you ever realize how able bodied people just are not expected to do things that cause them excruciating physical pain? like they’re just. not

if i shouldn’t use my cane because i can sometimes technically walk without it, it would just hurt like a motherfucker then abled people should no longer be allowed to use potholders to take things out of the oven because i mean

well they could technically pick up a hot pan with their bare hands. it would just hurt like a motherfucker

*sees an abled person using potholders*

i just think it’s really sad that you’re giving up on yourself like that

if you use potholders how will you ever build up the calluses necessary to pick up scalding hot metal without burning yourself so severely? it’s like you’re not even trying to get better

I mean, my mother uses potholders, but she’s in her 70s. You’re just… too YOUNG to be resorting to potholders at your age.

If you start using potholders, your inability to hold hot metal will only get worse.

As a professional cook I was, and still am, able to pick most stuff up out of an oven without a pot holder. I might get blisters and maybe it will hurt, but usually it won’t

AMAZING! based on this one specific individual’s experiences i will now safely assume that it’s possible for anyone to overcome hand pain & leave potholders behind for good!!! as long as you want it bad enough, anything is possible!! make this story go viral so that all those self pitying losers who still use potholders know that there’s no excuse

☆♡LIKE & SHARE IF YOU WERE INSPIRED!!!♡☆

This made me cry. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be potholder-bound like that, and it must have taken such incredible strength to overcome it. If someone like that can hold hot metal, the rest of us have no excuse to give up on anything.

Always reblog.

“You poor thing, you don’t deserve to need to use potholders, you’re too nice!”

“I would never have known you were disabled if you weren’t using potholders.”

“Here let me get the pot for you.”

“Oh you use potholders. That makes sense. We have closed captions for the movie if you want.”

And, for the curious:

Twitter I'm @Neilhimself

Facebook I'm @NeilGaiman

Instagram I'm @Neilhimself

All with links.

What's your tumblr though?

I'm obviously not on Tumblr. I do not appear to have any social media.

There's a Spiders Georg/Recluse Neal joke in here somewhere

A guy in the jury of the German version of American Idol recently compared the COVID lockdown to concentration camps, so the producers were like “Nope”, blurred him out, replaced everything he said with speech bubbles, beeped out his name everytime it was mentioned and even replaced the performance of a contestant who sang one of his songs with a generic jingle.

When the contestant was singing his song, they also showed this:

Contestant Christian chose a song by the judge we removed from the show due to his unspeakable remarks. That’s why we also won’t play this judge’s music.

I always roll my eyes at posts about what "true punk" is/was and how it was always a left-wing thing because, like, the Sex Pistols were on of the first popular punk rock bands and they were recognized right from the start as posers who had no coherent politics beyond trying to shock people

"Nazi Punks Fuck Off" would have not been a necessary statement if Nazi punks were not a very real thing and a very real part of the punk scene, just sayin'

You literally cannot be a Nazi Punk tho. You're either a Nazi, or you're Punk. Punk has ALWAYS been about kindness and freedom and making things better. Punk is about hope. Punk is about being so angry about injustices that you are going to start a fight over it. Being a Nazi goes against everything that Punk stands for and the two cannot coexist within a single movement.

No it hasn’t! This is literally exactly the kind of ahistorical take on punk that drives me off the wall, and you’re exactly the kind of person I was vagueing about!

Punk hasn’t always been about freedom, from the start it was being subversive, and what exactly punk was trying to subvert has always been extremely broad and open to interpretetion by different groups!

The Ramones were conservatives. The Sex Pistols had no intended political message beyond being offensive and their frontman supports Trump now. These initial groups were not acting to make a statement about freedom or kindness but to push against the increasing conformity, cleanliness, and smooth production of mainstream rock music. That did not necessarily entail standing up for freedom or left-wing causes. Of the initial “big three” old-school punk bands, The Clash were the only ones that were politically progressive!

Lots of punks in the 80s wore Nazi armbands for the express purpose of being shocking and offensive to mainstream sensibilities because that is what punk was about. And soon enough, the “ironically edgy” Nazi punks gave way to actual goddamned Nazis in punk. Fuck, have you even heard of Skrewdriver? Do you even know that Nazi punks were the reason that “skinhead” became modern shorthand for “neo-Nazi?”

