes. Statues are about adoration. They are about saying that this man was a great man and he did great things. That is not true. He was a slave trader and a murderer.’

- historian David Olusoga on BBC News, regarding the statue of Edward Colston being pulled down by BLM protestors in Bristol, and the “erasing history” argument used to criticise the act.

This speech-language pathologist taught her dog 29 words, and he can even form full sentences.

Video by Christina Hunger

Dogs actually do have a language center in their brains. They process language just the same way we do, just not as well.

They do understand our words. This is not true of all domesticated animals (horses, for example, can only manage to distinguish a relatively small number of spoken commands…but boy do they know what you’re really saying).

They don’t understand “just your tone of voice” as a lot of people think.

As of 2016 the record vocabulary for a dog demonstrating understanding of words is over 1,000.

So if you give them a way to talk back, they’re going to use it.

The development of language skills is probably a side effect of domestication and of being kept in close contact with humans. A dog that was a better hunting partner would be kept and bred and over time they developed a better understanding of language.

In other words, dogs are pretty dang smart because we need them to understand us.

And also that is a very good boy.

^ Would like to agree and make one amendment - very good GIRL. This is Stella the dog!

Check out the owner Christina’s Instagram: one of the first things I saw was a video where the dog started barking and, when prompted by the owner, said “outside, look look look look look look look, come outside.” Which is basically exactly how one would expect a dog to speak. 

The owner described bringing an unknown package into the house, and the dog ran away to push the buttons for “help no no help help” which is also about what I expect goes on in a scared pup’s mind.

In another video, the dog tried to push a button, and the button wasn’t working. The dog paused and then pushed the buttons for “No. Help.” 

In yet another (which the owner seemed impressed by), Stella said “come eat come play.” The owner asked the dog which she wanted to do, to eat or to play? And the dog clarified “come eat.” After eating, then the dog tried to instigate play. So the dog may have been able to understand a short spoken question, and how “questions and answers” work, and also understands sequences, even if she can’t express them (”I want to eat, THEN I want to play”)

Stella can even recount short-term memories, like when her family returned from the beach for dinner and she said “water good, no eat, play”

By the way, the owner uses the buttons as well, which probably really helps reinforce their meaning. She uses them to say things like “Stella all done eat” or “Stella and Christina go outside, bye!”

Wanna know my favorite part? Stella sometimes pushes the buttons for “Stella good” when she’s done a good job. Stella IS good! :D She also makes phrases using “love you,” like “Christina, love you, come play!”

*whispers* amazing 

< CRYING HAPPY TEARS

we do not deserve doggos….

Me: No one is hiring me

Adults: you’re just not trying hard enough

Me: oh yea, sorry about that. Let me apply “harder” this time. I’ll be sure to write my contact info extra “hard” this time. I’ll make sure to touch up my resume and make it hella “hard” this time around too.

preach

Adults:  You just need to hit the pavement, knock on some doors, call the hiring manager!

Every job application ever:  PLEASE NO UNSOLICITED VISITS OR PHONE CALLS.

Fact: Our reception pool forwards the names of people who call unsolicited on to HR, who puts the names on a DO NOT HIRE, CANNOT FOLLOW DIRECTIONS list.

This is what is the most terrifying about re-beginning the job search.

Fact: My brother was a store manager at AT&T for several years, and handled the hiring process. People that would call and call about the job wouldn’t get hired because, “They seemed to be the kind of people that would constantly need attention on the job, or wouldn’t make a good fit in customer service, because they don’t have the patience to wait for us to call them back.”

Meanwhile I’ve always been taught to do exactly those things because it “shows that you care and take initiative”

Here’s how I got my new job:

Your mileage may vary with this technique, but given the way job hunting is set up now carpet bombing an application site like Indeed is always worth a shot. I will note that when I came across a job I thought sounded extra interesting and more in line with the fields I wanted to be in I’d save the application instead of applying, then take the time that night to put together a better full application.

Good luck. Job hunting is terrible.

From The Little Girl from the 1981 Lego Ad Is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something To Say.

“Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”

HOLLA!!!!

