Seconding the tags. Lovely poetry

look, yes, of course a pond will kill you. A little-L lake will kill you, if you are careless enough, but they are lazy things, pitcher plant predators, and they do not hunger. The Great Lakes remember when they were the blistering endless winter and the slow crush of ice reshaping the land. They remember the implacable starvation of an unbreaking cold across the continent, and they carry that ancient ice water in their bellies, hungry still. Lake Superior wears her winter boldly, and she will wrench frigid breath from your lungs in the heat of August and pull you, unrotting, to her depths. Huron beckons you further and further from shore with such a gentle slope, so easy, until you are finally chest-deep in the water but you cannot see the shore anymore, only the endless expanse of her. Erie sends her fogs like snowfall, whiteout blizzards, blinding you to her rocky shallow basin, reaching up to claw the belly of boats. Lake Michigan pretends, charming, a child's ocean, and her longshore tides creep along her beaches and tear away anyone foolish enough to believe the clear blue lie of her docility, most lethal of all.

Ontario is no business of mine.

Here, in order of appearance: Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie.

The Great Lakes aren't haunted. No matter what anyone says, the Lakes aren't haunted. They are the memory-eaters, the old dark painted over with charming blue, and what sinks does not rise, not even the dead. When the Lake raises goosebumps, it isn't the bodies in the depths. It's just the Lake, reminding you that you are mostly water and water calls to its own.

The oceans, the old saltwater womb, warn you with every breaker that they are dangerous. The oceans never let you forget that you crawled from their hold, with your saltwater veins, but not all of your ancestors did, and there are things beneath the ocean tides, waiting with teeth to spill the blood you stole. The oceans with their shawls of hurricanes, their steady beating, make it impossible to forget the threat of them.

But the Great Lakes? The Lakes will lie to you. The Lakes will not gift you the buoyancy of saltwater, will tempt you with still surfaces and cool drinkable freshwater. The Lakes will promise that there is nothing with teeth waiting below, as though the Lake itself is not the maw of something hungry. The Lakes are new to the world, in the scale of epochs, and they play games. They lap at your knees like they are tamed, but if you swim long enough there will be a moment where the Lake throws you sideways, pulls you under, and you remember that this is a wild thing, with teeth of ice and nothing but water in its belly. They hold the last breath of every foolish swimmer that lowered their guard for a second too long, and the carcasses of centuries of shipwrecks, and they do not surrender what they take. No, the Lakes are not haunted. The Lakes are not cursed. There is no monster waiting in the depths, only the depths themselves, and that is enough.

They say that freshwater doesn't lay quiet in its bed until it's had its measure of blood, and the Great Lakes are thrashing at their shorelines.

Oh, my darlings, bodies and shipwrecks and memories are not the only things the Great Lakes devour--seasons, too, the Lakes cling to. All summer long the Lakes hold tight to the chill of winter, scattering cool breezes off their shoulders onto the coast. All summer long the Lakes hoard heat, storing it down in the deep thermal reservoir of fresh water, the golden heart of sunlight tucked away for the dark winter months. All summer long the Lakes steal warmth from the air and store it away, and when the sharp northern winds bring winter, the Lakes breathe out the last ghost of summer and fling themselves skyward. When the air is freezing, the Lakes have held fast the deep battery of summer, and the warm memory of July evaporates from the water and crystallizes in the atmosphere as January snow. All summer long the Lakes trade in winter winds, and all winter they shake out the white storm coat of summer.

Aw heck I missed Eddie Fitz Day...

So here’s a different fun fact for you: the steel-skinned Lakers, the great cargo ships that haul iron from the shores of Superior and beyond—many of them are old, as ships go. An ocean-going cargo ship has a working life of fifteen years; thirty if the salt does not bite too deeply. But the Great Lakes keep what they take, and what they take endures. Those who are not local to the area may not know that there is a massive industrial shipping route leading from the Great Lakes east to the Atlantic, and west to the Mississippi. Mostly these cargo ships--limited in size to only a little more than 1000 feet due to the length capacity of the Soo Locks on the St. Mary River, the gate from Lake Superior to Huron--carry raw materials. Iron, from the deep veins of the Mesabi Iron Range; taconite; powdered cement, limestone and salt and grain. The Lakers, hollow bellied, carry their burdens for decades. Many Lakers serve for eighty or more years; The SS Medusa Challenger, launched in 1906; converted into a barge in 2014 and renamed the St. Mary's Challenger, still carries cement a hundred and seventeen years after her first launch. The oldest of the Lakers in service today, the SS Alpena, was launched in the 1942, and still carries faithfully.

