Can we talk about these distinct gang aesthetics though?

These two gangs are clearly set together to be contrasts, with one side having on the surface a chaotic, even perverse, aesthetic whilst the other gives the pretense of being more dignified and civil. One populated exclusively by men, the other (at best guess) dominantly by women.

But what's fascinating is going a step deeper.

Let's start with the left gang, which is led by chem-baron Chross. Their aesthetic is meant to evoke bouncers, barstaff, and general wait-staff at classy establishments. With their strong metal chins, pince nez glasses, and canes they're also clearly trying to give an air of being likewise dignified, perhaps even noble, themselves.

But this clashes with a couple small details about their appearance. Firstly, they're almost entirely uniform, with only minor details like neckerchief or moustache style actually differentiating them. This may in fact be a contributing factor to why they are quite literally numbered with tattoos on their foreheads. Lastly, as we learn when they engage Jinx later in the episode, those metal chins aren't just chins, they actually seem to replace their mouths as well. Meaning that as part of their uniform membership in Chross' gang, these guys have sacrificed their self-expression, their identity, and even their voice.

They are the model of self-repression for the sake of inclusion in an in-crowd. Chross himself, quite pointedly, almost lacks a chin entirely. He gets to speak, you get to listen.

Then there's the right gang, led by chem-baroness Margot.

Obviously, these figures (I'm avoiding saying women here given their aesthetic basis and just how little we get to see of them by comparison) are dressed up in leather-play kink fashion.

Their head coverings might be dominatrix articles or just as easily submissive (I am not remotely versed enough to know which for certain). Margot's gang canonically operates brothels and pleasure bars, so it's conceivable that for them this is quite literally a uniform. One can almost imagine this confrontation being sparked between establishments directly opposite one another on the same street.

Margot's gang is expressive, opinionated, diverse, and colourful. Held together by mutual interests and circumstance more than a collective group identity as one might suggest of Chross' gang.

What's interesting however is that despite the identity-repression involved in submissive kink play, Margot's gang actually has a wealth of visual diversity. The majority of the uniforms are the same, but there's a diversity in bright hair colours, the styling of it, their makeup, small details on their uniform (studs vs spikes, etc), possibly skin tone (it's a little hard to tell given the lighting), and especially body type amongst their ranks. The lead member blowing a kiss is heavy-set whereas the disgusted peer to her left is lithe.

This contrasts strongly with the uniformity of Chross' gang, who are practically carbon cut-outs. Despite being likewise in uniform, Margot's gang has worked in self-expression wherever possible and notably retain their voices, as represented by their mouths being wholly unobscured.

There's likely also something to be said about LGBT+ representation here. It's a standing grievance raised about Pride about kink, often in leather or latex (if you're feeling particularly dedicated on a summer afternoon), being present in public. Chross even explicitly describes Margot's affairs as being a "boulevard of filth". Margot is open and affectionate, while Chross plays the businessman only concerned for his establishments and ventures.

So it's easy to imagine that Chross' gang picked this particular fight over prudish ideals and maintaining a civilised upper-class facade, whilst Margot's gang rose to the challenge.

Margot even explicitly states that Chross' gang started the turf war by attacking one of her establishments.

Story Concept: The Inhuman Human

In a world long-overcome by nature, lightning strikes one of the few remaining rods atop a crumbling concrete structure. The power surge, driven by rotted wires and pooled rainwater, triggers the activation cycle of a prototype robot left abandoned in the robotics lab within.

The robot has no personality, it was never intended to be a friend or a companion. Instead it has a planning system that allows it to assess its condition and available options and construct a protocol to achieve its objectives.

Objective one: Secure preservation. Identify active agents in environment. Assess long-term sustainability.

It ventures out of the lab to find a cityscape largely returned to nature. It is cold, wet, and the sky is still filled with thunder. Identifying a weather risk, it logically defers external investigation until the storm passes, scavenging useable power supplies from the remains of the lab in the meantime.

Once the sun shines again, the robot begins to explore. The lab is degraded, unstable, though it has lasted this long to ensure the robot's awakening it lacks the faculties to sustain it any longer. Other structures may be better-suited, or resources may exist to allow for the construction of a supportive structure.

The machine is smart. It weighs the costs and benefits. It does not know what lies beyond the lab, but it knows its preservation is insecure within it.

It makes a plan. It leaves.

The ground is soft in places, sodden with the rain of the last few days, but firm and rigid in others, where asphalt perseveres against the greenery pushing against it from beneath. The machine adjusts its feet accordingly with each step.

Objective: Investigate. Identify active agents in environment. Assess shelter efficacy. Locate useful resources for preservation.

