Here for the memes

Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi

our server's weekly movie voting rules

War has changed.

I really do miss back when it was considered fucking weird to ask trans people(or anyone who is even a little gnc/has a label you don't understand/is giving you queer vibes)* what their assigned sex at birth is. Like we literally used to roast cis people for this shit, that's legit why the "what's in your pants" meme exists, but somehow we've reached a point where a very vocal portion of the online trans community genuinely thinks you owe people this information so they can make insane generalizations about you and your life and if you refuse that's cause for suspicion and I really shouldn't have to explain how fucked that is.

Interrogating people about what's in their pants is transphobe/terf/transmed shit. "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is fed shit. Tbh "you owe me personal information about your body and medical history" is ableist and intersexist shit. Sex and/or gender tells you literally nothing concrete about a person and there is no world where you are owed this information. Can we cut this shit out and go back to judging people by their words and actions instead of what some random doctor decided their body looks like when they were a squishy baby, you know, like normal people? Please??

*It's also wildly intersexist but unfortunately I don't think we've ever reached a point of collectively accepting that it's horrid to ask intersex people unprompted questions about their bodies and medical histories. You are absolutely not owed any of that information for any reason, especially given that medical history typically goes hand in hand with profound trauma due to how normalized medical abuse against intersex people is, and everyone needs to get that through their heads yesterday. If they want to share they can and will, aside from that it's none-ya.

A very useful thread on Bluesky:

(There is a lot more. Rather than give you all the images, I've copied the full text below.)

TIL anyone who's going to overwinter in Antarctica has to have had their appendix out. Because removing an appendix that's not causing any trouble just as a precaution is way better than having one that's about to burst when you're on the ass-end of the planet with no way to be rushed to a hospital if shit gets real.

No, by the way, we absolutely did not think of this ahead of time. A dude named Leonid Rogozov got appendicitis in Antarctica. Fortunately, the expedition's doctor diagnosed him quickly and knew how to remove an appendix. Unfortunately, our man Leo was the expedition's doctor.

What did he do? Well, he set up a mirror, gave his belly a shot of novocaine, presumably told a colleague, "hold my vodka," and he removed his own fucking appendix. He survived.

this picture has such "i lived bitch" energy

Hey, USAmericans? Wanna save your country? Run For Something!

"syntax error: unclosed if at line 56": perfect error message, tells me exactly what I need to fix and exactly where to look for it.

"memory write failure at address 0xeb008a": good error message. describes the problem well enough to enable troubleshooting by an experienced user.

"something went wrong, please try again": bad error message. does not tell me anything useful.

"oops! something blooped! 🙁": I will kill you with my bare teeth

“My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” (from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. highly recommend it if you’re interested in having better dialogues and feeling less defensive in your life)

In the New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour - who pretty much defined the principles of “self-sufficiency” as a modern political movement - goes into detail about conflict and community-building. So far from today’s interpretation of self-sufficiency as an American prepper-homesteader isolated from their neighbors - self-sufficient in the sense of “alone” - he envisioned self-sufficient in the sense of “not needing to buy things,” whether that was buying things for pure survival or buying things just to feel good. Seymour felt strongly that a community of close friends, preferably meeting frequently in pubs with wood-burning fires and live music, was a hallmark of being especially practical and self-sufficient; and if you think about it, you’ll see that it makes sense.

After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.

And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”

In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.

Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.

So it’s worth having communication skills. As a matter of self-sufficiency.

If you have ever worked with the public, remember: the public will be part of your politically utopic community.

All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.

They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)

The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.

And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .

Etc.

If you want a cooperative, non-violent, non-coercive community, and especially if you want that to be the norm, you end up having to learn to work collaboratively and productively with the person who irritates and frustrates and upsets you most in the ENTIRE world. And if you can't picture doing that, then maybe it's time for some self-reflection about how you really want the world to work, and what you're capable of contributing to that.

Reposting this quote from The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency just because I find it extremely funny:

“Do not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.”

You need to take the view that it’s up to you to uncover the amazing hidden talents of your local freaks n geeks 😘

the lesson I'm taking away from this election is not that the Democrats need to become more left wing or more right wing but moreso that they need to find a way to cater their rhetoric towards people who genuinly have no idea what is going on. the target audience for every speech and political appearance should be someone who doesn't know what the three branches of government are because they were drawing a Cool S during high school civics

political scientists have failed to consider the possibility that the silent majority is silent because they didn't understand the question and are trying to play it cool

Superman: Red And Blue #05

This is great.

Superman is a man, raised by humans as a human to be a good person and moved by compassion and the need to do good in the world.

I wish this interpretation appeared more in movies and such

There are so many different shades of white light bulbs, I am so overwhelmed walking down the light bulb aisle, and then I'm never happy with the one I choose, no matter which one I choose, I get it home and I put it in and I'm like, ugh, I don't like THAT white

Color temperature range charts may be useful when going to try the next option (i kept a list of "nopes" in my wallet until i discovered I want shaded reading lamps, bathroom and kitchen lights all between 3800-4200 and everywhere else not above 3200 nor below 2800. YMMV, I enjoy warmer tone colors but not too warm or I'll get sleepy/depressed).

Different temp-colors for different areas/tasks.