And if you like to watch the big boats go by, then here's the Sault Ste Marie webcams.

Has a worm ever gotten struck by lightning

I’m so shook amazing :0

Man, talk about fuck that one guy in particular.

ppl will post butch positivity with like 5 allusions to transmasculitity (binding, t, top surgery, etc) and 0 mentions of transfem butches

i love you butches on estrogen! i love you butches who feel caught between expressing yourself as a woman and as a butch because of transmisogyny! i love you butches who want/have bottom surgery! i love you butches who don’t! i love you butches who feel like butch is your gender and i love you butches who feel like butch is your sexuality!

i love you transfem butches! i love you trans women butches! i love you butches!

Bastille was right. How am I gonna be an optimist about this. Also right about eh eho eho.

And stuff like "people in African countries have lower IQs" is not proof that scientific racism was right all along actually, it's a straight forward result of things like white people in first world countries singlehandedly defining what smart is and what skills and traits count as real intelligence and restricting which people have the access and resources required to develop them

i have just heard from @mohammedshehabtt that the crossing might open soon. screenshot below:

if muhammad is right, the crossing will open soon. that means he has only a limited amount of time to raise funds and get his family to a safe place.

muhammad is only 26. he's younger than i am. it breaks my heart that this is something he has to worry about. unfortunately, it is, and he's got his family to worry about too:

they've lost their home in the war. they are currently displaced in deir al balah. iman and toleen have gotten sick due to the conditions in the camp they're staying in. look at these sweet girls; they don't deserve this.

they deserve a home. they deserve warmth and safety. they deserve a cozy bed to sleep in every night, and a home to decorate with star-shaped lights like they had before.

this is not merely a dream they have; it is an attainable goal.

muhammad needs to raise €30k total to get his family out, of which he only has €5257 at the time of my writing this post. i am appealing to all of you who see this post to please share it. please donate whatever you can. i know a lot of people have been feeling hopeless especially now, but please don't. there is hope. if the people of palestine have hope and faith, so should we all. and now more than ever we need to work together to help them.

so please, share and donate. whatever you can do, please do it. thank you.

⭐ @mohammedshehabtt ⭐ vet (111) ⭐ gfm ⭐

fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals.  protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.

the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity.  make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged.  and strike. attack.

YES i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word. above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that

This makes me think that we need WAAAY more apps that generate junk data

Apps that generate junk data? tell me moooore.

Ooh I know this one!

Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money

TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)

WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it

Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me

@afraidofamericans

Boy it SURE would be a SHAME if this were SPREAD AROUND for everyone TO SEE

Elon is recruiting randos from Twitter to compete for the chance to work themselves to death figuring out how to take away your welfare.

Nothing says efficiency like creating a whole ass new department with two co-chairs.

As one whose loans have been forgiven, I want to frame this more accurately. Biden has taken tremendous heat for forgiving loans that ought to have been paid back and dumping the debt on the taxpayer.

What Biden actually did is what the EXECUTIVE branch of government is meant for: he enforced the law. The contracts for those loans and many more included forgiveness under certain criteria: x years of income-based repayment, 10 years of public service, borrower disability, so on. Borrowers met the criteria and were refused the forgiveness guaranteed in the contracts.