It marches down what was at one time a bustling highway, teeming with commuters on their way home for the day. What remained now was a sparse collection of rusted and/or rotting hulls, sitting at odd angles against the divider. The thin frame of a forgotten sign to somewhere hung overhead as it continued on its way, examining each relic as it goes in case a battery had miraculously retained a meaningful charge. None had.

As the sun begins to set, it reaches the town. Street lights were bent over, all eerily in the same direction as though from a blast, and many buildings seemed to have caved in either from disuse or whatever was responsible for the bending. Vines and trees work diligently to obscure whatever was still intact, as though nature wished to censor all evidence of the human race. Perishable supplies were either gone or no longer of any use, though this mattered little to it. What it needed was fuel, energy, shelter from external elements.

As it grew darker and darker, a smattering of fires emitted points of light and columns of smoke in the far distance, but whether it was people or decay... it could not yet ascertain.

Identify active agents in environment.

It had to know, was it alone? Were there familiar operators nearby? Were there mechanical peers? Hostile agents? To ensure its own preservation, it had to know if there was anyone to threaten it. It could make shelter, it could generate power, but people were far more expensive to deal with.

Identify active agents in environment.

It makes a plan. It sets its course for the smoke.

The moon is high by the time the robot reaches the approximate site of the smoke. An gas canister, central amidst a scorch mark, identifies its origin though the source of ignition is unclear. There is no indication of containment or heat harvesting. No indication of intelligent action, no footprints.

Conclusion: Emission incidental. Resume higher priorities.

The machine was fitted with excellent cameras for the time, but its navigation sensors were even better. While any human would have struggled to navigate in the moonlight, it could retrace its route to the depths of the city even in pitch darkness.

Along the way, local fauna began to make themselves apparent. Perhaps they were nocturnal, perhaps they'd simply grown less wary of the heavy footsteps of the passing automaton. Regardless, birds chirped, foxes howled, and deer occasionally passed close enough to the machine's route to be observed. They would stare at it, calmly munching a mouthful of grass, until it came sufficiently close to be of concern and carried on their way through the brush.

Identify active agents in environment.

The fauna, though guided by effective principles and goals, could not be called agents in the sense the robot held in high regard. They did not act upon their environment to intentionally change it. They scarcely could be said to make plans. Their survival was a basic impulse rooted in the genetics of their species.

Was the robot, thus, also fauna? Perhaps a particularly clever fauna, like an ape or corvid. With the proper infrastructural support, it mused, it could be considered a herbivorous lifeform, possibly a reptile. This and other things occupied its processors as it continued its march back to where the asphalt still dotted the ground. The outskirts could provide resources if necessary, but not shelter and energy in the short-term.

The birdsong abruptly went silent.

Change in environment. Analyse, identify.

Gears and servos whirred as it paused its march and spun, carefully, in place, like a tank searching for its next aggressor. It identify a creature hiding in a nearby bush, crouched low, as if ready to pounce. The ultraviolet light of the robot's navigation sensors clearly illuminating the mirror sheen in its eyes.

Wolf, canis lupus, adult female, approximately eight years old.

Her claws would not damage the exterior plating of the robot. It was built to sustain only moderate damage from a high-speed vehicle collision, should the opportunity arise. But they might cause damage to some of its more-delicate sensors, or chip some of the chains enabling it to move.

But the wolf was not interested in it.

Analyse, identify.

Following the eyes of the wolf, the robot's cameras track back across its path, to the opposite side of its trail. The wolf is watching something else, hunting something else. It is curious, peering out of the shadows at the robot, the giant metal creature it has never seen before. It thinks it is being sneaky, hiding behind a tree, in the dim moonlight. It thinks it is hidden from the world, ignorant that it is the least able of those present to see the situation infront of it.

Human, homo sapiens sapiens, adolescent, approximately twelve years old.

Active agent identified in environment.

If you don't frequent my coding streams I feel like you maybe won't appreciate the last 3 hours of my life. So here's a hopefully-comprehensible explanation:

Started a new project, adding a manager AI to Minecraft villages so they can grow and expand as needed without player intervention. Call the project Hrrmowners because it's a perfect name with no issues.

Step one, naturally, is to make the infrastructure for actually understanding the layout of a village, so I make a quick system that tells me all the bounding boxes of the structures used to build villages during world generation.

Then realise that I'm actually highlighting every single structure in the game. So I need to filter things down a bit.

It takes me about an hour to find any shred of information in the disparate and convoluted world generation infrastructure of the game to have even the first clue what spawned building is part of a village. Not anything else, just if its intended to be part of one. This still catches pillager outposts, and ancient cities for some godforsaken reason.