A lot of people don’t realize, but the Friends and Elves themes are actually LEGO trying to fix the massive mistake they made with gendered marketing in the ‘90s.

LEGO panicked in the ‘90s. They were losing money hand over fist as video games and movies occupied more of kids’ time. In response, like a lot of toy manufacturing at the time, they took a sharp right turn into highly gendered marketing. They made sure that all the new parents of the Reagan/Bush era knew that LEGO was safe and not challenging for their little boys’ masculinity. ALL of their advertising went to promoting LEGO as a “boys toy”, and they invested in “action” themes and cartoons for boys, like Clutch Powers and Bionicle. Even plain, non-themed bricks were advertised exclusively by and for boys. They even reduced the number of different colors and the vibrancy of those colors to make sure the bricks seemed masculine enough.

This came back to bite them, as naturally it should. They, along with the other toy companies in the ‘90s, pressed so hard with the gendered marketing, that there was literally no crossover market in most areas anymore. They had alienated half of their customer base. Those Reagan/Bush parents they were so worried about bought into the gendered marketing hook, line, and sinker. Many of these parents (especially the conservative ones with more money to spend on toys) wouldn’t even consider allowing their little girls to shop anywhere but the “pink aisle”. I know many women who grew up in the ‘90s have stories about that, of parents and other adults telling them they couldn’t shop anywhere else. There are parents all over, but especially in conservative markets like the Bible Belt, that will still not buy a toy for their girl unless the box is pink.

Because LEGO had remade itself as a “boy’s toy,” it had now been purged from the market of girls’ toys entirely. They tried to get back into the “pink aisle” with the Belville line, but Belville was shit, because they were made to appeal to the conservative parents rather than the kids. They were mostly about big, awkward dolls with almost DUPLO simplicity to the build aspect, most pieces were incompatible with regular LEGO system bricks, and they were just not fun.

Then, in the late ‘00s, someone at LEGO had the brilliant idea to actually ask little girls. They spent 5 years and millions of dollars doing hundreds of focus groups with girls with their parents not in the room to influence what they were saying. The resounding response? The girls wanted the exact same brick their male siblings had, but with more color variation, detail work, and also could we have people that look like people instead of blocks with arms?

LEGO Friends is the result of this feedback. Released in 2012, it has been the best way for LEGO to sneak past conservative parents and into little girls’ hands again. Friends is all LEGO brick, but as the little girls requested, it comes in more, brighter colors, has more small, storytelling-themed details, and features characters that look more like people. The sets were a bit tentative that first year, not a particular challenge to build, but have since gained complexity rapidly as the line took off. If you look closely and actually build the sets, you will notice that while the boxes are pink, the builds are usually another color. Still generally “cute”, but rarely exclusively pink. The pink is mostly the box to get it past the parents who see nothing but the box.

LEGO Friends is the third most popular LEGO theme of all time, after Star Wars at #1 and LEGO City at #2 (mostly because City has been there forever). Think about that. Five years, and it has beaten the sales numbers of most other LEGO lines in the last 80 years since the company was founded. Additionally, the LEGO Friends theme has entirely shifted LEGO’s statistics. In 2010, surveys indicated that the gender breakdown of end-users of LEGO products across all themes was 90% boys, 10% girls. In 2013, one year after Friends was released, it had shifted to 60% boys, 40% girls. That’s across all themes. Some quick market research discovered that little girls would get a Friends set or two, and then expand into other themes. Because obviously my town with a juice bar and a cupcake shop has to have a police station or a pirate fortress too, mom.

And LEGO added the Elves theme last year, specifically because older girls wanted to tell more complex and fantasy-themed stories with their LEGO builds. Elves is targeted at a slightly higher age group than Friends, and the complexity of the Elves constructions rivals any Star Wars set of similar size. Every single development with “girl” LEGO in the last 5 years has been at the express feedback of actual girls.

LEGO still has a long way to go to fix the mistakes of the ‘90s. There are still marketing people in the company who don’t fucking get it, and think that they’re just shilling “girl LEGO.” There are still a lot of old white men in very high positions in the company who don’t understand what’s going on, they’re mostly just coasting on what market research and focus groups are telling them. And some themes, like Ninjago, are still very clearly marketed for boys while Friends and Elves are marketed for girls. They have a long way to go to fix what they broke.