Omg but this is so helpful, I am so glad I am not the only person just completely bewildered by how many different tones are being labeled with a single word! This will help me so much!!!! Thank you!!!!

Menswear guy’s ability to own is so powerful he even owns himself.

more menswear guy

have you heard of it!! it's called safe following distance on freeway. yeah it's the new trend that all the. cool&fuckable people are doing. or so ive heard. anyways probably worth trying

Please fucking lie to your employer. Like they don’t need to know your mental health issues or what drugs you do. Ffs

its not lying if its to employers or cops

and look up ur rights on what they can and cannot ask u many places ban asking about ur record and transportation status and things like that resources will also tell u how they reword sketchy questions so ur prepared

Hey. Take it from a former HR person… this goes double right now. I just spent some time putting in some job applications myself (not for HR, lol) and got about 15 interviews. And idk if it’s because of COVID uncertainty or if places just don’t fucking care anymore because they know people are desperate for work, but the amount of straight up illegal shit my interviewers asked me was appalling. (That’s not even counting the questions that were technically legal but clearly fishing for information they’re not legally allowed to ask.)

A tame example? Two questions into a phone interview, the guy on the other end of the line asked: “How old are you?” I said “Excuse me?” - giving him a chance to rethink that. He didn’t. “How old are you?” “Sir, you are not allowed to ask me that question.” “Well, I want to know. I’m asking.” “And you’re legally not allowed to ask me that. I’m not required to tell you my age.” At that point, I guess he managed to remember an old HR bulletin or something (I hope to god he wasn’t actually HR himself), and he said, “Well, I need to know if you’re over the age of 18.” (Which is what he should have asked in the first place… or not, since that was in the application that he could have read.) “Yes. I’m over the age of 18.”  And we moved on. Two questions later, he tried another illegal question. I called him on it again and ended the interview, citing that a workplace with such a clear disregard for the law, especially upon first contact with a potential employee, was not going to be a good fit. (They offered me the job anyway, lol. I didn’t send a thank-you or a response.)

At a different interview, the majority of questions were “fishing” questions - just looking for that info they’re not actually allowed to ask. (This person was also either not really HR or an HR person who was exceptionally bad at their job.)

I could tell they were getting frustrated when I dodged answering the personal stuff, and they actually got extremely upset when I mentioned later in the interview (re: less relevant work experience) I had worked in HR. They were super flustered for the remainder of our time, and I watched them skip over questions on their sheet they had clearly planned on asking. They KNEW they were being sketchy and were counting on me not knowing anything about HR - or my rights - and so they got upset when I did. These were super tame examples. I’m begging you, if you’re job searching right now, PLEASE know your rights. Please know what interviewers are allowed to ask. Please don’t volunteer information or elaborate more than you’re required to about personal things. Save your words (and everyone’s time) by elaborating why you’re good for the position/what you can do. I may create a resource list on this shit later but PLEASE PLEASE KNOW THIS STUFF BEFORE YOU TALK TO AN EMPLOYER. This goes for anywhere you’re interviewing as well as your current employer. This also goes for HR. HR may be the person you go to when shitty stuff happens, but that doesn’t mean they’re your friend (or competent). They don’t need to know your age (beyond 16+, 18+, or 21+, depending on the job). They don’t need to know your medical history. (For the love of god, do NOT answer the “have you been diagnosed with depression?” question.) They don’t need to know if you have kids or whatever. They don’t need to know a LOT of those things that may appear on an application, including your veteran status, whether you’re on/have been on unemployment, etc. They’re not entitled to know specifics about your transportation (unless you’re using that transportation for the job, like Uber/delivery drivers). Look this up for your state/the job’s state. Beware questions like “What year did you graduate?” if you’re like me and don’t put dates on your resume (I just put amount of time spent at employers, not dates of employment). They’re fishing for your age. It’s “Oh, you know, 100 years ago,” if you feel comfortable making a joke, or “About [generic number, like 5 or 10] years ago” if not. Also beware things like the “What do you do in your free time?” question, even if you already work there. This is not a friendly getting-to-know-you question. This is a basis for judgement. Not up to an invisible standard? They’re going to be biased against you for pay raises, promotions, etc. Mention kids/lots of family/social engagements? That’s a tick against you for not being the kind of person who lives to work (yes, it’s gross and stupid). Mention lots of solitary things? Cool, that’s their mental note to ask more from you because you’re “not doing anything anyway.” By all means, be friendly with your coworkers/talk about shared interests if you want, but it is none of your boss’s business, and be aware what could get back to them.  Don’t. Tell. Employers. Shit.

We wrote up a handy list of those illegal questions here:

10 Questions You Should Never Be Asked in a Job Interview 

Hopefully people already know this by now, but I saw way too often back when I worked in retail. Don’t add your coworkers or boss on social media. Yes, your coworkers too. You don’t want to accidentally say something to them or have them see a post and mention it to your boss. I’ve seen it happen.

Just putting this out there.

Ever seen a Golden Tiger sneeze?

(Source)

no

Just so you all know, my tumblr glitched egregiously so now every time someone reblogs this from me, tumblr takes me off of my dashboard or search results and forces me to see this post again

WHY DID SOMEONE ADD AN INCINERATOR ????

I STILL HAVE TO SEE THIS BTW. ITS BEEN YEARS.

And you will see it again.

The Shape of Ideas