It’s not possible to deny punk to fascists by is by playing “no true Scotsman.” All that does is make it easier to pretend they’re not there, and not a real problem. If you want to tell the Nazi punks to fuck off, you have to first acknowledge that they have a deep history in punk, and you have to face that reality and confront it! You can’t just bury your head in the sand and pretend the problem isn’t real.

ok but see here is your problem 

popular punk rock bands

Cat sits on own tail.

Call yourself anticapitalist/socialist/liberal/woke/whatever but if you’re not nice to regular people on a moment to moment basis your politics are basically worthless.

“yeah see uhhh i love the pocs trans rights haha” *is the most abrasive and hateful person you’ve ever met*

the older i get the more i realize that the people who are just nice to me are a lot more important than the people who can say really good politics words in the right order online

the inverse is also true:

Moment to moment niceness is worthless if you deliberately, through malice or ignorance, put bigots into positions of power. 

“Oh but Birdie-Blaire is always so nice to me!” well Miss Birdie also thinks we should lionize the folks who fought a wholeass war over whether white people should be able to own Black people like they own ding-dang leaf rake. 

(Well Miss Birdie would not hesitate to call the police on her Black neighbors for five whole seconds if she was “afraid” and “thought they looked suspicious”.) 

And if you take it a different direction: 

Madalyn Murray O'Hair was a deeply unpleasant person nay some would even say a bitch, but she’s still a significant part of the reason why non-Christian children in American public schools don’t have to stand up and pray to Jesus every morning. Without jumping through hoops and still being harassed about it. 

The older I get the more I realize that people who extend personhood without condition to all people are more important than the ones who are just nice to (blue-eyed-blonde-haired-white-passing-cis-female-gender-conforming) me. 

I am done letting people off on bigotry because they’re nice (just like I’m done letting people off for being obnoxious blowhards because went to the extreme measure of having politics that aren’t noxious).

I like to make a distinction between ‘nice’ and ‘kind’. The dictionary definitions overlap, but ‘nice’ is more about appearing pleasant, fitting in, being polite, while ‘kind’ is about being sympathetic and caring for someone. It’s usually difficult to challenge the status quo while remaining nice, but it’s often tough to support the status quo and remain kind. 

hedonism is good actually rich people just suck at it

i think not only do we have a moral obligation to preserve human life but also a moral obligation to maximize the pleasure of others and ourselves (provided it doesn’t hurt anyone)

people don’t just deserve to eat food, they deserve to eat good food that tastes good without worrying about nutritional content

people don’t just deserve clothes, they deserve nice clothes that are well made and fit their personal style

people don’t just deserve the bare minimum, they don’t just deserve to be alive, they deserve to live and have nice things for no other reason than making that particular person happy

Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.

The part I love about Pratchett’s work – okay, there are a lot of parts I love, but the part I love right now – is that he doesn’t direct that anger at the people who are selfish and careless and maybe a little mean to each other, the people who cheat and lie and sometimes kill strangers for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He knows those are normal people. Some people are just jerks. And you don’t “fix society” by outlawing jerks or imprisoning them or executing them. You don’t “fix society” by carefully educating everyone into not being jerks.

You fix society by making it so that petty selfish jerks can only be petty selfish jerks, not commanders of industry who can ruin the lives of thousands (or millions) instead of punching the milkman who doesn’t deserve it. 

He especially knew that the vast majority of people who lash out at their neighbors, the petty spiteful lying cheating “scum” people, just want to be comfortable. Raise their standard of living, and most of them will stop using casual cruelty to cope.

Not all. And you have to watch out for those. But warm socks and a hearty breakfast will stop a lot more injustices than shackles and public beatings. 

This ties into a conversation I was having over on twitter recently. The Rincewind books rarely come up as anyone’s favorite - they started out as satire, which falls flat if you aren’t intimately aware of what he’s satirizing, they were very early, before Pratchett really got his thing going (those first handful of books are almost an AU), and Rincewind’s storyline doesn’t really have much of anywhere else to go. So I get it. I rarely re-read them myself. 

