Take a break, this cute tardigrade needs time to cross your dash:

Reblog to let your followers know that despite your current obsession your previous obsessions still exist and are simply lying dormant until they awaken and strike again

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/tv/hero-complex-film-festival-battlestar-galactica-tribute-hits-emotional-note/#/0

“Mary and Eddie created a family on set for all of us, and I’ve never worked with two actors who took it upon themselves to enhance, enable, nurture, be there for and challenge a big broad young cast who were essentially welcomed into their trailers, homes, weekends constantly in Vancouver. They gave us a sort of worth that lifted our confidence and it has transpired some 10 years on, and we’re all still a family thanks largely to these two,” said Bamber.”

FAMILY ❤️

Part 1/? of How to Deal With the Next Four(ish) Years

Learn how to tell the difference between "their policies/rhetoric actively target me/a marginalized group" and "they have not been as successful as I hoped in protecting me/a marginalized group." I saw the rhetoric a fair amount pre-election that the Democratic Party and its policies were transphobic, that Biden failed queer people, etc. as a reason not to vote for Harris or for Democrats, and the reality is that the Democratic Party and Joe Biden have actually been pretty steadily implementing laws and policies to support and protect queer (including trans) people, and Republicans want queer/trans people to die.

If you want to protect marginalized groups, whether they're ones you're part of or not, you really need to start actively working on distinguishing between the two. And if you keep hearing that the Democrats are just as bad about a marginalized group in the US as the Republicans, actually look into that. What is the evidence? What laws have been introduced or passed by one party versus the other? What rhetoric do they use? What policies and regulations are being put in place?

And is the problem that the Democratic Party is "just as bad" or that they have not managed to stop Republican laws in red states?

None of this is to say that the Democratic Party is perfect, but in most cases only one party is actively working to harm or kill marginalized people, and it's not the Dems.

Understand the government structure that directly impacts you. Not every state or locality operates the same way, and you may have more or fewer layers of government over you with different levels of power. Do you have a town/city government and a county government, or just one or the other? How many officials are elected in your state versus appointed?

Part of that is also understanding what is controlled at the local, state, and federal level. If you're mad about a law or policy and want it to change, whose law or policy is it? Chances are, if it's about how things work for you, it's a state or local law rather than a federal one. Once you understand that, you can target any organizing efforts in the right direction.

Pick your battles. This is not to say that you shouldn't care about a lot of things, but trying to personally organize around everything will probably just make you ineffective and burn you out. Is it Palestine? Ukraine? Sudan? Environmental justice? Climate change? Immigration? Abortion? Queer rights and protections? Education? Native American rights? Criminal justice reform?

Understanding your own priorities can also help you determine what candidates you support and where you draw your red lines. I care a lot about public schools, but support for charter schools is not a red line for me in a politician. Being pro-life is.

But I'm also pragmatic--if my choice is a pro-life person who also wants all queer people to die and a pro-life person who wants to protect queer people, I will hold my nose vote for the latter rather than risk the former winning.

Start identifying what protections you and your loved ones might need that you can access now. Is it an IUD, a tubal ligation, or a vasectomy? Is it getting your legal name changed now? Is it establishing other legal protections such as power of attorney even if you're married?

Vote in every election. If you are an eligible voter, you should be a registered voter, and you should vote every single time. I think the only election I've missed in the last 5 years is the 2024 Democratic primary, and that's 50% because it was basically an uncontested race and 50% because I forgot when it was.

Primaries are where you get to have a say in who your candidate is--at all levels. Look at the policies of who is running and vote for who you want to win--whether because of policy, temperment, or any other reason.

But state and local elections are incredibly important, because they have a huge impact on your actual quality of life. Show up and vote. Vote on off years. Vote when it's just local. Vote for Board of Education, for water commissioner, for sheriff, for judges.

Voting is cheap, it's easy, and it does make a difference.

unpopular opinion maybe but waking up to rain on a quiet weekend is quite literally the most magical thing in the world

Project 2025 ain't gonna roll out all at once. So what we're gonna wanna do is make passing each individual part of it as difficult as possible, so there's less to undo once we finally get this country back on the rails.

Resist every step and do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Distracting people with stupid bullshit is one of Trump's favorite political techniques. We saw it all over the place in the first term.

Trump will say something like "You know the Hispanics actually punch kittens, it's what they do."

And the news will be like "TRUMP SAID HISPANIC PEOPLE PUNCH KITTENS" for three weeks.

And while they're doing that the Republicans in Congress have quietly deleted healthcare.

Do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Trump is a dancing monkey whose greatest asset is the ability to yank the spotlight off of everyone else. Keep your eyes on Congress.

from one chronically anxious person to another: the world is not going to go up in flames. What happens will be more slow, more bureaucratic, more boring. There is no catastrophe to end all catastrophes, no rapture, no sudden end. You can't give into the call of the void, because there is no void. So you just have to do the work to make tomorrow a better place, anyway. Because that's how it gets better.