At the same time, if you’re unwilling to allow a pink building toy to be a gateway to other building toys just because it’s pink, the problem is not the pink building toy.

LEGO Friends I’m sorry for all that I said about you

A fitting salute to the Imperial Forces.

5 June 2020

No. Hollywood has an older man problem.

this is so gross

I wish I could remember the name of the actress who went ballistic after being told that, at 35, she was too old to play the love interest for the 55-year-old lead.

It was Maggie Gyllenhall.  And I stand corrected, she was 37.

Damn

so the minnesota freedom fund turned out to be fraudulent :///

y’all..........remember 1. most grassroots organizations aren’t prepared or expecting to raise 30+ million dollars in 3 weeks 2. days after they started they said they had enough donations and asked people to direct funds to needier orgs 3. they announced they’ve spent over $200k bailing people out and are working on doing more 4. community organizing done right is hard work with a lot of different factors and limited resources Beyond just money.

hold these organizations accountable and demand transparency. but this original post has such little information and y’all are just circulating it? read the thread from the oakland mask org that started years ago and how intense this work is. it’s been three weeks and these are what looks like less than 12 people who have been given an immense amount of cash in an unbelievably short amount of time. i wouldn’t be so quick to call this a shaun king situation.

I follow Fadumo. She's deleted these tweets.

The MN Freedom Fund has existed since 2016. Prior to the George Floyd protests, they were a small bail fund that paid out around $1000 per day. Paying out over $200,000 in 20 days puts them at over 10 times their previous payout rate.

They stopped taking donations very early on because the support overwhelmed their capacity.

Their front page now, as it has been since late May, is almost entirely links to local efforts which need more support - Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and funds like Rebuild Lake Street and the Northside Business Association.

Meanwhile, The National Lawyers Guild has said that jails are delaying activists from being able to release protestors.

The MNFF should be transparent about how it's using the money, yes. I believe they should also redirect the donations they can't immediately use to other organizations. But they're a 501(c)3 nonprofit, there are restrictions on how they can spend and transfer money. You can check out their nonprofit filing forms on ProPublica - no one at MNFF receives a salary.

Keep orgs accountable, keep pushing for transparency, but please do a little more leg work before accusing an org of fraud.

all this. you can't just waltz into a courthouse, write a check for $35 million, and call it a day. it would be scandal if the $35 million had been spent frankly.

they also can’t ‘redirect the donations they can’t immediately use to other organizations’, because it’s illegal for nonprofits to do so in the state of minnesota

On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions  of Gonzo the Great: Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it. 

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.

The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous. 

We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy. 

Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.

All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel. 

They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.

Or so we thought.

The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.

The first human spacecraft were… exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.

It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet. 

We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.

Humanity, at long last, was awake.

It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.

The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at… stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.

We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.

It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.

What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.

The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra. 

The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.

We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.

Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.

There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.

A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.

It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.

When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.

I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.

I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.

It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.

The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.

Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”

I nodded.

The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species. 

“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”

Reblogging again because I just want to say that I truly hope this is our legacy in the stars. Hopefully we can be better there than we were here

We are sharing some of our favourite gifs each day this month for Antifa International’s fifth anniversary. Today: Nazi monuments being destroyed after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

If this offends you 😊 unfollow me 😊

And a note to confederates: these monuments weren’t kept because this was “history”. These monuments celebrated horrible things and we BLEW THEM UP.

When you’re in the 1400’s Florence and your buddy starts coughing

update: when you’re in Milan in 2020

update#2: when you’re anywhere in Italy in 2020

update#3: when you’re anywhere in 2020

(x)

we’re finally getting to use the 3rd amendment guys

finally. this is relevant

[id= tweet by ryanthoreson “Even in my darkest moments in 2016, I didn’t picture myself in 2020 casually telling Matt that I’m making dinner from our pandemic rations because I forgot to get groceries before the police curfew.” /end id]

If April ends up worse I swear to God

Sure is something to read this post at the beginning of June.

