The Learned Wobbly

"im sorry to tell you but this is unfortunately fetish art :( " you’re a coward and a fool. tell me what about eroticism makes it lose value as a piece of art. tell me in what way is lust a less worthy feeling to be depicted in art than anger or joy or sadness or any other human emotion. why did you like it before and why do you not like it now? what changed? why does it upset you? what makes it bad now, what makes it gross, what makes it wrong? do you reject what you dont understand? do you let your gut reaction dictate what you deem bad? what you deem immoral? whats allowed to exist and what isnt?

We got one very hilarious win

do something good today.

call your loved ones, speak to them. listen to a new album from band you've heard about but didn't have time to get into. water your plants. draw a cat. but please don't give up, and keep living.

bad times come and go. but you can't see good times if you're not here anymore

also see this tweet which saved my mental health more than once on the span of last 5 years

It's also that the way to deal with it is to focus on what is within your control: Watering plants is within your control. Keeping plants, pets, family, friends, neighbors as alive and well as you CAN keeps you as alive and well as you can.

Trump voters on tiktok are EXTREMELY mad about the following:

They can all eat shit and die mad…

this isn't going to happen but it WOULD be very funny

the prison abolition leaving my body when it's funny

PUNK PSA:

Please don’t put anything too political on your back patches— especially about your own marginalized experiences.

This has been a long standing rule in punk communities, passed down for generations. People do get jumped and experience violence as a result of this. You can’t see who is behind you, you can’t tell if they’re far right, and you can’t prepare yourself for sudden violence from behind.

So many people are new to the scene, introduced via social media, and don’t know the weight of walking with something on your back (literally and metaphorically) that immediately outs you as marginalized. If you’re able to defend yourself, or out with friends who can watch your back, by all means go for it and wear whatever you want on your back patches but if you walk alone at all ever, please be safe.

Also this is why punks wear spikes and studs on our shoulders especially. Makes it harder for someone to grab you and works as self defense (but also never wear spikes at a small show or if you plan to mosh— people can get hurt!).

Never put a target on your back. Put a target on your front so you can punch first.

joe biden, you stupid fuck. listen to me. Crimes are legal for sitting presidents as long as they’re official actions. Listen: Joe. You have one chance

Even if he decides not to do, y'know, the obvious, there's gotta be some creative ways he can fuck shit up for Trump. Nothing he does in terms of actual policy will stick, but make Trump spend his first hundred days undoing Biden's last 75.

Especially make him undo stuff that will be incredibly popular. Executive order legalizing marijuana nationwide. Declare a free pizza party for the whole country, scheduled for the first week of February.

Declassify Trump's IRS records, his FBI file, and everything available about his personal habits during his previous stay in the White House. Did he ever order any pay-per-view porn? Clog a toilet? The American people deserve to know.

I'm just spit balling here; I'm sure there are even better ideas.

Humbly submitting that it would also be very funny if he resigned and then Kamala did all those things

Honestly resigning so that the country gets a black Asian woman President whether the assholes like it or not would be the funniest thing he could do all on its own.

Apple propaganda notwithstanding, the reason tower PCs are big isn’t because they’re outdated. The reason tower PCs are so bulky is because they’re designed to be user serviceable. The case has lots of open space so your big, meaty hands can easily access all of the components, and everything is secured with friction-fit tabs and standard machine screws to minimise the need for specialised tools. A properly laid out tower PC is fully serviceable with a single Phillips-head screwdriver and no greater manual skill than your average Lego playset – heck, for some of the more modern case layouts you don’t even need the screwdriver, unless you’re performing major surgery like a full motherboard replacement.

Like, think about who benefits from convincing you that a fully modular computing device that can be serviced and repaired with your bare hands and minimal technical skill is unfashionable.

no lie i genuinely believe brands are so behind the pleather movement bc they can just buy cheap plastic sell it as expensive 'vegan leather' and be ready for you to return in a couple years to buy another 'vegan peeta approved™ leather jacket' bc they last like 5 minutes compared to the way leather lasts decades all the while you can pat yourself and coorporate's back for being sutainable all the while pvc (what some fake leather products are made of) has been labeled the single most environmentally damaging type of plastic and while there are non pvc fake leathers such as pu leather... its not like thats much better producing plastic pollutes and the second your pleather clothes start to breakdown (which happens much faster than you think) theyll wound up on landfills for at least a 100 years...

also they love love LOVE to try and sell you "plant-based leather" that you then look at the details and it's "45% cactus" or whatever and there's no mention of what the rest of it is

it's plastic.

it's always plastic.

Let me tell you a story.

50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it's body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.

But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.

The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn't melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.

Anyway, I pulled grandad's jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.

The cow is still dead. There will be another cow that dies tomorrow for the same reason. But there's no market for leather these days. Its skin won't be a garment that lasts 50 years. Its gonna rot in a pile with all the others. Someone will sell a "vintage" cowboycore Americana aesthetic dark academia plastic peice of shit that will be garbage in a year. And then they'll sell another one.

That cow, that became a leather coat?

It's probably also a saddle that another cowboy is still riding.

And several belts. Probably some wallets, several gloves, some riding tack.

Nobody who doesn't work with leather understands how much material you get from one cow. I have sides (like 1/4 of a cow) that I've been making things out of for years and there's still lots left in my materials stash.

Once that coat is too worn out to wear, there will still be lots of the leather that's still good. Someone who can't afford to buy hides will probably make smaller things from those pieces (that's how I started working with leather).

Even when every piece of that hide is completely unusable, it will decompose like it was originally going to, and shed no microplastic particles. A synthetic alternative lasts a fraction as long and sheds microplastics for its entire life.

You also can't use that synthetic leather for many of the things you'd use real leather for. It's not fire resistant, so welders can't use it to protect them from sparks. it doesn't have the tensile strength of real leather, so you can make equestrian tack out of it. It doesn't provide any abrasion resistance, so you can't make motorcycle leathers from it. It can't be used for protective equipment in sports like archery, because it would disintegrate under normal use.

Synthetic leather can only be used in place of real leather in fashion and upholstery applications, and it's not very good at either. It requires hundreds of times more material for the same applications due to its short lifespan, and it produces plastic pollution constantly.

There's literally no good argument for replacing real leather with synthetic alternatives. Even if you want to go the animal rights route, how many marine and aquatic ecosystems are you willing to sacrifice for the life of a few cows? Are you even saving cows, when we use them for so many other industries? Does a domesticated animal have more right to life than the wild species impacted by synthetic leather production?

In the long run, it's just not worth it.

If you haven't yet cured your ballot, make sure to do so. Some states this could still determine who wins the senate! You have until the 12th, and apparently the 14th for North Carolina(?)

You can also sign up to volunteer for a phonebank and call voters, providing information on how to cure their vote. They'll teach you and others have said it's very easy, and you can participate from any state.

Here's a BlueSky thread with links

just remember, one day you're going to open tumblr and the crabs will be raving like they never have before

Grieve AND organize.

Good article by David Hunter on how to survive the Trump presidency, both on the personal and on the political plane.

This is an excellent article. It talks about the psychology of tyranny, the history of resistance and the paths we have to take to rescue each other and recover.

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.