Figure that there must be a gameplay element or two that specifically are handled by villager objects. Maybe it doesn't have all the information I need, but it might have something useful for this early stage of development.

Iron Golems spawn in villages, but it's actually the villager AI that does it, and it doesn't care about an actual village.

Cats only spawn in villages (and witch huts), and they have a spawner object in the world data. Could this be the clue I need? No, because it doesn't actually reference any kind of village data object, it just checks for occupied beds nearby via the points of interest storage of the world.

"Points of interest" are a system of noteworthy positions in the world added in 1.14, aka the Village & Pillage update, and basically let villagers reserve a bed to sleep in and a workstation to treat as its job. Every point of interest is a tile entity that gets loaded in a separate list when the chunk is restored from memory, so the world never needs to know anything about its own terrain to know where those points actually are. It just adds them in whenever the chunk spawns.

Notably removed in 1.14 is the villages.dat file in every world save. It contained the locations of every building in the village. That was fed into a Village object in world memory to monitor stuff like iron golems spawning.

It doesn't exist anymore. "Villages" as a concept, only actually exist in the world generation step, and then nothing knows or defines what they are.

TLDR: As of Minecraft 1.14, in the Village & Pillage update, the mobs named villagers actually have absolutely no clue what a village actually is.

So after another 4 hours trying to make some kind of useful progress on this problem, here's the result:

What we have here is a typical village with every street in white, every worksite in red, and every house in green. This is purely based on whatever structure information I've been able to grab out of whatever's left at runtime for the /locate command to use. I cannot get this view at worldgen, I have to invoke it at a specific location, severely hindering its usefulness to begin with.

In terms of jank, we are at "XKCD 2347" level here.

Every piece is hovering above its actual in-world placement because the generated structure gets fit to the terrain's Y level but no-one tells the bounding box that.

The only reason I know what anything is is entirely based on its file directory address, where worksites and houses share the same root folder so I have to check one before the other.

Actually using this information to construct a layout of the village is far more trouble than it's worth. If Mojang ever want to add a village feature that doesn't work purely through POIs, I pray they get double pay for the amount of overtime it'll take to implement.

And frankly... this is a complete mess.

As near as I can tell the components are built for sprawl, so you get things like big stretches of street, composed of stretches that reserve space for other buildings, that can only hold one building on one side of itself (case in point: the lower left street is just mirroring in alternating directions, so only half the space occupied is actually used).

There's absolutely no logic to almost anything but least of all the streets which go basically wherever they want, so everything I try to build on top of this mess is going to have the Christmas tree lights of civil infrastructure at its core no matter what. I generated one village that had eighty three street pieces to five houses because it tried to go into a cave and just stopped dead with nothing at the end.

I know we all kinda took that for granted what with how villages, Nether fortresses, and strongholds are just kinda *wiggly arms* in arrangement but this really does underscore just how bad the game is at generating ostensibly-purposeful things.

I might still try and salvage this hideous abomination of civil planning but most probably for this project I'm going to roll my own planning office of sorts for a custom mob just so I don't have to fight the vanilla worldgen code like this.

what happened with Mr beast

If you want to get caught up on the Beast Games controversy (which is just one of the endless twisted shit he's being accused of right now):

(I'm going to be using "MrBeast" to mean the company, and "Jimmy" to refer to the man of the hour)

Jimmy has an upcoming Amazon show called Beast Games. If you haven't heard of it, it's described as Squid Game-esque, and is marketed as the biggest game show ever put together. There are 2,000 contestants (though it was originally advertised as 1,000, and the contestants weren't aware of the change), competing for a prize of $5 million, the largest game show prize in history. Contestants commit to 9 weeks of filming, with the first stage taking place in Las Vegas as a kind of qualifier.

Prospective contestants said they were asked if they were willing to die for MrBeast, if they would be buried alive, or be shot into space. The contract they signed also required them to say they are willing to die for Jimmy. A lot of them said they applied anyway because they desparately needed the money for a variety of personal reasons (like medical debt or student loans).

However, contestants have described the horrific conditions they were subjected to on set, having been treated like animals. Just to be clear, these are still allegations, and MrBeast has denied it as 'inaccurate'. But there is overwhelming confirmed evidence indicating that everything they have been accused of is 100% true.

Apparently the show starts with Jimmy appearing looking down at the contestants as a Jesus figure, surrounded by money, while the contestant's were told to scream praise at him "like he's god". He proceeds to watch the challenges from above, sitting on a throne like Nero.