 But he’s a favorite character of mine - because he would by preference lead a mostly solitary least-effort life, pretty much despises the entire world and everyone in it, and yet he always shows compassion. Even when it really pisses him off that he’s got to take care of an extremely powerful scared kid or a bunch of terrifying sheep. He does the compassionate thing. Because you have to. 

It’s difficult to explain to Americans that the majority of bureaucracy and paperwork they have to deal with is because the government has too little power, not too much. Replacing private insurance with well-designed single-payer healthcare + removing the rules barring the IRS from setting up an automatic tax form filing system would probably save the average American something like a day of their lives every year. 

Like it’s a common right-wing talking point that it would be a nightmare scenario to have the DMV run healthcare, when literally every single experience I have ever had with the DMV was easier and more streamlined than my average customer service experience with my private health insurer. Bernie Sanders please destroy my healthcare plan

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik

wish i could go back to eden and give eve a vibrator

what hozier song is this

had a dream last night that my alarm was connected to twitter and everytime i hit snooze it publicly tweeted it with a disparaging little message along the lines of “filthy horrible boy has slapped the screen again, and slumbers on” so that your followers could shame you and i was deeply, DEEPLY humiliated but that did not stop me from hitting snooze upwards of 14 times

hey op! i couldnt sleep until i built this! you motherfucker!

just gotta “borrow” my sister’s alarm clock

get that twitter api, write the bot in some python bc god is dead n slap together some fuckin UI with legos

your idiot self wants to sleep in???? hit that snooze button a couple times???? (maybe 4 times in a row)?? disgusting.

twitter knows! bc it posts how many times youve hit it. fuck you

the next step is NOT profit. noone profits. everybody loses. go home.

OH MY GOD?????????

One question I have is where you, and you can speak on this in a personal matter and not as a rule if you’d prefer, would draw the line at between “theft” and “sharing”.

Presumably sharing by someone within the culture would come in the form of a media production.  A song, play, book, etc.  Would someone else writing that same piece of media (we can presume literal, complete copies/equivalents) be “theft” of it as they would likely gain some benefit from it, or would it be an accurate and respectful portrayal of a marginalized group by a member of another group, marginalized or dominant?

I’m not sure what you’re asking here.  At first glance, it sounds like you’re asking if a person from outside of the community plagiarized a piece of media and published it under their own name, would that be okay, because it was originally created by a person within that marginalized community?  

Or are you asking if they wrote that story with input from the group in question, would that count as accurate and respectful?  (I think that’s what you’re asking, but that thing with the “presume literal, complete copies” is really throwing me)

For the first… no.  That’s just plagiarism.

For the second… it would be nice if we got that much consideration and respect on how our culture is presented, but most minority groups never get that much respect from people carving off the “fun bits” of our cultures for themselves.  

Apologies for the confusion then.  I was trying to relate that the productions would be word-for-word the same, not trying to imply thievery or theft, where Situation A has an in-group writer and Situation B has an out-of-group writer.

The actual level of input on the piece itself is up in the air, ranging from “complete input” to “literally didn’t talk to a single person.”

I see what you’re doing; you’re trying to create a thought experiment by simplifying and abstracting things–spherical stories in a narrative vacuum on a frictionless page, as it were.  There’s a plot point travelling down train tracks towards five helpless characters and a POV switch nearby.  That sort of thing :)  You’re trying to abstract it down to the cultural input by having the story’s “value” be given as a constant so you can test the other variables in the equation.

Unfortunately, culture doesn’t happen in isolation.  Not only does that hypothetical fail on the level of stylistic differences between different creators–you’re never going to get identically written narratives from different people, as any fandom writing prompt will demonstrate–quite simply you’re not going to get an author from a given culture to write a story about traditional concepts from a different culture in the exact same manner.  So this is a hypothetical so abstract as to be useless for your intended purpose.  I’m sorry, but it isn’t that clean, because there are so many other factors at work here.  

The thing about abstracting in that way - trying to change or expand the topic under discussion from one specific instance to some sort of general rule that will always apply under to any situation under any circumstances - is that, in sociocultural situations like this, the power dynamic always magically is abstracted away. Somehow. 