Bonus round: The church had no idea Trump was going to show up and were pissed off about it.

They didn’t want him there.

A voice memo from one of the clergy: https://twitter.com/MikevWUSA/status/1267620999647899648?s=20

One of the most important things I learned in my Language and the Law class is that law enforcement will intentionally misinterpret every type of statement asking for a lawyer as not asking for a lawyer. Even directly saying it like this “I will not speak to you without a lawyer” can be taken as a simple statement of fact rather than a request for a lawyer. You literally have to state “I am now invoking my right to a lawyer” and every time they try to proceed with an interrogation you have to answer every question with “I am invoking my right to have a lawyer present”. You can’t just tell them you won’t talk without a lawyer or that you want a lawyer. You have to state that you are invoking your rights. Otherwise they could just say “well they just said they wouldn’t speak without a lawyer present. That’s not invoking their rights to a lawyer. It’s just stating a fact.” even just stating your right to a lawyer doesn’t count!

PLEASE share this addition. I am a lawyer who works in criminal defense, and this is one of the most avoidable things that people consistently get wrong about the Miranda rights.

Here are some more “ambiguous” phrases which courts have found DO NOT invoke your right to a lawyer:

“Maybe I should speak to my lawyer first.”

“I might like a lawyer.”

“I think I should have a lawyer present for this.”

“Could I speak to my lawyer first?”

“How long until my lawyer gets here?”

And perhaps most egregiously – “Get me a lawyer, dawg – ‘cause this is not what’s up.”

Here are the magic phrases which you need to know if you want to invoke your Miranda rights:

1) “Am I free to leave?”

It’s worth asking this even if the answer is obvious. Even if the officer does not let you leave, by forcing them to admit that you are not free to leave, you are creating a record which your attorney can use to prove that you were in custody. Miranda rights only apply if the interrogation is custodial, meaning that police officers will frequently claim that their suspects were “not in custody” to get around their Miranda rights.

2) “I am invoking my right to remain silent.”

Simply staying silent will not invoke your right to remain silent. As absurd as this is, you must explicitly say that you are invoking your right to remain silent in order to invoke that right.

3) “I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

As stated above, you must be not only clear and unambiguous, but clear and legally unambiguous. Don’t get cute. Don’t get sassy. And on the flip side, don’t get intimidated and use verbal ticks to minimize your request. Say the line with those words exactly – say it clearly, and say it once, and then say nothing else.

Because even after you’ve done all this, the police can still try to get you to talk. They’re not supposed to interrogate you, but they’re allowed to make casual conversation, and if that conversation just happens to circle back around to the thing they wanted to question you about, well, that’s really your fault for talking after you said you wouldn’t, isn’t it? Can’t possibly fault the poor officers when you initiated – if you really wanted to have your rights respected, you wouldn’t have talked to them in the first place.

The police know this, and they will mercilessly exploit this loophole. So, once you’ve successfully invoked your Miranda rights, any and all conversation you have with police officers will put those rights back into jeopardy. 

Putting it all together:

Ask: “Am I free to leave?”

If they say no, say: “I am invoking my right to remain silent and I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

And then shut up and do not say a single thing to them for any reason whatsoever until you have actually spoken to an attorney. Yes, even if it takes hours. Yes, even if they start talking to you about something else.

Finally, a very important disclaimer:

I may be a lawyer, but I’m not your lawyer, and I cannot guarantee that what I’ve just laid out here will always work for every situation. We didn’t get to this bizarre and absurd place overnight – we built this ridiculous system piecemeal, by deciding on a case-by-case basis that certain phrases were “too ambiguous” or certain types of questioning weren’t actually questioning at all. The law is still in flux, and is still fundamentally out to get you, and willing to bend plain meaning beyond all recognition to do it. Even if you invoke your rights perfectly, exactly as I have specified above, there’s a chance that your invocation of rights will be disqualified on some new technicality that no one’s even thought of yet – and that’s precisely the problem.

Watch this video: “Don’t Talk To The Police”

Please DO NOT USE black lives matter tag on socials if you’re participating in black out tuesday. Use #BlackOutTuesday or #TheShowMustBePaused instead.