The contestants were asked to give up their medications and inhalers to the production staff. Medical staff were worried as to what would happen, and allegedly secretly told contestants to hide their meds in their clothes and smuggle them onto set instead of allowing them to be taken away. When the game actually started, contestants who had given up their meds were denied them for days. Many of the meds were also lost by staff and never found. At least two had seizures because they were refused their epilepsy medication. It took several minutes for medical staff to reach them when it happened.

They also had to give up their clean underwear for some fucking reason, and many never got it given back during filming, or even after, because the staff apparently lost it.

Women were refused tampons and pads, and were bleeding through their clothes. They were told by staff that they didn't need them, because it "wasn't a medical emergency". The crew were seen laughing at the women begging for clean underwear. Contestants were also refused new contact lenses, and told they couldn't take out their old ones.

Contestants were also starved, with one saying he went 20 hours without being fed. The meals they did receive were almost nothing - one consisted of a miniscule amount of cold oatmeal, a few pieces of raw vegetables, and a hard-boiled egg. They were sometimes given Jimmy's shitty Feastable chocolate bars (you know, the ones that are also controversial because MrBeast lied about their nutritional content), so they could be filmed gushing over how incredible it was. One contestant described how her group would secretly collectively hoard the chocolate as supplies, because they had no idea when they would next be fed, if at all.

People with dietary requirements like allergies were especially fucked, because they were served the same thing as everyone else instead of replacement meals, so they just couldn't eat. A diabetic, after finally being given her insulin, long after she was meant to have it, was denied food she needed to take it. She was told she didn't genuinely need to eat. After a lot of groveling, she was given half a banana.

When other contestants went to staff to beg for food, medical care, or other help, they were refused it, and apparently some were screamed at or cursed out for having the nerve to even ask.

There was barely any water available, so in the Nevada heat sunstroke was almost universal. Contestants were vomiting or passing out, and some were said to be hospitalised from dehydration. Occasionally, gatorade was temporarily available for rehydration, but the staff didn't announce it (their microphones didn't work properly apparently), so most contestants only learned about it through word-of-mouth from their teammates. Within days, the gatorade ran out.

There were also sometimes brief windows where medical care was made available, but again, staff didn't actually inform anyone when this happened, with people only hearing about it through the grapevine.

Sleep deprivation was also a huge issue. Because the challenges took place at night, contestants had to sleep in broad daylight on the turf floor of the stadium in a cheap sleeping bag. They were only allowed to sleep for 3-4 hours at a time.

The male contestants realised they could get ahead by simply attacking the female contestants with no consequence. Female contestants were knocked out cold during the games, and dragged off by production staff. This wasn't just during the challenges either - food was so scarce that when meals were passed around, contestants would steal or fight over each other's food, and the male contestants would sometimes beat the female contestants and take their meals by force.

The teams were incredibly unbalanced. Although there were a wide array of contestants, all the challenges were physical. The young athletic male contestants formed their own groups, and wouldn't give team vests to women or elderly contestants, apparently physically ripping them off of them.

There was almost no medical staff, and only two ambulances for 2,000 people (plus crew). Horrific injuries are reported, the majority suffered by women, from beatings and tramplings. One thing we know to be true is that local hospitals began receiving Beast Games contestants with serious injuries, including broken bones.

One contestant described to the New York Times how she was elminated, leaving the tournament bruised and bleeding. She was offered on camera a $1,000 consolation prize, only for the staff to then turn off the cameras and immediately take the money back.

Eliminated contestants were offered $1,000 to sign an NDA. When an article about what happened came out, MrBeast called all the contestants and offered them another $1,000 in compensation, as well as free therapy.

MrBeast blamed the poor conditions on Crowdstrike (what?). They've said they'll conduct an internal, not independent, review, and use this as a learning experience for the next stage of the competition in Toronto. One of the actual reasons is that Jimmy actively sought out workers who were not part of a union, so they wouldn't be beholden to safety standards.

MrBeast has been blatantly trying to censor online criticism of Jimmy, and coverage of both this and the myriad of other controversies emerging over the past two weeks, on YouTube, Reddit and Twitter. Additionally, DogPack404, a former employee of MrBeast who released a video on him, received two cease-and-desist letters from law firms representing Jimmy, accusing him of personal defamation and breaking an NDA. YouTube has also been protecting their most popular and lucrative creator, demonetising, age-restricting and shadowbanning videos on him.

The fact that Jimmy is being accused of so much abominable shit that this isn't even the biggest controversy right now is fucking wild.

idk if people on tumblr know about this but a cybersecurity software called crowdstrike just did what is probably the single biggest fuck up in any sector in the past 10 years. it's monumentally bad. literally the most horror-inducing nightmare scenario for a tech company.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

a friday evening simultaneous rollout boot loop is a phrase that haunts IT people in their darkest hours. it's the monster that drags people down into the swamp. it's the big bag in the horror movie. it's the end of the road. and for crowdstrike, that reaper of souls just knocked on their doorstep.

