Euripides’ Bacchae, 405 BC (colorized)
designing an alphabet is fucking HARD. weh.
- King Sejong the Great of Korea, 1443 CE
i thought maybe owning my first dog would make me understand why I have met so many stupid dog owners in my precious time on planet earth but it's actually the extreme opposite. it is way easier to just train them
i think starting with horses very young teaches you very quickly and in a material way that large animals are dangerous in a way that 99% of people living in western societies will never understand the word "danger" to mean. horses are not stupid and panicky and aggressive, that meme bores me, they're just 1500lbs and sentient and have their own rich inner lives. a horse gets a little too excited about dinner and squashes you against a barn wall on its way to the alfalfa net exactly once before you learn to use your sophisticated ape brain to avoid setting up that scenario for yourself to get hurt in a second time. dogs are the same but they're ruthless pack carnivores we've bred all the self-preservation instinct out of on purpose so they would be willing to die under a wild boar while we stab it to death with pole arms. that carnivore is now living in your house. he is not allowed in my kitchen but he's a very good boy who does his best.
Sorry to everyone who’s enjoyed the last 130 years of science and culture journalism, but Disney needs the money to fund Toy Story 9
travelling back to the paleolithic era to explain to a neanderthal that in the future there will be food that is simultaneously disgusting and also the best tasting food you've ever eaten. the neanderthal nods and says "oh yeah we have that" and leads me to a clearing in the woods where a perfectly normal mcdonalds sits.
Cop behaviour
I watched Judas And The Black Messiah last night and it reminded me to write this, which I've been meaning to say for a while.
So unions sometimes use a technique called salting, where "salters" join the workforce of a company that the union wants to organise in just for the explicit but covert purpose of sowing worker discontent. They will no longer be fertile ground for capitalist exploitation, they have been "salted", see?
Agitators in organisations often work the same way, sowing division between group members in order to cause general incohesiveness. They also push for organisers to attempt the most dangerous and risky, even suicidal, uses of their resources and people, because they're trying to get them arrested or killed, and even if they've developed some amount of genuine sympathy for the group they've infiltrated, they still see the state as infinitely more powerful and predestined to win, so add on a general doomer attitude to the cop behaviour list.
It is also cop behaviour to try and accumulate as much power and responsibility inside an organisation as possible, because that's the best position for surveillance and sabotage. It is also cop behaviour to bring pointless wedge issues and discourse into discussion over and over. Do I have to repost the FBI memo about how to infiltrate subaltern groups where they say "talk frequently and at great length"? Maybe I'll reblog with that attached later.
So here's the thing: discoursing endlessly about fucking kink at pride, starting fights over tedium and minutiae, egotistical careerism within orgs, pressure to attempt needlessly extreme actions, these are all cop behaviours. In the same way that the behaviours of a salter could equally be the behaviour of an independently anti-work and disgruntled worker, rather than a union spy, the behaviours of an undercover cop could equally be the behaviour of a dogshit organiser who has no place in your organisation, so if your org is structured in a way that makes it immune to these BEHAVIOURS, it wouldn't matter if literally everyone but you was an undercover pig.
Protect against cop behaviour and you don't need to worry about cop infiltration
A female character being widely hated is a huge green flag.If my experiences with fandoms and critics have taught me anything,it's that if that's how they react to her,that i'm about to meet the most based fictional girl to ever exist
We know you want to burn down capitalism.
But for today, just don’t answer your boss’s call off the clock.
We know you believe in ACAB and think they all should get the wall.
But for today, just don’t call 9-1-1 on the guy screaming outside of your apartment.
The memes are fun. The memes are aspirational and keep us reaching for the horizon.
But look down, too, at what actually is.
Endure pains now—suffer the inconveniences now—knowing that they likely involve unpleasantness.
The Revolution™ is fun to imagine and involves no pain. But the real world does involve pain, and it’s necessary to exercise the muscles needed for future work and opportunities.
Not to mention - The Revolution™ is something that, for a lot of disabled folks, is damn near impossible to imagine a scenario where we survive. I have relatives who rely on insulin to live, if the system goes down for more than 3 months without effective distribution lines being reactivated - they're dead. I have a physical disability that makes even walking even short distances impossible sometimes, if there is a major disruption of electricity, fuel, or food, I'm starving. Sure I have food storage, but that only lasts so long (not mentioning my partner who is also disabled and has severe dietary restrictions)
And this is why Community Support is so important. Instead of focusing all of our energy and time on the things and people we hate, it is important to put time into helping people around you survive. Direct Action isn't just protests and picket lines and riots, it's also soup kitchens, community gardens, food pantries, assistance for seniors and disabled folks - shit like this. Offer to help pick up someone's groceries, offer someone a ride to their doctor's appointment, offer to watch someone's kids for them, help where you are able to. Help people they way you advocate for them to be helped.
The Revolution is built on the backs of billions of small acts of support, love, and care. A revolution that ignores the downtrodden, the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized - leads to only more ignorance and cruelty. More pain and death and suffering.
Remember the people that our government forgets. Protect the people that our government attacks. That is Resistance. That is a Revolution.
feeling Bad, I’m gonna go on petfinder and find the most bizarre cat names possible, will report back with any notable ones
notable entries:
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
might i add
i think it’s really amazing how total strangers who have nothing in common but their shared love of a work of fiction will come together across distances and dedicate their time and energy working collaboratively to build an extensive, richly detailed fanon that completely fucking sucks
you guys are so committed to being bad at interpreting things you’ll just straight up decide this post means the opposite of what i wrote and reblog it anyway
Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hlep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you ask for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hlep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hlep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it helps reinforce the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hleper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
It's incredibly frustrating when someone does this. My mother used to be awful for it before I moved out; with the best will in the world she would constantly undermine me in exactly this way and then get indignant when I dared to point out that she wasn't really helping me at all. It wasn't until I started using kid gloves to explain things to her that the situation improved at all and thankfully I have managed to teach her that yes, doing exactly as I say when I ask her for help is the best way to support me, and because I know she loves me, I also know that she would want to be told how to help me in the correct way. It's not criticism of her as a person, just me explaining to her the best way to help me, which is information that she wants because she loves me and wants to do right by me.
Should I have had to explain that to her? No! Was it enormously tiring to have to teach her something on top of everything else, when I was already in need of help? Yes! But it's done now, and it's better.
Anyway, if you love a disabled person, listen to us and help us as we ask instead of second guessing us. Thanks. ( b ._.)b
cats can activate keyboard shortcuts you cannot even concieve of
my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn't need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn't require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps
You’re so right. Say more
I want OP to know that because of this post, I entered my cat in a show as a household pet. He even got 1st place in a couple of the judgings!
@zooophagous Look at you going viral and inspiring people to find joy in pet ownership!