you're in MY city now

home tour: a grand ground-floor apartment with dark blue walls and a garden

job applications asking questions like "would you rather play jenga with the weight of all human souls, or chess with the fate of all men?" and then getting mad because the correct answer was "i would ask the customer if they'd like to purchase any additional items"

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

I'm sorry but I have to share these tags

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

Goes insanely hard

To provide further context from what I understand the bill wanted to take the rights guaranteed to the Maori in said treaty and expand them to all New Zealand citizens. The issue with that is that it sort of defeats the point of the protections of the treaty.

The Treaty of Waitangi is not even that good of a treaty. But it is better than any treaty the Crown signed with indigenous peoples

And it absolutely was not meant to be

The treaty as written screws over Māori, and was written in Te Reo Māori and English with deliberately misleading translations to Te Reo Māori. I'm not an expert by any means, but basically the Te Reo Māori version has clauses that promise much more independence and sovereignty, while the English version does not

However

The English version promises them rights as Citizens

From what I remember from University 10+ years ago, this clause, this sentence, was added last minute by the writer of the treaty. Like, right before the big signing at Waitangi.

And the Crown was PISSED

Because now they had a legally binding document that promised, in their own language, to treat Māori with the same rights as they would English. Which was absolutely not the goal. The goal was to trick Māori into signing away their lands and that honestly still did happen. The treaty was not a good faith proposal by the Engliah.

But its still better than anyone else got, and it's better than no treaty. And because nowadays we can't just ignore the Te Reo Māori side of the treaty, the government's of the past few decades have been honouring Māori sovereignty, honouring their stewardship of the land, and undoing a lot of the bad faith "sales" or straight up stolen land.

Except our current fuck nuggets, who want to make Te Reo Māori an endangered language again, and steal back that land because they want to mine on it and sell it and they hate that Māori stewardship is so environmentally focused and not profit driven.

So, in a way, the current government is more true to the intentions of the Crown who initially came up with the treaty.

But since those guys were colonising bastards, I don't see "honouring" them as anything good.

Even with criticism of the treaty, without it, Māori would lose a lot of protections to their lands, their culture, their language, and as a country we would go backwards to a time when they were even more discriminated against

Toitū te tiriti

Uphold the treaty

Divorce 🤝 gender transition = a big costly life decision with too much paperwork that conservatives say will cause the end of civilization & ruin your life but if you actually ask people who chose to do it, they'll tell you their only regret is that they didn't do it sooner

Fun fact: I had wanted gender affirming top surgery for a long time but, due to a variety of personal hangups, didn’t think I could ever convince myself to prioritize it enough to dedicate the time and resources it would require even though objectively I would have been able to find them.

A little over a year ago, I was driving my friend to their top surgery consultation and we passed a billboard for a divorce attorney that read “life is short, get the divorce.” Some switch flipped in my head. I realized that, if this amount of time/money were all it took to escape some terrible marriage and live the rest of my life happy, the answer would be obvious. So why not for this?

I picked up some info at the clinic when we were there that day and exactly a year later got my own top surgery! Absolutely the best decision I’ve ever made. Fucking life changing. 10/10 cannot overstate what a good decision it was. And all because of a fucking divorce billboard…

Throwing it out there because I think her story could be important here.

When I was about 14 my dad picked up nail polish as a hobby with me, something the two of us had in common. The following year my patents divorced for completely unrelated reasons (mistakes my mother has made which have since been not forgiven but moved past) and despite the love they had both my parents have realized it was actually for the best.

I stayed with my dad and over time I noticed a slow change in wardrobe, whatever I thought. Because it doesn't matter to me. And then one day she comes to me, and in her own sense comes out as trans but says she would still rather be called my dad and is just changing her name. At 60, my dad got the divorce *and* the gender transition and is still slowly taking more steps in transition. I don't think she's ever been happier.

Regards transition, she's told me she knew when she was much younger but feared if she would be accepted because at the time (and still now but to a lesser degree) our area was quite conservative. She saw me out and open as nonbinary without any trouble and was able to live her life as she wanted too, with more ease of not worrying about losing my (straight) mother.

Get the divorce. Take your first steps in transition. Do both if you need to. It's never too late to start being happy. If it wasn't too late for my dad at 60, the best time is always the present.

(video tweet: https://twitter.com/Etherelle/status/1484410925490708481?s=20)

the work of etherelle: https://t.co/dPhLw3xuRx (carrd)

happy belated st sebastian day. no idea how to tag this.

The eyes here really seal the deal, though the toothpick-arrow is also a nice touch.

Also reminds me of the story that was circulating around awhile ago, where the narrator had made some sort of jam-filled bread effigy of Jesus for Easter or somesuch.

@gallusrostromegalus !!!

T'was me with the Bread Jesus Story and the Bread Jesus Attempt One and Bread Jesus Attempt Two and I am SO GLAD THAT SOME OTHER PERSON IS MAKING TERRIBLE CARBY CATHOLIC EFFIGIES.

I love that every year fire departments are like "hey. maybe DON'T fry your turkeys?"

and across the nation, patriots rise up and shout "FUCK YOU" bc surely it'll be fine for THEM

and then start massive grease fires in their backyards

it is my most favorite thanksgiving tradition

for non-americans who have no idea what I'm talking about, a TON of fire departments and public health people will do annual presentation videos on how deep frying turkeys can go catastrophically bad

and every year, the american public goes "...anyway, where's my propane tank-"

"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fry."

Things are grim right now but a small silver lining is that The Onion bought Alex Jones's site InfoWars and are going to turn it into "a parody of itself", using it to make fun of conspiracy theorists and far-right nutjobs.

Holy fucking shit of all the possibilities I did not see that one coming.

X

X

If you have the time and flexibility, you can also try out libreoffice.

yeah well. I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it.

HE 👏 WENT 👏 LOOKING 👏 FOR 👏 TROUBLE 👏

The euros fail to consider the form: it’s not Johnny’s hubris that is the subject of the song. It’s the devil’s, who thinks his power is worth more than simple love for a craft

neither americans nor the modern era have any sort of monopoly on one-upping the devil. one of the oldest european folk tales is The Smith and the Devil, in which a smith makes a deal with the devil for his soul and when the devil comes to collect, the smith tricks him into leaving him alone forever. tricking that bastard is an old and storied tradition.

"average person who makes a deal with the devil is dragged to hell after 10 years" factoid actually just statistical error. average person who makes a deal with the devil uses their new hellish gifts to outwit the old bastard so they can keep both gifts and soul for the rest of their long and prosperous lives. faust, who bargained for knowledge of all things and then wasted his 10 years chasing a girl who wasn't all that into him, is an idiot and should not have become the cornerstone of modern understanding of the trope.

I remember that one homophobic Muslim artist who made this one art of a Muslimah and a Christian girl feeding each other

This is yuri

There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...