Original comic by Rasenth

Leelah Alcorn was a trans girl, a teenager, who sadly committed suicide nearly 10 years ago. I'm happy that her comic touches the hearts of so many people, years after her death.

I saved screenshots of her blog and last message to the world. Her parents had a lot of control over how she was perceived after her death, but it was also to prevent deletion by Tumblr itself. Even back then, Tumblr has been shadow banning trans women on this platform.

My heart goes out to all trans women who are struggling with society's expectations of who they are supposed to be and who they are allowed to be. May you find peace, growth, and respite from whatever you're going through. You deserve happiness, most of all. Thank you for living, thank you for being here with us.

Leelah Alcorn's suicide was what made me aware that trans people actually existed. I remember how she helped me realize who I am and what I am. It's....insane to think it's been 10 years. I can't believe her drawings are just here.

I have a lot of love for her, even when she never knew who I was. Who I am. But she helped me. She truly did.

Rest in power, Leelah.

If you want a window into just how dire politics are right now in the UK:

There are two primary candidates for the election coming up on the 4th. The first is the transparently-corrupt leader of a corrupt regime that has spent the last 14 years siphoning money out of the country into their own accounts and feeding into racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and more or less any form of bigotry to encourage people to vote for them out of sheer terror and/or hatred.

The other is a guy so sharply at odds with the entire history and function of his party that there are increasingly-credible conspiracy theories that he’s actually a plant by the first guy to sabotage their opposition.

Okay I promise this isn’t meant to be a callout but I’ve heard this idea a Ton in the lead-up to the election and it’s really getting on my nerves so here’s the problem:

We absolutely are a two-party state right now, but we don’t have to be at the next election.

Absolutely no-one is comparable in voter share to Labour and the Tories. No-one. Any government we get is going to be one of those two parties. Even the small parties agree on this, that Labour is going to win without a shadow of a doubt.

And yes, Labour are utter trash right now, I freely admit that and I absolutely would vote Green… but they don’t stand a chance of actually winning. They stand zero chance of actually forming a majority. And if Labour, as most believe, nets a strong majority, there is no reason at all for them to listen to any other party. Voting for a party that cannot win will only accomplish splitting the vote.

In 2010 we had a similar situation. People weren’t happy with either party so they voted for smaller candidates instead. The result was a hung parliament, in which no single party held enough MP seats to form a majority and run the government. So we ended up with the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition government, which was basically just the Tories again and basically torpedoed any chance of the LibDems ever getting into power for at least the next few decades.

If we repeat that, voting for smaller candidates because we can’t stomach voting for either the Tories or Labour, we will in all likelihood just hand victory to the Tory party again. They didn’t win the popular vote last election either, but they absolutely can still win a hung parliament if the vote gets split.

And the thing is, yes Labour are terrible, but this is the first time in over a century that the Tory party are facing such total annihilation. If they lose this election, they very well may cease to exist.

Under Keir Starmer the Labour party has veered sharply to the right-wing, but the Tories will absolutely destroy us without question. There are genuine fears that by the time the next term under the Tories is over, the entire Union will have collapsed.

If you want to vote for smaller parties, you will never have a better chance of them getting meaningful power than after voting Labour this election. If we get rid of the Tory party, Labour are a much easier evil to overcome. It’s a painful choice, I know, but that’s the situation we’re in right now, and it will not help us to be naïve.

If we don’t strike down the wicked tyrant now, he will rise to be more powerful than ever, and we’ll be no better off at all.

Less than a week to go before voting on July 4th so remember to vote tactically everyone!

Vote for whoever has the greatest chance of unseating (or keeping out) the Conservative candidate in your region! The only candidates you shouldn't vote for regardless are Reform UK, who are transparently even more fascist.

It may not be a pleasant vote, I know, but we need to dig into our stockpile of healing potions (beloved) to get through this level boss and then we have room to breathe before taking on the next one.

jesus fucking christ

[First Image ID: A screenshot with a water filter over it of someone else's text post. The text post reads "I keep seeing this around, especially now around Yom HaShoah, and it's starting to piss me off, "Never again means never again for anyone." NO THE FUCK IT DOES NOT." /.End ID]

