Nicoooooo

I feel absolute rage when i call An Office and have to sit through a 5 minute recording telling me I can just use their website thanks!!! I can’t! Believe it or not I’m a child of the internet age who went on your website and it was shit!! Get me a human person!!!!

any government department: ~you can use our website~

me, 2 hours on hold: I really fucking cannot

pet peeve

“You wanted my help. Now you’re going to get it. No matter what it means for the both of us.”

I believe the colloquial phrase for what my dash just did is “a thing”

'whats your intention with my daughter '

Sir, I'm trying to take naps with her and feed her pasta

I learned a new concept

Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure. (Tech Target, first result on the search engine)

Literal opposite of planned obsolescence. I love you graceful degradation.

Oh neat the first time I heard of the concept the guy described it to me as "catastrophic functionality".

He was talking about it in the context of designing robots that would go in and stop nuclear reactor meltdowns, something that would 100% destroy the robot, but they would be designed to keep functioning and fighting the meltdown for as long as possible. He had some designs where over 80% of the robot has died and it was functionally dragging its corpse around by its one working arm because one more minute of functionality might save thousands.

I've been having a few bad years mental health wise, and thinking about those robots a lot .

Story is wild

Little girl was part of a county fair agro-educational program where they raise an animal for a few months and at the end it’s slaughtered. Supposed to teach them about the economics of farming and stuff.

But the little girl loved her goat so much she was crying on the day her goat was supposed to be taken away, so her mom sent the county fair people an email saying “I’ll pay for the goat and any expenses. We’ve had several deaths in the family in the past year, I don’t wanna take away one more thing my little girl loves.” Technically the goat had already been sold at auction, so the mom was on the hook for about $1000, only about $70 of which would have been profit for the county fair.

The county fair people were irate and got law enforcement involved, over this “breach of contract”. They literally got a fucking judge to sign a search warrant, authorizing them to go to this little girl’s house and search every room and every cabinet or box “large enough to contain a small goat”. The sheriff’s deputies seized the goat, and whoever they gave it to immediately slaughtered it, though they were supposed to wait until some kind of agreement had been worked out.

In the county fair’s initial email correspondence with the girl’s mother, they made it clear that they were pissed off because the story of the little girl who loved her goat was circulating on social media making them look bad, and they felt the girl needed to be taught a lesson about keeping your promises or whatever. So they refused the mother’s offer to pay for it, and insisted they get the goat. Even if it meant sending the fucking cops into her house lmao.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair

the congressman who bought the goat didn’t have any objections to the family saving the goat from slaughter either! it’s fucking insane that the cops were so eager to play act their swat commando fantasies that they played stooge to the benefit of no one except some self important local organizers!

Alternate link, LAtimes locks their stuff behind paywalls sometimes

Don’t forget the part where the goat wasn’t where they had a warrant to search, so they drove 500 miles, leaving the area they have legal jurisdiction in, then searched a farm they didn’t have a warrant for ans seized the goat. The fair then had the goat slaughtered, even though a court had ordered them to keep it alive until ownership was resolved and despite the fact that both potential owners of the goat had decided to keep it alive.

They broke multiple laws in order to “teach” a little girl the “lesson” that “everybody has to follow the rules”.

I sure hope all of the complaints sent to Shasta District Fair CEO Melanie Silva, whose decisions these were and continues to defend her actions, are polite and don’t waste too much ink. I’m certain nobody would take advantage of the fact that the Sasha District Fair and Event Center’s contact page lists their phone and fax numbers, not to mention the email form below that.

Would be a shame if that information was to circulate far an wide, and ruin that despicable woman's easter holidays

I found the lawsuit filing. It is a work of art, brief and to the point. If you read nothing else, check out page 2, the section headed Nature of the Action. Magnificent.

One of the things that bugs me in the notes is a bunch of people being like 'it's a livestock animal, it's her fault for getting attached' and.

My dudes, I cannot emphasize enough that the little girl's emotional attachment to the goat is in fact the least of the issues with this story. The main issue in this story is the fact that a bunch of cops broke multiple laws, including the unlawful entry to the property the goat was being held, the unlawful seizure and destruction of said goat, and the unlawful use of a criminal search warrant in a civil dispute case, just to start with.

The little girl owned the goat. At no point in the proceedings - and indeed at no point in the proceedings in the course of the normal auction-purchase-slaughter of a livestock animal in this program - did the fair own the goat. At no point in the proceedings did the person who successfully bid on the goat actually own it - he had made the winning bid to purchase rights to the meat. He hadn't even done that yet! The goat legally and incontrovertibly belonged to the little girl. The very worst that should have happened in this story is a brief property ownership dispute in a civil court.

The fair CEO decided to unlawfully force the auction of the goat, and, when the girl's mother began to dispute her actions, to make a false claim of theft, with precisely ZERO legal basis, calling the cops on an already emotionally fragile child, and then had the temerity to be angry with the child's mother because the story was making them look bad on social media.

Regardless of your opinion on the meat industry, livestock slaughter, or 4H, 'cops drive 500 miles, perform an illegal search, seizure and destruction of an American citizen's property, on the word of a biased 3rd party with zero legal rights to the property in question' should make you angry. Because it is a violation of civil rights, and also had no motive besides needless cruelty to an already grieving child.

