in the name of the moon...

The onion buying Infowars is the best possible scenario. They actually understand how to report on alex, and they'll know what to do with his assets.

And remember: Alex does not get a dime from the sale. Everything goes to paying the Sandy Hook victim families.

Knowing Alex, he wants to stay in the studio with the cameras rolling while the cops come to evict him. He wants a big dramatic escalation as the deep state hoists him out of the chair.

He fact that it's the onion will take quite a bit of the wind out of those sails lol.

oftentimes when you look back on media you enjoyed as a child it's like hello why did they let a 14 year old fight a dragon? but star wars holds up. luke is 19. his reaction to losing his whole family is to say "alright, let's do this. I'm gonna learn to meditate and hire a sexy drug dealer and his friend who's a furry to be my uber across the galaxy so I can blow up a fascist government" that's something only a 19 y/o would do

He's also a farm boy. I grew up in the south among a bunch of such guys: they are always willing to hop in a pickup to go cause some mischief. Oh, is this horribly illegal and it'll screw over the government? Even better!

so much of the original star wars makes more sense when you realize "millennium falcon" is exactly what some cocky asshole would call a beat-up truck with a bunch of illegal mods that he and only he thinks is the coolest thing ever

Yeah. I have been in more than one vehicle with a lot of mods and a name. You fear for your life but it gets you there. Usually.

oh to be tywin lannister in agot…

your son and presumed heir what’s-his-name has been kidnapped and is still at large. last you heard he was in the vale maybe? but you haven’t checked and you’re not planning to

this is low priority because your daughter (derogatory) has launched a coup to kill her drunk husband the king and seize power. she accidentally gets a two-for-one deal when her impulsive and suspiciously blond son has the second most powerful man in the country killed for shits and giggles on the steps of the westerosi vatican. now your house is fighting a five-front war.

your favorite child—who is both the best swordsman in the realm and a national disgrace—is leading your far superior armies but he’s getting his ass kicked by a high school freshman and his pet dog, so you’ve got no choice but to head to the riverlands to clean up the mess. but zero worries because nothing EVER goes wrong in the riverlands!!!!

The problem with commercial F/M romance is that it's written by the most heterosexual women alive and reading it you feel yourself slowly suffocating from the Gender of it all like a fish in a eutrophying lake. And what we actually need as a culture is F/M written by insane bisexuals violently allergic to heteronormativity

english's pronunciation rules are absolute bullshit poopoo made up crap but one of my favorite side effects of this in written english specifically is like. altering the spelling of a word in such a way that it's technically pronounced the same. but reads very differently when your eyes go over it in written form. and that sort of dissonance between the proper spelling and the altered spelling producing the same basic sounds in your brain creates an unprecedented level of comedy.

ingredience. creacher. both of these are pronounced essentially exactly the same but the altered spellings are just hilarious for some stupid reason. the english language is a disaster but at least whatever is wrong with it is REALLY funny.

pakige 📦

Good news everyone I have accidentally discovered the stupidest fucking conceivable way to make myself to do chores

It goes like this…..

-

My car: *low gas light on*

Me: I mean, I COULD stop at the gas station on the way home… OR! I could just NOT do that and deal with it tomorrow

Me: but what if I get stuck in a time loop starting tomorrow and every day I wake up and my car is on empty that would be so annoying

Me: uggghhh FINE I will stop at the gas station.

****LATER THIS EVENING:****

My sink: *has all my bowls and tea mugs in it*

Me: okay I don't actually care about this problem for tonight I am not planning on eating soup or tea

Me: …yeah but if i do end up being stuck in a time loop starting tomorrow it is going to SUCK to have only dirty tea cups in the morning forever

Me: uuuuughhhh okay clean sink it is

-

I hate this. My brain must have an extremely low opinion of me to even try it, and it worked.

But hey, I don't have to try to remember to leave 5 min early tomorrow for a gas run?

Official Time Loop Post

Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.

I know there is a lot of discourse (tm) around this right now but listen to me

sometimes you do just have to lie to children.

If, when my toddler is, you know, toddling around saying “mama? Big ball?”

If I were lean down and say “unfortunately the big beach ball for some reason fills you with such an unadulterated rage that is beyond human comprehension that you scream until you pass out, so mama had to remove the beach ball from the premises until you can better regulate your emotions” she would simply stare at me like I had 3 heads full of equal betrayal.

So, for now, instead “big ball went night night!”

Please understand when I say “removed the ball from the premises” I mean I popped it in a fit of exhausted confusion. I murdered the beach ball.

See I’ve lied to you all too and it was better this way.

you can’t just leave this in the tags etc.

You can’t be funnier then me on my own posts, I’m in tears from laughter

[ID: tags: "#that wasn't a lie though the big ball did go night night #it went to the great night night that awaits us all" /end ID]

While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.

Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.

Yesterday I had been feeling so horribly depressed furious and irritable all day that I saw no possible relief for the bottomless pit of existential agony within me. Then I went into the kitchen, poured all that remained of a one pound box of pasta into a pot (over half, around five servings) cooked it, dumped mozzarella cheese over it, and sitting at my desk ate nearly all of it in the span of 15 minutes, finishing what was left a short half-hour later. I felt almost immediately restored and so sleepy that I dozed off at 9:45 pm before getting up around 10:30 to brush my teeth

I think potentially there is something to be understood from this

When you hate everyone: eat something

When you think everyone hates you: go to sleep

When you hate yourself: take a shower

“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 😘

So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?

“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”

And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.

Saying "I'm not going to draw this thing because I don't know how to draw this thing" is really shooting yourself in the foot, because you've now cut yourself off from an opportunity to grow.

I had a friend in college who was an absolutely amazing artist. I loved seeing his work! One time I said something to the effect of "I could never do that."

He told me something that, as an artist, I resonate with. He said art isn't about natural talent; it's a learned skill. When you tell an artist their level of skill is impossible for you to reach, you're assuming their level of skill is a natural gifting they have, and it discredits the hundreds to thousands of hours of hard work they've put into getting where they are today, and you're cutting yourself off from trying to reach that point yourself.

I don't remember where I heard this but I wish I could, because it stuck with me:

Talent is THE RATE at which you learn things, not whether or not you can learn certain skills at all.

And that suddenly clicked for me. I have been very talented with a lot of things in my life and once I realized that I had basically been getting XP multipliers on my normal life experiences, it suddenly felt so much less awful to realize that I did not have the same advantage with other skills I struggle with, and that's okay. I might even have some debuffs on those, and that's okay. It's still all gaining as long as I keep working on it!!

"In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option."

--Against Access, by John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind educator

I think this also includes the important idea of imagining the other. Sighted people (like myself) often consider visuals the *most important* part of an experience. This isn't and can't be the case for a blind person. If you don't have sight, then the particulars about the color/expression/etc. aren't necessarily going to be important to you.

Smiling matters because it's an indicator of emotion. The quality of the teeth only matter if it's relevant to the joke. Striped shirt only matters if the text describes it as polka dots and that's the point.

Describe the parts of the image that give context, because a person whose primary mode of interpreting the world is not sight will most likely not want extraneous visual information.

As one of the blind bitches, my best advice for alt text is to lead with the main context in a single sentence summary and get more specific later if it's relevant. Alt text is read in the order it's written: if a summary is short and simple, I can know if it's something I care about listening to the whole of.

"A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge", for example, gives me the subject matter immediately - it's a photo of a cat - and the detail descends from there. Anything else in the image is coincidence or unnecessary; the photo was taken of the cat, and anything else in the frame is unimportant. The reason why the image exists should be in the first two lines - and comedic timing still works in alt text form! "A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge. A second cat is falling off a cat tree in the background." still gives that moment of realization that a build up to a joke usually would.

(Defining if it's a real thing or an illustration or a movie scene or whatever is also pretty important for context - "an illustration of a dead dove" is pretty different from "a photograph of a dead dove".)

"A sunny room with a large window and a park outside with children playing in it. There is a wide, sunny windowsill with plants on it and a cat lying next to them, looking outside" describes the same hypothetical image, but the order of it changes the importance; while it would work to establish a scene in fiction (well, clumsily worded fiction, at least) it's missing the point as alt text - the cat's the reason the photo was taken, but everything else gets described first!

I'm no expert, nor do I intend to speak for Everyone With Vision Loss Ever, but as endemiccharm said, unless the details are relevant to why the image exists, they're probably not necessary to mention! Get Shorter.

i listen to this podcast by two priests who talk about what life as a priest is like because I find their stories interesting, and one of the best moments was when the younger priest, baby priest we shall call him, absolutely lost it on the podcast because he had been preaching, then he saw someone do a full body sigh, shoulders up and down, then look at their watch, and then shoot baby priest a dirty look. Because priests are human too, this priest found it irritating on a human level, which, okay, I can see that--and then, he spent several minutes vehemently (and jokingly, but also, vehemently) proposing that Catholicism should update its rules so if anyone does that, the priest is allowed to come down from the altar and challenge the person to hand-to-hand combat. He argued that more people would come back to church if there was a chance of seeing the priest getting in a fistfight and in fact they might go to church multiple times a day. He stubbornly refused to allow exemptions for little old ladies. he was fully and passionately committed to the idea of Catholicism allowing priests to fistfight parishioners in the middle of mass, and I'm going to say it: i think he was right

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