[Second Image ID: A screenshot of someone's reply made in the tags. It reads "There's actually a whole (academic) article about this. How in Israel the phrase is generally understood to mean 'never again the victims' whereas in diaspora it's understood to mean 'never again for anyone' and how the phrase was PROBABLY coined by anarchist communists who specifically meant like 'dismantle the systems (like nationalism) that led to this in the first place'. IDK if this person is Israeli but it's usually Israelis you see responding like this and it's because they straight up have no idea the rest of the world doesn't see it like that. Combined w the at this point pretty infamous disdain for Holocaust victims and survivors for being 'weak'. It doesn't mean 'in your honour we will never let this happen again to anyone else' it literally means we will never again be like YOU who failed to protect yourself. Edit ppl sharing these tags feel free to do so without attribution. I'm not really keen to engage with teh people who will be angry abotu this. /.End ID]

@jewishvitya if you do not want to get involved feel free to ignore this @ but I wanted to confirm with you that this is an interpretation held by Israelis. Personally I've only heard "never again" as a blanket statement for "never again letting genocide happen to anyone."

Yeah, that's true, in Israel "never again" means we'll never allow ourselves to be victims again. That's how I understood it for us growing up.

We're aware of the different interpretation worldwide. But we don't trust other nations to protect us from another genocide, so I saw it more as an expression of guilt than a promise I can rely on. There's a level of... scoffing at this other interpretation and seeing it as a bastardized version of the promise we made to ourselves. "You don't mean it, you don't actually care, you just want to feel better about yourselves."

And this might be something to keep in mind. We don't trust gentiles. So any demand from Israel to stop oppressing Palestinians is taken as... you felt bad for us as long as we were victims, you like us when you can tell romanticized holocaust stories about how all we did was be murdered, but once we can protect ourselves, you hate us again. "They're so antisemitic they can't stand seeing a Jew being strong, they want us to roll over and be murdered." So many Israelis aren't even trying for... good PR. Because they believe that the only way to look good to a world that hates us is to die.

When other countries stand against Israel, the response is that we always knew we were alone and universally hated. So that's another reason to be patriotic and defend the existence of this country. Because no one else will protect us. That's why you see Israelis doubling down rather than seeing how wrong we are.

The disdain towards holocaust victims doesn't show anymore when we talk about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's part of the history of the meaning. Holocaust victims were seen as weak in early Zionism. To the point that survivors were mistreated.

If you see grains of truth in any of this, it's because these attitudes make use of very real antisemitism to lead us to these conclusions. Other countries are not doing enough to protect Jews and combat antisemitism. So it's easy to look at that and say "see? We can never trust them."

(Disclaimer in case this reaches someone who doesn't know me. I'm anti-Zionist, I'm explaining a mentality I don't agree with. I'm not making these arguments as if they're correct, I'm laying them out to show them.)

Yeah, while not Israeli, I was very much raised in a zionist mindset, which heavily involved the idea that someday we would NEED to run to Israel. And I was pretty heavily raised with all of these ideas, with a complete fear and suspicion to any gentiles to the point where I knew I wasn't supposed to trust a single gentile opinion on anything Jewish, because they were obviously just using it to control us into assimilation, or drive us out, survival optional.

I only recognized how dangerous that was from other Jews, and even then only because I was constantly uncomfortable with listening to the concept of a "self hating Jew" as the only explanation for why they disagree with Zionism. I need a reason, even when my entire being disagrees with someone, I need to understand why.

Without that mentality, the real oppression in the background of zionist thinking, makes it so easy to just spiral out into monstrosity. People really do hate us, and really do condemn legitimate self defense. So if there isn't the self awareness that fascism isn't a unique ideology of "bad people", that anyone can be prone to being swayed by fascist thinking even if they've been victims of it, the legitimate terror and still-present discrimination makes a fantastic barrier to lock yourself in an echo chamber where you dismiss those who say you're hurting them as not one of you, and thus lying.

This last paragraph is great, thank you for that.

Whole video is here 

Please watch the whole video

If you’re a disabled Minecraft player or just someone looking to roleplay a disabled character ingame, the Wheelchairs mod’s first full release version is worth looking into!

The reviews are in!

Very glad to see you folks like it, I tried really hard in every feature to ensure that I properly balanced immersion (feeling like you’re actually in a wheelchair when playing [affectionate]) with practicality (feeling like you’re actually in a wheelchair when playing [derogatory]) as well as giving players the tools to use the wheelchairs in a manner that best reflects them. That’s why the wheelchairs look the way they do, why they’re nigh indestructible, and why I’ve held off adding handles for so long thus far.

I wanted to do right by the community I was trying to represent, and from your responses it seems I’ve done okay.