People have gone mad over shaming borrowers for supposedly not fulfilling the terms of their loans, when many exceeded their obligations. Meanwhile few have said a peep against the lenders and servicers that refused to honor the terms they too signed off on. The Biden administration intervened to stop their mass evasion of legal obligations.

on my knees praying dear snoopy, please let my mutuals and all the cool people get mcr tickets and please make it so the scalpers die and the people who were assholes at the barricade for all of the swarm tour get nothing thank yuo

hey let's start spreading the reminder now that you cannot safely self-manage an abortion with herbal medicine or essential oils. natural abortifacients function by poisoning you; you wait for your body to realize you're dying and reject the pregnancy in order to conserve resources, and hope that happens before the rest of your organs shut down.

i think there will be an upsurge soon of unscrupulous and/or malicious actors preying on desperate pregnant people; do not help them kill people. don't spread recipes for herbal medicines or ingestible essential oil mixtures that purport to cause a pregnancy termination.

You can get mifepristone by mail. It works, and it's safe.

If your democrat friends start muttering about stolen election conspiracy theories, the time to have a sit down with them and express your concerns is NOW, while you still have a chance to reach them, not 6 months from now when they're fully conspiracy-pilled.

Here's some of the talking points and why they're bullshit:

But just as importantly as the facts: sit down with your friend and talk about the anxiety that's behind their conspiracy leanings. Acknowledge their pain and fear. Help them find ways to feel less powerless and regain their sense of agency. Take them to a mutual aid event, involve them in a fundraising event for a marginalized group, invite them to a local community effort. If they spend more time feeling connection and empowerment and less time doom scrolling online, they're far more likely to stay in reality.

This this this

I worked as an election judge across multiple polling locations and election types in my state from 2018-2023 (presidential primary and general elections, midterms, and special elections like for the school board etc.)

US elections are extremely secure. There are so many safeguards in place. Everything is double and triple counted.

The number of ballots electronically counted by the box are checked against the number of physical ballots at the end of the night, and also the receipt papers that individuals exchange for their ballot. All three of these counts MUST MATCH. Sometimes you're off by 1 number and it means everyone stops and triple counts these papers until you find the error (human error, it's been 16 hours and two pieces of thin receipt paper were stuck together and the second person to recount finds it and everyone cheers because thank fuck, it means no one dropped anything on the floor anywhere.)

There are eyes everywhere and there's a deliberate mix of poll workers across political parties/affiliations. It's simply not possible to alter even 1 ballot at 1 polling place, much less thousands.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump won this election. If there was interference, it was NOT at the voting booth. That's simply not possible. The "interference" (if you can even call it that) comes from right wing propaganda convincing stupid and/or hateful and/or selfish people to vote for him.

In 2016, we had 60% turnout.

In 2020, we had 66% turnout.

It's too early to know what this year's number is, but I bet it's around 60%.

Trump got 1.5 million more votes this year than he did 4 years ago, which is more or less in line with population growth.

His base showed up. Harris's base didn't. That's it. There's no deep mystery here, just the usual disenfranchised minorities and disinterested populace.

When turnout is high, Republicans lose. When the electorate stays home, Republicans win. This is simple math that has been true my entire adult life, and yet every 4 years, like clockwork, people ignore it.

Claiming you shouldn't be fat is one of the biggest lies they'll try to sell you

Yeah.

You're allowed to be fat and be happy being fat and love being fat and wanting to be fat actually

So it's come my attention that there are a lot of students, particularly in humanities and social sciences disciplines, who need to hear this, so here goes:

Do the readings.

Oh my God, just do the readings. I promise, it gets easier once you get into the habit of it.

What makes a good student? Doing the readings. Literally just doing the readings is enough to make you a good student.

The readings *are* the course. The lectures are just priming you for the readings. The tutorials and seminars are just how we collectively process the readings. If the readings were intended to be optional, they would have been listed under the "optional readings" heading.

"Oh but I hate this reading! The author's an idiot, they're wrong about everything" Good. Do the reading and then tear it apart in class. This isn't high school, you're not expected to mindlessly absorb things anymore

If you're in physics, do the derivations. Don't believe that any equation given to you is true. Derive it. Convince yourself that it must be true, and understand the limitations of its truth.

Cannot believe I forgot to also blame charter schools, voucher programs, and the conservative push to lower the teenage working age and get poor kids tracked out of college prep and into vocational training for this. i have let everyone down