#A lot of people want it to be too late#Because that means they can just throw their hands up and blame everyone else and not have to do the work anymore#But as long as there are people left it's never too late#Things will keep getting worse for a long time but if we keep working then it WILL turn around#We'll see some horrible days coming up but they will give way to a better future

@hopepunk-humanity

Activism is not cold-calling.

Activism is not cold-calling, and this is critically important to understand.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here about 'building bridges' and 'finding community,' and then (extremely valid) response posts saying "BUT HOW??" And I'm going to explain something that can be very counter-intuitive: there is strategy involved in community.

As a longtime volunteer labour organizer, I’ve taken and taught many trainings on the strategy of talking. Something that surprises a lot of people is the very first thing you do in a union campaign. You sit down with your organizing committee, take out pen and paper, and literally map it out. You draw a physical map of the workplace: where are the entrances, exits, break rooms, supervisor offices. Essentially, ‘where is it safe to have a union conversation.’ Then you draw another physical chart of your coworkers. You sort out who is union-friendly, openly hostile to unions, or somewhere in the middle, and then you plan out very deliberately and carefully who talks to whom and in what order.

Consider: If Vocally Leftist Jane walks up to Conservative David and says "hey what do you think about unions," David is going to shut down immediately. He's not inclined to listen to Jane. But if Jane talks to Moderate Jason and brings him into the fold, then Jason is a far more effective strategic choice to talk to David, and David may actually hear him out without an instant reaction.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If Conservative David turns out to be Alt-Right David, and could be dangerous to follow organizers, we write him off. We are not trying to reach Alt-Right David. We are trying to reach Conservative David, who may actually be persuaded to find solidarity with other employees as fellow workers. Jason is a safe scout to find out which one he is. It does no one any good if Leftist Jane (or even Moderate Jane who is a visible minority) talks to Alt-Right David and puts herself on his radar. Not only has she done nothing to convince Alt-Right David to join a union - she's probably actively turned him against the idea - but now she's also in danger and the entire campaign is at risk. NOBODY WANTS THIS. Jane was NOT a hero for doing this. The organizing committee was foolish and enacted a terrible strategy to everyone's detriment.

Where you can make a difference is with people who will listen to you. You having a conversation with your well-meaning but clueless Centrist Democrat Auntie, and maybe gently helping her understand some things the media has been glossing over, is way more strategically useful than you marching up to MAGA Neighbour You've Met Once and trying to "build community" or "understand" them. They don't care. They're impervious, dangerous, and cruel. But maybe your beloved auntie will think about what you said, and then talk to her friend Anna who IDs as "fiscally conservative" but didn't vote because she can't bring herself to get on board with Trump. Then perhaps Anna talks to her brother Nic who has MAGA leanings but isn't all the way there yet. Proto-MAGA Nic would not have listened to you, nor would he have listened to Centrist Democrat Auntie, but he might absorb some of what his sister is saying.

This is not a cop-out or an echo chamber. This is you spending your time and energy strategically and safely. You are not a useful activist to anyone if you’re dead. Anyone who is telling you to hurl yourself directly at MAGA assholes like cannon fodder has no understanding of the strategy behind community building, and you should feel comfortable writing them off.

Last point: If you are tired, emotionally devastated, and/or in danger: take a break. This post is for people who would feel better jumping into action, not for people who are too overwhelmed to even think about it right now. You are worth so much even if you’re not actively Doing Activism, and your rest is worth more than “a break period so you can recharge and Do More Activism.” We all deserve the individual dignity of being worthy of comfort, rest & safety just on the basis of being human, outside of whatever we're doing for others' benefit. To deny ourselves that dignity is to devalue ourselves, and that’s the absolute last thing any of us should be doing right now.

Oh hey this is the post I was going to write as a follow-up and now I don’t have to. Anyway, see everything above for why blaming the way women respond to men on the internet who they have no existing relationship with for the rise of alt-right misogyny is extremely beside the point. Effective activism leverages existing relationships - and requires people who are committed to doing activism in the first place.

This kind of planning is in fact what half of union organizing is. Its both genuine (you really need to actually care about the people you’re talking to!) and strategic (what matters to this person? How will they be able to accept this message?)

Also: you’re not trying to convince someone to agree with you perfectly. I’m trying to convince a hesitant coworker to show up on the first day of a potential strike and see how it goes. Or, as a different example, I’m not trying to convince my grandmother to call herself antizionist. I’m trying to convince her that she should use her influence in her synagogue community to advocate for an immediate ceasefire. In both cases, its finding the right ask for who I’m talking to- something that is both reasonable and will make a difference.