And so, rather than the discussion being about a representative of an historically-and-currently oppressive culture interacting with a specific instance of an historically-and-currently oppressed(usually--by-them) community, it turns into ‘but it’s just an idea ideas want to be free!” Or “How dare you tell your stories/sing your songs/create your artwork/sell them or share them and then be offended when we re-interpret them and claim them for our own?!?" * 

Ignoring the part where re-interpretation happens (not infrequently in ways which belittle or completely invert the original culture & message), usually drowning out the original, or where somehow magically most of any actual profit from that cultural heritage just naturally seems to accrue to individuals in the majority, oppressive culture. 

*(Sometimes with a side of ‘you watch Disney fairytale movies too so there!’, which again is ignoring power dynamics. And also the possibility that what Disney has done to predominantly european stories might also be an evil in itself.)

— Jonathan Rosen

So one of my neighbors has a lawn Roomba or whatever they're called, and this thing trundles around looking like a background robot in the background of the original trilogy, and ABSOLUTELY BAFFLING THE DOGS.

They have concluded, I think, that it's some kind of prey animal because right after this video ended they decided to crouch down and stalk it, which means I'm 90% sure I'm going to have to stop Arwen from eating it at some point.

Of course it's a prey animal it fucking eats GRASS

While I can’t fault your reasoning on robot taxonomy, apparently we’re both wrong:  Arwen, as much as she is a high-prey-drive animal, is foremost, a herding dog, and has decided that the Lawn Roomba is a SHEEP.

What happened is the lawn roomba belongs to the guy that does most of the maintainence on the neighborhood park, and he had it out grazing on a different section of lawn when my parents came down for a walk and Arwen was siezed by 200 years worth fo Kelpie Instincts, rolled out of her Harness and proceded to herd the shit out of this tiny, oblivious robot.  

Everything was on display- mock-stalking, intimidating eye contact, barking, running in front of it to try to get it to balk, the scariest barking she can muster (which is actually.  pretty scary if you’re not used to Loud Dogs), looking back at my parents for directions.  or rather, looking at my Mom while Dad tried unsuccessuflly to capture her.

After about ten minutes they realized she wasn’t biting it, and decided to let her play Sheep Simulator 5000 for a while. She eventually figured out that 

Conent that this was apparently some kind of blind, deaf and particularly stupid sheep, she could now manage the robot by smacking it if it got too close to the creek bed or fence for her liking, and was eventually content to sit on the highest point of the field and Supervise (TM) it.

“Hey.” Said Roger, owner of the robot. “Do you think if I put the ramp down she’ll herd it into the back of my pickup?”

Arwen was mostly asleep in the afternoon sun as roger put the ramp down but woke right up when mom Whistled, then pointed at the truck.  She immediately went after the robot and did something that wouldn’t have occured to me, an allegedly more intelligent being: the robot is roughly triangular, and when it hits an obstacle, will change direction so that one of its other sides (rather than points) is now the ‘front’.  So to get it to move in a straight line in the direction she wanted, Arwen would smack the two sides of the robot that she didn’t want it to go in in quick sucession, and got it across the field, over a small hill and up the ramp as fast as it’s clumsy little wheels could go.

“I didn’t know you had a fully-trained sheepdog!” Said Roger

“Me either.” said Mom.

So Arwen now has a Semi-Weekly Appointment to play with Sheepbot.

How annoyed would the people of the Marvel universe be at how many times Tony Stark changes his company name.

Like imagine you lived in that world and you didn’t really know WHY it went from Stark Industries, Stark Enterprises, Stark-Fujikawa, Stark Resilient, Stark Unlimited.

“What the fuck is this the 12th time he’s changed his name??? You can’t keep New Coke-ing us Stark! SEND TWEET!!”

I have a vague AU in which Tony Stark’s company has subdivisions encompassing all the vowels. SA, SE, SI, SO, SU, SY.

(In-universe, deliberately, for handwavey-corporate reasons. And possibly more, depending on how many languages/countries the company incorporates in.)

Rare photo of mother Wrench feeding her new hatchlings in the wild. Breathtaking.

Heartwrenching.

I hope the hatchling doesn’t bolt her food.

@copperbadge

It’s nuts they start out so small!