News to know: The next court update on this is sometime in October 2024. I'm watching this case because it covers a lot of different facets of how contracts work, minors rights, property rights in the face of law enforcement seizures and searches, and how does one county fair have so much brutality to wield against a then-nine-year-old. I would not be surprised if this gets bogged down again with more counter-suits. It's absolutely ghoulish that they're doing all this over less than 1000$ of goat and one little girls grief. I hope that the judge who sees this case knows just how dangerous it is to dismiss, since this is a matter of third-party property rights infringement using law enforcement agents as bludgeons. The Sheriffs *cannot* be allowed to maintain extrajudicial authority.

UPDATE:

GIRL WINS $300,000

A HAPPY ENDING

Happy third anniversary to this precious, beautiful and soft scene of Lena safe and happy with her found family 😭❤️

and happy third anniversary to this SuperCorp hug and to their first kiss 💙❤️

and also, thank you Katie McGrath for Lena Luthor 🥰 I love you so much ❤️

i cannot emphasize how necessary it is to have a buddy to participate in fandom with. completely elevated experience. don't have a buddy? find someone you like and message them and be their friend. gush over every sketch and drabble and insane headcanon they have. live life to the fullest.

I dunno man. I found out today that a subway sandwich is $14 now. A shitty subway footlong sandwich that isn't actually 12 inches long and is occasionally made with expired ingredients and was never a great option to start with. I ate those in high school because I was broke and at the mall a lot.

There are poke bowls in my city from a local place for $16. Super fresh fish and veg, warm rice, more than I can eat in one sitting, for the price of a sandwich and a drink at america's most mid-tier sandwich shop.

Someone in another post said (paraphrased) you used to be able to get something mediocre for cheap, but now the mediocre things cost as much as the nice things so why would you?

This is me when I realized I could get a proper bowl of curry from the fancy indian food place for basically the same price as a fuckin McDonald's hamburger meal these days

I heard an ad the other day for a "fantastic deal! Four dollar four inch subway snack sandwich!" And like. I'm sure that would seem like a much better deal I'd I wasn't one of the ones who grew up with obnoxious "five dollar foot long subway sandwich" ads.

A dollar an inch of sandwich. When it used to be 2.4 inches. 240% markup is GOOD? Fucking bite me

Yeah with fast food having delusions of grandeur these days it's really made me appreciate the non-chain food places in my area. The other day I went to the local Hawaiian BBQ place and discovered that they have teriyaki chicken AND Beef BBQ musubi for 3.99. and they come in pairs. PAIRS.

I KNOW.

So I immediately bought an order of each and had 4 delicious musubi and a drink for less than a combo at Burger King.

So yeah, show em we don't need their shit sandwiches.

There's some hilarious irony in that by creating an ad campaign so incredibly catchy and memorable that it entered public consciousness (the dream of any marketing team), Subway ensured everyone of a certain age range would view them as the poster child of fast-food price gouging.

if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

If I were writing about firefighters I'd also, in addition to just reading about them, take advantage of Our Blessed Internet to ask actual firefighters about how shit works. I'd do the same for a minority I'm not a part of.

I remember when there was this LiveJournal community where you could just ask about anything you needed for your novel - medicine, professions, vehicles, how things function in country X - and people who knew something about that would answer.

We need to bring this back.

And apparently just this summer they DID bring it back - it's called Little Details and it's on Dreamwidth!!!!

Remember, a world where everyone stays in their own boxes and only writes about their own narrow demographic is straight up a goal for racists. If you ever find yourself attempting anti-racism so hard you've looped back to "functionally the same thing racists want", stop, take stock, and ask yourself where things went wrong.

Happy birthday Chloe Price!

Do you realize how great and wholesome Rachel and Max’s relationship could’ve been?

Let’s not talk about the comics for a second, and let’s focus on Max and Rachel’s characters in the game.

First of all, Max is so patient with people in general. No matter how many times Kate pushes her away, she still wants to help her until the very end, not once does she resent her for it (rightfully, but ykwim), no matter how many times Chloe treats her unfairly she still sees her as her number one priority, and we can argue that she can be an asshole with Victoria, but every time I’d pick the option of being mean to her it would just feel OoC to me, so if we only look at the path when she’s understanding and patient with Victoria too, we get the picture. Max is incredibly understanding and patient with people. Like, sure, she sucks at comforting them, but she stays. And that’s arguably one of her best character traits.

So, if we take Rachel, who has a really hard time being her true self and opening up to anyone, so much that even Chloe wasn’t sure she really knew her, and Max, who is super patient and can often see right through people (since the beginning of the game, she can tell Victoria is insecure, she immediately knows Frank is bad news, she has her own analysis of everyone in her class even though she never talked to them…), and we add the fact that Max and Rachel have a lot of things in common, I think we could have a really great dynamic.

Plus, I genuinely think Rachel would be great for Max. We see at the beginning of the game how she’s insecure, and to me, Rachel would be the kind of person to cheer her up, and to show her her qualities, because she would really appreciate her. And on the other hand, Max would help Rachel keep her feet on the ground, and I think she really needs that sometimes.

Basically, this meme makes me think of what a potential dynamic between Chloe, Rachel and Max could’ve looked like :

Look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.

Anyway, so yeah. That’s a shame they never met (again, if we leave the comics aside).

polyamorous amberpricefield!!! 💙❤️🖤

~ free to use, credit nice but not necessary ~

Max: I would like you to meet my girlfriends.

Max: (gestures to Chloe who is on crutches) A danger to herself.

Max: (gestures to Rachel who is straightening her clothes) A danger to others.