A million times yes to both of these additions, which complement @ariaste's tags:

Activism is a balance of strategy & humanity. @elwingflight is correct that there is LOTS of planning involved in union organizing. There's literally detailed conversational scripts for talking to your coworkers about unionizing, and they're effective. We can and should be using script & strategy. The alt-right is doing it, also very effectively, and for unfathomably evil purposes. We need to be fighting back in ways that work.

And then @sixth-light's extremely powerful & succinct way of putting it: "Effective activism leverages existing relationships." Because fundamentally we are all people, and human beings can only take so much of being yelled at by strangers on twitter who see us as subhuman ("their side") or cannon fodder ("our side.")

I know the "you can't pour from an empty cup" saying goes around all the time relating to activism, but this doesn't just mean rest time - it also means making sure the time & energy you are using is used well, and that you're allowing yourself to see and appreciate the results, even if having a conversation with your grandma or hesitant coworker isn't overthrowing the regime in one go. You need to learn to set and achieve 'smaller' goals, because those are the building blocks, and because anchoring yourself to those points of connection will help you keep moving forward.

there should be a hug button where you can tell your mutuals its going to be okay instead of liking their vent post and hoping they realize ur not agreeing that they should die

Battlestar Galactica "Exodus Pt. 2"

This just in

Therapy is risky because sometimes they'll just ask you their standard "why can't you, though", and you think you're making some good point by saying something like "well if I don't do anything with my life then what's the point of being alive in the first place" and your therapist gets that look on their face and you immediately realise that your dumb ass just got caught, pinned to the ground with your stupid-ass neck between the spikes of a pitchfork, and you are not going to wiggle out of there before you two unpack what the fuck you just said.

As a former psychiatric nurse, I am here to tell you in utter seriousness that OUR ENTIRE DAMN JOB is to listen carefully enough to you that we can feed you the lines that will get you to this place: where you HEAR the thing that just actually fell out of your face while you were so busy trying to hold your act in place that you couldn't keep it from doing that.

The human mind—that exquisitely complex thing—is ALL about maintaining its current smooth operational status. EVEN when that status is wildly dysfunctional and/or destructive. I mean, the brain says, hardly ever hearing its own desperation, everything's working pretty well right now, isn't it? And it can't hear the (internal laugh track) audience's painful response.

Our job is to startle you into hearing the internal laugh track: and yeah, the pain. There is no other way to get out of the pain than to acknowledge that you're in it, and at least to begin acknowledging the sources of it.

...All those light bulb jokes? About really having to want to change? They're bullshit. Believe me when I tell you that no one really wants to change. The one thing everyone I ever worked with in therapy wanted was to to stay just the way they were... just (somehow, magically) less uncomfortable. And surprise!—that's not how getting better works.

Meanwhile: this is one reason I'm lucky as a writer... because having helped actual human beings walk through this process is one of the best possible forms of preparation for walking fictional characters through it.

And if having done it with real people sometimes makes it come across in the fiction as perilously close to comedy in the timing of how it unfolds? Well, sometimes it comes across that way with the real people too. And the laughter associated with your client realizing who the joke's been on may sometimes be painful, but (when it's genuine) has a uniquely joyous sound through the pain that can't be matched by any other human experience. It's a privilege to be part of that when it happens.

All you can do is keep feeding the person you're working the straight lines they've been telling you they need... and then wait for them to give up and bite.

CoPilot in MS Word

I opened Word yesterday to discover that it now contains CoPilot. It follows you as you type and if you have a personal Microsoft 365 account, you can't turn it off. You will be given 60 AI credits per month and you can't opt out of it.

The only way to banish it is to revert to an earlier version of Office. There is lot of conflicting information and overly complex guides out there, so I thought I'd share the simplest way I found.

How to revert back to an old version of Office that does not have CoPilot

This is fairly simple, thankfully, presuming everything is in the default locations. If not you'll need to adjust the below for where you have things saved.

This will roll you back to build 17726.20160, from July 2024, which does not have CoPilot, and prevent it from being installed.

If you want a different build, you can see them all listed here. You will need to change the 17726.20160 at step 4 to whatever build number you want.

This is not a perfect fix, because while it removes CoPilot, it also stops you receiving security updates and bug fixes.

Switching from Office to LibreOffice

At this point, I'm giving up on Microsoft Office/Word. After trying a few different options, I've switched to LibreOffice.

You can download it here for free: https://www.libreoffice.org/

If you like the look of Word, these tutorials show you how to get that look:

If you've been using Word for awhile, chances are you have a significant custom dictionary. You can add it to LibreOffice following these steps.

First, get your dictionary from Microsoft

Next, add it to LibreOffice

If you use LIbreOffice on multiple machines, you'll need to do this for each machine.

Please note: this worked for me. If it doesn't work for you, check you've followed each step correctly, and try restarting your computer. If it still doesn't work, I can't provide tech support (sorry).

thought about my OC yesterday, thought about my OC today, will think about my OC tomorrow