So, go download the mod! Modrinth will literally pay me money if it gets downloaded a bunch which, as a disabled creator myself perennially living in poverty, means the absolute world.

i wasn’t kidding when i said in my previous reblogs that i’ve been designing wheelchairs all afternoon. endless combinations of wood types and wool colors! i am obsessed with the way chests attach at the back like a backpack and flying is fun. i think what i love most about the wheelchair is how they look so distinctly minecraft and feel like a wheelchair at the same time.

some of my favs so far:

[image description: four screenshots of wheelchairs in minecraft. the first one is made of blue and purple wood with a dark grey cushion. the second one is made of birch wood with a blue cushion. the third image shows the birch wheelchair from behind with a chest attached to the back. in the last image a minecraft player is flying in a wheelchair using an elytra attached to the wheelchair. /end description]

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READ WIND BREAKER: I AM NO LONGER ASKING

a powerpoint

I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

i think a LOT of you with chronic conditions should learn this one magical phrase to get your hospital doctor to shit his entire pants, which is leaving the room and saying "im going to go discuss your behavior with the ethics committee, i think you might need a reminder of what your job is"

examples of when this would get a doctor to shit himself: if he mentions that you need to loose weight, go straight to the ethics committee and ask if its ethical to withold treatment until weight is lost, the answer is no and they know this. if a nurse etc, wont wear a mask and you NEED them to, the ethics committee, upon review of the case, will not be happy many such cases, remember that doctors and nurses at hospitals have an Oversight Board

while this is well intentioned, also please remember that this is only really an option for white people.

bipoc people have been loudly stating tor a long time that doctors are to bipoc women what cops are to bipoc men.

not saying don’t try this but also consider bringing someone with you, being on the phone during an appointment, or recording your appointment. solidarity is an effective tactic when appealing to the system is not.

Patient Advocate here to a. validate everything Josie has said above and b. add some extra advice from things I have seen in my career as an advocate.

BIPOC women and Queer folks tend to be more likely to receive retaliation when advocating for themselves. Red Flag notations like "noncompliant" or "malingering" get resorted to much faster for these patients and can impact your care going forward. My suggestion instead of the OP advice is, if you request something that is denied, ask "can you document my request?" This is less likely to trigger defensiveness but sometimes, this will prompt a physician to rethink their decision. However, if they still don't honor your request, do not tell them you are reporting them to Ethics (or Patient Relations, or your local Department of Health, etc), simply walk out and do it. The documentation can't be deleted once your visit is closed, so there will be a paper trail of your request.

These scrutinizing bodies are ruthless, and even if Physicians themselves don't act frightened by them, the organizations they work for absolutely HATE having unnecessary case reviews on their plate. In some cases, citations from the DoH can lead to the hospital being reimbursed less money from insurance providers. That speaks the language of shareholders and CEOs and can move a lot of needles, if you catch me.

As near as I can tell, tipping your hand is never helpful. If you feel politely trying to resolve it would be pointless and you have to escalate, do it. Do not warn them. Do not threaten them. Just do it. Clinic managers can be helpful if you aren't at a hospital big enough to have a patient relations person.

Bring an advocate/witness who ideally will take notes of their own, have the doctor document any requests they refuse, and when you get home, follow up with a completely neutral message in the patient portal restating what was stated in the appointment, and asking for confirmation that you understood everything. Even if they do not respond, you at least have an un-alterable account of what was said, time stamped, from very shortly after the appointment.

A lot of places now have rules about recording and while I think this is horseshit (I know why the rule is there but it's still horseshit, we should be allowed to protect.ourselves), and in many places is legal to do without their knowledge, if it is against clinic policy they can fire you as a patient, so be prepared to take that hit if you reveal that you did record something.

State medical licensing boards are moderately helpful. They are of necessity staffed by doctors, not regular people, so they have the same biases as the medical community at large.

As a disabled white woman who was maliciously described as "non-compliant" and a "difficult patient" by a doctor who didn't like that I said, "I feel like you're not listening" (I shit you not. That's what I said to the doctor who put the initial note in my file), resulting in years of medical abuse and severe neglect that almost resulted in my death, @naamahdarling is correct.

I cannot begin to imagine how much worse my treatment would have been if I wasn't white. Granted, my abuse wouldn't have lasted for decades, but that's only because I wouldn't have survived long enough to endure it.

You need to read the room and do what's safe for you. Sometimes it's safer to just thank them for their time, walk away and report their asses after.

Broke:

Belle has Stockholm syndrome because she falls in love with the Beast, her kidnapper.

Woke:

Stockholm syndrome was coined to slander a woman who had been in a hostage situation but openly criticized the poor police response which recklessly put her in more danger and escalated the violence. She was then belittled and discredited publically by the police for this.

So. Yeah. Maybe Belle does have Stockholm syndrome actually.

If anyone is curious here is the wikipedia section describing this.

[ID: Gif image from Disney's Beauty and the Beast with Gaston leading a large group of villagers down the road holding a torch. The atmosphere is dark.

Wikipedia screenshot containing the following:

According to accounts by Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, the police however was acting incompetently, with little care for the hostages' safety, which forced the hostages to negotiate for their life and release with the robbers on their own. In the process the hostages saw the robbers behaving more rationally than police negotiators and therefore developed a deep distrust towards the latter. Enmark had criticized Bejerot specifically for endangering their lives by behaving aggressively and agitating the captors. She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire. She was also critical of prime minister Olof Palme, as she had negotiated with the captors for freedom, but the prime minister told her that she would have to content herself to die at her post rather than give in to the captors' demands. Ultimately, Enmark explained she was more afraid of the police whose attitude seemed to be a much larger, direct threat to her life than the robbers.]

Hope the ID helps, it's my first time writing one.

Here are some other facts you should know about Nils Bejerot: He had a major influence (this involved founding the "Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society") on Sweden's zero-tolerance approach to drug use.

And he wrote "Barn, Serier, Samhälle" (Children, Comics, Society), basically the Swedish version of "Seduction of the Innocent"; an infamous anti-comics book by Fredric Wertham that led to the Comics Code Authority.

This is the man who coined the phrase "Stockholm syndrome", guys.

what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”

That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?

Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food

I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.

(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)

Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.

I LOVE learning about stuff like this :D

that corned beef and cabbage thing you hear abou irish americans is actually from a similar situation but because they weren’t allowed to eat that stuff due to that artificial famine

<3 FOOD HISTORY <3

Everyone knows Korean barbecue, right? It looks like this, right?

Well, this is called a “flanken cut” and was actually unheard of in traditional Korean cooking. In traditional galbi, the bone is cut about two inches long, separated into individual bones, and the meat is butterflied into a long, thin ribbon, like this:

In fact, the style of galbi with the bones cut short across the length is called “LA Galbi,” as in “Los Angeles-style.” So the “traditional Korean barbecue” is actually a Korean-American dish.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. You see, flanken-cut ribs aren’t actually all that popular in American cooking either. Where they are often used however, is in Mexican cooking, for tablitas.

So you have to imagine these Korean-American immigrants in 1970s Los Angeles getting a hankering for their traditional barbecue. Perhaps they end up going to a corner butcher shop to buy short ribs. Perhaps that butcher shop is owned by a Mexican family. Perhaps they end up buying flanken-cut short ribs for tablitas because that’s what’s available. Perhaps they get slightly weirded out by the way the bones are cut so short, but give it a chance anyway. “Holy crap this is delicious, and you can use the bones as a little handle too, so now galbi is finger food!” Soon, they actually come to prefer the flanken cut over the traditional cut: it’s easier to cook, easier to serve, and delicious, to boot! 

Time goes on, Asian fusion becomes popular, and suddenly the flanken cut short rib becomes better known as “Korean BBQ,” when it actually originated as a Korean-Mexican fusion dish!

I don’t know that it actually happened this way, but I like to think it did.

Corned beef and cabbage as we know it today? That came to the Irish immigrants via their Jewish neighbors at kosher delis.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/

The Irish immigrants almost solely bought their meat from kosher butchers. And what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish corned beef thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes. The Jewish population in New York City at the time were relatively new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe. The corned beef they made was from brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow. Since brisket is a tougher cut, the salting and cooking processes transformed the meat into the extremely tender, flavorful corned beef we know of today.

The Irish may have been drawn to settling near Jewish neighborhoods and shopping at Jewish butchers because their cultures had many parallels. Both groups were scattered across the globe to escape oppression, had a sacred lost homeland, discriminated against in the US, and had a love for the arts. There was an understanding between the two groups, which was a comfort to the newly arriving immigrants. This relationship can be seen in Irish, Irish-American and Jewish-American folklore. It is not a coincidence that James Joyce made the main character of his masterpiece Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a man born to Jewish and Irish parents. 

Ahh, similar origin to fish and chips in the UK then.

That meal came about either in London or the North of England where Jewish immigrant fried fish venders decided to team up with the Irish cooked potato sellers to produce the meal everyone associates with the UK.

Because while a bunch of stuff from the UK was lifted and adapted from folks we colonised (Mulligatawny soup for example, was an adaptation of a soup recipe found in India and which British chefs tried to approximate back home), some of it was made by folks who actively moved here (like tikka masala, that originated in a restaurant up in Scotland).

Super interesting.

And that’s BEFORE we get into replacing a staple crop! So in the Southern US, you have two groups of people, one who used oats and one who used plantains, and they BOTH replace their staples with corn. And then you get Southern food.